I just saw the news that former NC Senator Jesse Helms died. I know he wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I consider him an American icon. He wasn't perfect, but on a lot of big issues I thought he was great (like the military, for example). He was 86.
UPDATE: More on helms from John Fund:
The issue of race will always cast a shadow on Helms's legacy. He could never understand why he was viewed by many as a bigot, having run one of the most integrated TV stations in the South and often hiring blacks on his staff. His criticisms of affirmative action and forced busing were on the mark. But as conservative scholar John Hood notes, "he failed to marry every criticism of government overreaching with calls for the South's social and moral transformation and clear denunciations of racist business owners."
Indeed, the mainstream media rarely put Helms's career in context the way they did, for example, with Sam Ervin, a Democrat who served with Helms in the Senate from North Carolina before retiring in 1975. Ervin was the leading legal strategist against Civil Rights legislation, and he largely crafted the Southern Manifesto against Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. But Ervin was the man who chaired the Watergate hearings that helped bring down Richard Nixon, and his views on civil rights were almost never mentioned. Both Helms and Ervin were courtly, principled conservatives. Only one became a cartoon media villain.
2 comments:
He was a sexist, bigoted, homophobe who favored segregation. In other words, a poster boy for the Republican party. He is a reason there should be term limits for members of Congress.
That's a funny comment considering it was Democrats who stood in the way of civil rights legislation in the 1960's. What party controlled the South after Reconstruction until recently again?
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