The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire
Cecil Bothwell
Brave Ulysses Books, 2007

Chapter 13
Curious Conversations

Billy Graham’s voice on the tape is quite distinct. “This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.” Graham was talking with Richard Nixon about alleged Jewish control over the news media in the United States. There was nothing unusual about the setting, but this 1972 visit was recorded by a president whose infamous tapes are now scrutinized by legions of curious historians. Hence, thirty years after the words left the good Christian’s mouth, he was forced to defend them when the Associated Press broke the story. He told the AP:

“’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.’”

- AP wire story, March 2, 2002

For the most part and in most places, Graham was given a pass on this statement, including a much-publicized meeting with Jewish leaders who accepted his dissembling mea culpa. The Asheville Citizen-Times , Graham’s hometown daily, editorialized, “taken in the context of his life’s work ... and recent apology ... Graham appears to have stepped away from that pact.”

The “pact” was sealed in the next sentences of that same conversation.

“You believe that?” Nixon said in response.

“Yes, sir,” Graham said.

“Oh boy. So do I,” Nixon agreed, then said: “I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham said, reassuring the president.

- AP wire story, March 2, 2002

Newspaper and broadcast reports about Graham’s comments, condensed in the way all such reporting must be, tended to give the impression that the exchange was brief. Transcripts of the conversation, however, reveal that the discussion rarely strayed from that topic for over an hour and a half. Graham’s comments included: “They’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff;” and “They are undermining the country.” Nor is the record complete - about twenty minutes of the recording, in two segments, was excised before public access was granted.

Further on in the conversation Graham says, “A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”

Nixon responds, “You must not let them know.”

After Graham departs, Nixon tells Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.”

His Chief of Staff responds, “It’s a shocking point.”

Nixon concludes, “Well, it’s also the Jews are [an] irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

Nor did Graham’s involvement in that conversation end when he exited the White House. He wrote a follow-up letter in which he promised, “I will try to follow through faithfully on each point we discussed.” Graham’s blatant bigotry at the time of these utterances is irrefutable, though many have come to his defense by citing his public record of support for Israel - a position which is far more political than religious. His defense thirty years later bears closer scrutiny. What are we to make of a preacher who insists that his words don’t reflect his beliefs?

Nixon wasn’t the only person in his White House who maintained records. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff from his inauguration in 1969 until shortly before the president’s resignation, kept a daily diary which was published in 1994, a year after Haldeman’s death. The Chief of Staff noted a conversation between Nixon and Graham on February 1, 1972 about “the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media, and agreement that this was something that would have to be dealt with.”

Haldeman quoted Graham as saying, “the Bible says there are satanic Jews, and that’s where our problem arises.” Though this statement doesn’t occur on the tape, scholars have surmised it may have been said in the redacted portions of the recording.

The tapes corroborate the overall accuracy of Haldeman’s diary, but Graham claimed in a Life magazine interview, November 2, 1994, “I never discussed the Jewish people, the Jewish problem, or if there is a problem, with the President, ever. If I participated in any such conversation, I would have been very pro-Jewish because I’ve been that way ever since I can remember.”

Referring to Graham’s veracity in other matters, John Minder, Dean of Florida Bible Institute while Graham was a student there, said, “Billy has a way of making the story better over the years. He starts remembering it the way he’d like it to have been, which isn’t always the way it necessarily was, y’know.”

Haldeman’s account is elsewhere replete with detailed descriptions of Graham’s involvement in politics. During the 1972 election, Nixon was understandably concerned that George Wallace might make another run for office, despite the would-be assassin’s bullet that had left him paraplegic. The Republican “southern strategy” required support from the racist whites who comprised Wallace’s most ardent followers. White House operatives decided that Graham should be enlisted to talk Gov. George Wallace out of entering the presidential race (as an independent) because “Graham has a line to Wallace through Mrs. Wallace, who has become a Christian.”

Graham accepted the assignment and, on July 18, shortly after the former governor was wheeled out of his latest surgery to address a festering bullet wound, the minister reached him by phone. The next day Graham reported to Nixon, “Wallace had assured him there was almost no chance that he would run. He did ask Graham whether he would take more votes from Nixon or [Democratic candidate George] McGovern if he did run; Graham replied that three out of four Wallace voters would otherwise go to Nixon. Wallace swore that he would never turn one hand to help McGovern.”

Wallace had achieved national fame as the Alabama governor who stood up forcefully against integration. In his inaugural speech he declared, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He personally blocked the door at the University of Alabama to prevent entry of black students and ordered state police to block Martin Luther King’s march from Selma. His independent run for the presidency in 1968 had almost cost Nixon the White House, since Wallace peeled away southern support in a narrowly contested election. In 1972 he defeated McGovern in the Florida primary and enjoyed strong support nationwide. While campaigning in Maryland, in May of that year, Wallace was shot five times by a would-be assassin.

McGovern, running as an anti-war candidate, was the antithesis of the white supremacist Wallace who sneered at northerners and “pointy-headed intellectuals.” A soft-spoken liberal from South Dakota, McGovern was professorial, thoughtful and engaged in an issues-based race for the White House. Nixon, co-author of the Republican “southern strategy,” was busily using race as an issue to end the Democrats’ century-long domination of politics below the Mason-Dixon line. Whereas the Wallace candidacy had given racist and conservative Democrats an opportunity to cast votes against the party’s liberal national candidates in the 1968 general election and in 1972 primaries, Nixon operatives were eager to draw those same voters into the Republican camp.

In the topsy-turvy world of presidential politics, Nixon had run as a peace candidate against Humphrey, whom he pasted with responsibility for Johnson’s unpopular war policies. As author Christopher Hitchens ( The Trial of Henry Kissinger , Verso, 2002) and others have documented, during that campaign, Nixon’s operatives including Kissinger ensured failure of Johnson’s peace talks by promising South Vietnamese leaders that they would get a better deal under a Republican administration. The south boycotted talks until after the election. Publicly, Nixon promised the nation he had a recipe to end the conflict in Vietnam, and, after his narrow win, immediately escalated the war. In 1972, facing an explicitly anti-war opponent, Nixon stressed the importance of maintaining a stable leadership during wartime, touted ongoing peace talks, and quietly played on southern racism. Despite the discovery that summer of the Watergate break-in, the first in a series of criminal acts which would bury his presidency less than two years later, Nixon was well on his way to an electoral landslide when he dispatched Graham to defuse a possible Wallace challenge for southern votes.

The timing of Graham’s phone call seems, at best, tasteless. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that a ministerial check-in after serious surgery had more to do with matters of the spirit than of the body politic. Haldeman says Graham reported, “... he asked Graham to come and see him and asked him in the meantime to pray for him and indicated that he’s concerned because his abscess won’t heal.”

Wallace was a paraplegic suffering from the lingering effects of an assassination attempt, asking for Graham’s intercession with God in the hours after yet another surgery. Graham nevertheless forged ahead with his political hatchet job.

Graham gave Haldeman “names of all his Christian youth types” and it was noted, “He’s very enthusiastic and thinks we have a very good group to work with us. He also feels we have a good chance on the blacks by splitting them and getting the religious blacks who are scared of the criminal elements and so on to come over to our side. He thinks we’re in good shape with the Jews.”

As noted in an interview published in Life magazine in 1994: “Graham further acknowledges that he brought black leaders to the White House - but not, as Haldeman says, in hopes of ‘splitting’ them, but simply to ‘better the relationship between Nixon and the black community.’ This is hard for the visitor to swallow. Didn’t Graham hope to help Nixon politically? He pauses before answering and then says quietly, ‘I suppose that would have been true.’”

In July, 2007, the Nixon Library and Archives released documents from that period which provide further insight into Graham’s efforts. In a memo dated December 30, 1969, Nixon instructed White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to “follow up with Billy Graham in his work with Negro ministers across the country. He feels this is our best chance to make inroads into the Negro community. I am inclined to agree with him.”

Following up, Haldeman wrote a note to his assistant, Leonard Garment, on January 16, 1970. “ 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. I understand you’ve been in touch with Reverend Graham on this matter, particularly in relation to Reverend Edward Hill. In light of the President’s continual interest in this project, would you please proceed to meet directly with Dr. Graham and provide the President with a status report of how we are proceeding with this project and what our future plans are.”