With little allegiance to the traditional GOP, Sen. Jesse Helms created a high-tech political organization that served as his own de facto political party.

The National Congressional Club recruited candidates, helped elect Ronald Reagan president, dominated the state Republican Party and raised an estimated $100 million from 1973 until its breakup in 1996.

The club's success was the result, in part, of two key insights: that television was the best way to reach voters and that there was a rich vein to be mined through direct-mail solicitations.

Crucial to the Helms organization's success was the development of computers. When Helms was first elected, donor lists were kept on index cards, and each fundraising letter was written on an electric typewriter. But new technology allowed Helms to mail out personalized solicitations to a national network of contributors. Most of the letters included lurid warnings about the growing power of militant blacks, homosexuals or labor union bosses.

The contributors included Harvey Buckwalter, a retired farmer from Pennsylvania who was worried about abortions, the spread of the AIDS virus and other concerns. He wrote 28 checks to Helms' re-election effort between 1987 and 1989, totaling $804.

"There is too much wickedness, waste and disgrace," Buckwalter said once in an interview. "Unless we get back to fundamental principles based on the Bible, we are all doomed."

Dovetailing with his fundraising, Helms forced Senate votes on amendments regarding such hot-button issues as abortion, school prayer, court-ordered busing for racial integration of the schools, homosexuals and federal funding of the arts.

While other senators snickered when Helms' amendments were defeated by wide margins, Helms used the votes to help raise money for his political organization.

"Jesse has an organized army," Helms chief fundraiser Richard Viguerie said in 1981. "If he sees something he doesn't like, he's now got nearly a half-million people he can appeal to, and they'll follow his lead. There isn't another politician in the country who has that."

Some senators, such as Dale Bumpers, an Arkansas Democrat, openly attacked Helms, accusing him of tying up the Senate with amendments so his political organization could raise money.

"His presses are running, his letters going out," Bumpers told the Senate in the early 1980s. "He is going after all the troglodytes in the Senate who are opposed to school prayer."

The Helms organization was also among the first in North Carolina to understand the power of television -- particularly of tough advertising that portrayed Democratic candidates as out of touch with Tar Heel cultural values.

The breakthrough occurred in 1978. After spending a year building a statewide organization for his first re-election effort and spending $1 million, Helms had hardly budged in the polls. Arthur Finkelstein, Helms' pollster, proposed spending $200,000 on TV advertising. Helms shot up 15 points in the polls.

"It was like a revolution in a moment," recalled Carter Wrenn, a longtime Helms strategist. "Our whole conception of political campaigns changed when that poll came back, and they were never the same again."

From then on, Helms poured money into television campaigns and spent little on such traditional politics as county organizations, dinners and yard signs.

The attack ads became the calling card for Helms campaigns -- whether it was tying Democratic Sen. Robert Morgan to the Panama Canal Treaty, Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday or two-time Democratic Senate candidate Harvey Gantt to racial quotas.

Backed by his machine, Helms won re-election four times. But it was never easy. Helms won once with 55 percent of the votes, once with 52 percent and twice with 53 percent.

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