William A. Link's RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR reviewed in Washington Post

Southern Man
Jesse Helms was an archetype. Now is he an artifact?
Reviewed by Michael Skube
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Washington Post

RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR
Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
By William A. Link
St. Martin's. 643 pp. $39.95

A visitor to Jesse Helms's campaign headquarters in Raleigh, N.C., in 1984 would have noticed something curious. Helms, seeking a third term in the Senate, was in a bitter race against North Carolina's two-term governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat. Helms, of course, was the Republican. But nowhere in his headquarters did you see the word "Republican." No GOP elephants were in sight.

On the red, white and blue banners that festooned his office you saw just "Jesse Helms" and "Conservative." That was the political identity he had fashioned early on in the small town of Monroe, N.C., where his father was chief of police, and in more than 50 years of political activism, Jesse A. Helms Jr. never strayed from it.

William A. Link's Righteous Warrior is a scrupulously fair biography of a man who gave himself entirely to protecting a way of life he saw as endangered. To Helms, that meant conservatism more than it meant one political party or another.

Helms, who left the Senate in 2003, is now 86, retired and ailing. His legacy will be much disputed, with no shades of gray. He was -- depending on your education, your race, your station -- either a defender of the way things should forever be, or a retrograde and faintly dangerous feature of the Southern landscape, like those tacky roadside fireworks stands. He was either a courtly gentleman who loved children and old people, or he was, as the essayist Hal Crowther once described him, "a kind of navigational marker, a fixed thing to steer away from if you want to keep yourself from grounding on dangerous shoals."

Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, attempts to explain Helms's importance without engaging in either veneration or caricature. In his view, Helms was an architect of the conservative reshaping of politics in the 1970s and '80s, a conduit of regional support for Ronald Reagan and a source of organizational know-how for conservatism nationally. "The rise of the new American right," Link argues, "cannot be properly understood without coming to terms with Helms's role."

But conservatism comes in many stripes. Helms's values owed little to Alexander Hamilton, whose espousal of a strong central government Helms would have found uncongenial. Nor would he have had much in common with, say, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, for whom conservatism was a disposition more than a creed.

Rather, Helms thought conservatives had a duty to proselytize, to persuade, to confront the enemy at every turn. And the enemy was, in various guises, liberalism, socialism, communism, atheism, women's rights, homosexuality, forced integration, secularism -- anything, in short, that might be catalogued under Modernity.

And yet there was another side, seldom seen. Link describes Helms watching appreciatively as his granddaughter shot baskets with former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a liberal Democrat, in Washington. More surprising still was his bonding, late in life, with U2's Bono to seek greater financial assistance for AIDS victims in Africa. With his granddaughter, he was even a guest in Bono's skybox at a U2 concert; the audience, Helms said, was "moving back and forth like corn in the breeze." None of this altered his views of feminism, homosexuality or anything else he opposed.

Before he became a symbol of a particular brand of uncompromising, racially tinged social conservatism, he was a high school tuba player, the graduating senior voted "most obnoxious" by his classmates and an aspiring sportswriter. Some thought he had a promising career in newspapers. His reporting and commentary in the now-defunct Raleigh Times was, as Link describes it, alternately "hard-hitting and personal."

This would seem to be giving him more than his due. One could say, just as fairly, that he had positions more than he had ideas. He was never given to reflection, and he was not intellectually curious. He knew what he needed to know, and that was that. If he had gifts as a communicator, they were for pungency and for understanding his audience. He entered politics in the early 1950s as a Senate aide and later worked as a lobbyist for North Carolina bankers. But his big break was becoming an editorial commentator at a Raleigh television station, WRAL, in the '60s. It provided him a visibility the state's political establishment underestimated, and in 1972 he upset Democratic Rep. Nick Galifianakis for a Senate seat. He held it for three decades, rising to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, where he brokered administration appointments he wanted and blocked those he didn't.

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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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William A. Link's RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR in NYT Sunday Book Review

Politics Issue
R, North Carolina
By DAVID GREENBERG
New York Times Book Review: February 10, 2008

RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism.
By William A. Link.
Illustrated. 643 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $39.95.

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

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