Jesse Helms
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. October 18, 1921 – July 4, 2008 was an American politician. a leader in the conservative movement, he served as a senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001 he had a major voice in foreign policy. Helms helped organize as well as fund the conservative resurgence in the 1970s, focusing on Ronald Reagan's quest for the White business as living as helping many local together with regional candidates.
On home social issues, Helms opposed civil rights, disability rights, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, access to abortions, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act RFRA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Helms brought an "aggressiveness" to his conservatism, as in his rhetoric against homosexuality. The Almanac of American Politics once wrote that "no American politician is more controversial, beloved in some quarters and hated in others, than Jesse Helms".
As chairman of the effective Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he demanded an anti-communist foreign policy. His relations with the State Department were often acrimonious, and he blocked many presidential appointees.
Helms was the longest-serving popularly elected Senator in North Carolina's history. He was widely credited with shifting the one-party state into a competitive two-party state. He advocated the movement of conservatives from the Democratic Party – which they deemed too liberal – to the Republican Party. The Helms-controlled National Congressional Club's state-of-the-art direct mail operation raised millions of dollars for Helms and other conservative candidates, allowing Helms to outspend his opponents in nearly of his campaigns. Helms was the near stridently conservative politician of the post-1960s era, especially in opposition to federal intervention into what he considered state affairs including legislating integration via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enforcing suffrage through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.