Jesse Helms, 86, champion of right-wing politics

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

Sen. Helms' former chief of staff, James Broughton, said the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for the past several years.

In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2003, Sen. Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left, and, often, a mighty pain for presidents whatever their political leaning.

Ronald Reagan, a friend who could thank Sen. Helms for critical campaign help, once described him as a "thorn in my side." Sen. Helms was known for taking on anyone, even leaders of his own party, who strayed from his idea of ideological purity.

"I didn't come to Washington to be a yes man for any president, Democrat or Republican," he said in an interview in 1989. "I didn't come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests."

He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry Kissinger as secretary of State during the Nixon administration and Frank Carlucci as secretary of Defense during the Reagan presidency.

And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Sen. Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and civil-rights leader, for what Sen. Helms deemed his "action-oriented Marxism."

His willingness to block the business of the Senate or the will of presidents earned him the sobriquet "Senator No" — a label he relished.

Perhaps his most visible accomplishments in the Senate came two decades apart. One was a 1996 measure that tightened trade sanctions against the Marxist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The other, a 1973 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, prevented American money from going to international family-planning organizations that, in his words, "provide or promote" abortion.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Sen. Helms' contribution to the conservative movement was "incredibly important."

For one thing, he said, Sen. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fundraising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.

Sen. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Reagan's presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.

Sen. Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word "redneck" to describe himself — protecting simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism. For 30 years he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wingtip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Freemasonry pins.

He liked his art uncomplicated.

"The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, 'Oooh, terrible,' but I like beautiful things, not modern art," he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies for the arts. "I can't even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building." He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

In the 1980s he took on the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who explored gay themes in some of his work, and of the artist Andres Serrano, who depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting.

His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides policy, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. (He later said the remark had been "a mistake.")

In campaigns and in Congress, Sen. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from "unnatural" and "disgusting" homosexual behavior.

"Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah," he said, "and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle."

In his last year in the Senate, he decided to support AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common.

Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Helms went on to victory.

His bruising style and right-wing politics won him many friends in his home state and across the nation, but he also created a legion of enemies. Millions of dollars were raised outside North Carolina both from those who flocked to his ideological banner and from those who ached to see him defeated. He never won more than 55 percent of the vote in five campaigns for the Senate.

"He was a very polarizing politician," said Ferrel Guillory, a veteran North Carolina journalist. "He was not a consensus builder. He didn't want everybody to vote for him. He just wanted enough."

But as tough as he could be in the political theater, Sen. Helms could exhibit a softer, warmer, even impish side in his personal dealings, even with political adversaries.

In 1963, after 21 years of marriage, Sen. Helms and his wife, Dorothy, adopted a 9-year-old boy with cerebral palsy after they read a newspaper article in which the child plaintively said that he wanted a mother and father for Christmas.

He welcomed teenagers. Even when lobbyists could not get in to see him, high-school students could. His office once calculated that he had met with 170,000 teenagers in his 30 years in the Senate.

Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, N.C., a small town southeast of Charlotte. His father served as police chief. Monroe embodied the kind of small-town virtue that Sen. Helms would vigorously promote throughout his career. "Everybody understood everybody else," he said of his hometown. "Everybody understood that it was important not to do certain things, and that, if you did them, you would pay for it."

Sen. Helms attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but did not graduate.

One of his first jobs after leaving college was as a sports writer for the Raleigh News & Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the paper's society reporter. The couple married in 1942. They had two daughters.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy; daughters Jane Helms Knox, of Raleigh, and Nancy Helms Grigg, of Chapel Hill; son Charles Helms, of Winston-Salem, N.C; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.