“Conversation №662–4”
Key Sources for “Billy Graham & the Synagogue of Satan”
KEEPING a piece of writing relatively readable may require going easy on the footnotes. I just left them out altogether from my piece on the recent release of formerly-withheld Nixon tape featuring Evangelist Billy Graham in conversation with President Richard Nixon about the Jews. For those who are interested in the nitty-gritty of the redactions and revelations, I have assembled this page of sources with a sketch on how I learned this story.
The February 1, 1972 conversation took place in the Oval Office after that year’s National Prayer Breakfast, which both the president and Billy Graham attended. Notes for their meeting were taken by Nixon chief-of-staff H.R. Haldeman, who was also present. After Haldeman’s 1993 death, excerpts from his notes were released in 1994 in book form, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons,1994), on page 405. The main interest for the editors was Watergate. This entry is very short.
The full entry was published on the more-expensive and extensive CD-ROM version of the Haldeman Diaries concurrently released. That was where reviewers got the quote from Graham on “satanic Jews.” That entry is available at the Nixon Library and the relevant section looks like this:
In response to the subsequent storm of controversy about “satanic Jews,” Graham issued a statement saying “Those are not my words.” That response was technically correct — but in the light of what he actually did say, it’s hard not to see that denial as a disingenuous parsing of the facts. This became clear when the tape for the February 21, 1973 phone call between Nixon and Graham was released in 2002. On that tape, Graham reminds Nixon of their earlier conversation when he’d first told him about the “Synagogue of Satan.” (That call was also archived at the Nixon Library here.)
The audio for the February 1, 1972 Oval Office meeting was labeled “Conversation №662–4” by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff on the official Tape Subject Log. When the tape was released to the public in 2002, the Tape Log — a dated record of Oval Office visitors with an indexed listing of discussion topics — was made and eventually placed online. The Log made it clear there were several “withdrawn items,” set off from the indexed subject headings by a row of stars.
From the indexed subject headings of this conversation made by the Nixon Library staff, it looked very much to me like this “withdrawn item” came smack in the middle of Nixon and Graham’s exchange about Jews, and right before Graham delivers his line about the Jewish “stranglehold.”
That same conversation appears in a transcribed and published version edited by Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, The Nixon Tapes, 1971–1972 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), starting on page 360. The missing section is represented by three dots.
There was no wording in the released material which came anywhere close to “satanic Jews.” That’s what first got my attention.
This story showed up on my radar in the years following my experience reporting on the then-raging “Satanic Panic” in the early 1990s, when I wrote for Cornerstone magazine. Cornerstone’s work on Satanic Panic helped put the brakes on the Panic (and has been cited in recent books on “fake news,” including Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History and Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.) During that time, I was co-author, with Jon Trott, of an exposé and later the book Selling Satan: Mike Warnke and Evangelical Media, about a religious entertainer whose story of being a Satanist high-priest was proven fabricated. That experience got me interested in various related topics, and made me sensitive to Evangelical discourse that attributed nefarious deeds and conspiracies to devil-worshipers. As time went on, I got particularly interested in the political uses of such discourse.
The “Synagogue of Satan” language used by Billy Graham caught my attention more recently as I came across references to it while researching the Evangelical discourse of demonization, working on a theological studies degree at North Park Theological Seminary. In the course of that work, I looked into the story of the Nixon conversation and noticed that there was still material to be released. I later sent out a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Archives. These were turned down: the Nixon tapes, for various governmental reasons, are not subject to FOIA requests.
This application and appeals process put me in contact with Cary McStay, an archivist at the Nixon Library, who helped me jump through the requisite hoops to make a formal request that the material on “Conversation №662–4” be recategorized. That process put me at the head of the line when Billy Graham died in February of 2018 — and so finally moved forward the process.
In late July, the unexpurgated part of “Conversation №662–4” that I was most interested in was quietly posted on the Nixon Library website and can now be heard here. The relevant portion starts about 27 minutes in.
The conversation looks like this when the new material fills the gap.
My seminary classwork and additional reading helped me understand the larger historical context and the papers of Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum at American Jewish Archives filled in more recent contexts, especially materials by Tanenbaum where he discusses his relationship with Billy Graham.
My interest in the “Synagogue of Satan” conversation was originally a subset of research for what I still hope will be a book on aspects of the Evangelical language of demonization which I began working on in seminary. Given the contents of “Conversation №662–4” and pending further investigations, this part of the story may take up more space than I anticipated.
© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.
