HELMS, JESSE ALEXANDER, JR.
The career of Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. is unique in post-World War II U.S. politics. Few legislators have fought as relentlessly, caused as much uproar, or arguably, had as much influence as
the ultraconservative Republican from North
Carolina. As a fiery radio editorialist in the
1960s, Helms waged a one-man war on liberal-
ism. His notoriety helped him win an historic
1972 Senate race, a breakthrough in a state that
had not elected a Republican in the twentieth
century, and three reelections followed. He
emerged not only as a party leader but as an
independent legislator with his own tough
agenda on social issues and foreign policy.
Born October 18, 1921, in the small segre-
gated town of Monroe, North Carolina, Helms
was named for his formidable father. Jesse
Helms Sr. was the town’s police and fire chief,
and he exacted obedience from Monroe and his
two sons alike. “My father was a six-foot, two-
hundred pound gorilla,” Helms affectionately
said. “When he said, ‘Smile,’ I smiled.” His
mother, Ethel Mae Helms, marshaled her family
off to the First Baptist Church twice a week. In
Helms’s childhood, Monroe still romantically
celebrated Confederate Memorial Day, and
patriotism, regional pride, religion, and racial
separation were formative influences on the boy.
He showed early promise in writing, by high
school already reporting for the local newspaper.
Journalism held such interest for Helms that
he quit Wake Forest College in 1939 to work on
the Raleigh News and Observer. The 20-year-old
moved up rapidly. By 1941, he was assistant city
editor of the Raleigh Times, the city’s smaller,
more conservative paper. Then Pearl Harbor
intervened. Accepted by the U.S. Navy for limited
duty in recruitment and public speaking, Helms
made a crucial discovery: he was good at broad-
casting. Starting in 1948, he began a new career as
a radio news director at station WRAL in Raleigh.
Helms soon moved from the role of political
observer to that of political insider.His reporting
in the vicious, racially divided 1950 Democratic
primary race for the Senate led to accusations
that he had doctored a photo of the wife of the
loser, Frank Graham, so that she appeared to be
dancing with a black man—a fatal blow to the
candidate’s chances in the segregated state.
Helms denied it. The winner, Senator Willis
Smith, took him to Washington as his adminis-
trative assistant in 1951. Working in the Senate
propelled Helms closer to a political career.
From 1953 to 1960, Helms was a lobbyist
and editorialist for the North Carolina Bankers
Association. He had an opportunity to exercise
his politics in a weekly column and at the same
time held his first elective office, on the Raleigh
City Council, where, although nominally a
Democrat, he opposed virtually all taxes.
The great turning point in Helms’s life came
in 1960. As the executive vice president of the
Capital Broadcasting Company, he began broad-
casting fierce radio editorials on radio station
WRAL.Here, for the next 12 years, he developed
views that would last the rest of his life. These
broadcasts were fire and brimstone. In much the
same way that radio host Rush Limbaugh criti-
cized liberals in the 1990s, Helms attacked lib-
eral trends in the 1960s.He referred to the 1960s
as “this time of the fast buck and the ‘New
Morality’—the age of apathy and indifference,
the season of disdain for simple virtues and
common honesty.”
What riled Helms most was the CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Carried across the state of
North Carolina, Helms’s attacks on desegrega-
tion were reprinted in newspapers under such
titles as “Nation Needs to Know of Red Involve-
ment in Race Agitation!” The liberal media were
to blame, Helms reasoned, and if they would
stop distorting the truth, then “there would be
millions around the world who would change
their minds about race relations in the South.”
Despite his own biases, Helms and WRAL sur-
