Sources: Helms may announce he won't seek re-election

August 21, 2001 Posted: 3:32 PM EDT (1932 GMT)

By Jon Karl CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, is expected to announce on Wednesday evening that he's not going to run for re-election, according to GOP officials in Washington and North Carolina.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for Helms would not confirm the content or time of any Helms announcement but said that the senator was "working on a statement."

GOP officials said Helms' announcement will be made at WRAL -- the Raleigh-based television station where Helms worked as a political commentator before he was first elected to the Senate in 1972.

Helms, 79, has suffered from a variety of health ailments over the past few years. His seat is open for election in 2002.

The longtime Tarheel State lawmaker has held on to that seat, despite some close electoral calls, for five terms in Congress' upper chamber.

A perennial darling to conservatives of all variety in his home state, Helms has won friends nationally and internationally for his often genteel Southern sociability while grinding on the nerves of his political opposition, some world leaders, supporters of government funding for the arts and groups seeking broader rights and wider recognition.

His first term in the Senate earned Helms a reputation as someone willing to stand up for frequently unpopular conservative causes. The newfound attention brought him an unexpected vice presidential nomination at the 1976 GOP convention -- with the support of some 800 delegates - and election to a second term in 1978.

But it was his two runs against Charlotte Democratic Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 -- and the Republican takeover of both the House and Senate that occurred between those two elections -- that vaulted Helms to political superstar status in many respects.

The 1990 contest against Gantt was billed by the Helms camp as essentially a referendum on affirmative action -- as characterized by a television spot showing two white hands crumpling a rejection letter while a voice stated: "You were the best qualified for that job, but they had to give it to a minority."

It has been social issues such as affirmative action, federal funding for the arts, and his aversion to homosexuality that have kept attention on Helms.

Offended by works such as some of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and pieces devised by performance artist Karen Finley, Helms has sought repeatedly to block funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, focusing his ire on any creation of a sexually explicit nature that has received federal money.

When the GOP took over both houses of Congress following the 1994 midterm elections, Helms became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he at once advanced his long-held anti-communist line, despite the demise of the Cold War, and forged odd friendships, including a bond with U2 lead vocalist Bono, who approached Helms earlier this year to discuss retirement of third-world debt.

As head of the committee, a run that ended earlier this year with the Democratic takeover of the Senate, Helms pressured the United Nations to make substantial changes before it received millions in U.S. arrears, he assisted in the passage of "Helms-Burton" bill to further box in Cuba's President Fidel Castro, and worked to scuttle the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

-- CNN's Ian Christopher McCaleb contributed to this report.

-- Anonymous, August 21, 2001