Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., left, is congratulated by Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., after Helms won his fifth term to the U.S. Senate in this Nov. 5, 1996, file photo. Helms has died at age 86, the Jesse Helms research center says.

Raleigh, N.C. ? When telling stories about Jesse Helms after his death on the Fourth of July, the politician who took his place in Congress recalled how the iconic North Carolina senator liked to invite pages to sit down and chat over ice cream.

“Can you imagine how excited these young people would be, sitting and having ice cream with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

Other stories weren’t as sweet.

Helms opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a commentator and voted against its reauthorization once in the Senate. He notoriously registered his disgust in 1993 when President Clinton nominated an openly homosexual woman to serve at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,” Helms said at the time. “If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”

“I wish, as do many people, that he would have used his strength and power to work for the civil rights movement instead of against it – what a legacy that would have been,” said the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP.

In the hours after Helms died early Friday at the age of 86, having spent the past few years out of the spotlight while in declining health at a Raleigh convalescent home, he was remembered by some as a patriot. Many noted with reverence that he died on the Fourth of July, as did Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and praised his legacy as an unyielding conservative champion.

“I certainly can’t help but think the Lord made it happen that way,” said his longtime political strategist, Tom Ellis. “We know, at least conservatives know, what that meant to the cause.”

But there were also reminders that Helms was the often caustic “Senator No,” a man who in three decades in the Senate delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.

“He was a master at manipulating the politics of fear to his advantage, quite skillfully,” said Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University.