• Jesse Helms Center Foundation, Thirty for Thirty: Thirty Landmark Addresses Given By Senator Jesse Helms During His Thirty-Year Legislative Career, Jesse Helms Center, 2012, 270 pages, available at jessehelmscenter.org.
RALEIGH — “They’ve got to deal with that right-winger from North Carolina until well into the 21st century, the Lord willing.”
That was Jesse Helms in 1997, referring to editorial writers at The New York Times. Helms duly remained on the scene until July 4, 2008, and this collection explains why the Times didn’t care for him, though U2 singer Bono certainly did.
“There are 2 million people alive in Africa today because Jesse Helms did the right thing,” said Bono. In Thirty for Thirty, Helms explains why he supported U.S. action against the spread of HIV, and a lot more.
The speeches read well and one may be certain that Helms, a former news editor for the Raleigh Times, is the author. But Thirty for Thirty is more than Jesse Helms’ greatest hits. Indeed, it covers ground worthy of review by right and left alike.
The New York Times disliked Helms because he opposed communist dictators such as Fidel Castro, “an evil, cruel, brutal, murderous tyrannical thug.” Helms did not neglect North Korea, “where millions starve and die to satisfy the bizarre whimsy of a psychotic dictator.” When Nobel laureate and Gulag Archipelago author Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited the United States, his first stop was the residence of Sen. Helms.
In 1983, en route to South Korea, Helms befriended some children about to board KAL flight 007. The Soviet Union shot down the airliner, killing 269 people, including the children Helms befriended, and U.S. Rep. Lawrence McDonald of Georgia. Helms easily could have been on that doomed flight and his brief speech at the memorial service is the most moving in this collection. Agree with them or not, others are notable for their command of the issues.
Anyone who wants to hear the case for keeping the Panama Canal will find it here. Helms’ speech on the National Endowment for the Arts, which in the 1980s was funding material such as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” cites legal precedent and notes that “Congress does not infringe or deny an artist’s right to freedom of expression simply because it refuses to financially support that artist’s exercise of this right.”
In 2000 Helms tells the United Nations that, “It is a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek the approval of an international body, some of whose members are totalitarian dictatorships, to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny and claim their inalienable God-given rights.”
The book includes Helms’ reference to “foreign rat-holes” and nations headed by “thugs and hoodlums.” The speeches also recall Helms’ jousts with Sen. Ted Kennedy, the “Chappaquiddick choir boy” who was “off teaching morality to a driver’s ed class.”
For his part, Helms held strong convictions about limited government. “If a man sees himself as the creature of the state,” Helms said in 1977, “then he must expect to be completely controlled in his thinking and his actions, and he surely will be. He should bear in mind that such self-conception dictates that his property belongs to the state as well.”
The Constitution, Helms said, “is thus, by explicit design, a rather elaborate scheme to tie government down and hold the exercise of power within narrow bounds.” Further, “The whole spirit of American government is a spirit of restraint under which the citizens can enjoy the benefits of a well-ordered liberty. Congress has lost sight of this restraint by allowing federal taxation, borrowing, and spending to get totally out of control.”
In 1973 Helms said Americans “do not want the large, cumbersome, meddlesome, expensive, restrictive, coercive, energy-sapping government they have today. … But I also believe that momentum now favors government growth. And if this momentum is not halted, people will get ever more tolerant of government growth.”
The last two national elections would seem to confirm Helms’ prophecy. Pundits are consigning conservatism to the ash heap of history even as some conservatives are having second thoughts about limited government. Here, Helms’ speeches and experience can provide some guidance.
Helms served during the Carter era of economic decline at home and retreat abroad. A “misery index” monitored the malaise, and sensible people were becoming survivalists. Helms stuck to his conservative principles and supported Ronald Reagan who, against considerable odds, boosted economic growth and ended the Cold War.
In the Obama Era Leviathan has gained considerable heft and the nation remains in recession. Imperialist Islam has replaced Stalinist expansion, but retreat is the rule. If all that is to change, it won’t be because those on the side of “that right-winger from North Carolina” see their principles and convictions as irrelevant.