Did Richard Nixon Used Make America Great Again
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Church and State
When Richard Nixon Used Billy Graham
For 'America's Pastor,' access to the highest rungs of American power came at a price—1 he would later regret.
As endless obituaries remind united states of america today, Baton Graham knew every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama; he was a White House visitor for decades. The Southern Baptist preacher known equally "America's pastor" was past turns advisor, confessor and confidant to chief executives from both parties.
The showtime visit, to Truman in 1950, did not get well. When Graham and fellow evangelists revealed the details of their conversation, and staged a prayer session on the White House lawn, Truman labeled him a "counterfeit," seeing him as more a publicity-seeking opportunist than a pastor. Simply Graham persisted, seeing the national phase as possibly his biggest chance to influence America'south spiritual life—and even the course of the nation'southward history.
Beyond the decades, he gained unique admission to the ability centers of American life. Publishing magnates William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce helped propel him to fame; financial and business organisation leaders saw his message as a powerful antidote to the appeals of "socialistic" politics, while more liberal political figures saw the benefits of bonding with America's favorite religious figure. More and more, Graham came to embody the tension between the spiritual necessity of speaking Biblical truth to ability, and the compromises required by admission to power itself.
In this regard, of all Graham'due south White House visits, none was more intriguing—and revealing—than the one he made on September 8, 1968.
This was a visit with a message to President Lyndon B. Johnson from one of the ii men battling to succeed him. And it reveals merely how much Graham, the virtually prominent religious figure of his fourth dimension, was pulled in by the temptations of temporal power. At the fourth dimension, Richard Nixon was the Republican presidential nominee, with a good chance of taking the White Firm away from a Autonomous Party deeply divided over the state of war in Vietnam. His relationship with Graham stretched dorsum decades; Nixon'southward militant Cold War anticommunism had been a perfect match with Graham's "Christianity vs. Communism" bulletin of the 1950s and '60s.
And the message Graham brought was tailormade for a president plagued past doubts over the state of war, and well-nigh his place in history.
Nixon wants to you to know, Graham told LBJ, that he profoundly admires all of your hard work; y'all are, he said, "the hardest working president in 140 years." He told Johnson that if Nixon won and ended the Vietnam War, he would give Johnson "a major share of credit" for a settlement and would "do everything to brand you ... a place in history."
For his part, Johnson promised Nixon his total cooperation should he win the White House.
Information technology was a message unlike anything out of our political past: the nominee of the opposition party sending a trusted envoy with words of admiration, and the promise of a kinder judgment from history.
It was a message destined to fall on receptive ears. LBJ's unhappiness with Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey—his own vice president—was an open secret in Washington. He was convinced that Nixon was closer to him on Vietnam than Humphrey; and so much and then that Defense Secretary Clark Clifford came to believe that LBJ actually wanted Nixon to win.
Why would Billy Graham, of all people, have been selected to deliver this most sensitive of political messages? In fact, there were good reasons.
In that location were strong ties between Johnson and Graham; a scheduled five-minute meeting shortly later on JFK's bump-off stretched for v hours, and Johnson had oftentimes turned to Graham for spiritual force. And Graham's ties to Richard Nixon were stronger. In 1960, when he wrote John F. Kennedy to assure him—misleadingly—that he was not going to utilize JFK'due south Roman Catholicism against him, he also wrote that he would likely vote for Nixon because of longstanding personal bonds. In using Graham as his emissary, Nixon knew that Johnson would receive him as a messenger he could trust. He'd know with absolute certainty that Graham was faithfully delivering Nixon's assurances.
Only someone with a merits to stand outside of politics, someone with a cloak of spiritual respectability, could be trusted with so unusual a test. It is difficult to imagine such a message being delivered past, say, an emissary of the Republican Party or Nixon's campaign.
But of grade the bulletin wasn't outside of politics at all: Information technology was deeply political, even opportunistic, and, as we know now, factually dubious. It was later revealed that Nixon'southward entrada was actually working to undermine a peace initiative.
It is one example of just how much "America'southward pastor" was a staunch political ally of one particular American, Richard Nixon. At the 1969 inaugural, Graham delivered a prayer that read, in part: "We recognize, O Lord, that in Thy sovereignty K has permitted Richard Nixon to pb us at this momentous hour of our history"—a sentiment that sounded to some every bit if he was asserting that Nixon was God'south selection. His support for the war in Vietnam was so enthusiastic that on April 15,1969, after meeting with missionaries from Vietnam, Graham sent a memo to the White House urging that, if the peace talks in Paris failed, Nixon should bomb the dikes that held dorsum floodwaters in the North. This, said Graham, "could overnight destroy the economy of Northward Vietnam." Information technology would as well accept destroyed countless villages, sending as many equally a million civilians to their deaths.
He became fifty-fifty more instrumental to Nixon, moving well beyond spiritual counselor. In 1972, he peppered the White Firm with memos on everything from campaign strategy to stagecraft.
His most infamous "bonding" with Nixon happened in 1972, when a White House chat turned to the bailiwick of Jewish domination of the media. Nixon was a notorious anti-Semite—a fact that became clearer subsequently the Watergate tapes—and Graham played to the president's prejudices with enthusiasm. He called that alleged media command "a stranglehold," mused about "doing something about it" in a 2d Nixon term, and added, "A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,'' Graham said. ''They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so along. Just they don't know how I actually feel near what they're doing to this country, and I take no power and no way to handle them.''
''Yous must not let them know," Nixon replied.
These repellent remarks may well indicate a core of anti-Semitism; just they can also be read as Graham's effort to curry favor with Nixon by feeding his darker impulses, much equally Henry Kissinger did throughout Nixon's White Firm tenure. That reading, in turn, tells usa much about the willingness, fifty-fifty eagerness, of a spiritual guide to preserve his access to temporal power. Had Graham chastised Nixon for such views, or fifty-fifty declined to endorse them, it might have made him more of a spiritual shepherd, but lessened Graham's admission to the inner circles of power.
Late in life, Graham came to view his choices differently. In a 2011 interview with Christianity Today, he said, "I … would have steered articulate of politics. I'm grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in ability have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no 1 to talk to. But looking dorsum, I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn't practise that now."
He also spoke in very unlike terms about international matters, strongly endorsing efforts toward disarmament, was open well-nigh the thought that Christianity might not be the only route to conservancy, and distanced himself from the Moral Bulk and other manifestations of the Religious Right.
But the route Billy Graham took during his prime raises a fascinating question: What if Graham, with his undeniable magnetism, had chosen a different path? What if his insistence on integrated religious gatherings—a provocative posture in the South of the 1950s— had been accompanied by a forthright campaign for integration in schools, and in a campaign for the vote? What if he had found the boardrooms and offices of the political elite less highly-seasoned than the injunction to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?" We might have been remembering him as we do another Southern minister, who led a life sixty years shorter, but who moved mountains.
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/21/billy-graham-death-richard-nixon-217039/
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