RALEIGH, N.C. -- Former U.S. Sen. Jesse A. Helms, who rose to national prominence as an unwavering and unapologetically controversial lion of the American right, died on the Fourth of July. He was 86.

During a career that included 30 years in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Helms endeared himself to conservatives throughout the country. To supporters, Sen. Helms told it like it was and stood firm. To his critics, Sen. Helms told it like a demagogue.

"America lost a great public servant and true patriot today," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Sen. Helms' reputation.

"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," McConnell said in a statement.

Sen. Helms became known as "Senator No" for his constant battles against everything from increased government spending to civil-rights legislation to the National Endowment for the Arts.

It was a title he came to relish. No to civil rights. No to abortion. No to communism. No to the United Nations. No to gay rights. No to school busing. No to the U.S. giving up the Panama Canal. No to a nuclear arms reduction treaty called SALT II.

Sen. 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. When Sen. Helms announced in 2001 that he was retiring from the Senate, Washington Post columnist David S. Broder described him as "the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country."

Sen. Helms did make a few changes that moderated his image at the end of his 30-year Senate career -- but they seem now more like footnotes to the senator best known as a latter-20th century magnet for attack by liberals.

The man who spent his life fighting the left and decrying homosexuality told Christian activists in his last year in the Senate that he'd joined the fight against the worldwide AIDS epidemic. And a friendship bloomed with Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This didn't necessarily mean that Sen. Helms had mellowed. It just made the man whose path always turned right a little more complex and not so easy to read.

"He was one of the most conservative senators, but he wasn't the leader of conservatives in the Senate. He was a leader of conservatives outside the Senate," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. But Sabato said Sen. Helms' positions would be a major problem today for a GOP that is perceived by many as moving too far to the right.

Sen. Helms "was happily willing to lose," Sabato said. "He was willing to lose gloriously rather than abandon his views and principles."

As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Sen. Helms said, "Dr. [Martin Luther] King's outfit . . . is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior." He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."

"Senator Helms certainly was no bigot," McConnell, the current Senate Republican leader, said yesterday. "He was a man, however, not into subtlety. You know what he thought about a particular issue. You certainly knew because he was not into the kind of nuance and subtlety that so often divides American politicians."

Sen. Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committee and used his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his anti-communism stamp on foreign policy.

As he aged, Sen. 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 he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.

Sen. Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh bookstore to sign copies but did not make a speech.

In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, he said he hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such delight in repeating."

"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.