John Gizzi of Newsmax profiles the late Tom Ellis, featuring commentary from JLF Senior Fellow Marc Rotterman.
“Tom Ellis was a bare-knuckle fighter for two of the greatest conservatives of the 20th century: Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms.”
Moments after informing me on Sunday that Ellis died at age 97, Marc Rotterman, veteran North Carolina Republican political consultant, used those words to describe the Raleigh, N.C., attorney and canny political strategist.
“Mr. Ellis,” as even law partners still called him after practicing together for decades, was the courtly, pipe-smoking man who first broached the subject of running for the U.S. Senate to Raleigh TV editorialist Helms during their regular Thursday night poker game.
The rest, as they say, is history. Both Helms and Ellis switched their lifelong Democratic affiliation to Republican and launched a no-holds-barred conservative campaign. In 1972, rolling up 54 percent of the vote, Helms became the state’s first Republican senator in 80 years.
Over his next 30 years as senator, whether the issue was giving up the Panama Canal or stopping tax dollars for abortion or fighting world Communism, Helms was usually the quarterback, or at least the linebacker, for the conservative team.
And Ellis inarguably played guard for him.
