Castro

Former Sen. Jesse Helms died on July 4, and the first inclination might be to ask, "He was still alive?," for he seems so removed from our times. This former television commentator who served 30 years in the Senate, was known mostly for his uncompromising and untelegenic opposition to nearly everything, especially communism and liberalism.

Surely National Review Online, the child of Bill Buckley, would bring some deeper perspectives, or so I thought. He was, the editors wrote, "one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation." They went on:

It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First
and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet
Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in
Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra
rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.

He
was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art,
ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments
of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in
the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of
course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been
placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him? Certainly liberals have forgiven the pasts of other segregationists, from Sam Ervin to William Fulbright…

One might ask, who in either party was for communism? Also, Ervin and Fulbright went on to do heroic service in saving the Constitution from imperial presidents, and in any case, their early positions on civil rights have been well documented. But Helms was a generation or more younger than these men yet had learned nothing. He became a Republican representing North Carolina and helped turn the white South to the GOP with both subtle and overt calls to racism. He succeeded beautifully. But even here, he would have failed had not Lyndon Johnson championed civil rights, handing the South to the Republicans for, in his formula, "a generation." Or more.