A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Time magazine asserted that after the first three months of the Nixon presidency, “Billy Graham’s spirituality pervades” the White House, but documents from the Nixon archives make it clear that his was not the only spirit roaming the halls of the national mansion. Early memos regarding the Sunday services dealt with format, frequency, possible speakers and musical groups, and denominational representation. The staff sought Graham’s advice on these matters, and he submitted a long list of possible speakers, stuffing it with such Evangelical colleagues as Stephen Olford, Harold Lindsell, Leighton Ford, and Nelson Bell, but also taking care to include old friends like Gerald Kennedy, several prominent black ministers, Roman Catholic archbishop H. E. Cardinale, and spokesmen from both the National Council and World Council of Churches. Within a short time, however, the staff was clearly less interested in setting the tone for the republic than in forging a tool for Republicans. An early “action memo” to Charles Colson instructed him to get moving on the “President’s request that you develop a list of rich people with strong religious interest to be invited to the White House church services.” Colson and his colleagues apparently performed quite admirably; the guest list for a subsequent service included the presidents or board chairmen of AT&T, General Electric, General Motors, Chrysler, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Westinghouse, Pepsico, Bechtel, Boise Cascade, Republic Steel, Federated Department Stores, and Continental Can Corporation.

  Not every boatload of pilgrims to the White House packed such corporate weight, but none was composed of seekers plucked randomly from the shore. One memo, allocating a quota of invitees to various personnel—- Cabinet members, Charles Colson, and Nixon’s secretary Rosemary Woods got approximately fifty slots each; Pat Nixon and Harry Dent received ten apiece; POW wives were allotted six seats—specifically recommended that “non-VIPs” be limited to no more than 25 percent of the congregation. In another memo, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, noted that “we are now covering the members of the regulatory agencies,” pointing out that while that was not objectionable in itself, “all of our Assistant Secretaries and other Presidential appointees should be covered first. It isn’t going to do us one bit of good to have a member of a regulatory agency at the Church Service or any other function. If they are to be invited, please limit the invitations to the Chairman or to an appointee we [are] working on for a specific purpose.”

  As might be expected for such an explicitly instrumental device, every effort was made to make sure that no preacher breached protocol by pretending to be a prophet and that all reports of the services be as favorable as possible. When Billy Graham was not in the pulpit (contrary to the popular impression that he was a regular performer, he preached at only four White House services in the six years they were held, though he did sometimes show up on other occasions to lead prayer and confer a blessing simply by being present), the staff tried to be sure their pastor-for-the-day was a conservative, a Nixon backer, and in touch with a major constituency. When Cincinnati archbishop Joseph Bernardin was invited to participate in a service shortly before St. Patrick’s Day, a memo explained that “Bernardin was selected because he is the most prominent Catholic of Irish extraction and a strong supporter of the President. We have verified this.” At times, safe men were hard to find; when Harry Dent submitted a list of “some good conservative Protestant Southern Baptists,” he felt moved to add, “They are the only good conservative Protestant ministers.” Sometimes even conservatives were hard to trust. Elton Trueblood, theologically conservative but dovish in sentiment and independent in character, was given two handwritten notes prior to entering the pulpit, both stressing that he was not to raise any political issues in his sermon. The staff recognized, of course, that an invitation to speak at the White House could enhance a preacher’s reputation and was willing to confer that blessing in return for expected political favors. In June 1970, after Nixon raised Baptist hackles by appointing Henry Cabot Lodge as his unofficial emissary to the Vatican, Graham suggested that inviting Carl Bates, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, might offset some of the criticism Nixon was receiving. Then, a few months before the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971, he recommended that lay preacher Fred Rhodes, who expected to seek the presidency of that twelve-million-member denomination, be invited to preach. A staffer noted that Rhodes was a “staunch Nixon loyalist” and that “a White House invitation to speak would aid greatly in his campaign for this office.” The quid pro quo was no mystery: “[I]f elected, Colson feels that Rhodes would be quite helpful to the President in 1972.”

  Perhaps feeling Nixon’s decision to create a religious sanctuary in the White House meant he was finally going to go public with the deep religious convictions Graham had been attributing to him for fifteen years, Billy tried to edge him a bit closer to the altar, to get the President to own up to the piety the preacher felt certain was present. Before Nixon’s first appearance at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (sponsored not by the President but by the International Christian Leadership organization), Graham recommended that “the President’s remarks probably should be very low-key and appear to be impromptu.” It would also be good, he thought, if the President would “talk about his religious childhood and the impact of religious people on his life, mainly Sunday School teachers, the pastor of the Whittier church where he attended as a child, and other people such as this.” Graham figured, no doubt, that such a reminiscence would both appeal to the assemblage and reopen the springs of Nixon’s religious sentiments. The evangelist told any who would listen that no one who saw Nixon perform on such occasions could fail to be impressed, but he privately pressed for more, urging Nixon, in the fall of 1969, to make “a statement similar to the one Lincoln gave” before the end of the Civil War, issuing “an anguished call to prayer.” At about the same time, he sent along a plan suggested to him by Jane Pickens Langley, the wife of William C. Langley, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, in which she suggested that “at noon each day, everything, including television and radio, could be stopped for two minutes of silent prayer with a definite subject suggested.” With a siren serving as a call to prayer, Ms. Langley felt virtually certain that “very few people in this country would fail to comply—even if only out of superstition. . . . It should be an act of patriotism in which everyone wants voluntarily to participate, and if it is presented correctly, it can become that.” To this singularly blatant suggestion that the nation adopt a new ritual for its burgeoning civil religion, Graham appended a simple note: “I personally think she has a point.”

  Nixon chose not to push for a daily prayer break, but he clearly valued most of Graham’s efforts on behalf of his administration’s religious program. He was dependably effusive over his White House sermons and treated his appearances as more special than those of other preachers; on one occasion, he not only invited eighty-year-old Morrow Graham and Nelson Bell to attend a service at which Billy was preaching but gave Graham the right to invite as many as thirty additional guests—a singular allocation of scarce political resources. Nixon also appreciated the fact that when Billy Graham was preaching he never had to worry about surprises. Graham would not say anything to embarrass him and would smooth over any rough spots that might arise. At one interfaith service at which Graham appeared on the program with Rabbi Edgar Magnin and John Cardinal Krol, the elderly rabbi got up to speak before his time had come, thus inadvertently cutting out a second number the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was prepared to sing. He also used more than the ten minutes or so the staff had allotted for his remarks. When his own time came to speak, Graham graciously observed that he thought it might be best to have a few moments to reflect on Rabbi Magnin’s wisdom before his own sermon, and wondered if the choir might be able to grace the congregation with another offering. The choir happily complied, Graham cut his own prepared remarks short, and the service ended on time, just as if it had been a television program. Members of the congregation may never have noticed, but R
ichard Nixon did, and wrote a note of gratitude for his friend’s skillful handling of an awkward situation.

  Charles Colson, whose reputation as the most cynical of Nixon’s aides has been badly tarnished by what appears to be a thoroughly genuine religious conversion and by subsequent years of leadership of the Prison Fellowship ministry, believed that Nixon’s interest in religion had an authentic aspect. “Sure,” he admitted, “we used the prayer breakfasts and church services and all that for political ends. I was part of doing that. But Nixon was an interesting guy. There was an ambivalence about him. There were times when I thought he was genuinely spiritually seeking. The things he’d believed as a young man, he said he no longer believed. He didn’t believe in the Resurrection, or in Jonah being swallowed by the whale. He believed those were symbols. But then he’d talk about Catholics and how they had a set of firm beliefs. He’d say he wished he could be a Catholic because they had a set of beliefs and were comfortable with them. You could tell he was struggling inside. That was probably his mother’s influence working on him. At the same time, he was a very shrewd politician. He knew how to use religious people to maximum advantage. He used to write orders on giving aid to religious schools or he’d take Cardinal Krol out on the Sequoia [the presidential yacht]. That was aimed at winning the Catholic vote. But that’s what politicians do.”

  Billy Graham saw less of the calculating Nixon and recognized that many observers saw little or nothing of the pious Nixon, but he too insisted that his friend never quite shed the religious impulses that had sent him and his brother striding down the aisle at evangelist Paul Rader’s tent meeting in Los Angeles years before. “There is a very deep religious side to Richard Nixon that never came out,” he insisted. “He is a Quaker and Quakers don’t believe in expressing their religion much, but he would [talk about it] to me privately. I made a deal with him. I said, ‘I will not keep any notes or diary on my relationship with you, because you deserve privacy. You deserve to have some people around you whom you know are not going to divulge conversations, and especially a clergyman. I want you to have somebody that you can talk to in confidence.’ I think he felt that with me, and with Ruth. He told us some things that I am sure he would never want anyone to know. He would take off his shoes and talk by the hour.”

  The closeness between the two men extended well beyond the confessional, and each felt at ease trading favors with the other. Sometimes the favors were minor, as when someone on the White House staff persuaded Duke Ellington to include vocalist Jimmie McDonald, who had recently left Graham’s crusade team, in a concert of sacred music the famed bandleader was presenting on the West Coast. On another occasion, after spending a weekend at Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Texas, Graham tactfully conveyed word that the former president would greatly appreciate an invitation to come to Cape Kennedy to watch the launching of the rocket that would send Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon; the request was promptly granted, with Nixon himself making the call to his predecessor. Other exchanges were more substantial. When it appeared that perhaps as many as four thousand unordained but “full-time Christian workers,” including a sizable contingent from Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ movement, were about to be drafted in 1969, Graham placed an urgent call to the White House, contending that they should receive the same exemption granted to ordained ministers. Previously, most local draft boards had routinely granted the exemption; when they had not, the National Selective Service System Appeal Board had upheld the right of such workers for the ministerial exemption. As the war wore on, however, many local draft boards tightened up and the appeal board began to turn down requests to exempt Campus Crusade workers on the grounds that they were not actually ministers. In a memo to Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Dwight Chapin reported that “Dr. Graham states that . . . on the President’s Review Board there are one or two gentlemen who are antagonistic toward the work done by these Christian leaders. Needless to say, Graham is very anxious to have someone look into this matter and to see that the policy of exempting these ‘full-time Christian leaders’ is carried through.” The White House obviously considered this as more than a minor annoyance to be finessed as gracefully as possible. Several staffers got involved in seeking a resolution, and one memo noted that “since the board serves at the pleasure of the President, the most quiet and expeditious method of obtaining a review of this matter would be to replace at least some of its members.” Graham professed not to recall this episode, but the matter of deferring “Billy Graham’s people” was on the White House agenda for at least two months and a “talking paper” for a telephone conversation with the evangelist directed that he be told there was “little danger of a wholesale draft of these ministers.”

  Predictably, Graham’s friendship with Nixon drew heavy fire from several quarters. Liberal clergymen and others opposed to the war in Vietnam regularly condemned the evangelist for his failure to behave as a prophet, a stance that in their opinion required him to use whatever influence he possessed to persuade Nixon to refrain from bombing and to bring the war to a swift end, even at the price of conceding a defeat in American policy, if not in actual combat. Will Campbell, an iconoclastic southern preacher whose efforts to minister to both the victims and perpetrators of racial hatred and whose calls for peace in Vietnam had won him status as a true prophet, branded Graham “a false court prophet who tells Nixon and the Pentagon what they want to hear.” Nicholas von Hoffman unleashed such a stinging assault on Graham that Herb Klein felt moved to register a complaint with the editor of the Washington Post. Gary Wills called the friendship between the two men “an alliance of moral dwarfs,” and I. F. Stone called the clergyman “[Nixon’s] smoother Rasputin.” And so it went. In part, the criticism stemmed from the perception that Graham had an undiscriminating sense of sin, that because he regarded all sins as manifestations of the same fallen nature and all humans as equally sinful (though perhaps redeemed), he found it difficult to distinguish between, for example, pornography and saturation bombing of civilians. His critics also resented his decided preference for obedience to authority—virtually any authority that did not expressly forbid worship of God or compel worship of some other being—and his underlying assumption that those in power, particularly in the United States, were more likely to be right than wrong. Finally, they charged him with abdicating responsibility for improving the world by preaching that such problems as racial injustice, poverty, and war would never be solved until Jesus returned to inaugurate the millennium.

  None of the charges was groundless. Since the end of the Benevolent Empire created by Charles Finney and his contemporaries before the Civil War, Evangelicals had concentrated on problems of individual behavior and character rather than on the shortcomings of corporate bodies. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr brilliantly described how men of good character and impeccable personal morals could and did participate in business, government, and other large-scale institutions that were engaged in unjust, sinful, exceedingly destructive behavior, without any clear sense of incongruity or paradox. Evangelicals, with Billy Graham as a classic example, seemed never to have grasped Niebuhr’s point. To Graham, structures were immoral because they were made up of immoral individuals. If these individuals could be redeemed, then the structures would automatically right themselves and begin to behave in a Christian manner. For that reason, calling for repentance on the part of small-time sinners—“the bartender who sells beer to minors, the income-tax chiseler, the college grad whose diploma is won by cribbing rather than cramming”—seemed to Graham to be as important a part of “The Answer to Corruption” as passing laws to curb wholesale abuses by corporations and the politicians.

  It was also easy, at a time when millions of Americans were challenging all forms of authority, to find support for the view that despite an irenic spirit and ostensible commitment to individualism, Billy Graham was an authoritarian personality. He had said, “I once asked an army officer which he wou
ld rather have on the field of battle—courage or obedience. He flashed right back, ‘Obedience.’ God would rather have your obedience than anything else.” He repeatedly asserted that young people had rallied to Hitler and Mussolini and various Communist leaders because they wanted a master to be the center of their lives. And he believed that nothing—not racism, not a divisive war in Southeast Asia—was likely to be so dangerous to the security of the nation and so odious in the eyes of God as angry protests in the street and rebellious assault on “the system” by student radicals. As for clergymen who led protests against the war, in an address before the Southern Baptist Convention he said, “Where many of these men get the ‘Reverend’ in front of their names, I do not know. Certainly they don’t get it from God.” A man who openly challenged the standing order, he seemed to be saying, could not be a man of God. “It is interesting to me,” he observed, “that God does not tolerate disorder. He laid down precise laws in the physical, chemical and electrical world.” Since God did not tolerate disorder, Graham saw little reason for his appointed representatives to do so either. He told a gathering of Protestant policemen in New York City that they were agents of God with “a tremendous responsibility at this hour of revolution and anarchy and rebellion against all authority that is sweeping across our nation,” and he lamented that “the Supreme Court, in trying to protect freedom, is giving the nation dangerous license.” He huddled with J. Edgar Hoover to receive a report on radical students and declared a few days later that “there is a small, highly organized group of radicals” who were “determined to destroy what they call ‘the system’” and were “very dangerous to the security of our nation.” In an interview on NBC television, he revealed that he had information that approximately one hundred terrorist groups would soon begin a campaign to destroy established order in the nation.