Feisty Jesse Helms Defends Stances in Memoir

Former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, writing with the same passion that made him the Senate's leading archconservative for 30 years, renews his criticism of abortion in a memoir published this week, comparing it to both the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," Helms wrote in "Here's Where I Stand," which is scheduled for release Tuesday.

In the book, he defends his criticized comparisons of abortion and the Holocaust.

"I reject that criticism because this is indeed another kind of holocaust, by another name," he wrote. "At last count, more than 40 million unborn children have been deliberately, intentionally destroyed. What word adequately defines the scope of such slaughter?"

Helms devotes an entire chapter to his views on race relations, defending his record as a 1960s television commentator and senator who challenged most of the nation's civil rights legislation.

"I felt that the citizens of my community, my state and my region of the country were being battered by this new form of bigotry," he wrote."I simply could not stay silent in the face of this assault -- and I didn't."

Helms rejected the notion that racist tendencies drove him to oppose the creation of a national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983, or to run a 1990 campaign ad tying his black opponent to affirmative action.

He wrote that he opposed the King holiday in part because the Senate rejected a Helms amendment that would have unsealed the FBI files of the civil rights leader. Helms contends that King's advisers included communist sympathizers.