[explogate 02: the aura of sanctity]

PREACHER AND PRESIDENT ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Mike Hertenstein
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read
Floating signifiers: the same gesture can mean “peace” or “victory” — or “up yours.”

[the aura of sanctity]

“Total torture at best” — that’s what Richard Nixon really thought of the National Prayer Breakfast: so recorded his chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, after a notably brutal installment of the annual civic ceremonial, one featuring exegeses on the Psalms by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.³ Still, the Breakfast was an occasion to touch base with Billy Graham, whose presence seemed to legitimate that event — and anyone else he hung out with.

In 1971, the preacher and president talked re-election. “Graham wants to be helpful next year,” memo’d Haldeman. “Point him in areas where to do most good.” There seemed to be “real stirrings in religious directions, especially re young people,” according to the evangelist.⁴ In fact, the month before, Graham had observed promising signs — literal signs, printed with Christian slogans, along the Rose Parade route he’d ridden as Grand Marshal. The experience, he wrote later, help lift his lingering post-Sixties gloom.⁵ It was certainly a welcome alternative to protesters with other signs, often nasty, attacking the President and his war policy — or Billy Graham, when, inevitably, he was seen as representing these around the world.

Haldeman was ex-adman enough to keep the country’s most-beloved evangelist on the team but Nixonian enough to keep his involvement quiet: “Must mobilize [Graham] and his crowd. Can’t have leak.”⁶ Ironically, it was only another couple weeks before a rebuilt White House taping system became functional, after the notoriously-paranoid president finally decided that self-surveillance was the best way to control the narrative.⁷ The tapes would indeed give shape to the White House narrative, from a certain perspective, just not from the perspective that Nixon originally intended.

In 1972, amid revelations of secret talks with the Vietnamese adversary, the National Prayer Breakfast gathered its varied congregation with new hopes for peace on battlefields at home and abroad. Nixon, in his speech, quoted Lincoln. Both sides in the Civil War had prayed to the same God, he noted, but the key question was not “whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God’s side.” The easiest way that Richard Nixon found to identify himself in proper proximity to God was in his public friendship with America’s Pastor.

Reverend Graham was not just the President’s pastor. The evangelist was every bit of a politician himself and a canny media adviser as well. As those White House tapes would show, Billy Graham was one of The President’s Men.

The two had met in the 1950s. Both caught the anticommunist wave, Reverend Graham denouncing the Communists as “Satan’s Religion,” Congressman Nixon smearing opponents as Reds, winning the nickname “Tricky Dick.” Both grew in media savvy, especially after Nixon lost his first presidential race by a literal whisker i.e. looking bad on TV. For his second White House run, Nixon hired a hotshot young television producer who’d later be “the architect and soul” of Fox News. After successfully marketing Richard Nixon to the electorate, Roger Ailes would turn Nixonian paranoia into a business model that shaped American public discourse thereafter.

The story of Ailes’ image-making campaign for Richard Nixon was told in the bestselling book The Selling of the President, 1968. Media-staffer memos put that sales strategy in religious or mystical terms: “Selection of a president has to be an act of faith.” Voters wanted image, myth, or aura. “It is our task to build that aura.” Interestingly, a for-real theologian spoke of religious “aura,” too, in connection with the selling of this particular president.

Reinhold Niebuhr had long denounced the “aura of sanctity” that was cast on politics by a complacent civil religion — and here he’d meant specifically Billy Graham. Niebuhr contrast Graham’s sort of religion with the kind represented by the biblical prophets, whose “radical religious protest” rejected the securities of a mutual-legitimization between church and state to follow a higher standard, no matter the personal cost. The “aura of sanctity,” in other words, was what Roger Ailes generated for his client, what Nixon tried to keep intact by plugging leaks, what the president gained by his public relationship with Billy Graham — and, in a different way, what Graham gained in return.

In his account of the ’68 campaign, Joe McGinniss described the confusing overlap surrounding the question of “God’s Side” in his oft-quoted story of bumping into Graham in Nixon’s hotel, the morning after the president-elect’s victory at the polls. “We did it!” the evangelist exclaimed to the writer. McGinniss wrote that it was never clear to him “whether ‘we’ meant Billy Graham and Richard Nixon or Billy Graham and/or God or perhaps all three together.”⁸

[political without being political]

The 1972 Oval Office conversation that would become notorious for its antisemitic turn began as just another political campaign strategy-session. “I really think that your presence can have an enormous effect,” said Nixon.

You know what I mean. Because without being political. Which you cannot be. Not totally. But nevertheless. You can have an enormous effect.⁹

Graham replied that he’d left his schedule open, to wait to hear “a bit more from you all where you’d like me to be.” Nixon told the preacher to focus on Pennsylvania. “That’s my strongest state,” Graham replied. Certainly one of the evangelist’s strongest supporters lived in the state: Sun Oil heir J. Howard Pew, prominent among the many “oil-patch Evangelicals,” who’d help found and fund that movement — including Graham and his Christianity Today.¹⁰ Graham told Nixon he’d get “a whole string of events” in Pennsylvania, i.e. religious meetings specifically arranged to boost Nixon’s electoral support.

Later, Graham did push to bring Nixon to speak in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. That invite, however, to what had been till then a politically-neutral event sparked so much controversy that Nixon bowed out. Even so, the evangelist — who’d brought Vice President Nixon to an SBC missions event in the 50s — had initiated a new tradition. Thereafter, candidates would make their campaign-trail pilgrimage to the SBC: after Ronald Reagan, the candidates would just be Republicans.¹¹

Richard Nixon and Billy Graham were longtime friends and political allies.

One of Billy Graham’s go-to sermons in the 60s and 70s was titled “The Church in a Dangerous Hour” — a subject that remains ever-fresh, but seemed particularly relevant in what were in those decades particularly dangerous days.¹²

In what turned out to be a dangerous hour-and-a-half in the Oval Office, the pair toggled between politics and religion, image and reality. Graham advised Nixon to look into the camera and project authority, stick to controlled situations. A single address to black voters, he said, might be good for 5–10% of the vote. And don’t over-campaign. Nixon’s image was mostly pristine of late — aside from continual smears from a D.C. columnist who’d been a particular pain in the rear.

For years, Jack Anderson had been leaking details of White House policy-making, foreign and domestic. That morning, word came that the journalist was looking into real estate dealings of Nixon’s brother.¹³ A bigger scandal would come of Anderson’s reports on Nixon’s backing of Pakistani generals in what has been described as a genocide. The situation would become known as the Bangladesh tragedy, a Bosnian or Rwandan level bloodbath— except in this case the US would be caught standing with the perpetrators. Pakistan held open the door to China: Nixon’s visit there later that same month would become the foreign policy breakthrough he knew would increase his chances his re-election. In the long run, Nixon would be lauded for China, but his support for the massacre would be remembered as a crime against humanity.¹⁴

In the short run, the scandal seemed to be blowing over, in Billy Graham’s perspective. The evangelist couldn’t have known then that Jack Anderson was about to get the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting¹⁵ — nor that the scandal had already provoked Nixon to revive his covert anti-leak unit, “the Plumbers,” who’d get busted soon enough bugging Democratic National Headquarters.

Graham was focused on re-election politics. These included the media strategy of Nixon’s main opponent, Edmund Muskie. The Democratic Senator from Maine would be remembered as the father of environmental legislation and a champion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Graham scoffed to Nixon that the Senator would no doubt try to project an image of honesty — “Abraham Lincoln and all that baloney.” He’d forgotten how Nixon had just dropped some Lincoln at the Prayer Breakfast. One more thing the evangelist couldn’t have known was that Nixon’s dirty-tricks squad was about to blindside Muskie with some creative media slander that would help unravel his campaign.

Billy Graham had his own strategy. “What I’m going to do is say things about you personally,” he told Nixon. “We talked before. Integrity. Religion. So forth. That type of thing.” The evangelist added that “if we come right down the wire and it looks like I could help in a public way even if I had to come out and say ‘I’m voting for Richard Nixon because…’ I’m ready to put that on the line. Even though it would hurt my ministry for years.” Actually, Graham had put it on the line that way many times before, making clear his political preferences since the Truman era, apparently without hurting his ministry.

Nevertheless, for the time being, he said he needed to keep things on the down low. “I’d rather have somebody that’s not going to let it out or even write it up that I ever was involved politically. You know I have to maintain a public image as far as possible of being political without being political.”

NEXT: [explogate 03: big national youth deal]

© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.

Mike Hertenstein

Written by

Scholar in the garret, monk in the cell, heckler in the back. Late-life seminary student. Writer, reader, listener, watcher.

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