Remembering Jesse Helms

Jesse Helms died today at age 86. His death shouldn't please anybody; he retired from the Senate six years ago, and at this point in life he was somebody's sweet old grandfather and little else.

That said, here's his record in the Senate in a nutshell:

• He began his political career as an overt white supremacist, delivering racist tirades on a North Carolina TV station and helping segregationists win elections by appealing to racist sentiment. His biggest early accomplishment was derailing the 1950 Senate campaign of Frank Porter Graham by leaking a photograph of Graham's wife dancing with a black man and writing an ad that played to the feelings of the era ("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?").
• He never really lost his racist edge. During the 1980s, he played to white fears about affirmative action in his campaign ads. In the 1990s, he found great joy in singing "Dixie" while stuck in an elevator with Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), the body's only black member. (He boasted to a colleague in advance of the racist prank: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries.")
• He was the Senate's most prolific right-wing censor, declaring war on the National Endowment for the Arts over the mildly homoerotic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and attempting to lead a charge to buy out CBS News in an effort to make it more conservative.
• Until his very last year in the Senate (when he finally agreed to support an Africa AIDS funding bill), Helms did everything he could to block federal AIDS funding (declaring AIDS to be a fair punishment for homosexuality) and led that charge throughout the Senate in the 1980s. Because of his partially successful efforts to delay AIDS research and prevention efforts, he is indirectly responsible for the early deaths of millions.

So what can I say positive about Jesse Helms? Well, he became less of a visible segregationist when it became politically unpopular to be a segregationist, and he grew less opposed to AIDS funding when it became politically unpopular to oppose AIDS funding. I guess that demonstrates some kind of moral progress, either on his part or on the part of his constituents. But most of all, he retired in 2002--and the life he has led since then was almost certainly much more noble, much more admirable, than the life he led in the Senate. Could he have become a good man over the past six years? Maybe so. Probably so. Let's run with that.