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RALEIGH — Former U.S. Sen. Jesse A. Helms, who rose to national prominence as one of the leading lions of the American right, died Friday. He was 86.

During a career that spanned more than a half-century as a reporter, congressional aide, bankers lobbyist, city councilman, hard-hitting television commentator and finally U.S. senator from North Carolina, Helms helped define what it means to be a conservative.

Helms, the five-term senator and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had spent his final years in declining health at a Raleigh retirement facility, his memory slipping away.

Few politicians of his time were more controversial than Helms: beloved by many for his unvarnished individualism as he crusaded for greater morality in the public square, but also despised by others as a mean-spirited bigot from the old cotton South.

Helms, who died at 1:18 a.m. on the Fourth of July, became known as “Senator No” for his battles, including those against increased government spending, civil rights legislation, communism and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was even willing to wage war against fellow Republicans if he felt they were straying from the conservative agenda.

In North Carolina, Helms was a political surgeon, grafting the old segregationist Democratic Party into the body of a newly revived Republican Party.

Helms made sure Robert E. Lee was remembered at GOP dinners and the playing of “Dixie” was never out of fashion at his rallies.

Conservative Democrats — dubbed Jessecrats — flocked to Helms, transforming the state GOP from a regional party concentrated in the foothills and mountains into a statewide power. Helms broadened it from the wine-sipping country club set to the sweet-tea-drinking pickup truck crowd.

In barbecue joints, filling stations and church basements across North Carolina, all you had to do is say the name “Jesse,” and everyone knew who you were talking about. No last name necessary.

Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word “redneck” to describe himself — who protected simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism.

For 30 years he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wing tip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Free Masonry pins.

He was a lightning rod for criticism. Whenever Helms was up for re-election, liberals poured money into the campaign of his Democratic opponent. Chuck Manatt, then chairman of the national Democratic Party, once called Helms the “Prince of Darkness.”

By the end of his 30-year Senate career, Helms was one of American politics’ most recognizable figures, his likeness gracing the cover of Time magazine and lampooned on wristwatches where time ran backward.

He also was one of Washington’s most powerful men. He could call friends some of the great figures of the age — Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Helms was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, where his father was the town police and fire chief.

Helms briefly attended Wingate College near Monroe before leaving for Wake Forest College. He quit after a year to begin a career as a journalist, working for the next 11 years as a newspaper and radio reporter.

Although he later became famous for his feuds with the media, journalism was a ticket for success — a chance to display his gift with words, to observe politics close up and to meet powerful men who could advance his career.

While he worked at The News & Observer, Helms met Dorothy Coble, editor of the society page. They married in 1942.

The Helmses raised two daughters in Raleigh, as well as a son whom they adopted as a 9-year-old from a children’s home in Greensboro after reading a newspaper story in which the boy said he wanted a mother and father for Christmas.

In 1957, at 36, Helms won a seat on the Raleigh City Council and served two terms.

In 1960, WRAL owner A.J. Fletcher talked Helms into becoming the second TV editorialist in the country as an ideological counterweight to The N&O.

In 1970, at the urging of his daughter, Helms switched his registration from Democratic to Republican. Two years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate and was swept into office by a Nixon landslide.

Helms and his lieutenants began to shape a political movement that would be called “The New Right.”

Helms’ political organization saved Reagan’s career during the 1976 North Carolina GOP primary.

With Helms’ help, Reagan won North Carolina, placing him on a trajectory to win the presidency in 1980.

The key to Helms’ longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win elections without appealing to the mainstream. The use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds nationally was pioneered in the 1960s, but Helms perfected the approach.

The Helms organization handed four-term Gov. Jim Hunt his only defeat in a nasty Senate race. It unseated U.S. Sens. Robert Morgan, a moderate Democrat, and Terry Sanford, a liberal.

It scotched the Senate hopes of John Ingram, a white populist, and Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte.

His team was also among the first in North Carolina to understand the power of television. Attack ads became the calling card for Helms campaigns.

The 1990 Gantt campaign became notorious for a television ad showing a white man’s hands crumpling a rejected job application as a voice intoned: “You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt said it is.” The so-called “white hands ad” had an immediate effect.

In the traditionally clubby Senate, where give-and-take is the key to success, Helms refused to embrace bipartisanship.

“Compromise, hell!” Helms once wrote. “That’s what has happened to us all down the line — and that’s the very cause of our woes.”

He was also a master of constituent politics, and his staff helped thousands of North Carolinians obtain Social Security checks or passports. He would sometimes keep world leaders waiting while he met with loyal constituents.

Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century’s social movements — the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.

Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina.

Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace or Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.

He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and called racial integration a phony issue.

In 1983, Helms made headlines when he waged a filibuster against an effort to make King’s birthday a national holiday.

Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston, the former president of the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had a strong reaction when Helms announced his retirement.

“Jim Crow Sr. is about to retire after spreading his venom of racism and hate for almost 30 years,” he said. “Jesse Helms’ only lasting legacy will be one of prejudice and mean-spiritedness.”

Helms achieved a longtime dream when, in 1995, he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And in his final years in the Senate, Helms was a more traditional lawmaker. He worked in a bipartisan fashion to reorganize the U.S. State Department. Helms approved paying $1 billion in U.S. debt to the United Nations, an organization he had long despised.

A longtime smoker, Helms suffered many health problems starting in the early 1990s. He had double knee replacement surgery, had radiation treatment for prostate cancer, suffered from Paget’s bone disease in his hip and had peripheral neuropathy, a loss of sensation in his feet, which required him to use a motorized scooter or walker.

In his final years, his memory began to fail him as he suffered from vascular dementia. By that time, Helms had announced his retirement.

Ferrel Guillory, who directed the editorial page at the Raleigh News & Observer when Helms was at the peak of his power, called him “a man of the small-town rural traditionalist South.”

Helms never forgot, he never changed. “It was part of his political appeal, too,” he said. “They always said, 'You know where Jesse stands.’”

In addition to his wife and three children, Helms is survived by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times News Service contributed to this report.