William A. Link's Righteous Warrior In Chicago Tribune

A life of 'Senator No'
Biography of North Carolina's Jesse Helms may be a bit too kind to its subject

By Eric Arnesen
Chicago Tribune, March 8, 2008


Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
By William A. Link
St. Martin's, 643 pages, $39.95

The modern conservative movement owes much to the political innovations, persistence and crusades of former five-term Republican U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. First elected to the Senate in 1972, Helms staked out a position on the far right that allowed him to demonize his liberal opponents and promote a deeply conservative agenda. For more than a quarter of a century, he assumed the role of an ideologue who eschewed pragmatism and denounced compromise. His limited legislative accomplishments were vastly outweighed by his role in advancing an anti-government ideology, unquestioned American nationalism, strict social conservatism and the new grass-roots right.

In "Righteous Warrior," William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida and author of numerous books on the South, has produced a judicious and comprehensive biography of Helms, a man who "left a permanent stamp on late-twentieth-century American public life." Link shares few if any of Helms' political sensibilities. "I disagreed with him profoundly," he says at the outset. Helms "represented everything that I dislike in modern politics, his policies represented polar opposites of everything I believed in." "Righteous Warrior" is a balanced, respectful (if overly detailed) study in which Link largely holds his politics in check. In fact, the book is, if anything, overly kind to its subject.

Born in Monroe, N.C., in 1921, Helms grew up imbibing small-town conservative values of "self-reliance, discipline, and hard work" and developing a deeply held Baptist faith. In young adulthood he allied himself with conservative Democrats who opposed the emerging civil rights movement. As executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association in the 1950s, he preached against communism, liberalism and racial integration. Turning to broadcast journalism at conservative TV station WRAL in the 1960s, Helms was able to take his message to as many as a million households in his state. Along with many Southern whites unhappy with the civil rights revolution, Helms abandoned the Democrats and pursued his conservative crusade under the banner of the Republicans. "Helms saw the coming conservative backlash as the backbone of the new anti-liberal revolution," Link writes, and rode that resentment to a Senate victory in 1972.

Over the next three decades, Helms doggedly promoted his agenda in the international and domestic arenas. An advocate of unilateral American power and an "aggressively nationalist" foreign policy, he exhibited "unwavering and unequivocal support for waging the Cold War" against the Soviet Union and its allies. Toward that end he relentlessly denounced detente and arms control with the Soviets, viewing America's communist enemy as a barbarian force over which the U.S. should maintain unquestioned military superiority. Rejecting collective security agreements, he opposed treaties that would in any way restrict America's "freedom of action." His conviction that the Soviets were up to no good in the developing world led him to embrace and even champion authoritarian regimes with abysmal human-rights records in Latin America and Africa.

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