[21] Smith (a conservative Democratic lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association) portrayed Graham, who supported school desegregation, as a "dupe of communists" and a proponent of the "mingling of the races".

The latter represented the "new politics" of voters who included the young, African Americans voting since federal legislation removed discriminatory restrictions, and anti-establishment activists, who were based in and around the urban Research Triangle and Piedmont Triad.

[54] Helms and Bob Dole offered an amendment in 1973 that would have delayed cutting off funding for bombing in Cambodia if the President informed Congress that North Vietnam was not making an accounting "to the best of its ability" of US servicemen missing in Southeast Asia.

The support of Helms, alongside Raleigh-based campaign operative Thomas F. Ellis, was instrumental in Reagan's winning the North Carolina primary and later presenting a major challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican National Convention.

Later, Helms was not pleased by the announcement that Reagan, if nominated, would ask the 1976 Republican National Convention to make moderate Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker his running mate for the general election,[68] but kept his objections to himself at the time.

[75] When Carter announced, on August 10, 1977, the conclusion of the treaties, Helms declared it a constitutional crisis, cited the need for the support of United States' allies in Latin America, accused the U.S. of submitting to Panamanian blackmail, and complained that the decision threatened national security in the event of war in Europe.

[127] Senators Helms and James A. McClure blocked Ted Kennedy's comprehensive criminal code that did not relax federal firearms restrictions, inserted capital punishment procedures, and reinstated current statutory law on pornography, prostitution, and drug possession.

[41] During the budget crisis of 1981, He restored $200 million for school lunches by instead cutting foreign aid,[150] and against increases in grain and milk price support,[151][152] despite the importance of the dairy industry to North Carolina.

[154][155] Helms heavily opposed cutting food aid to Poland after martial law was declared,[156] and called for the end of grain exports to (and arms limitation talks with) the Soviet Union instead.

[163] Although Helms recognized budget concerns and nominations as predominant, he rejected calls by Baker to move debate on social issues to 1982,[164] with conservatives seeking to discuss abortion, school prayer, the minimum wage, and the "fair housing" policy.

[171] He proposed an amendment taking school prayer out of the remit of the Supreme Court, which was criticized for being unconstitutional; despite Reagan's endorsement, the bill was eventually rejected, after twenty months of dispute and numerous filibusters, in September 1982, by 51–48.

[172] Helms and Strom Thurmond sponsored another amendment to prevent the Department of Justice filing suits in defence of federal busing, which he contended wasted taxpayer money without improving education;[173] this was filibustered by Lowell Weicker for eight months, but passed in March 1982.

[198] Helms alleged that the CIA had interfered in the Salvadoran election March and May 1984, in favor of the incumbent centre-left José Napoleón Duarte instead of D'Aubuisson,[199] claiming that Pickering had "used the cloak of diplomacy to strangle freedom in the night".

Ignoring Elliott Abrams' request for a softer line towards Panama, Helms—a long-time critic of Noriega—agreed, and the hearings uncovered the large degree of leeway that the U.S. government, and particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, had been giving to Noriega.

[229] In a letter to Attorney General Edwin Meese, Helms made a request of the Justice Department to investigate if he or members of his staff had been spied on during the Chile visit and called the charges against him "frivolous and false indictment".

[235]) In 1987, Helms added an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act, which directed the president to use executive authority to add HIV infection to the list of excludable diseases that prevent both travel and immigration to the United States.

A letter-writing campaign headed by Helms ultimately convinced President Bush not to lift the ban, and left the United States the only industrialized nation in the world to prohibit travel based on HIV status.

[250] At the behest of several civil rights groups and the Democratic National Party, the US Department of Justice sued the Helms campaign, the NC GOP, four lobbying firms and two individual lobbyists.

[264] In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded grants for a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, some of which containing homosexual themes, in addition to a museum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, supporting an exhibition that featured an image by Andres Serrano of a crucifix suspended in urine.

The summer of 1997 saw Helms engage in a protracted, high-profile battle to block the nomination of William Weld, Republican Governor of Massachusetts,[286] as Ambassador to Mexico: refusing to hold a committee meeting to schedule a confirmation hearing.

In January 1998, Helms endorsed a legislative proposal by the Cuban-American National Foundation to provide 100 million worth of food and medicine so long as Havana could promise the assistance would not be allocated to government stores or officials of the Communist Party.

[295] On May 15, Helms announced a proposal of 100 million aid package for Cuba that would provide food and medical assistance to the Cuban people by the Roman Catholic Church and politically independent relief organizations.

[297] He asserted the administration should have worked to develop strategies to undermine Castro and instead spent years "wasting precious time and energy on a senseless debate over whether to lift the Cuban embargo unilaterally".

[309] In a June 5 statement, Helms announced the date of the four hearings and that Holbrooke would be questioned regarding his career, specifically his mediating role in negotiations of the Bosnia accords with President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević.

In 2004, he spoke out for the election of Republican U.S. Representative Richard Burr, who, like Elizabeth Dole two years earlier, defeated Democrat Erskine Bowles to win the other North Carolina Senate seat.

[325] Early in his career, as news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in the 1950 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, against Frank Porter Graham, in a campaign that used racial issues in a divisive way, in order to draw conservative white voters to the polls.

[333] He was accused of being a segregationist by some political observers and scholars, such as USA Today's DeWayne Wickham who wrote that Helms "subtly carried the torch of white supremacy" from Ben Tillman.

"[249][255][256][257][258] During the same election, Helms's campaign mailed 125,000 postcards to households in predominantly African-American precincts falsely claiming if people voted without updating their addresses on the electoral register since their last move they could go to jail.

[74] In his final year in the Senate, he strongly supported AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common, and continued to hold the belief that the "homosexual lifestyle" is the cause of the spread of the epidemic in America.

[349] He believed, writing in When Free Men Shall Stand, that "such utopian slogans as Peace with Honor, Minimum Wage, Racial Equality, Women's Liberation, National Health Insurance, Civil Liberty" are ploys by which to divide humanity "as sons of God".