We like our heroes and villains to be plain as day with no gray, no shadyness whatsoever. Jesse Helms presents a problem to this thinking. He was an imperfect human being who died at the age of 86.
During the course of his lifetime, he held some racial views that were wrong. So, for that it’s suggested that Conservatives simply throw him on the ash-heap of history while the body isn’t even cold.
It’s been pointed out that Jesse Helms never apologized for his segregationist views. No, but as Rick Moran points out:
And yet, his Senate office was, if not a model of diversity, a place that was at odds with his perceived bigotry. No less a personage than James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi, was employed by Helms as a special assistant from 1989-91. His press secretary was black as were several administrative assistants.
It’s true that he never apologized for having advocated segregation, but the truth is that he never used any governmental position to advance segregation. George Wallace and Strom Thurmond did. He didn’t stand in the doors and his generation was before we required Oprahesque apologies. Like most White Southerners, he didn’t tearfully apologize, he just moved on as best he could.
What about on the positive side of that legacy coin. Writes Moran:
By any measure, Helms was a powerful man in the Senate. He singlehandedly held up American dues paid to the UN until they reformed the budget process and, more importantly, reduced the required contribution by the United States to that body. He also was a Senate leader in preventing normalization of relations with Cuba by sponsoring an amendment with Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) that strengthened the embargo by placing sanctions against foreign companies that did business with Cuba. He also almost singlehandedly derailed granting Most Favored Nation trading status to China.
His fundraising organization, the North Carolina Congressional Club, was one of the biggest boosters of conservative candidates during the 1970s and 80s. Some credit Helms with making Ronald Reagan’s victory possible, but that is almost surely an exaggeration. Helms rescued Reagan’s candidacy in 1976 by helping him to win the North Carolina primary after five straight losses to Gerald Ford, but by 1980, Reagan had wrapped up the nomination by the time the North Carolina primary rolled around. But dozens of conservatives came to Congress riding on Jesse Helm’s money, a feat that Republicans were forever grateful.
If not for Jesse Helms, Reagan would have had a harder time getting things done, and all that Cold Warrior stuff had a huge impact on the lives of many people. Mark Thiessen tells the story of a Ukrainian sailor who twice jumped overboard in an attempt to defect:
The Soviets insisted that Medvid had accidentally fallen off — twice. The State Department did not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain — no matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship’s departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then — and he had the subpoena delivered to the ship’s unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina cigarettes.
Despite Helms’s efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on Helms’s Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape — that was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in Ukraine.
In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, “the KGB didn’t fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They were afraid of something,” he said, “and now I know what they were afraid of.” They were afraid of Jesse Helms.
President Bush had it right when he said on Friday that “from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: In the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.” This is the Jesse Helms that Miroslav Medvid remembers. Unfortunately, it was not the Jesse Helms written about this weekend.
And it is this Jesse Helms we ought to remember and to honor, not as a man free from faults. But as a man who defended those behind the Iron Curtain and the unborn. Someone, who helped build a conservative movement. He was a flawed man, but a man who loved his country and left behind far more good than bad.
And let me be honest, it seems to me quite unseemly that while the family is still in mourning, some conservatives are busy kicking the dead body of Jesse Helms for political gain and straining their arms to path themselves on the back for their courage in attacking a dead man. Not even a Democrat should receive this type of knifing.
