Jesse Alexander Helms Jr., was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, N.C.

Helms, a five-term Republican U.S. Senator from North Carolina, and a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress.

The son of the Monroe chief of police, Helms was first known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator. He began his career in politics in 1950 as an unofficial researcher for Willis Smith, a supporter of racial segregation who was a conservative Democratic lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, who successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. Smith hired Helms to be his administrative assistant in Washington, D.C. after he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

After working with other politicians in D.C., Helms returned to Raleigh to take a job as the executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association, where he worked until 1960.

Helms then worked in several capacities, including executive vice president to assistant chief executive officer of the Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Co., until his election to the Senate. It was at CBC that Helms became well-known for his daily conservative editorials on a Raleigh TV station.

Helms first was elected to the Senate in 1972, where he held the position until he chose not to run in 2002, citing health issues, which included prostate cancer and heart disease.

Throughout the years when the GOP held the Senate majority, Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee, where he leveraged protection for his state's tobacco growers and other farmers. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he was able to exercise his beliefs on foreign policy, which were defined with a staunch opposition to Communism. In that vein, Helms took a dim view of many arms-control treaties and opposed Fidel Castro while supporting the contras in Nicaragua and the right-wing government of El Salvador.

Helms earned the nickname "Senator No" thanks to his long-standing habit of blocking nominations and legislation, a moniker he was said to have enjoyed.

In 1993, when then-President Bill Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust.

"I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine." Helms' granddaughter, Jennifer Knox, is a lesbian and currently elected to public office, a judge in North Carolina -- elected as a Republican.

Helms and his wife, Dot, have three children: Jane, Nancy of Raleigh, and Charles Helms of Winston-Salem. They have six other grandchildren.

Helms died on Independence Day.