Oh, good grief. NPR, you disappoint me. Today on Talk of the Nation you gave 20 minutes of air time to John Fund’s attempt to whitewash Jesse Helms’s reputation.
It can’t be done, but the right-wingers keep trying. See Hilzoy’s compilation of their statements. Some of them are beyond ludicrous.

• George W. Bush: “…an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.”
• “He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”
• Senator Mitch McConnell: “Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”

Liberty in Helms’s mind meant anti-Communists alone; there was no championing of liberty for the poor, the black, or the AIDS sufferer on Helms’s part. See Hilzoy for a list of Helms’s own statements which pretty much prove that decency and Jesse Helms were twain who never met.