Jesse Helms, the hard-line conservative North Carolina Republican who served three decades in the U.S. Senate and became one of America’s leading crusaders against communism, liberalism, tax increases, abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action and court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, died Friday morning at a nursing home in Raleigh, N.C., at the age of 86. The cause of death was not immediately released, but his wife announced in 2006 that he had vascular dementia.

Helms was a shrewd and powerful politician, a superb organizer and a master fundraiser who won election to five terms in the Senate, beginning in 1972. Sometimes called the patron saint of the New Right, he developed a national following and helped set the nation’s conservative social agenda.

He was extraordinarily effective at raising the issues that would provoke the media and raise the passions of his constituents. He appealed to predominantly white, blue-collar, middle-class Americans who rallied to Helms’ championing of what he called traditional family and religious values.

He supported prayer in the public schools, free enterprise in business, a strong military, a balanced budget and “decency, honor and spiritual and moral cleanliness in America.” In 1989, he drew national attention for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts after it funded works he considered homoerotic and anti-Christian.

To his opponents, Helms was divisive, mean-spirited, race-baiting and manipulative. He was a pioneer of negative television attack ads, which he used frequently and effectively in his political campaigns.

When Helms announced in 2001 that he was retiring from the Senate, Washington Post columnist David Broder described him as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”

Helms’ opposition to social change and what he considered legislative overstepping led to his nickname of “Senator No,” a title he came to relish. In 1977, he angrily denounced a treaty advanced by President Jimmy Carter to turn over the Panama Canal to the country of Panama. He blocked nominations for federal office, withheld funding for the United Nations, opposed gun control and threatened to cancel federal support for arts groups and school busing. A staunch opponent of Communism, he sought to isolate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and refused to relent on strict U.S. trade embargoes of Cuba.

Political tactics

As a political fundraiser, Helms had few rivals. At his beck and call was a vast and sophisticated operation known as the National Congressional Club. Operating out of an office building in downtown Raleigh, the club was essentially a political action committee made up of a nucleus of Helms’ longtime friends and supporters.

Out on the hustings, Helms was courtly, Southern and unpretentious. He had an aw-shucks, folksy personal style that many found engaging, and he had genuine rapport with the rank-and-file voters of his state, many of whom saw him as a classic political outsider, unafraid to take unpopular stands in challenging the political establishment.

He also had a reputation of going for the jugular in a political fight. “He ran negative ads against me for 20 months,” former North Carolina Gov. James Hunt Jr., who lost to Helms in North Carolina’s 1984 senate election, said in a 1990 interview with The Washington Post. “During that time, he was able to tear me down and get people to see the race in his terms, Jesse Helms’ race.”

That strategy included efforts to link Hunt with liberal causes by showing pictures of him with Jesse Jackson and Walter Mondale. It also emphasized Helms’ 16-day Senate filibuster against making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a federal holiday. Helms was the only senator to vote against making the date a holiday. During his filibuster, he decried King for what he called “action-oriented Marxism.”

Helms was re-elected in 1990 and 1996, defeating former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt in bitterly contested campaigns. He orchestrated his campaigns against the African-American Gantt to be about “North Carolina values” vs. “extreme liberal values,” and Helms made it clear where he stood.

In 1989, he drew national attention for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts after it funded works he considered homoerotic and anti-Christian. “What the perverted homosexual filth is, is not modern-day Michelangelo,” Helms told a crowd at the state fairgrounds in Raleigh. “It is modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.”

During the ensuing months, the election contest played to a national audience, and Helms campaigned hard against what he described as yet another effort by liberals to give racial minorities unfair preference in employment. Among the more effective of his television ads was one that showed the hand of a white man crumpling a job rejection letter, while an announcer intoned, “You needed that job … but they had to give it to a minority.”

Gantt later described Helms’ effective but divisive tactics: “The tension that he creates, the fear that he creates in people, is campaigns.”

Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, N.C., a small town where his father was police chief. He attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but left before graduating and worked for the Raleigh Times newspaper as a sports writer and city editor.

During World War II, Helms served in the Navy, then returned to his job at the newspaper. In 1948, he joined the staff of radio station WRAL, where he became news and program director. He also helped start the North Carolina News Network, a statewide radio system.

His political career began in 1950 when he served as a top campaign aide to Willis Smith, a wealthy and openly segregationist Raleigh lawyer running for the U.S. Senate. In one of the roughest campaigns in North Carolina history, Smith used a series of race-based attacks to defeat University of North Carolina president Frank Graham.

Helms later said he played no major role in the Smith campaign, but others insisted he was its chief architect. In any event, Helms accompanied Smith to Washington as his administrative assistant. Three years later, when Smith died, Helms went back to North Carolina as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association and served two terms on the Raleigh city council.

Back to North Carolina

In 1960, he returned to the news business as executive vice president of a regional broadcasting company that operated WRAL-TV.

Helms became a household name in North Carolina with his editorials on local news broadcasts. At 6:25 p.m. each night, Helms broadcast five-minute tirades against the likes of Chapel Hill intellectuals, “the so-called civil rights movement,” big government, high taxes, student protests and the Kennedys. The commentaries were rebroadcast the next morning, and they were carried on 70 radio stations, making Helms’ observations staples of daily life in North Carolina. A newspaper column he wrote during those years was carried in 200 papers.

Originally a Democrat, he switched to the Republican party in 1970. Two years later, when he upset Democratic Rep. Nick Galifianakis, Helms became the first Republican elected to the Senate from North Carolina in the 20th century.

In the Senate, Helms rose to become chairman of the Agriculture Committee and invoked seniority to push aside Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar to become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He was a staunch defender of North Carolina’s tobacco industry and used the Foreign Relations Committee as a platform for his anti-communist views.

Conservative agenda

Helms was a master parliamentary tactician who promoted his conservative agenda by putting holds on bills in committee, stalling ambassadorial nominations and attaching strings on amendments. He was generally more effective at blocking legislation than in getting it passed.

But he was also a loner, taking stands that isolated him both from the left and the right, as in his refusal to attend African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela’s speech to a joint session of Congress. He refused to support a 1987 United Nations treaty banning torture and in 1997 blocked President Bill Clinton’s nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a liberal Republican, to be ambassador to Mexico.

“I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest,” he once said.