The arch-conservative Jesse Helms died this morning. I have no comment.
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Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet
Hank Kalet 
I\’ll say something nice. At least, he stood up and said what he believed in. Unlike today\’s politicians that will lie thru their teeth to get elected and then stab the voters in the back!Just off the top of my head, clinton\’s middle class tax cut, bush compassionate conservatism, corzine\’s open gooferment. And on and on and on.You may not like the guy, can\’t stand his beliefs, and wouldn\’t want him to marry your sister … BUTT … (there\’s always a big but)You have to acknowledge the guy did not hide who he was and what he thought. He was a fighter for what he thought was right.I\’d rather have a guy like him who is \”honest\” with me, than all the liars we currently have. imho
From August 2001 when Helms retired: Washington Post columnist David Broder, whose August 29 column, headlined \”Jesse Helms, White Racist,\” offered a glimpse into the public record that many other reporters were side-stepping. Broder offered a few examples of Helms\’ bigotry. There are many. As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith\’s opponent, including one which read: \”White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.\” Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham\’s wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986) Ancient history? No. Helms remains unapologetic to this day. Forty years after the Smith campaign, Helms would win election against black opponent Harvey Gantt with another ad playing to racist white fear– the so-called \”white hands\” ad, in which a white man\’s hands crumple a rejected job application while a voiceover intones, \”You needed that job…but they had to give it to a minority.\” In columns, commentaries and pronouncements from the Senate floor, Helms sowed hatred and called names: The University of North Carolina was \”the University of Negroes and Communists.\” (Capital Times, 11/22/94) Black civil rights activists were \”Communists and sex perverts.\” (Copley News Service, 8/23/01) Of civil rights protests Helms wrote, \”The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that\’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men\’s rights.\” (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, \”Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.\” (New York Times, 2/8/81)Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality \”degenerate,\” and homosexuals \”weak, morally sick wretches.\” (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: \”There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.\” (States News Service, 5/17/88)Helms remonstrated ten female members of the House of Representatives to \”act like ladies\” when they interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to demand support of a U.N. treaty against gender discrimination, and subsequently had them removed from the hearing by Capitol police. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/28/99)And the man ABC News now describes as a \”conservative icon\” (8/22/01) in 1993 sang \”Dixie\” in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, \”I\’m going to make her cry. I\’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.\” (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)More recently, when a caller to CNN\’s Larry King Live show praised guest Jesse Helms for \”everything you\’ve done to help keep down the niggers,\” Helms\’ response was to salute the camera and say, \”Well, thank you, I think.\” (Wilmington Star-News, 9/16/95)Finally, Helms\’ strong if sometimes shadowy support for violent, anti-democratic forces abroad, from South Africa to El Salvador, might have given media outlets further pause in describing him as a mere conservative; few probed his ties to groups that would more accurately be described as fascist. One exception was an editorial in the Boston Globe (8/23/01): \”Helms\’ role in supporting foreign thugs such as Roberto D\’Aubuisson, the cashiered Salvadoran major who ran death squads responsible for savage political murders, did lasting harm to America\’s good name. In South Africa, Argentina, Mozambique, Honduras, and Nicaragua, Helms cooperated with racists and fascists who have nothing in common with the ideals of American democracy.\” I\’m sure that Jesse and Strom will enjoy their romp in right wing hell.
He was an evil SOB, nothing good about this regressive nasty thug. I will shed no tears over Castro when he dies and I am certainly not going to waste any tears over the hate monger, Jesse Helms. After the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton \”better have a bodyguard\” if he visited North Carolina. That sounds like a death threat or threat of violence to me. Right wingers can get away with threatening a Democratic president, no problem.Helms backed right-wing authoritarians who ran death squads in El Salvador, and the military in Guatemala.
More excerpts from the Aug. 2001, David Broder column about Helms. Broder is no liberal:\”What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.[ ]To the best of my knowledge, Helms has never done what the late George Wallace did well before his death — recant and apologize for his use of racial issues. And that use was blatant.In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history.”“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. Thurmond and the Senate majority were on the other side, but the next poll showed Helms had halved his deficit.[ ]All year, Peterson reported, “Helms campaign literature sounded a drumbeat of warnings about black voter-registration drives…. On election eve, he accused Hunt of being supported by ‘homosexuals, the labor union bosses and the crooks’ and said he feared a large ‘bloc vote.’ What did he mean? ‘The black vote,’ Helms said.” He won, 52 percent to 48 percent.\”
Hendrik HertzbergSeptember 3, 2001 In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.His vaunted anti-Communism was never based upon a principled belief in democracy. His support of the apartheid regime was of a piece with his enthusiasm for any dictatorship, no matter how brutal, that could plausibly be described as right wing. (He even supported the Argentine junta in the Falklands war with Britain.) He has crippled America\’s diplomatic corps, systematically starving the State Department of funds and capriciously blocking the confirmation of highly qualified ambassadorial nominees. But it is in his unrelenting hostility to international institutions that he has done his greatest and probably most lasting damage.