A lot of people thought they knew Jesse Helms. Friends, admirers, detractors, haters. I didn’t know him when he hired me, back in 1992. Possibly I never met the man so many people thought they knew. But in 10 years working for him at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I knew a man of profound conviction, unflinching honesty, and true compassion. There are others who share Helms’ convictions — his loathing of communism, his aversion to tyrants, his disgust with waste, his impatience with abuse of taxpayer treasure. But there isn’t one willing to use the tools granted an American senator by the Constitution and the Senate rules to fight each menace, every day.

People said Jesse Helms was old fashioned. It’s true, he typed every word on his beat typewriter, using his signature yellow paper. He was religiously polite, and politely religious. He believed in marriage. He respected meritocracy. And he was old-fashioned in other ways too. Living on credit was alien to him. When he applied for a charge card at Sears, he had no credit history to allow him easy approval. But while he was conservative in so many ways, he was curious enough and honest enough to change.

Some told me that Helms had once been anti-Israel, that he had decided on Zionism in order to beat Jim Hunt in the brutal 1984 election. Perhaps he had been hostile to Israel; perhaps he merely believed $3 billion in assistance to the only functioning and diverse economy of the Middle East was a little silly. Either way, his support and respect for the state of Israel, deeply rooted in his own faith, was far from political.

A favorite story, too often told, was of an Israeli tank commander on the Golan who made his way into battle, explaining his tank had no reverse gear, and lost his leg never flinching in the face of fire. It epitomized Helms’ conception of honor and love of country.

Helms loved North Carolina, and never forgot he had been elected by the people of that state to represent them. He defended tobacco interests because those were North Carolina interests. But when a major tobacco firm leaned on him to oppose early sanctions on Iran, Helms wrote me back a little note in his characteristic electric blue ink: Sometimes a man must say no.

Conventional wisdom has it that obstruction was Helms’ main aim, but it wasn’t. It’s true he didn’t mind being the only body in the way of an oncoming train, but he loved a partner in his fights as well. For all my years at the Committee, I kept under the glass on my desk a short note of thanks from Senator Kennedy that Senator Helms passed along.

Helms and Mr. Kennedy were anathema, but when it came to fighting Libya on behalf of Pan Am 103 victims, neither hesitated to suit up on the same side. Anytime staff suggested doing the right thing with the wrong man, Helms opted for the right thing. Even a blind hog, he’d scrawl in electric blue, finds an acorn once in a while.

Too many mistook Helms’ gentility for foolishness, his humanity for weakness. He liked Madeleine Albright, the penultimate secretary of state with whom he worked. Partly, he respected the woman; partly, he appreciated her effort to do business with him. But when she hounded him to abandon his principles, he was perplexed. Why, he asked staff, does she expect me to abandon what I believe in? Because she thinks you’re her friend, he was told. Then, he explained, she will learn the limits of our friendship.

Helms was a believer, and fundamentally, what he believed is the quintessence of America. The American constitution is the word of the land, trumping the fashionable vagaries of international law. Handouts create dependency, locally and internationally, but generosity to those in need is never amiss. Freedom is the heart’s blood of civilization. He loved Tibet, he loved Taiwan, he loved the Cuban people, and he loved real freedom fighters everywhere because he knew that he was one too.

Washington is full of people who say they love freedom. But what do they do? Jesse Helms faced down Soviet dictators, Arab thugs, Chinese communists, Latin American creeps and more, using every tool at his hands. He faced down the corruption of the United Nations, the fecklessness of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the anti-Americanism of the United States Information Agency, and the tyranny of all those who go along to get along. Often he did so in ways that frustrated the careerist bureaucracy that runs Washington.

He refused to allow taxpayer money to go to institutes that supported Saddam Hussein. He refused to confirm ambassadors who opposed fighting the drug war. His objections were grand — cutting off indirect funding to Palestinian terror groups, and small — nailing United Nations diplomats for New York City parking tickets. The same principle underpinned every gesture: Respect America, respect our democracy, respect our earnings, and respect our people — and all people who share our values.

I first went to work for Senator Helms in January 1992. He was shaking up his staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which he was then the ranking member, and had brought in his oldest, dearest friend, Admiral Bud Nance to lead the effort.

There were a dozen of us, more or less, on Helms’ Foreign Relations Committee team. We didn’t all agree about everything, and Helms never cared. We, with Admiral Nance — an only son with a mother to raise him, who went from Monroe, N.C., to Iwo Jima to the command of the U.S.S. Forrestal and then a senior White House job — were a family. We still are.

Honor and decency were our only watchwords. Helms never valued making the world safe, as he said, for cocktail parties. He trusted his God, his people, his nation. I worked for him for nearly a decade before I learned he had adopted a young, disabled boy into his family. He never used his family to advance or enrich himself.

It’s true, he wasn’t a hypocrite. He didn’t love nuance. He was a happy warrior in a just cause, so many just causes. What an honor it was to work for him, that man I knew.

Ms. Pletka is the vice president for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.