RALEIGH, N.C. - Former Senator Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.
He was 86.
Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Centre at Wingate University in North Carolina. He died in Raleigh of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.
"He was very comfortable," Broughton said.
Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms centre said.
"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Helms' reputation.
"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in," McConnell said in a statement.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.
"Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end.
In April 2006, his family announced that he had been moved into a convalescent centre after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the Republicans held the Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views.
He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador.
He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that President Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No."
He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust.
"I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine."
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight years.
Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization be disdained for most of his career.
And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.
But, in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office.
He likened abortion to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," he wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.
He knew it, too.
"Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultra-liberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990 after winning his fourth term.
He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns.
In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators -- sometimes all of them at once.
"I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed the beginning of a Christmas break.
And he once objected to a request by phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings on television.
