Jesse Helms Dies at 86

RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Helms, who 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, died on the Fourth of July.

He was 86.

Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University in North Carolina.

"He was very comfortable," said a former chief of staff, Jimy Broughton, who added Helms died of natural causes in Raleigh.

Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.

As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer, and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006, his family announced that he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.

The center said funeral arrangements were pending.