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The club not only engineered Helms' re-election in 1978, 1984 and 1990 but also elected John East, an obscure political science professor at East Carolina University, to the Senate in 1980, and a Clinton businessman, Lauch Faircloth, to the Senate in 1992.

The club knocked over Democrats like bowling pins. The Helms organization handed four-term Gov. Jim Hunt his only defeat. It unseated U.S. Sens. Robert Morgan, a moderate Democrat, and Terry Sanford, a liberal. It scotched the Senate hopes of John Ingram, a white populist, and Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte.

The Helms organization was among the first in North Carolina to understand the power of television. Attack ads became the calling card for Helms campaigns -- whether it was tying Morgan to the Panama Canal treaty, Hunt to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday or Gantt to racial quotas.

Always just enough

Helms won re-election four times. With his confrontational politics, it was never easy. Helms won with 55 percent, 52 percent and, twice, with 53 percent -- figures far below what most established Senate incumbents received.

Helms was an unlikely political star. He was not a war hero like South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, he did not have Reagan's Hollywood looks or charm, and he often talked as if he had a mouthful of marbles.

But Helms had a Trumanesque, give-'em-hell style that many appreciated.

He was a master of constituent politics, and his staff helped thousands of North Carolinians obtain Social Security checks or passports. He would sometimes keep world leaders waiting while he met with constituents.

Helms often labored late into the evening, pecking with two fingers on his manual Royal typewriter, sending personal notes to people across the state.

"When I was elected to the Senate, I made a commitment to myself that I would not be a big-shot senator," Helms said after he retired. "I wanted to do what I could for the so-called little people."

Although he had a fierce public image, Helms also had a ready wit. During a speech in Goldsboro in 1990, Helms had some advice for a San Francisco woman who wrote to the senator to tell him she threw up at the mention of his name:

"The next time it happens, frame it and send it to the National Endowment for the Arts, and they'll give you $5,000."

On the campaign trail, Helms articulated small-town values. His stories about growing up in Monroe -- about turkeys being taken to market and a little boy buying flowers for his mother's grave -- had a Norman Rockwell character.

"Helms conjures up a sort of nostalgia about what many people think were better times -- the age of the nuclear family, a time when children obeyed their parents and blacks knew their place -- that made North Carolina seem like a better place to live, to a certain number of people," said William Snider, the longtime editor of the News & Record in Greensboro.

If Helms could bring a lump to the throat, he also could cause veins to bulge.

"He was a brawler, and that came across to people," said Carter Wrenn, a Helms strategist. "And he was holier than thou. Jesse had sort of a moralist attitude, an 'I'm right and you're wrong, and you're going straight to Hades.' "

Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century's social movements -- the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.

Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.

He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue.

"All his public life, he has done and said things offensive to blacks, and to anyone sensitive to racial nuance," wrote Ernest Furgurson, his first biographer.

'Compromise, hell!'

In the traditionally clubby Senate, where give and take is the key to success, Helms refused to play the game of compromise. Rather than work out his differences with opponents, Helms preferred to stand his ground in defeat.

"Compromise, hell!" Helms once wrote. "That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at the time?"

After Helms conducted an unsuccessful filibuster against a gas tax increase proposed by Reagan, Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming said, "Seldom have I seen a more obdurate and obnoxious performance."

Helms was forced to change his role gradually as Republicans gained control of the Senate and the White House.

He became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1981 but seemed less comfortable with the back-scratching of farm politics. He needed majority leader Bob Dole to help rescue a farm bill that was in trouble.

But he achieved a longtime dream when, in 1995, he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Helms' first love had always been foreign affairs. He was an anti-communist hard liner -- from opposing detente with the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration to fighting friendlier relations with China during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Helms worked against socialist regimes in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, and opposed nearly every nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union and most international treaties, including an anti-genocide pact, fearing they would impinge on American sovereignty.

He operated on the principle that any foe of communism was a friend of his. So Helms befriended not only dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and Chinese protester Harry Wu but also Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, colonels charged with running death squads in El Salvador, and the apartheid regimes of South Africa and the former Rhodesia.

In his final years in the Senate, Helms was a more traditional lawmaker. He worked in bipartisan fashion to reorganize the U.S. State Department. Helms approved paying $1 billion in U.S. debt to the United Nations, an organization he had long despised, and became the the first U.S. senator to address a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in 2000.

His years of decline

Helms' Washington office showed how far the son of a Monroe police chief had come. The walls were lined with cartoons lampooning him, as well as personally inscribed photographs of actor John Wayne, Solzhenitsyn and evangelist Billy Graham.

A longtime smoker, Helms suffered many health problems starting in the early 1990s. He had double knee-replacement surgery, underwent radiation treatment for prostate cancer, suffered from Paget's bone disease in his hip and had peripheral neuropathy, a loss of sensation in his feet, which required him to use a motorized scooter or walker.

In 2002, Helms experienced a lengthy hospitalization when he had a prosthetic heart valve inserted. And in his final years, his memory began to fail him as he suffered from vascular dementia, and he had a hard time recognizing many longtime friends.

By that time, Helms had announced his retirement.

Even in poor health, Helms was a powerful political symbol, giving his blessings to such GOP Senate candidates as Burr and Dole.

And he could still pull in a crowd.

In barbecue joints, filling stations and church basements across North Carolina, all you had to do was say the name "Jesse," and everyone knew whom you were talking about -- no last name necessary.

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