The indomitable No man

Documentary puts Jesse Helms' contradictions on display

Jesse Helms has never been shy about making his true feelings known in public, and the UNC-TV film "Senator No: Jesse Helms," which airs tonight at 9, makes that very clear in its first minute.

"Just think about it," the five-term North Carolina Republican senator begins a portion of a 1990 campaign speech, "homosexuals, lesbians, disgusting people, marching in our streets demanding all sorts of things ..."

Then, Helms lets his theatrical flair come out. He puts his hands on his hips and leans forward a bit, almost like a petulant Mick Jagger performing "Brown Sugar," and concludes his thought "... including the right to marry each other."

The Jagger reference is not made just to resort to that tired but still-popular trope of calling a famous politician a "rock star." But to the religious-right movement that the man from Monroe helped empower, Helms fits that bill if anyone does.

Independent filmmaker John Wilson's painstakingly thorough, 90-minute documentary tells us something else about the divisive senator and media commentator that will astound his detractors. Helms wanted, especially toward the end of his career, to be remembered as a humanitarian. He wanted to be loved.

The contradictions make for a fascinating and sometimes complex portrait in "Senator No: Jesse Helms." He was an unapologetic anti-civil rights crusader and race-baiter who also gave excellent personal service to constituents who visited his Washington office, and famously joined with his unlikely friend, U2's singer Bono, to fight AIDS in Africa.

Archival footage and photos -- some of which capture Helms' early professional years working for The News & Observer and WRAL -- are interspersed with interviews with the subject, as well as commentary by friends, foes and interested observers.

One of the latter, News & Observer reporter and columnist Rob Christensen, wonders aloud how you can square a man who adopted a child with cerebral palsy in the 1950s with the same man who, decades later, sought to cut food stamps.

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, who says he considers Helms "a close friend," partly explains Helms' uncompromising sociopolitical stance as an adherence to values ingrained in him during his small-town Southern Baptist upbringing in the 1920s and '30s. Still, Biden doesn't excuse the welfare-queen stereotype that Helms brought to the food-stamp argument.

Other, stauncher foes have their say about him, too. One of them is Harvey Gantt, the African-American former mayor of Charlotte who ran against Helms in 1990. During that campaign, Helms' organization ran the infamous "white hands" ad that showed a white man crumpling a rejection letter from a prospective employer who gave the job to a minority applicant instead, due to "racial quotas" supposedly favored by Gantt, according to the ad.

"We couldn't believe that someone, in 1990, would run an ad like that," Gantt says in an interview with Wilson.

So did Helms manage to leave a kinder legacy at the end of his career, when he retired in 2002?

Friends such as Bono and Biden suggest that he did. Others, such as Gantt and Patsy Clarke -- who helped form Mothers Against Jesse In Congress in reaction to his dismissive attitude toward AIDS-stricken gay men in the United States -- say no.

Wilson, who worked on the film for four years, says he was pleased with reaction to it from liberals and conservatives alike at a Chapel Hill screening last week. He says objectivity and balance were crucial to making it interesting, because a film that was either a tribute or a hatchet job would turn viewers off within the first few minutes.