This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
-- Graham's basic mode of preaching in these early years was assault. " Then, when he had his listeners mentally crouching in terror, aware that all the attractively labeled escape routes--alcohol, sexual indulgence, riches, psychiatry, education, social-welfare programs, increased military might, the United Nations--led ultimately to dead ends, he held out the only compass that pointed reliably to the straight and narrow path that leads to personal happiness and lasting peace."
Columnist and former priest James Carroll had much the same take, noting that "Graham had his finger on the pulse of American fear, and in subsequent years, anti communism occupied the nation's soul as an avowedly religious obsession. The Red scare at home, unabashed moves toward empire abroad, the phrase 'under God' inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, the scapegoating of homosexuals as 'security risks,' an insane accumulation of nuclear weapons, suicidal wars against postcolonial insurgencies in Asia--a set of desperate choices indeed. Through it all, Billy Graham was the high priest of the American crusade, which is why U.S. presidents uniformly sought his blessing."
While Carroll had most of that right, the record suggests that, over and over again, it was Graham who sought presidential blessing, rather than the other way around. Letters enshrined in the presidential and Graham libraries reveal a preacher endlessly seeking official audience. As Truman said, years after his presidency, "Well, I hadn't ought to say this, but he's one of those counterfeits I was telling you about. He claims he's a friend of all the presidents, but he was never a friend of mine when I was president."
Of course, politicians have often brandished fear as well, and the twin streams of fear-based politics and fear-based religion couldn't have been more confluent. Communist infiltrators, missile gaps and the domino effect each took their turn, as did the Evil Empire and, more recently, Saddam, Osama bin Laden and an amorphous threat of global terrorism.
In light of the Biblical endorsement of rulers, Graham supported police repression of Vietnam war protesters and civil rights marchers, opposed Martin Luther King's tactic of civil disobedience, supported South American despots, and publicly supported every war or intervention waged by the United States from Korea forward.
Born on a prosperous dairy farm and educated at Wheaton College, Graham first gained national attention in 1949 when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, searching for a spiritual icon to spread his anti-communist sentiments, discovered the young preacher holding forth at a Los Angeles tent meeting. Hearst wired his editors across the nation, "puff Graham," and he was an instant sensation.
Hearst next contacted his friend and fellow publisher Henry Luce. Their Wall Street ally, Bernard Baruch, arranged a meeting between Luce and Graham while the preacher was staying with the segregationist Governor Strom Thurmond in the official mansion in Columbia, S.Car. Luce concurred with Hearst about Graham's marketability and Timeand Life were enlisted in the job of selling the soap of salvation to the world. Time, alone, has run more than 600 stories about Graham.
The man who would become known as "the minister to presidents" offered his first military advice in 1950. On June 25, North Korean troops invaded South Korea and Graham sent Truman a telegram. "MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW. MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN ANY PART OF WORLD. WE CANNOT LET THEM DOWN."
It was the first time Graham encouraged a president to go to war, and with characteristic hyperbole: Korea has never topped the list of Christian-leaning nations. Subsequently, Graham gave his blessing to every conflict under every president from Truman to the second Bush, and most of the presidents, pleased to enjoy public assurance of God's approval, made him welcome in the White House. Graham excoriated Truman for firing General Douglas MacArthur and supported the general's plan to invade China. He went so far as to urge Nixon to bomb dikes in Vietnam--knowing that it would kill upward of a million civilians--and he claimed to have sat on the sofa next to G.H.W. Bush as the bombs began falling in the first Gulf War (though Bush's diary version of the evening somehow excludes Graham, as does a White House video of Bush during the attack).
According to Bush's account, in a phone call the preceding week, Graham quoted poetry that compared the President to a messiah destined to save the world, and in the next breath called Saddam the Antichrist. Bush wrote that Graham suggested it was his historical mission to destroy Saddam.
Through the years, Graham's politics earned him some strange bedfellows. He praised Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported his assault on Constitutional rights, then scolded the Senate for censuring McCarthy for his excesses. He befriended oil men and arms manufacturers. He defended Nixon after Watergate, right up to the disgraced president's resignation, and faced public scorn when tapes were aired that exposed the foul-mouthed President as a schemer and plotter. Nixon's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, reported on Graham's denigration of Jews in his posthumously published diary--a claim Graham vehemently denied until released tapes undid him in 2002. Caught with his prejudicial pants down, Graham claimed ignorance of the hour-and-a-half long conversation in which he led the antisemite attack.
As reported by the Associated Press on March 2, 2002:
"Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon . . . some 30 years ago," Graham said in a statement released by his Texas public relations firm. "They do not reflect my views, and I sincerely apologize for any offense caused by the remarks."
Whether or not the comments reflect Graham's views at the time or thirty years later, it is his defense that bears much closer scrutiny. What were we to make of a preacher who insisted that his words didn't reflect his beliefs? Were we to believe him then or later, on other matters?
Graham was a political operative, reporting to Kennedy on purported communist insurgencies in Latin America, turning over lists of activist Christians to the Republican party, conferring regularly with J. Edgar Hoover and networking with the CIA in South America and Vietnam. He was even assigned by Nixon's operatives to talk George Wallace out of a second run for the White House.
To accomplish the latter, he phoned Wallace as he was coming out of an anesthetic stupor after one of his numerous post-assassination-attempt surgeries. While the long suffering gunshot victim asked the minister to pray for him, the minister asked him not to make a third-party bid for the presidency. "I won't do anything to help McGovern," Wallace replied.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
1
