As fond as he was of Lyndon Johnson, eight years of Democratic occupancy of the White House did little to shake Billy Graham’s conviction that America still needed his old friend Richard Nixon. Pneumonia prevented Graham from going to Vietnam during the Christmas holidays in 1967, but when Nixon invited him to spend a few days in Florida to help him reach a decision about making another try for the presidency, Graham rose from his sickbed and took a private plane to Key Biscayne, declaring bravely that “there are times when some things are more important than health.” The two men spent several days together, talking, watching football games, going for long walks on the beach, studying the Bible and praying, and of course, speculating about whether Nixon would have a chance at the Republican nomination, and if he got it, whether he could defeat Lyndon Johnson, who he assumed would seek reelection.
Because of his loyalty to Johnson, and perhaps because he did not want Nixon to risk another crushing disappointment, Graham withheld his counsel. Finally, near the end of their visit, Nixon said, “You still haven’t told me what I ought to do.” Billy told him all he needed to hear: “Well, if you don’t, you’ll worry for the rest of your life whether you should have, won’t you?” That was enough for both of them. Nixon would report on several later occasions that Graham had been more responsible than anyone else for his decision to run, and Billy began immediately to resume knitting the fabric of fellowship that would very nearly become a pall on his ministry. When the press learned of his visit and asked if he would like to see Richard Nixon on the Republican ticket in 1968, he conceded that “I would go that far.” Mindful of his ties to the incumbent, he added that “I would not say who I would vote for as President, but I would say he is the most experienced Republican for the type of conflict we have today.” He stressed that he was a registered Democrat but reserved the right to be flexible. “I vote independently,” he said, “and I usually split. I vote for the man and not the party.”
The following spring was routine for Graham but wrenching for America, with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, Johnson’s decision not to run again, an increase in campus disturbances, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. At the time of King’s death, Graham was in an Australian crusade, part of which had to be rescheduled for 1969 because of yet another bout of illness, this time a serious lung problem. Graham interpreted the assassination as further evidence that America was unraveling, calling it “dramatic indication that we have tens of thousands of mentally deranged people in America. In some respects it has become an anarchy.” Unable to return home for the funeral, he sent telegrams and flowers and gave the press a muted tribute to King: “Many people who have not agreed with Dr. King can admire him for his non-violent policies and in the eyes of the world he has become one of the greatest Americans.” King’s death did not lead Graham to believe he needed to take more daring action. A few weeks after the assassination, Howard Jones and Ralph Bell sent him a long letter in which they recalled that riots had erupted in 125 cities after King’s death and that other trouble could be expected during the coming summer. They suggested that he and BGEA had an unparalleled opportunity to step into the gap and provide responsible leadership on the racial issues. Specifically, they urged him to commission a film aimed at both blacks and whites that would enable him to use his enormous influence to address burning questions in a bold and forthright way. Perhaps to avoid a confrontation that might have resulted in long-term strain, Graham chose not to respond directly. Instead, he directed an aide to assure Jones and Bell that he felt his long-standing practice of integrated crusades and his increased use of black musicians, black clergy, and black celebrities were having a more beneficial effect than anything else he could do. A few weeks after that, at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral, he stood beside Ralph Abernathy, who was aggressively defining himself as King’s legitimate successor, and thought to himself, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could see Dr. King’s dream come true? But he moved no closer to using, or even fully approving, King’s tactics of prophetic confrontation and challenge of the establishment.
By late spring it seemed increasingly likely that Nixon would capture the Republican nomination. Before President Johnson withdrew from the campaign, Graham insisted he was “studiously trying to avoid political involvement this year.” With Johnson out, however, and with the country “going through its greatest crisis since the Civil War,” he acknowledged that “many people who just don’t know how to cast their vote might accept what I have to say.” Did that mean he might endorse a specific candidate? “I might find I will,” he allowed; “I do believe I could influence a great number of people.” At a Portland crusade in May, he introduced Julie and Tricia Nixon to the assembly, noting that “there is no American I admire more than Richard Nixon.” And from that point until the election in November, he dropped so many favorable statements about Nixon that none but a dunce could have mistaken his intentions. Certainly, Democrats understood. A Johnson aide reported to the President that several senators and other leading Democrats were “disturbed at Billy Graham’s intention to support Richard Nixon.” Recalling that the evangelist had been talked out of an open endorsement in 1960, the aide added, “I know and understand (and approve) the rules you are operating under, but there must be some way or suggestion you can make on how to prevent Billy Graham from doing this.” A handwritten note on the memo indicates the “President has no influence.” Another note, from Johnson himself and partly illegible, reads, “Call him. [I’m just] his friend. I can’t control him.”
National Council of Churches executive Dan Potter, a staunch Graham admirer since the 1957 New York crusade, observed that even without explicitly endorsing Nixon, Graham could play a significant role in an election. “Billy has tremendous power,” he noted; “almost frightening power. I think he uses this with a degree of discretion. But such power in a single individual . . . I say it’s frightening. Because I think that Billy’s presence, in terms of Nixon’s election, has a real influence. And when he sits by a prospective [candidate], even though he tries to be in every way a friend of all Presidents and Kings, he has to guard this very carefully. Because he does have the power of a person who is a symbol to millions of persons who watch his every move, and even a casual gesture becomes a significant signal. I think he is partially aware of the truth of this and therefore his influence is quite tremendous.”
At the Republican convention in Miami in August, Graham (at Nixon’s request) led the closing prayer after the nominee made his acceptance speech. As the evangelist offered congratulations and said his good-byes, Nixon caught him by the arm and offered him a delicious perk: a chance to sit in on the selection of his running mate. “You’ll be interested in this,” he said. “It’s part of history.” Back in a hotel suite, Graham stood at the edge of a circle of twenty or so Nixon insiders and prominent Republican leaders, listening with fascination as they discussed possibilities. Deep into the night and without warning, Nixon turned to him and said, “Billy, what do you think?” Graham was taken aback, “afraid I was putting myself in a political thing I didn’t want to get into,” but unable to pass up a chance to offer his opinion. “I would prefer [Oregon] Senator Mark Hatfield,” he said. “First of all, he’s a great Christian leader. He’s almost a clergyman. He’s been an educator and has taken a more liberal stand on most issues than you, and I think the ticket needs that kind of a balance.” Whatever Nixon thought of Graham’s advice, Hatfield’s well-known opposition to American policy in Southeast Asia and his support of Arab interests in the Middle East made him unacceptable to others in the room. Perhaps sensing he had already said too much, Graham decided it was time to head back to his hotel in Key Biscayne. The next morning Nixon called Graham to tell him he had decided on Maryland governor Spiro Agnew. Graham was utterly surprised: “I’m sure Nixon didn’t know him very well. I said, ‘Why did you choose him?’ He gave me his answers, which I don’t want to reveal, and I said, ‘Well, I hope he loves the Lord and will be a Christian Vice-President.’ And he said, ‘Well, you listen at about twelve o’clock and you’ll hear the announcement.’ Then about ten or eleven his communications director called me and said, ‘Billy, Dick wanted me to call you and tell you it’s still up in the air. It’s between Agnew and Hatfield.’ So I listened at twelve o’clock and, of course, it was Agnew. That night I went to the convention as the guest of Senator Frank Carlson, a very close friend of mine. We sat there and you could just feel a pall over the convention. I said, ‘If my assessment’s right, this is not a popular choice.’ And he said, ‘You’re right. We don’t know him.’ I was called to platform to lead a prayer that night and I met Agnew for the first time. I never saw him after the campaign, I think, except at the inauguration and maybe once at the White House at a religious service. I never knew him at all. The night he resigned, I called him on the phone and told him I’d be praying for him, whatever the future held, because that’s the time I think a minister has some input spiritually. That’s the only contact I ever had with Mr. Agnew.”
The Democrats’ selection of Hubert Humphrey, another old friend, kept some check on Graham’s expressions of enthusiasm for Nixon, but his preference was transparent. At a September crusade in Pittsburgh, he read a telegram of greeting from Humphrey, but he invited Nixon to take a prominent seat in the VIP section, where the television cameras could easily find him, and he lauded him from the platform, citing his generosity, his “tremendous constraint of temper,” and his “integrity in counting his golf score,” and calling their friendship “one of the most cherished I have had with anyone.” Nixon described the occasion as “one of the most moving religious experiences of my life.” The telecast of that particular service, broadcast just before the election, was added to Graham’s TV schedule at the last minute because of “the urgency of the hour.”
A few days after his crusade appearance, Nixon made a well-announced and thoroughly photographed call on Morrow Graham in Charlotte, displaying his ease and charm by observing three times that he felt obligated to visit Billy’s mother, since Billy had preached at his own mother’s funeral a few months earlier. Three weeks later, Julie Nixon turned up in Montreat for a visit at the Graham home, furnishing Billy with another opportunity to note that he was contemplating an endorsement but was not quite ready to give one at that point—without explaining what constituted the difference between an official endorsement and a clear and frequent statement of preference. Sometimes Graham’s support came disguised as his own assessment of the political climate, as when he professed to discern a rightward trend among “a big segment of the population,” a segment whose members did not carry placards or demonstrate or take what they wanted by violence, but who were nevertheless out there and ready to act, “a great unheard-from group” who were likely “to be heard from loudly at the polls.” No one sensitive to campaign rhetoric would likely have missed the similarity between this group—presumably people Billy Graham had seen in his own audiences—-and the “Silent Majority” the Republicans were courting so assiduously. At other times Graham presented his nonendorsement as if he were no more than a neutral friend of the court. When Democrats trotted out their old reliable slurs on Nixon’s basic character, Graham declared that his friend “has a great sense of moral integrity. I have never seen any indication of, or agreed with, the label that his enemies have given him of ‘Tricky Dick.’ In the years I’ve known him, he’s never given any indication of being tricky.” He acknowledged that Nixon was “reticent about speaking of his religious life” but declared he knew him to be “a devout person and a man of high principles, with a profound philosophy of government,” and characterized him as having “the qualities to make an American Churchill in time of national crisis.” After offering yet another such defense, he added, “While I do not intend to publicly endorse any political candidate, as some clergymen are doing, I maintain the right to help put the record straight when a friend is smeared.”
Two decades later, Graham insisted that while Nixon’s aides may have wanted to exploit their friendship, Nixon tried to protect him from possible backlash. “It seems to me, as I look back,” he said, “that he wanted to guard me. I was in Atlanta when he was giving a speech and he said, ‘Don’t come. It’ll be too political.’ But Ruth and I wanted to go, so we went and sat in the back so nobody would see us. His aides did see us and we rode back to the hotel with him. I remember that somebody had asked him what he intended to do about the fire-ant problem if he were elected president. He said, ‘I’ll tell you this: When we get to the White House, we’re going to deal with them. We’re going to handle that.’ We teased him about that in the car. That was the only time I ever went to one of his campaign meetings.” Graham apparently overlooked his much-publicized presence in the studio audience of one of the carefully managed question-and-answer shows Nixon used during the campaign. On a later show the moderator asked the candidate if it was true that evangelist Billy Graham was supporting him; Nixon replied that he felt safe in reporting that it was true. A few days later, Graham himself provided confirmation. In an interview published four days before the election, he revealed that he had already cast his absentee vote for Richard Nixon. Nixon campaign operative Harry Dent freely admitted he had exploited that bit of good news in television ads that ran right down to the wire on the following Tuesday. Less readily acknowledged was that according to some sources, the new ads had been in production for at least three weeks before Graham made his well-timed announcement.
Nixon invited Graham to watch the election returns with him in New York, but Billy demurred. He did, however, agree to stay at a nearby hotel to be available to pray with him if he lost the election. About nine the next morning, when it appeared certain that Nixon had edged Humphrey by approximately half a million votes, Bebe Rebozo called to say that “Dick wants you to come over and have prayer with the family.” It was hardly the consolation in defeat he had been prepared to offer, but it was close enough, and he and T. W. Wilson hustled over to the president-elect’s hotel suite, where Rebozo ushered him in to see the Nixons and their two daughters. After a few minutes of congratulations and election talk, Nixon said, “Billy, I want you to lead us in prayer. We want to rededicate our lives.” Graham recalled that “we all held hands and I led prayer. And then he went straight off to meet the press. He always had that spiritual side to him. It was always coming out.”
Graham remained impressed by the irrepressible outcroppings of Nixon’s spirituality, though he did feel it needed some channeling and pointing-up on occasion. As he recalled, Nixon wanted him to be the only clergyman to pray at the inauguration, but “I told him, ‘You cannot leave the Jewish people out. You cannot leave out the Catholics and the Orthodox.’ But he said, ‘No, I want you, and I want you to take ten minutes.’ I told him, “No, Sir, I can’t do that.’ Finally, someone did persuade him that he had to have all the major religious groups, but I think I did take three or four minutes, which Time called ‘Billy Graham’s mini-inaugural address.’” In the process of that extended prayer, which Christian Century characterized as a “raucous harangue” that made Nixon’s inaugural speech seem “simple and winsome” by comparison, Graham thanked God that “thou hast permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of history” and expressed confidence that America was headed toward “the dawning of a new day.”
One may doubt that God arranged Nixon’s victory over Hubert Humphrey, especially since the margin of his triumph (less than 1 percent) was not as impressive as, for example, that of the Israelites over the Amalekites, but Richard Nixon’s term in office unquestionably initiated a new era for “civil religion,” that blend of religious and political culture that has potential to both call a nation to acknowledge and honor its transcendent ideals and to delude it into thinking it has already done so. Every president in American history had invoked the name and blessings of God during his inauguration address, and many, including Billy Graham’s friends Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, had made some notable public display of their putative piety, but none ever made such a conscious, calculating use of religion as a political instrument as did Richard Nixon.
Like other presidents before him, Nixon appeared at prayer breakfasts and made the standard salutes in heaven’s direction, but the keystone of his effort to present himself as a man deeply concerned with religion and religious values was the White House church service, which he initiated on the first Sunday after his inauguration, with Billy Graham as the preacher. Other presidents had held religious services in the White House; indeed, Lyndon Johnson had invited the cabinet, leading staff members, and some of his personal friends to a service in the White House on the Sunday immediately following John Kennedy’s funeral, and Billy Graham was the speaker on that occasion as well. But none before Nixon had ever sponsored a regular schedule of Sunday services. Throughout Nixon’s presidency, an uncommon amount of his staff’s time and attention went into the White House Sunday services. Surely some genuine spiritual benefit was obtained—by the participants, by the guests, perhaps even by the President himself—and Billy Graham still maintained, fifteen years after the last “Amen,” that they were basically beneficial, though he recognized that the negative publicity they drew in some quarters had “backfired” on the President. “I thought it was a good idea at the time,” he said, “and in hindsight, I still think it was a good idea. It was better than not going to church at all, and the President was worried about security and the commotion it would cause if he went to a regular church. Some people thought it was practicing civil religion—Mark Hatfield had that view—but I never thought of it in those terms. I just thought it was a great idea that the President of the United States would have services in the White House. I don’t think there was any political connotation. There might have been, but I think Nixon was being very sincere. He wanted to set an example for the whole country.”
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 Richard 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 would 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.
With regard to the third objection his critics raised, Graham always acknowledged that he saw no lasting solution to most of the world’s problems short of the Second Coming. Without question, this conviction seriously weakened his and other Evangelicals’ commitment to movements dedicated to major social change. But he did not invoke this belief as a means of escaping responsibility; he invoked it because he believed it was true, because he believed the Bible taught it. Even so, his views on the two great social issues of the decade—race and Vietnam—were neither as individualistic nor as patently acquiescent to governmental authority as his critics charged.
On the question of race, Graham stuck to his long-standing policy of insisting on integrated crusades, urging brotherhood and understanding, and warning that demonstrations and protests were likely to prove futile and counterproductive. In the summer of 1969, when Graham returned to Madison Square Garden for a ten-day crusade, civil rights activist James Forman was presenting his Black Manifesto to white churches and synagogues, demanding they pay $500 million in reparations to black Americans. When asked at a precrusade news conference if he expected Forman to present his demands at the Garden, Graham replied drily that “I don’t think we’re going to have any outside speakers. I’m going to do the preaching. If he were to come, we would welcome him with a big smile and hope he enjoyed the service.” Perhaps sensing he would never get past the Garden’s security force, or if he did, that he would not be able to work the guilt of Graham’s congregation as successfully as that of, say, New York’s liberal Riverside Church, Forman made no attempt to interrupt the crusade’s services, and Graham never mentioned the Black Manifesto in his sermons. He did, however, attract more blacks to the Garden than he had in 1957. Time magazine estimated that at least a quarter of his audience on most nights was nonwhite.
For all his distance from the main arenas of conflict, Graham’s frequent references to racial injustice and his principled adherence to what he did believe made it easier for other Evangelicals to take stronger stands. An important manifestation of that phenomenon came in September 1969, at the U.S. Congress on Evangelism. Though BGEA had no official role in this gathering, its leaders consciously saw themselves as extending the work of the 1966 Berlin Congress; Graham served as honorary chairman and gave a major address, the meeting was held in Minneapolis, and a book containing the speeches delivered at the gathering was edited by George Wilson and produced by BGEA’s World Wide Publications. This congress, which attracted 5,000 delegates from 93 denominations and most states, served as a kind of springboard, enabling Evangelicals to identify more boldly with social action. Many of the old familiar notes were struck by the old familiar people, but the meeting also offered bolder fare. Leighton Ford, who had begun to appear on the Hour of Decision broadcasts almost as often as Graham and was unofficially being groomed to succeed him, declared it a shame the church had been “so slow to face the demands of the Gospel in the racial revolution of our time,” and Stephen Olford warned of what could happen when church people clung to segregation. When he arrived at New York’s Calvary Baptist Church, he reported, he found it staunchly segregationist. After he preached and taught a series of lessons on the evils of such an arrangement, all but eleven members voted to integrate the church. Of those eleven, four soon confessed their sin and repented; of the stonyhearted remainder, all seven died shortly thereafter. In the dramatic, riveting manner that had arrested a young Billy Graham’s attention more than twenty years earlier, Olford thundered the explanation of their deaths: “God’s judgment fell!”
Black delegates to the congress moved well beyond their white brethren. Tom Skinner, a former Harlem gang leader who admitted stabbing at least twenty-two people before being converted by a gospel radio broadcast, acknowledged that “Mr. Graham has been an outstanding spokesman in terms of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in healing the relationship between Black and White in this country,” but he noted that religion had not always improved the lot of the oppressed and suffering. He reminded the delegates that religion had also undergirded slavery and that the church had been guilty of gross negligence of minorities and the poor. And then he got specific. “When I move to your community and buy a home and I’m being given a rough time,” he asked, “will you take a stand? If my daughter falls in love with your son and they decide to get married, will you allow them to marry in peace? Will you reciprocate by accepting me as a brother? This is what black Christian brethren are crying out for, a genuine relationship.” Skinner challenged his white brethren to open the doors to their institutions, to provide black faculty and recruit black students for their colleges, to grant black writers and ministers access to their magazines and radio stations, and to let them talk about race, not just about communism and sex and movies and nightclubs. To do less than this, to mouth platitudes about equality and then to censure blacks who participated in protests and riots, or to relocate their congregations when blacks moved into the neighborhood was to cry “Give us Barabbas” and to crucify Christ anew. In another uncomfortable historical allusion, Ralph Abernathy, the black Baptist minister who succeeded Martin Luther King as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, compared the law-and-order campaigns mounted by many politicians in 1968 to the campaign that elevated Hitler to chancellor of Germany in 1933. Finally, a group of nearly fifty black ministers presented the congress with a list of complaints, calling on white Christians to “confess in word and action to the sins committed against black people,” urging representatives of church agencies to foster equal-employment practices and asking church leaders to help blacks obtain improved urban housing.
The Minneapolis congress neither took nor recommended any specific direct action on racial issues, but Evangelicals concerned for social action regard it as an important moment, and Graham himself took seriously the need to move beyond rhetoric and personal example. Though skeptical about the efficacy of forced busing, he made a series of five spot announcements urging southern parents to “obey the law” on school integration. Then, during a crusade in Anaheim, California, a few days later, he met E. V. Hill, a successful and influential Baptist pastor and close friend of Martin Luther King’s. A conversation scheduled for forty minutes stretched into six hours as Hill detailed with considerable emotion the impatience many black churchmen felt toward their white brethren. Shortly afterward, Graham arranged a meeting between a group of key black ministers and the President of the United States. He acknowledged that “they would never have gotten to him in a hundred years if I had not opened the door,” but Nixon treated it as more than a courtesy visit. Though internal memos reveal that the President thought the meeting had run on much too long (over three and a half hours), Graham recalled that “they let him have it with both barrels and he sat there and took it.” And at least on the short run and not without an eye for political advantage, Nixon responded to their complaints. The clergymen were quite specific, discussing such matters as their difficulty in getting funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for housing projects for senior citizens and bonding restrictions that seemed to favor contractors. These appeals touched Nixon’s compassionate as well as his calculating side. A Haldeman memo prior to the meeting indicated that “the President is extremely interested in following up with Billy Graham in the work he is doing with Negro ministers across the country. He feels, as does Graham, that this may be our best chance to make inroads into the Negro community.” But more than unvarnished political tactic was at work. Immediately after the April 1970 meeting, Haldeman informed Ehrlichman that Nixon wanted “one of the projects cleared and done tomorrow. He points out that you can always find a way to do the things for the people on the other side and that just for once he’d like to see us find a way to do something right for the people on our side. . . . [He] wants to see at least one of their projects approved and under way if it means the staff at OEO have to take up a collection from their own pockets to raise the money to do it.” Another staff memo indicated that “we are exploring additional ways in which we can involve these men and assist in their efforts to solve the problems of their communities.” Whatever the controlling motive, help fulaction did occur, and at least some black ministers moved closer to the Republican camp. In May 1970, E. V. Hill wrote to Nixon to say that “upon your instructions, your staff intervened and within a few days caused the program to commence and also enabled the program to have as its contractors two very able Negroes. . . . I have not been quiet in proclaiming what you have personally done in this matter. I shall continue to tell my community . . . of the interest of the President in a ‘local matter.’”
When Graham looked at Vietnam, his stance continued to be less clear than his views on civil rights. Just weeks after Nixon took office, the evangelist told reporters that “we must have peace in Vietnam. I’m not only going to say I’m for peace, but I’m going to try to do something. In my particular area it must be done in rather a quiet way.” What he did immediately was to gather a group of missionary leaders from various parts of Southeast Asia for a three-day meeting in Bangkok, where they shared their perceptions on the war and offered specific recommendations for ending it. The men were not tyros who had spent a few months in the area and were now calling for a worldwide day of prayer. Most had been in Vietnam from five to twenty years, and some enjoyed regular access to President Thieu and other members of the South Vietnamese government. Prior to the meeting, they interviewed hundreds of Vietnamese officials and other key people. In a thirteen-page confidential report to Nixon, Graham characterized them as a “hawkish” group, making their criticisms of the war all the more telling.
According to the missionaries, the South Vietnamese people were overwhelmingly pro-American and pro-Nixon, but the Paris peace talks had generated a fear that “a coalition government will be imposed on them that in the long run may lead to a Communist takeover.” The group also manifested a growing sense of disillusionment with Americans in Vietnam, citing reports that “more than 40 percent of American troops are now on some form of dope or narcotics.” They also charged that South Vietnamese officials and other citizens were enmeshed in a massive web of corruption largely traceable to the actions of Americans, particularly contractors and other businessmen, whom one missionary described as “the ‘crud’ of American society.” As a result, at least a third of all the goods shipped to Vietnam from America eventually found their way onto the black market, and multiplied millions were being spent on programs that were colossal failures, creating disillusionment at the “glaring corruption, incompetence and waste of American civilians working for companies doing business in Vietnam.” The missionaries believed that American policy was hopelessly misguided. Americanizing the war by providing extensive manpower and taking over the decision making not only robbed the South Vietnamese of their dignity but enabled the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese to appear like a “little boy” being beaten by an American giant, which gave them a tremendous propaganda weapon, even though their own giant—the Communist world—stood directly behind them. To make matters worse, the American giant often appeared clumsy and ineffective, “using methods of warfare learned at West Point and more appropriate in the battle theaters of World War II than in the jungles of Vietnam.” Equally damaging, the missionaries felt, was “the overwhelming cultural intrusion,” particularly the flood of American consumer goods readily available through post exchanges and on the black market. If this kept up, they warned, “we will have destroyed what we came to save, and that is the Vietnamese, their culture, and their freedom.”
The missionaries felt it was still possible to win the war if the Paris peace talks produced no honorable settlement. The first step would be to return the war to the Vietnamese, letting them fight it in “the Oriental way.” Guerilla warfare, encouraged by Eisenhower and Kennedy but deemphasized by Johnson, should be resumed, “using Oriental methods which seem brutal and cruel in sophisticated Western eyes, but which are being used every day by the Viet Cong to spread terror and fear to the people.” The North Vietnamese, they believed, feared a well-equipped and well-trained South Vietnamese army using guerilla tactics far more than they feared American soldiers. Especially valuable in a renewed emphasis on guerilla warfare would be the mountain people, whom the missionaries felt they could control for another year or two, despite intense efforts by the Chinese to win their allegiance. America should also encourage and equip North Vietnamese defectors to return to the north to engage in guerilla warfare and ultimately to attempt a coup. “Why,” Graham asked, “should all the fighting be in the south?” By missionary estimates, perhaps no more than 10,000 of the 27 million North Vietnamese were hard-core Communists. The rest, they suspected, would welcome liberation by anti-Communist forces.
Because ineffective and insensitive American policy provided the Vietcong with important psychological advantages, Graham and his colleagues recommended major attention to propaganda. “Instead of showing 10 hours of American movies a day,” he said, “use our vast television investment for propaganda purposes,” with concentrated attention to boosting Vietnamese morale, helping them feel a kinship with free nations throughout the world, and exposing Communist tyranny by such methods as interviewing Vietcong defectors and showing “the terrorism by the Communists right on television.” This last tactic alone, he felt, “would do more than anything we can think of.” Used properly, Graham believed, the multimillion-dollar radio and television system devoted almost entirely to entertainment purposes would produce 5,000 or more defectors from the Vietcong every month. Finally, he recommended that the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization be reorganized—“It is totally out of date”—and that Nixon convene an Asian summit conference.
When Graham’s report, which varied somewhat from his repeated public insistence that he limited his counsel with political leaders to spiritual matters, became available for public inspection in February 1989, he noted characteristically that the views contained in it were largely those of the missionaries and that he had merely conveyed those views to the President. It is clear, however, that he agreed with them, not only from his own statements in the report but also from the fact that six months after he had sent it to Nixon, he sent a copy to Henry Kissinger, assistant to the President for national security affairs, noting that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had been impressed with it and expressing his hope that Kissinger would also pay heed to it. Kissinger, too, had “found it quite useful” and was “looking into the points which they raised.” Less concretely, Graham also began to voice an ambivalence about the war, reflecting the missionaries’ influence. In an interview with Dotson Rader (grandson of evangelist Paul Rader, under whose preaching Nixon made his boyhood commitment to Christ) Graham revealed that he understood the feelings of “the people of Southeast Asia who are frightened that we might pull out” but added that America “can’t be the world’s policeman. We have far too many problems at home, growing too dangerous. And, also, I am not at all sure that the war is supportable, morally supportable. I am simply not sure at all.”
Despite his misgivings, Graham could not bring himself to disagree openly with government policy, and he was at pains to show himself in sympathy with the views of Richard Nixon. When the Christian Herald, one of his early boosters, published an editorial opposing U.S. policy in Vietnam on both moral and legal grounds, Nixon asked Graham to find out who, specifically, had been responsible. Graham reported that the culprit was David Poling, who “openly professes his liberal thinking on practically all matters” and had led the magazine “increasingly to the left” during his tenure as president of the Christian Herald Association. Graham suggested, however, that Nixon need not be too concerned about the editorial. The circulation and influence of the magazine had been declining steadily in recent years and he believed it “definitely could not have any kind of impact on American Protestant thinking at the present time.” Besides, he added, “Christianity Today . . . is well-known as the most influential Protestant news journal, and it consistently takes stands opposite to those of the Christian Herald.”
In addition to his efforts to help find some solution to the war in Vietnam, Graham stood ready to serve his President at any other promising juncture where he might be needed. Before a meeting with Israeli primeminister Golda Meir, he told Nixon, “If you have any suggestions as to how I may contribute in this delicate Middle East situation, please let me know.” The White House evidently did not feel the evangelist was overreaching. One staffer suggested to Kissinger that Graham should convey to Mrs. Meir a sense of American unease over Israeli military strategy—specifically, a series of aggressive air strikes against its neighbors during the summer of 1969. Nixon also relayed Graham’s offer to Kissinger and asked for a report on the meeting between Graham and Meir. There seems to be no record of the meeting itself, but Graham was clearly perceived during this period as one of Israel’s valued friends. The World Wide Pictures film His Land, released in 1969, outlined Graham’s theological understanding of the role of Israel in God’s grand historical plan and was well received by Jewish leaders both in Israel and America. The film moved prominent Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum to declare that “for acts of friendship toward the Jewish people at a time of turmoil which has not been altogether congenial to Jewish security, Billy Graham deserves better than a stereotyped skeptical response from thoughtful Jews and many others, while not ignoring basic differences.”
Graham offered to provide similar diplomatic services, as well as to gain entree to yet another world leader, when he asked Dwight Chapin to see about having the American ambassador to France arrange a meeting with that nation’s new president, Georges Pompidou. A few months later, when Graham’s schedule placed him in Paris at the time of Charles de Gaulle’s death, he wired the White House to let Nixon know that he “would be available for anything he might want me to do in connection with De Gaulle’s death.” In each of these cases, Graham probably had more to gain than the President, but on two other occasions in 1970 he exposed himself to sharp criticism and enthusiastically lent himself and his prestige to efforts that Nixon’s staff hoped would shore up the President’s policies and popularity and rally support for the administration.
In May 1970 Graham held a crusade in the stadium at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and invited the President not only to attend but to address the crowd, another crusade first—Lyndon Johnson had attended a crusade while President but had not spoken. Graham, of course, insisted his invitation was free from political intent and professed bafflement that anyone should think otherwise. “If Mr. Nixon had been running for election,” he acknowledged, “I could understand the charge of politics. But he is the President. I wouldn’t think that you’d call the President political.” Years later, he still maintained that his only concern had been spiritual: “I was going to preach the straight gospel. I thought he needed to hear it. I had him sit on the platform, of course; he was President of the United States.” Not everyone agreed with Graham’s assessment. In a CBS News editorial, Dan Rather asserted that whatever the evangelist’s intent, Nixon had leapt at the chance to make a safe, popular appearance in the South. By identifying with Graham, who was enormously popular in his native region, the President hoped to give a boost to Republican candidates in that year’s elections. He was particularly interested in the race for governor of Alabama, where a defeat to George Wallace would derail his troublesome presidential ambitions, and in the Republican attempt to unseat Democratic senator Albert Gore, Sr., in Tennessee. He did not think it seemly to campaign directly against the two men, but his advisers were said to feel that standing with Billy Graham would provide “just the right touch.” Secondarily, at a time when colleges were erupting in protest against the Vietnam War—the killings at Kent State had occurred just ten days earlier—Nixon sought to prove he could appear on a major campus without creating an uproar, and it seemed unlikely that a stadium full of Billy Graham supporters gathered from conservative East Tennessee would explode into anti-establishment chaos, especially since a state law made it a crime to disrupt a religious service.
The evening proved to be less than the total triumph Nixon and his advisers hoped for. As he and Graham strode across the stadium turf on their way to the platform, a sweeping ovation washed over them, and a contingent of volunteers from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the unsmiling and vigilant corps of Secret Service agents provided an impenetrable defense against a small band of protesters holding placards recalling the biblical injunctions against killing or kneeling at the edge of the field in memory of those who had died in Vietnam. After Graham introduced Nixon, noting that “I’m for change—but the Bible teaches us to obey authority,” the President urged the youth night crowd to depend upon “those great spiritual sources that have made America the great country that it is.” When several hundred hecklers scattered about the stadium responded to that bit of piety with chants of “Bullshit! Bullshit!” and “Stop the crap and end the war!” the huge crowd swamped them with new waves of applause and cheers of approval that continued for several minutes. At one point, Nixon asked for attention, but he knew that most of the crowd was with him. He acknowledged the existence of different points of view and asserted his own belief in dissent, but added, with a triumphant smile, “I’m just glad that there seems to be a rather solid majority on one side rather than on the other side tonight,” a verdict that touched off still another torrential ovation. Overall, it was a satisfying evening for the President—Time called it “one of the most effective speeches he has yet delivered,” and when the service was telecast a few weeks later, most of the protest had been edited out, making it appear even better. Later that evening, after Air Force One arrived in California, Henry Kissinger called from San Clemente to tell Graham how much Nixon had appreciated the opportunity to have a part in the service.
Graham’s other key effort to quiet the turmoil bedeviling the President occurred when he and Bob Hope teamed with Disney personnel, Reader’s Digest publisher Hobart Lewis, and hotel magnate J. Willard Marriot, Sr., to produce a July 4 religiopatriotic extravaganza known as Honor America Day. The exact genesis of the Super Salute to God and Country is is difficult to pin down, but Graham was obviously involved at the earliest stages, and despite insistence that it was strictly a nongovernmental affair, the White House played a central role in its planning and execution. The official rationale for the event was that in those troubled times, a divided nation needed an opportunity to renew and express its commitment to its deepest and most precious ideals and values and to celebrate the glorious joys of being an American—a combination revival meeting and national birthday party. In keeping with that aim, the organizers attempted to sound all the major chords in America’s heart song, with little sense that excess might detract from effectiveness. When told that a team of marathoners would relay an American flag from Philadelphia to Washington, and that the flag’s arrival at the Lincoln Memorial would touch off a worship service presided over by Billy Graham, H. R. Haldeman did not wince in fear that many Americans might find the blending of civil and sacred symbols too blatant. Instead, he wrote on the memo, “Great idea! Start from Liberty Bell. Maybe others from Williamsburg, Jamestown, Mt. Vernon, etc.” Later, he suggested that “most of all we need a solid cornball program developer.”
Billy Graham’s participation went far beyond letting his name appear at the top of the stationery and showing up to preach. BGEA seconded Walter Smyth to work on the project full time, and Cliff Barrows oversaw the planning of the music for the religious service. Graham mentioned Honor America Day on his Hour of Decision broadcast, sent a special letter urging his East Coast supporters to attend the celebration, and dispatched several staffers to stir up interest among churches within reasonable driving distance of Washington. He personally encouraged black ministers to support the event, since an all-white gathering would appear too flagrantly Republican. He also tried to make sure that others did their part. In a memo to Charles Colson, Dwight Chapin noted that Graham “is pushing everyone very hard and when we run up against problems, Billy immediately reacts to the call and gets people tracking right. A call of thanks [to] keep him charged up would be a good touch.”
The festivities themselves went smoothly. Rabbi Tanenbaum, Bishop Sheen, and E. V. Hill led prayers, and astronaut Frank Borman, “the first man to pray publicly in outer space,” was on hand to remind the assembly of the glories of prayers past. The U.S. Army Band and the Southern Baptist Male Chorus lent collective gravity to the occasion; Pat Boone, Kate Smith, and Johnny Cash sang patriotic favorites; and country singer Jeannie C. Riley warned that “when you’re running down my country, Hoss, you’re walking on the fighting side of me.” On the ideological edges of the crowd, leftist and other antiwar groups protested the American presence in Southeast Asia, and right-wingers damned the administration for not really trying to win in Vietnam. In the center, where he felt most comfortable, Billy Graham ticked off the reasons why America was worthy of honor. A generous America, he said, had repeatedly opened its doors to the distressed. Instead of hiding and denying its problems, it recognized and tried to solve them, giving all the right to voice their opinions freely, even when they ran counter to the policies of the government and will of the majority. And, most important of all, America should be honored because of its pervasive faith in God Almighty. It was vintage Fourth of July fare and vintage Graham, a shining example of his ability to articulate the beliefs and sentiments of the great and decent center segment of American culture. The crowds on hand were disappointingly small—CBS estimated the total turnout at approximately 15,000—but millions watching network news heard Graham proclaim that “we honor America because she defends the right of her citizens to dissent”; call dissent “the hallmark of our freedom in America”; and thunder in conclusion, “Honor the nation! . . . And as you move to do it, never give in. Never give in! Never! Never! Never! Never!” Despite failure to attract the hoped-for “vast crowd,” the White House was pleased. Patrick Buchanan urged Chapin to distribute pictures of Graham preaching in front of the Lincoln Memorial to “all publications,” to mail a copy of his sermon to every minister in America, and to see to it that the sermon was reprinted in the Reader’s Digest. No one appeared more appreciative than Nixon, who both called and wrote Graham to commend him on his speech, assuring him that he had touched the hearts of millions and noting that “the Honor America Day ceremonies reinforced my own conviction that it is time to strike back—not in anger, and not in a mean spirit, but in affirmation of those enduring values that have proved themselves in crisis and trouble, generation after generation, and given our nation its greatness.” Graham never imagined for a moment that Nixon’s values varied from his own or doubted that Richard Nixon was God’s man for that critical hour in American history. In a handwritten note near the end of the President’s second year in office, Graham wrote, “My expectations were high when you took office nearly two years ago but you have exceeded [them] in every way! You have given moral and spiritual leadership to the nation at a time when we desperately needed it—in addition to courageous political leadership! Thank you!” He signed the letter “With Affection.”