Putdown for Helms, pass for M.L. King, Jr.

ITEM: A new book by former Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), entitled Here's Where I Stand, was reviewed in an Associated Press news story that appeared in the Washington Post for August 30. In the piece, Helms was referred to as the "Senate's leading archconservative for 30 years." The article goes on to mockingly recount that Helms "rejected the notion that racist tendencies drove him to oppose the creation of a national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday." In his book, says the AP account, "Helms contends that [he was against the holiday because] King's advisers included communist sympathizers."

CORRECTION: The liberal media here fall back into their well-worn bag of tricks: Jesse Helms, for example, is labeled as an "archconservative" (though corresponding tags are rarely applied to left-wing extremists). To discredit the media-created image of him, Helms denies that he is a racist, thus planting the seed in the minds of unwary readers that there may be something to the charge or else it would not have been mentioned.

Saying that Helms "contends" that Martin Luther King had Communist ties --so as to suggest that those ties may not have existed--is especially galling and deliberately misleading. The senator, of course, was very aware, as were liberal politicians in Washington, that several of King's top advisers were indeed Communists. These included Hunter Pitts O'Dell, who had been a secret member of the governing body of the Communist Party in the United States, and Stanley Levison (whom Ambassador Andrew Young called one of King's closest friends), who had served on the executive committee of the U.S. Communist Party and was personally involved with Moscow's illegal funding of party activities in this country. Keep in mind that we're referring to Soviet agents, not parlor pinks.

In January of 1987, this writer needed nine pages in Conservative Digest just to highlight major Communist/King connections. This topic is also covered in John Barron's Operation SOLO, his 1996 book that describes a decades-long FBI operation inside the Kremlin, which also took note of Communists inside King's entourage. A particularly revealing account (though sympathetic to King) is David Garrow's 1981 book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Garrow recounts how a left-wing icon, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, ordered wiretaps on King and how President John F. Kennedy himself took King into the Rose Garden of the White House to warn him what had been detected. Speaking of O'Dell and Levison, JFK told King: "They're Communists. You've got to get rid of them."

While King equivocated and pretended to do so, he never did cut his ties to those Communists, as Garrow admits.

Nevertheless, when the mass media attempt to smear Helms and, by extension, conservative beliefs in general, they imply that the longtime senator is probably a racist, either deluded or misinformed with the ridiculous or insignificant notion that the sainted Rev. King knew some Communist "sympathizers."