Limiting government fueled Helms’ political life

Former Sen. Jesse Helms wasn’t quite what some critics claimed or what some supporters thought. He strove to be himself and largely succeeded over a long legislative career — no mean feat for any politician.

Mr. Helms, who died Friday at age 86, was a Democrat before he was a Republican and a limited-government conservative above all else. He was a proud regional politician born to the politics of a South that could not come to grips with the 1960s civil rights movement. But he was neither parochial nor bigoted.

During a long chat with this reporter in Thomas Jefferson.”

While he defended the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a 1993 copyright dispute, he also said Southerners are thankful for the Union victory that ended slavery — which he called a step forward in human progress. For him, as in his view for all true conservatives, it is the nature of government to be the potential enemy of individual freedom.

“Of course, we are all better off to be living in a country where freedom for all individuals is the law of the land,” he said. “We are better off with the defeat of communism. Imagine how much better off we will be when once again unborn children can be safe from the destruction of abortion.”

Mr. Helms took offense at the repeated accusation of racism, speaking often of his good relationships with blacks and pointing to the black members on his staff — one of whom was Library of Congress, but only Mr. Helms replied.

Mr. Helms said he opposed the Civil Rights Act because he didn’t want the federal government intervening in state matters. He considered the civil rights movement corrupt and self-serving, said University of Florida and a Helms biographer.

“I felt that the citizens of my community, my state and my region of the country were being battered by this new form of bigotry,” Mr. Helms wrote in his 2005 memoir, “Here’s Where I Stand.” “I simply could not stay silent in the face of this assault — and I didn’t.”

He could be — and often was — stubborn and unyielding when principles and policy came together, bucking Democratic and Republican administrations, blocking treaties and arms agreements, presidential appointments and domestic legislation whenever he thought they jeopardized limited government, national defense or civilized standards of behavior.

Even some of his liberal critics admired him for that — “You may not agree with Jesse, but you always know where he stands,” the mantra went.

He told The Times it would be presumptuous of him to agree with those who called him the “conscience of the Senate” during his 30-year tenure in that chamber. But he fully understood why he was best-known as a defender of the conservative faith on foreign policy.

“I felt pretty good the day our bills to reorganize the United Nations were passed,” he said with that smile that contained a tinge of devilishness mixed with surprise that he had said what he had just said.

Taming the State Department and U.N. spending are important parts of Mr. Helms’ legacy. Nobody deserves the credit more for putting the Senate back at the center of White House’s or the State Department’s initiatives, he said.

From his start in the Senate in 1973, he expressed concern over the content of the Paris Peace Accords that North Vietnam’s communist government.

During the Times interview, Mr. Helms said he had purposely taken on foreign-policy issues. A member of Africa and about the effect at home and abroad of proposed treaties and agreements.

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