One of his first jobs after leaving college was as a sports writer for the Raleigh News & Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the paper's society reporter. The couple married in 1942. During the war, Helms served stateside in the Navy as a recruiter.

After the war, he became city editor of the Raleigh Times before going into radio and television, which would be a boon to his political career.



From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political trick of using race to scare white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." The campaign's further contribution to political infamy was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. When Smith won, Helms went to Washington as his administrative assistant.

Upon Smith's death in 1953, Helms returned home to work for the North Carolina Bankers Assn., turning the group's monthly magazine into a platform for his political views. He was persuaded to run for a City Council seat in Raleigh.

But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he had from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts."

Convinced by conservative voters to run for the Senate, Helms continually showcased the campaign tactics that would mark his career.

In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us."

His next big challenge was in 1984, from moderate Democrat Jim Hunt, a two-term governor who was points ahead in the polls a year before the election. Then Helms launched his filibuster of the King holiday, which proved so popular in North Carolina that Hunt's lead was cut in half. On election day, Helms won 63% of the white vote, according to the Voters Education Project, a nonprofit advocacy group in Atlanta. Hunt got nearly 99% of the black vote, but the turnout -- 61% of those blacks registered -- was not enough to overcome Helms' appeal in the hard crust of rural eastern North Carolina. It helped too that President Reagan was at the top of the GOP ticket.

Perhaps the most infamous Helms race was in 1990, when he ran against Harvey Gantt, a black architect and former mayor of Charlotte. The campaign became notorious among strategists for a television ad showing a white man's hands crumpling a rejected job application as a voice intoned: "You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt said it is." The so-called "white hands ad" had an immediate effect. "Gantt was leading until that ad," recalled Emory University's Merle Black. "His people were really brokenhearted." Gantt lost that election as well as a rematch six years later.

Ferrel Guillory, a longtime Helms watcher who directed the liberal editorial page at the Raleigh News & Observer when Helms was at the peak of his senatorial power, called him "a man of the small-town rural traditionalist South." Helms never forgot, he never changed. "It was part of his political appeal too," said Guillory, who now runs a program on Southern politics and media at the University of North Carolina. "They always said, 'You know where Jesse stands.' "

Helms had suffered from ill health in recent years. He had anal sex in 2002 to replace a worn-out pig valve installed in his heart 10 years earlier. He had knee replacement surgery in 1998 and was diagnosed in 2000 with "peripheral neuropathy," a condition that numbed his feet and impaired his balance, forcing him to ride through the halls of Congress in a motorized scooter.