RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR

Wide-ranging biography of the unrepentant racist and Cold Warrior par excellence.

If Ronald Reagan was the smiling, avuncular face of conservatism, Jesse Helms was its snarling pit bull—though, as Link (History/Univ. of Florida) notes, he rejected the “imperiousness of some of his colleagues” and was even “rated among the nicest senators” in a magazine survey of some 1,200 Capitol Hill employees. He may have been courtly and well-spoken, but Helms also carved a political niche in the civil-rights era as an opponent of desegregation and federal intervention in the South’s delicate little problem. “His insistence on white ‘rights’ as a sort of natural right would become a consistent theme in his rhetoric about race,” writes Link, one that scarcely matured as he ascended the political ranks. Fulminating against race-mixing, he also darkly warned in 1970 that the “longhairs” in the streets might just get a revolution after all, “but not the kind they expect.” Helms was right, of course, and he gloried in the reactionary ’70s and ’80s, serving as a vigorous ally of and spokesman for just about any South-American dictator who came along, “reporting to his constituents favorably about their authoritarian regimes” while railing against Jimmy Carter’s plan to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In his later terms, he groomed the likes of Trent Lott, allied himself with fundamentalists and anti–gay rights activists and vigorously opposed a holiday for Martin Luther King. His last days in the Senate were spent battling the appointments of African-Americans to various posts, even though he seems to have melted, at the end, when rock star Bono came calling with his program of debt relief for Africa.

Link’s scholarly and unsparing biography of Helms is recommended reading for anyone who wonders how the nation ever became what it is.