In private he was known as a courtly Southern gentleman, unfailingly polite to employees, friends and family. On Capitol Hill no one terrorised the State Department and the Washington Establishment like Senator Jesse Helms — otherwise known as “Senator No” or “The Great Obstructionist”.

A long-term member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later its chairman, at one time during Bill Clinton’s administration he held up 400 promotions in the State Department, the passage of 12 foreign treaties and the approval of 30 ambassadors. Gaining worldwide notoriety for his extreme right-wing views, he voted against abortion, détente, labour unions, Medicare, social security and school desegregation, and for the return of the Panama Canal.

The Senator for North Carolina was the scourge of all liberals, homosexuals, civil rights activists, the United Nations and an outspoken supporter of the Argentine junta during the Falklands war, apartheid South Africa and President Pinochet’s Chile. “You have to be somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun to pass Jesse’s tests,” observed one frustrated State Department official. “If he moved any further to the right he would drop off the edge.”

Jesse Helms came to the Senate in 1972 as part of the Richard Nixon landslide re-election — the State’s first Republican senator since the Civil War. He chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee from 1981 to 1987 and the Foreign Relations committee from 1995 to 2000.

His grass-roots support came from white, small farmers and blue-collar workers, his finances from tobacco and oil companies. He always denied being a racist, but was not above playing the racist card during elections. As one of the remaining “Good ol’ boys” of the South, he was raised in a time when, in his view, black Americans “knew their place”, and he hated what he saw as the destabilisation of his ordered society after the victory for civil rights.

He was born and raised in North Carolina in 1921 in the town of Monroe, where his father was fire chief and police chief. It was a typical small Southern town of the Twenties, boasting five Baptist churches, four Republicans, a pool hall and a whore house. Young Jesse’s sole distinction was winning the tuba-playing championship.

He became a Southern Baptist of the hellfire school and deacon of his church. He was active in charitable works, and adopted a disabled boy but voted against federal measures to help the disabled. He married his wife Dorothy in 1942.

Helms began his political career as a Southern Democrat — one of those who frequently stood to the right of their Republican counterparts — and switched parties only in 1970. He started his working life as a journalist, becoming city editor of the Raleigh Times in North Carolina at the age of 21 after graduating from Wake Forest College. He served in the US Navy during the Second World War as a recruiting officer but was never posted away from the state.

He returned to North Carolina for a three-year stint as news and programme director at a local radio station before going to Washington as a congressional aide in 1951. By the late 1950s he was back in North Carolina, where he won elective office for the first time as a member of Raleigh City Council. His political views, however, got more exposure through his appointment as executive vice-president of the Capital Broadcasting Company, which controlled radio and TV networks in the state. There, Helms began to write and broadcast daily editorials, lambasting the national television networks for what he called their “consistent bias” — especially in their coverage of the civil rights movement.

To Helms, the upheaval taking place in the South in the Sixties was not news. It was, he said, “A little one-act play consisting of staged events,” adding that “blacks and whites together can learn that there is no cause for hostility, simply because rabble rousers preach it, or because social activists claim it exists”.

He used his radio pulpit to remarkable effect, attacking academic freedom, the integration of American schools, waste in government, and always and inevitably the dangers of communism. He called for more military spending, tougher criminal laws and more money for the police. After 12 years of this he was finally ready to run for the Senate and he swept past the strongly favoured Democratic opponent, with 56 per cent of the vote.

In the Senate it soon became apparent that Helms meant what he said. In his first term he tried to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling against prayer in public schools, voted in favour of the death penalty, against school bussing and against President Ford’s nomination of Nelson Rockefeller as Vice-President. He opposed government subsidies for the licensing of handguns, the Panama Canal treaty, the creation of a consumer protection agency and federal loans to New York City.