Joe Biden’s Legacy: The Ambivalence of Bipartisanship and Friendship in Politics
by Richard Lange
On January 20, 2025 Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States. At the same time, this day marked the end of Joe Biden’s four-year presidency. Together with Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, he is one of four Presidents since World War II, who only served one term in office. While the end of his presidency was overshadowed by his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential election and the re-election of Donald Trump, his legacy as president is considerable, even if debated controversially: the economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic, investment in infrastructure and new manufacturing jobs and the support for Ukraine, to name just a few things (POLITCO 2025).
But Joe Biden’s political career as well as his legacy extent far beyond his four years as president. From 2009 to 2017 he was Barack Obama’s vice president and before that, he served for six terms as Senator for Delaware from 1973 to 2009. While initially engaging in legal affairs, serving on the Senate’s judiciary committee, he turned to foreign policy in the 1990s, serving as the ranking member and later chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee from 1994 to 2009. In this essay, I will take a look on one of the lesser-known episodes of Biden’s political career: the 1999 Helms-Biden Act, a bipartisan agreement, brokered by Biden and Republican Senator, Jesse Helms, that ended a decade long blockade of U.S. payments to the United Nations and stimulated significant reform of the U.N. institutions. This episode is about more than just overdue payments to the United Nations but it points to the virtues and ambivalences of bipartisanship and friendship in American politics. It is thereby pointing to an underlying principle of Joe Biden’s politics, without which his legacy cannot be fully understood.
Since the early 1990s relations between the U.S. and the U.N. had deteriorated. A more general turn away from multilateralism combined with specific criticism of U.N. institutions as well as its secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the cost of peacekeeping operations, led conservatives in Congress to obstruct payments of parts of the U.S. funding to the U.N. (Goldberg 2020). One of the leading U.N. critics, and for sure the most influential, was Jesse Helms, an archconservative Senator from North Carolina and since 1994 chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee (Link 2008: 463f.). He outlined his criticism of the U.N. in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article as follows:
As it currently operates, the United Nations does not deserve continued American support. Its bureaucracy is proliferating, its costs are spiraling, and its mission is constantly expanding beyond its mandate – and beyond its capabilities. Worse, with the steady growth in the size and scope of its activities, the United Nations is being transformed from an intuition of sovereign nations into a quasi-sovereign entity in itself. That transformation represents an obvious threat to U.S. national interest.(Helms 1996: 2)
By the end of the 1990s, the outstanding U.S. payments to the U.N., the arrears, as it is called in U.N. technical language, amounted to 926 million dollars. In 1997, Helms introduced legislation that would enable the payment of U.S. arrears to the U.N. in two tranches while at the same time pressuring for U.N. reform. This solution found the support of the then ranking minority member of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. The bill was stuck in Congress for another two years, but eventually, the so-called Helms-Biden Act signed into law by President Clinton in 1999 (Link 2008: 465).
This episode is remarkable in terms of policy alone, and therefore the Helms-Biden Act serves as example for conservative critique and liberal support of the U.N. alike (Goldberg 2020 and Schaeffer 2022). But to understand the full meaning of this bipartisan effort and thereby Joe Biden’s politics, it is necessary to take a closer look at Jesse Helms, who was a most unlikely ally and political partner for any liberal internationalist like Biden. U.S. support for the U.N. was secured not against, but by one of its most prominent critics in Congress. As Joe Biden said in a Senate speech: “Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Helms could go to the UN.” (Helms 2001: 24).
Jesse Helms, born in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1921, was a veteran of a North Carolina conservative broadcasting company and a grassroot organizer, before he was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1972. He was staunchly anti-communist and anti-liberal insofar, as he opposed any expansion and intervention of the state, in particular the civil rights agenda of the 1960s (Link 2008: 63). As a lifelong segregationist, he was one of the leading national opponents of the school-busing projects and tried to prevent the introduction of Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday (Link 2008: 63, 170f. and 261f.). His other positions were equally conservative: “Helms statements about AIDS and gays”, as one biographer wrote, “went far beyond anything said by Republican leaders in Congress” and thereby anticipated the culture wars of our time (Link 2008: 343 and 416). He thereby became an important leader of the emerging New Right in the 1970s and an early supporter of Ronald Reagan (Link 2008: 168). For his fierce and uncompromising defense of Reagan Revolution in the 1980’s, he “attained a stature among those on the Right second only to Ronald Reagan’s” (McClellan 2006, 379).
In foreign policy, he opposed détente, mistrusted any rapprochement with the Soviet Union and was against arms control. Until the end of the Cold War, his first foreign policy priority was to construct an anti-communist alliance in Latin America, engaging in close contact with conservatives like Augusto Pinochet of Chile or Roberto d’Aubuisson in El Salvador (Link 2008: 243 and Gaddy 2022). He was a master of Senate procedure and pursued an obstructionist approach that earned him the nickname “Senator No” (Link 2008: 199). In doing so, he opposed not only Democratic administrations, but acted as a guardian of the conservative revolution, who when Reagan came into office opposed many of his foreign policy appointments, for being too moderate or for their past affiliations with what he believed to be détentists Nixon, Kissinger and Ford (Link 2008: 239f.). Even after the end of the Cold War, he introduced legislation to tighten the embargo against Cuba to further isolate the regime of Fidel Castro (Link 2008: 456). In the 1990s he promoted a nationalist foreign policy, that rejected multilateral institutions, peacekeeping as well as nation building and instead pursued American military strength and security (Link 2008: 422). With regard to the Clinton administration, Helms noted in his memoirs: “President Clinton and I were on the opposite side of just about every major issue that came up during his administration” (Helms 2005: 193).
So how did it happen that Biden developed a well-functioning bipartisan relationship with Jesse Helms of all people? Biden repeatedly told the story of his first encounter with Helms in the Senate:
I walked down the floor a very, very strident fellow named Jesse Helms from North Carolina was excoriating Ted Kennedy and another good friend of mine, Bob Dole – […] for introducing the precursor for the Americans With Disabilities Act. And he was going on about how it was not the role of government, and no one had a right to tell a county, or a business person, or anybody else they had to have a curb cut or buses had to accommodate, et cetera. And I thought he was being heartless. So I sat down and Senator Mansfield looked at me and said ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ And I went on for probably three minutes talking about how Jesse Helms had no social redeeming value; I thought he was terrible. (TIME 2017)
The lesson Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, an important mentor to Biden, gave him that day heavily influenced Biden’s thought about the Senate and politics in general:
And he looked at me when I finished and he said, ‘Joe, what would you say if I told you that Jesse Helms, three years ago sitting at his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Dot, saw an advertisement in early December for a young man with braces up to his hips—14 years old—and steel braces on his arms saying, ‘All I want for Christmas is someone to love me, and take me home.’ So what would you say, Joe, if I told you Jesse and Dot Helms adopted that young man as their own child?” I said, ‘I’d feel like a fool.’ He said, ‘Well, they did, Joe. And Joe, it’s always appropriate to question another man or woman’s judgment. But it’s never appropriate to question their motive, because you don’t know.’ And once you question motive, you make it impossible to reach compromise. (TIME 2017)
On this basis, Biden and Helms developed a friendship and working relationship. The Senator Jesse Helms Archives in Wingate, North Carolina, holds a collection of letters between Biden and Helms, showing the close cooperation and personal affection, underlying their political cooperation. Birthday cards, get-well wishes, letters of thanks and condolence, but also details about how to handle nominations and legislative procedures and, time and again, agreements to work together in the interest of a functioning committee. In February 1998, Biden wrote the following regarding an upcoming review of the Foreign Service Act: “I hope we can work together in the same bipartisan spirit as we did last year on the State Department/UN reform bill” (Letter from Biden, 1998) And scribbled on the bottom of a letter to Helms from May 1999, Biden wrote: “I am happy we’ve became good friends” (Letter from Biden, 1999). In the same spirit, Helms described his relationship with Biden in his memoir:
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden, is a man for whom I hold nothing but affection and respect. We are good friends. […] and I knew we could trust each other and that we shared the same goals, even when we had differences about how to achieve them. (Helms 2005: 182).

Jesse Helms and Joe Biden, 2002. Courtesy The Wingate University Archives.
Besides the Helms-Biden Act and UN reform, Biden and Helms managed to get the National Missile Defense Act, another highly controversial issue, through the Senate and initiated a series of smaller reforms of U.S. foreign policy institutions. Throughout the late 1990s Helms often refrained from his old obstructionism and instead worked closely together with Biden, managing the daily business of the Foreign Affairs Committee. As Helms reflected on that time: “The work of the committee is too important to become a backdrop to power plays” (Helms 2005: 265; see also Link 2008: 463). It would be easy, to end this story here, in praise of bipartisanship and friendship in politics, showing what can be achieved when politicians from very different camps put aside partisan struggle. It would be easy to contrast these times with contemporary U.S. politics and mourn the loss of respect and humanity in politics.
But working together with political adversaries, respecting them regardless of political position, comes at a price and his ability to work with everyone in the Senate also leaves a stain on Biden’s legacy. In 1975, Biden and Helms, together with other Senators, co-sponsored and amendment opposed to busing and preventing the federal government from withdrawing funds from school districts that not enforced desegregation. Biden neither is nor was a racist. In fact, he has a record of supporting civil rights. But he was opposed to the means of busing to achieve desegregation. On that basis and due to his readiness to compromise with segregationists like Helms, some civil rights activists argue that his support for the eventually approved amendment might have slowed down the desegregation of schools for years (Link 2008: 172 and Ross 2019). In 2019, when running to be his party’s presidential candidate, this episode received renewed attention. Besides the question of his motives to oppose busing, his advocacy of bipartisanship was critically discussed. In the course of the debate, Biden once again referred to the time when there was “civility” in the Senate, invoking the names of two segregationist Senator’s from the 1970s. He therefore was criticized heavily by fellow Democrats, who not only criticized the moral dimension of praising good contacts with segregationists, but who also questioned if this attitude was still in touch with the modern Democratic Party (Bradner 2019 and Morill 2020).
Both parts of that bipartisan story, the ability to get something done in Congress, and the question how far compromise in the name of bipartisanship can go without abandoning personal and political conviction, are part of Joe Biden’s legacy. Today, as U.S. society and lawmakers seem to be more divided than ever, the fact remains that little can be achieved legislatively – if anything at all – without a reach across the aisle. And at the same time, with that increasing polarization of U.S. politics, the willingness to compromise in both parties appears to be lower than ever. The story of Biden and Helms shows that if politicians are willing to leave dichotomous worldviews and partisan confrontation behind, political deadlock can be overcome and pragmatic solutions reached.
For Biden himself, it is clear what he wants his legacy to be: Addressing newly elected Democratic members of Congress in January 2025, he recalled his relationship with Senators like Jesse Helms: “I got Jesse Helms to vote to fund the United Nations.” Moreover, he mourned the loss of personal understanding in contemporary politics as “the single greatest loss we have.” (Biden 2025). Using his last chance as President and as a veteran Senator of 36 years, he urged the freshmen Democrats in Congress:
So, please reach out. I don’t want you to compromise on any principle you fully disagree with, but just understand the other person’s perspective. It’s a way to get to go. Because if we don’t do that, look at — anyway, I’m confident you’re going to be able to change this, turn this around, in a way that we continue down the road we’re on. (Biden 2025)
About the Author
Richard Lange is a Doctoral Researcher at the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg „Authority and Trust” at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and a PhD student at the Curt-Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University. Richard studied History and Political Science at Heidelberg and Durham (UK). He holds an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary History from Heidelberg University as well as an M.A. in International Relations from Leiden University.
Contact: rlange@hca.uni-heidelberg.de | Richard Lange (uni-heidelberg.de)
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Archival Sources
Letter from February 3, 1998, Correspondence, Biden, Joseph R., Jr., The Jesse A. Helms Papers, The Jesse Helms Center Archives, Wingate, NC. Courtesy The Wingate University Archives.
Letter from May 14, 1999, Correspondence, Biden, Joseph R., Jr., The Jesse A. Helms Papers, The Jesse Helms Center Archives, Wingate, NC. Courtesy The Wingate University Archives.
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Richard Lange (January 29, 2025). Joe Biden’s Legacy: The Ambivalence of Bipartisanship and Friendship in Politics. HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved June 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/136ff
