Tar heel pioneer: name any Republican strategy of the past thirty years; chances are Jesse Helms got there first.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism - Book review

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

by William A. Link

St. Martin's Press, 482 pp.

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For an astonishing thirty years, Jesse Helms embodied conservative extremism in the U.S. Senate and the Republican Party; even in his "mellow" final term, ending in 2003, his rare nod toward mainstream opinion served only to highlight the rest of his wildly reactionary views. But was he a political outlier, as his frequent battles with other Republicans-including conservative icon Ronald Reagan--seem to show, or a trendsetter?

William A. Link's scholarly biography of Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, provides considerable ammunition for the latter view, as the subtitle indicates. If this excellent book has one weakness, it's that the author doesn't spend much time in explicit comparisons between Helms and his right-wing allies and successors. But after reading it, I have a hard time thinking of a major aspect of the modern right where Jesse didn't get there first, and with a flourish.

It's true that Helms wasn't the very first southern conservative Democrat to shift into the GOP because of opposition to civil rights. But he certainly was in the vanguard, and after winning his first Senate race in 1972 with strong support from his conservative Democratic base in the eastern part of North Carolina, he supervised a brisk conquest of the state GOP from its ancient moderate mountains-and-piedmont ownership.

A radio and TV commentator for more than a decade prior to his first run for office in 1972, Helms was unquestionably a pioneer in the media-heavy campaign methods that dominated U.S. politics by the end of the 1980s. Personal campaigning for him was a rarity, and often a sideshow. Given his background, it's interesting that Helms also created a template for conservative demonization of the "liberal media." One of the largely forgotten incidents Link discusses is Helms's brief 1985 campaign to engineer (in conjunction, ironically, with Ted Turner) a hostile takeover of CBS--an early effort to give conservatives a "fair and balanced" television network.

At the same time, Helms was also a key figure in the development of an ideologically motivated small-donor base for the conservative movement and the GOP. Much of Link's book is usefully devoted to Helm's uneasy but integral relationship with the North Carolina-based fired-raising machine the Congressional Club, which...