S6:E4 Long Southern Strategy

S6:E4 Long Southern Strategy

by | May 28, 2024 | Episodes

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How the Republicans learned to court the South

When did Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, start courting the American South? It’s a big question! For decades, Republicans were known as the party that helped black people (except, you know, for ending Reconstruction to help gain the White House). Then, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the tide turned. Goldwater’s team promoted him as a racist when he toured the South. And… he won some ground in the traditionally Democratic region.

So when it came time for Richard Nixon to run in 1968, his team decided to court the South. Not out in public like Goldwater had. Instead, they decided to operate a campaign of “benign neglect” where they would not enforce existing laws meant to protect African Americans.

Our special guest this week is Angie Maxwell, author of The Long Southern Strategy.

Discussion Questions:

  • What caused the rift in the Democratic Party that made Strom Thurmond leave (hint: it has to do with Truman)?
  • What was the Democratic Party like before Truman?
  • What influence did Strom Thurmond have on Nixon?
  • Who was Barry Goldwater? How did he change the Republican Party by courting white Southerners?
  • How might the idea of the South being “benighted” impact them as a people?
  • Why do so many evangelicals see themselves as “benighted”?

Sources:

  • “The Long Southern Strategy” by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields.
  • “Reaganland” by Rick Perlstein
  • YouTube clip of Nixon not wanting “Law and Order” to mean “racist”
  • Nixon talking about “law and order” in a speech
  • Nixon’s campaign ad about protests and tear gas
  • Article about Nelson Rockefeller
  • Nixon’s civil rights ad
  • Helpful Time Magazine article
  • “These Truths” book by Jill Lepore
  • Bio on Strom Thurmond
  • Article about Reconstruction
  • “The Evangelicals” book by Frances Fitzgerald
  • Truman’s speech to the NAACP

Transcript

CHRIS: This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season 6. Not only do we need to understand how Christians were pulled in, but we also need to understand how the Republican Party changed in the 1900s. This episode won’t talk much about Christianity, but it’s key to understanding the Republican Party of the 1970s, one of the areas we’re spending a lot of time on this season. I think you’re really going to like it. Okay… here’s the show.

Dexter Chipps was a Catholic man in a time when Protestants didn’t much care for Catholics. He was a strong supporter of the mayor of Forth Worth, Texas, and the owner of a lumberyard. On July 17, 1926, Chipps got on the phone and called a pastor who was speaking out against the mayor. He’d said that he was “not fit to be the mayor of a hog pen”. The call, as you can imagine, did not go well. So Chipps stomped off to confront the pastor. The two men exchanged words. Their argument grew loud. Chipps challenged the pastor to a fight.

But he picked the wrong man to mess with. The pastor drew a pistol from the desk drawer and fired four shots. Three bullets pierced Chipps and killed him. The pastor called his wife and the police saying, “I just killed me a man.”2

The pastor in question is somewhat of a controversial figure, one you’ve probably never heard of before. His name was J. Frank Norris. He embodied what one writer described as your stereotypical vision of a Texas fundamentalist. Brash. In 1909 he was hired by the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, known as the “church of the Cattle Kings”

He was also nearly convicted of arson when his church burned down. And he got away with shooting Dexter Chipps on grounds of self-defense. 33 prominent Texas Baptists signed a statement describing Norris as “divisive, self-centered, autocratic, hypercritical and non-cooperative.” Then, a year later, the Baptist General Convention of Texas kicked him out.5

Norris was a founding member of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. Fundamentalism, if you remember, began as a movement to fight modernist theology: that belief system that said you could remove the miraculous from Christianity. Maybe Jesus never rose from the dead or walked on water. Norris preached against modernism often, which is notable because, in the 1920s, there really weren’t any modernists in the South. For that reason, there weren’t really fundamentalists in the South in the 1920s. When the Scopes “monkey” trial was held in Tennessee in the south, it came as a surprise when the region was painted as fundamentalist by the press, because it wasn’t. Fundamentalism in the early years was a northern phenomenon.

Norris is credited by some historians as bringing the movement below the Mason-Dixon line He pastored two churches, one in Texas and another in Detroit. Combined, his congregations reached 25,000 people. Young men trained in his seminary and then went on to spread fundamentalism wherever they were placed.

The American South is an interesting and dynamic place. One that is often misunderstood. Today we associate it with fundamentalist religion and the Republican Party. But that wasn’t always the case. But a lot changed over the decades from the 1920s to the 70s. This season I’m telling the story of how some, especially white, evangelical Christians tied themselves to the Republican Party. To do that, we have to understand not just Christianity, but also changes in the GOP. Because the party of today or even of Ronald Reagan was not the party of the early 1900s.

But soon they took notice of the south as a voting block. White Southerners had long voted for the Democrats. But that would all change as they were courted not by a pastor tried for murder, but a presidential candidate who claimed that he was not a crook.

You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.

To explore the topic today, I spoke with a fascinating guest.

ANGIE: My name is Angie Maxwell. I am the Diane D Blair endowed chair in Southern studies and a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas.

CHRIS: Author of “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics” and just an all-around interesting person. I loved talking to her about the South because, not only does she study it, but maybe you noticed, she is Southern. Okay, so, there is this concept of the South as benighted, looked down upon by the rest of the country. The term “the benighted south” goes back to psychologist Alfred Adler.

ANGIE: And he originally studied organ inferiority, like how does the body compensate for a shoulder or leg or something like that…

CHRIS: But then he moved into social psychology early in the 1900s…

ANGIE: And what was so interesting about the theory he developed is that he said the first thing that was necessary for an individual to develop an inferiority complex was a moment of consciousness or recognition that someone deems you inferior.

CHRIS: For the American South, that was not just losing the Civil War, but also living through Reconstruction. That period after the war when the North occupied the South with the military. The purpose: to enforce new amendments meant to protect the rights of African Americans. A humiliation to white Southerners to not just lose a war, but be reminded of it constantly as soldiers marched through their towns.

Adler determined that someone with an inferiority complex would show it in one of three ways.

ANGIE: Either that person would withdraw from the society that deems them inferior or they would deem someone else inferior, kind of the corollary superiority complex. Or they would change the rules by which people were judged. And we see that happen in the South, particularly when there are intense periods of public criticism. So the Scopes trial is the perfect example, you know, it’s covered in international newspapers on the front page of the London Times for eleven days. And American journalists when they realize the international media was following so closely and making fun at this American experience and trial that was going on then the American journalists started saying ‘This isn’t American, this is Southern’. That critique from within the United States became very directed toward the South.

CHRIS: Even though the Scopes trial, which I covered in detail last season, was the result of a northern phenomenon. You can see this clearly if you watch the old film “Inherit the Wind” where the people of the town are depicted as mean-spirited hicks, when in fact they were warm and welcoming.

ANGIE: Probably the worst thing that white southerners thought would happen if they lost the war was that people would be bankrupt. Right? How would they have labor and how would they process an agricultural economy? They never thought their slaves would be their Senators.

CHRIS: During Reconstruction, hundreds of black men were elected to local offices. 600 to state legislatures, and 16 served in congress10. Including Hiram Revels, the first black senator who was from Mississippi.11 As a Republican, then the party of Lincoln.

ANGIE: Right? That was not something that was imagined. And it was not something that happened outside of the region, either. So that experience of being under scrutiny… totally deserved, but that experience of the world turned upside down to such an extreme degree created a tender skin to criticism. There is something in that heritage that just gets passed down.

CHRIS: You likely know what comes next. Jim Crow Laws, black codes, legislation, and social norms designed specifically to keep black people from advancing. A compromise with the Republicans that ends the military occupation of the South in exchange for the presidency.

ANGIE: Because of the experience of Reconstruction they lock that power down structurally in every possible way they can imagine.

CHRIS: Once they regain control, white southerners… by and large… vote for Democrats. For decades.

ANGIE: And so when the New Deal comes along…

CHRIS: …the big set of government programs passed under FDR that covers everything from government-backed home loans to jobs to the FDIC to building trails in national parks… People were desperate. The South, like everywhere, benefits from the programs passed by a Democratic government. But… that starts to trigger dissent in the party.

ANGIE: I feel like it’s in the aftermath of the Great Depression and New Deal that there starts to be a lot of tension between the national Democratic Party and the direction it is moving, building off of that New Deal coalition, and the state Democratic parties in the South.

CHRIS: Because, try as they may, they couldn’t keep black people from benefitting from all of the programs. They made it hard for them to get those home loans… but… the New Deal still managed to lift up black people.

ANGIE: There were early efforts at FERA which was an early welfare program, and there were southern states that turned that money away rather than give it to African Americans in their state.

CHRIS: That tension escalated when FDR died and Harry Truman came into power in 1945.

ANGIE: Truman makes a speech to the NAACP. He’s the first president to make a president to make a speech to the NAACP, and he doubles down on the direction the National Democratic Party is going.

TRUMAN: It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. And when I say all Americans – I mean all Americans.12

CHRIS: It’s a moving speech. I’ll post links in the show notes.

ANGIE: And then of course desegregating the military by executive order…

CHRIS: This again, is a democrat talking. What had been the party of Jim Crow.

ANGIE: And so the 1948 Truman re-election becomes the watershed moment.

CHRIS: Northern Democrats like him…

ANGIE: But Southern Democrats think ‘we’re just going to get rid of this guy. We’ll get someone good in there as our nominee’. When Truman succeeds in getting the nomination in the 1948 convention southern democrats get worried, they really see this kind of slipping away, their national party slipping away. And they walk out, not all of them but most of them. And they run their own candidate in Strom Thurmond.

CHRIS: Strom Thumond. One of those names you probably heard in high school history class. He’d been a lawyer, state senator of South Carolina, and participated in D-Day in Normandy. Then governor of South Carolina. Super into states’ rights and segregation.13 We’ll hear more about him later, so try to remember Strom Thurmond. This splinter group of the democratic party makes him their nominee.

ANGIE: If Truman loses because of these Southern Democrats then the democratic party is going to realize they can’t win without the South and come crawling back. Or if no one can get the majority of the electoral college then they’ll be in a position to do some negotiating.

CHRIS: They’re holding their own party hostage. We’ll see this a bunch this season as the extreme wing of a party, a movement, a conference threatens to split if the moderates don’t give in to their wishes. This is where moderates have to choose between allowing their movement to become extremist, or risk losing to the other side. Which will it be? Which is the lesser of two evils. Some folks in the South were so against Truman that he didn’t even appear on the ballot in Alabama14. This group calls themselves the Dixicrats. But the Dixiecrats failed.

ANGIE: It’s close as we all know, the famous picture saying “Dewey Won” but Truman is successful, and that puts the Southern white segregationist/ pro-Jim Crow Democrats into a purgatory of sorts.

CHRIS: Because, yeah, they’ve got a Democrat in the White House, but it’s Truman. A guy who is pro-desegregation. Truman, by the way, is someone we should all know more about. Did you know that he was close to passing national healthcare? Something he called “simple Christianity”.15 Anyhow…

Then you get to this interesting moment in American politics, kind of like what I talked about last season in the election competition between William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt. Where the parties were just… harder to tell apart. Starting in 1948 the University of Michigan ran a study. They collected data every four years and devised two questions for voters about the pair of major political parties in the US.

MICHIGAN: (question on a survey, so say it straight-forward) “Would you say that either one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal than the other?”

CHRIS: Believe it or not, between 1948 and 1960 many voters could not answer this question16. So the U of M researchers asked a bonus question:

MICHIGAN: “What do they have in mind when they say that the Republicans (Democrats) are more conservative (liberal) than the Democrats (Republicans)?”

CHRIS: A full 37% of those surveyed did not know how to answer the questions. They had no idea which was conservative and which was liberal or how to tell the difference. Wilder still is that only 17% gave the answer that the people running the survey considered the best, correct answer. Eisenhower may have been a reflection of that since both parties wanted him.

Now, if you’re a white Southerner who is really into segregation… this is untenable. But changes were also going on in the Republican Party.

ANGIE: Some union-busting Republicans are upset and they start to feel the wealthy Rockefeller Republicans, the East Coast and West Coast more liberal Republicans are just manipulating the party and controlling everything. And that conservative faction starts meeting and talking about where they can find bedfellows. How do we grow our wing of the party?

CHRIS: And maybe we can bring some white Southerners to the party. It’s not a clear line. Eisenhower, the Republican, sends troops to Arkansas to enforce the integration of schools in Little Rock in 195718. Making it harder to bring racists into the party of Eisenhower.

ANGIE: It’s Strom Thurmond who works out a deal.

CHRIS: Remember him? He was the South Carolina Democrat who wasn’t thrilled with Harry Truman’s civil rights ideas…

ANGIE: That kind of works out a deal after the Civil Rights Act Right is signed and he can keep his seniority.

CHRIS: That was in 1964. Remember, he was a racist. He’d said earlier, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation.”The guy jumps from Democrat to Republican and has plans to help the conservative faction of the Republican Party. This conservative group wants Barry Goldwater to be the nominee for president. You may not remember that name, but he comes up a lot when discussing the radical shift of the Republican Party. If you were to draw a roadmap that showed when the GOP took that turn, Goldwater would be where the highway took a sharp turn.

ANGIE: And in 64 at the convention the conservative wing has gotten behind Goldwater because he’s one of the few Republicans that had voted against the Civil Rights Act. They think he’s dynamic. He made some pretty aggressive speeches about Eisenhower being soft on unions. You know, it’s a long shot for him to get the nomination. But Nelson Rockefeller who the other wing of the party had put up was newly remarried to a former staffer with whom he had an affair and she was having a baby and it brought some of those kinds of social taboos up at that time and decreased his popularity. And so Goldwater squeaks it out. The conservative faction of the Republican Party has its moment. They send a team of people that stump in the South hard for Goldwater and they use some pretty explicit language about Goldwater will not enforce any of these civil rights changes. They’re worried about the Voting Rights Act looming on the horizon because that’s one that could change the power structure in the region.

CHRIS: The Voting Rights Act made polls taxes, literacy tests, intimidation at voting places, that kind of stuff, illegal and would be passed by President Johnson in 1965.21 Racists obviously didn’t want this to pass because it meant that they could no longer play their usual tricks and their people would be voted out of office.

ANGIE: So Mississippi goes in the 80 percentile for Goldwater.

CHRIS: White Southerners eat up the rhetoric of Barry Goldwater. A Republican, a man from the party of Lincoln, takes a formerly Democratic state by appealing to white racists. This is the power of Barry Goldwater and why he’s worth remembering. He demonstrates that Republicans can make headway in the South.

ANGIE: So it’s nuts, right? The messaging was very effective. What Goldwater believed personally is not something I can express. But how he was portrayed on that tour in the south called “Operation Dixie” that his team did was explicitly anti-civil rights and pro-segregation.

CHRIS: Does that mean he wins because he speaks to racists?

ANGIE: No, he wins five deep south states and his home state of Arizona and loses everywhere else in the country.

CHRIS: So he loses, but… he demonstrates that there is room in the south for the conservative wing of the Republicans. All it takes it the right messaging.

ANGIE: You know the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party kind of thinks they’ll go back to being the party in power

CHRIS: We let the far right have their fun and they lost the vast majority of the states. Time to get real. Let’s get Nixon up to bat next.

ANGIE: And in a sense, Nixon in 68 is a compromise candidate. Nixon had been the candidate in 60. He’d almost won and he had a pretty pro-civil rights campaign. Compare his 60 campaign and 68 campaign they are wildly different.

CHRIS: You can hear that in one of his televised campaign ads in 1960.

ANGIE: And he courted the black vote outside of the South, particularly in some of the urban areas in big cities. He had somewhat of a friendship with MLK. He had gone on record after Brown v Board when he was VP under Eisenhower saying the Warren court had made the right decision.

CHRIS: Backing school integration. Amazing stuff. Not the guy you’d think would turn and give in to the racist wing of the party in order to court the South.

ANGIE: The Goldwater wing, this conservative faction, they don’t have a leg to stand on after his terrible showing. And Nixon is still very bitter about the close loss in 60. The strategist thing is like, we can’t put another Goldwater out there because the party’s not going to stand for it, but if we can take a well-known person, a well-known name and we can skate the middle here, build on some of the gains Goldwater made in these deep South states, but code the language in a way that doesn’t offend so many Republicans in the region we might have a winning combination now.

CHRIS: We need to look moderate, but send a message to the south that we are on their side. We just can’t do it outright. We have to be sly. In doing so, maybe we can tip the scales and win a presidency.

ANGIE: There was a young super-conservative in Ronald Reagan trying to make headway in that 68 primary and it was Strom Thurmond who convinced these newly converted southern Democrats turned Republicans and the convention. He said, “I know you think Reagan is the true conservative, but Reagan has assured us he will not enforce civil rights changes. We’ve got to stick with him”. He wielded that power. It’s not that there were huge numbers of delegates, but when a party is split any group that has any influence has a lot of power.

CHRIS: With the help of Strom Thurmond, they tip the scales for the Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller loses the nomination yet again. Twice to Nixon, once to Goldwater, and the conservative wing of the Republican Party gets their man nominated for president. Richard Nixon.

ANGIE: Nixon recognized that George Wallace was going to enter the race as the third party candidate and that he was the segregationist governor of Alabama.

CHRIS: You may know George Wallace from the song “Sweet Home Alabama”. When he was inaugurated as the governor, he said…

WALLACE: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

CHRIS: Just in case you had any questions about where he stood. This guy’s running as a third-party candidate. He’d going to take the hardcore racists.

ANGIE: You can’t out anti-civil rights George Wallace in 1968, so your option is only to go toward the middle.

CHRIS: That is what Nixon did. He was the middle guy. He was Eisenhower’s VP. Remember the 50s? Remember how nice they were? After all of the tumult of the Kennedy assassination and student protests, Nixon had nostalgia on his side. But his team still wanted to court the South, whatever they could peel loose from Wallace.

ANGIE: George Wallace is going to win the hard-line segregationists but Nixon picks up enough support to win the South. It didn’t work with Goldwater, but with some fine-tuning this long attachment of white Democrats to the Democratic Party has somewhat been broken.

CHRIS: Leaving an opportunity for Republicans. Bringing us to a moment that borders on legend.

CHRIS: The details of the meeting are sketchy, as, you know, folks are not likely to take good notes on backroom deals. But Nixon’s trying to gain the nomination in his party, and there was the option of courting the South. To do that, he had to kiss the ring of Strom Thurmond.23 The two met in a hotel room in Atlanta on June 1, 1968. One historian said it was the most important event in the election of that year. Another compared it to the election of Rutherford B Hayes that got him the presidential win but ended Reconstruction in the South and protection for black people there. Essentially, it amounted to a commitment to “benign neglect”. Yes, Brown v Board of Education was a done deal, ending separate but equal in public schools. But that didn’t mean that the federal government had to enforce it. Whatever the exact details, Nixon and Thurmond entered the hotel ballroom where the state chairs were gathered. A few weeks later, Strom Thurmond formally supported Nixon.

ANGIE: We do see a very changed Nixon in that campaign. And we do see Strom Thurmond who naturally would have endorsed a Wallace decide not to.

CHRIS: Right? Makes sense that Thurmond would want to nominate Wallace, the Sweet Home Alabama racist governor. But Thurmond backs Nixon. Now, Nixon couldn’t just come out and bash black people like Wallace had because he’d alienate the party’s base who weren’t racist. Instead, it comes down to benign neglect and… dog whistles.

The dog whistle term gets used a lot these days. There are those who deny that Nixon used them, like Dinesh D’Souza26. But it seems clear that there was a major change in Nixon’s behavior, and it’s hard to deny since there was a playbook released as a best-selling book called “The Emerging Republican Majority” by Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips that pretty well lays out the plan.

At first, Nixon zigged and zagged. He appointed two white supreme court justices who had resisted civil rights but then backed affirmative action27. Confusing. But the language was there.

ANGIE: What they mean by political dog whistle, and they’re really hard to do now because of technology, is saying something in a way that a certain community hears it and knows what you mean even if other folks take a totally different meaning from it.

CHRIS: The name comes from whistles that put out frequencies so high that only dogs can hear them.

ANGIE: And that isn’t necessarily bad in its context, right? Maybe you’re just trying to communicate something to a community.

CHRIS: Like when a candidate says “I was tried in the wilderness” or “though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death” it signals to people who know their Bibles that this candidate understands Scripture. Or is religious? To those who don’t get the reference, it’s just a folksy saying. To the true believers, it says “this person gets me.”

ANGIE: An example would be “law and order”

CHRIS: This audio is from a 1968 campaign ad for Nixon. Remember how Angie said there was a big difference between the Nixon campaigns of 1960 and 68? Here it is. Instead of a calm Nixon chatting into the lens, this one has him doing a narration over photographs of burning buildings, protestors with signs promoting socialism, and officers with what looks like tear gas launchers.

CHRIS: Nixon spoke about law and order in speeches and when accepting the Republican nomination. Yet, when some people heard “law and order” they took it to mean control over black people. Dog whistle.

ANGIE: I mean, there are tons of people in the country who hear “law and order” and think “law and order”.

CHRIS: Great TV show. (laughing)

ANGIE: That’s exactly right. Who doesn’t want there to be orders and law to be followed? But that phrase in the South was messaged to say an end to the civil rights protests, the boycotts, and organized crackdowns. That spoke to a lot of white Southerners that the civil rights beat of covering all of these protests in the South, just make the South look terrible… there’s people all the way from that to those who worry that it’s going to erupt in violence. What I’m always pushing myself to think about is the actual lived experience of people and when you think about white communities in the South during segregation for so many decades they… it was like a co-existence that was so separated. It wasn’t in your face all the time. It was real easy to pretend this is just how life is and this is just peaceful. Really easy to not see some things for your average white Southerner living this existence in a separated white world. Even non-violent protests, which were in the South, pops that bubble where people believed African Americans supported segregation too. This is good for them or paternalistic. This is just how life was supposed to be. The protests, even non-violent, showed them that African Americans did not want this. This has hurt and oppressed. The media calling it all out… it’s hard to keep that conditioned life lie going that this is all benevolent. Law and order meant we’re not going to have these walkouts and protests and that spoke to a lot of moderate white Southerners who just wanted a system that was polite. Polite racism.

CHRIS: Yet to white southerners, law and order signaled an end to the protests and a re-establishment of the old way. Again, they didn’t need to reach the extreme racists. George Wallace did that. They couldn’t compete with him. Law and order, though, could appeal to moderate white Southerners in a way that outright racism couldn’t. Hence the dog whistle.

ANGIE: In this case, they were very concerned about communicating it so directly as the surrogates to Goldwater that it is offputting to those moderates who didn’t want to be thought of that way, didn’t want to be called out for being racist. Didn’t want to support violence, but things to stay where they were. The hardliners didn’t vote for them either. They didn’t want complete and total social change.

CHRIS: And the South goes with Nixon.

I realize it may feel like I didn’t prove my point well enough. But African Americans certainly felt the change in mood from Nixon. In 1960, 40% of African American voters went with Nixon. In 68 only 13% of non-white voters went with him.30

Despite what Nixon said on TV and what D’Souza claims today, African Americans clearly picked up on the dog whistles. They were aware in the moment what was going on31. Then there’s this idea of neglect. What you believe isn’t signaled just by what you do, but also by what you don’t do.

ANGIE: There’s a continued effort by a lot of southern governors to block integration into universities and into different spaces and you do not see an Eisenhower level of response. Where he sends in troops. People saying this was the administration you were a part of… and then you see the same thing happening at other southern universities and southern towns and there’s just no action and at that point, those laws are in place. Eisenhower took action when you didn’t have a Civil Rights Act. Then you do get a Civil Rights Act and you don’t see action when those laws are violated.

CHRIS: You’ll see something like the Kent State shooting where they send in the military then but not to protect African-Americans.

ANGIE: The expectations were different after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those were such enormous efforts and we just don’t see an executive response anywhere near what had happened 10 years prior.

CHRIS: And you see the rise of segregation academies where white people send their kids to private schools rather than have them integrated. Government dollars start flowing in that direction. Like in the state of Virginia which offered grants to draw teachers to private schools.

CHRIS: So it’s the benign neglect, it’s what Nixon didn’t do compared to what people expected. What racist thing did he say? It’s not that. It’s that the country gets a Civil Rights Act passed and the executive does nothing to enforce it.

CHRIS: This is going to be important in a few months when we talk about school integration and bussing. Because one of the key issues that catalyze white evangelicals to the Republican Party in the Carter era is fear of losing their tax-exempt status due to the enforcement of integration laws. It’s a wild story, one that, honestly, we’re telling the wrong way. Pray for me. It’s going to be a tough episode to make… Anyhow, pay attention as we go because the theme of dog whistles will come up again, as will dueling themes of quiet racism and peace and quiet. Note that this disjointed arc from Truman to Nixon demonstrates how the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, changed its attitudes toward African Americans in order to court the Southern white vote.

Nixon wins two terms and eventually resigns after the Watergate scandal, as discussed in the last episode. It’s tempting to end the story there. But what I appreciate about Angie Maxwell’s work is that she studies what she calls “the long southern strategy”. Despite some oversimplifications of this story, the South does not stay with the Republican Party after Nixon’s resignation. The following election it’s Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter. And Carter, the Democrat, wins the South.

ANGIE: What Jimmy Carter portrayed is that he was one of them.

CHRIS: A white Southerner. Really, there isn’t anything easy about this moment. Here was Nixon, the law and order candidate and both he and his VP Spiro Agnew were obvious criminals and both of them got away with it. Ford, running for president, is the guy who pardoned Nixon. Carter wins the South and the presidency, but only by a narrow margin.33 Helped by burgeoning evangelical involvement, Carter being an evangelical, and by the fact that the darling of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, avoided supporting Gerald Ford34.

It’s tangled. But the south goes for the Democrats under Carter. Then it goes for Reagan and it seems like the Republicans have their attention once more.

Until Bill Clinton comes along and wins it back for the Democrats. The “Southern strategy” didn’t always work for the Republicans. It isn’t a straight line like it’s sometimes portrayed. Again, the South is a dynamic place like anywhere else.

ANGIE: It’s such a simple explanation, right? The Civil Rights Act passed and suddenly all these white Southerners become republicans. Right? It’s so much more complicated than that and there is a lot of in-fighting in the Republican Party. Lots of Republicans are very upset about this trying to appeal to white Southerners. It was a very mixed and tumultuous time.

CHRIS: And it will take a long time to fit all of the pieces together this season. Because so much was happening. We haven’t even touched on women’s liberation, the ERA, the anti-ERA movement, other supply-side economics, changes in theology, the New Right. We’ll get to all of that. It’s fascinating. Race is just one part of what changes the Republican Party, and just one component of what nudges some evangelicals to support them. It would be a mistake to pin it all on just one part of this complicated story. Settle in, gang, we’ve got plenty more to cover.

For now, let’s circle back to J. Frank Norris at the beginning of the episode. The brash, love him or leave him preacher who shot a man and also introduced fundamentalism to the South. Fundamentalism wasn’t really there until he brought the kind of fear and anxiety that was his trademark into Texas. By the end of the century, fundamentalist Christianity would overtake denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention. Norris and men like him laid the groundwork for that decades earlier. Racism and a bunch of other issues would converge to swing party politics and drive evangelicals to make strange bedfellows in order to become a voting block.

One of the ways they did this was by convincing us that not only is the South benighted, but so are Christians. Same playbook, a different target. Norris brought that fear to the South. A host of others tried to hitch it to the gospel.

Listen to preachers on the radio or on TV. Tune into the news. Do you hear that Christians are being overlooked, left behind, and that our way of life is disappearing? Whether or not you agree with that statement, do you like what gets marketed with it? It’s the language that convinced the South that they had to use force to keep their way of life.

In the Christian world, it’s not fear of the North occupying our territory that riles people up. It’s a concern that “those people” or the government are coming for your children. That they are using textbooks to turn your kids against God. That the media and society look down on us. Say we’re backward. We’re constantly being told that we’re a benighted people and that the elites are coming for us. Do we want to live life as a benighted people?

Is it a statement of fact, or a trojan horse meant to manipulate? Is it possible that political forces need us to believe that so we’ll vote for them? And what could we do if we rejected that idea?

Special thanks to the amazing Angie Maxwell. Her books are “The Long Southern Strategy” and “The Benighted South”. Patrons of the show can hear a lot more good stuff from her by giving a little each month to help the show at patron.com/trucepodcast. We had a much longer conversation than what I could fit into the episodes. She was so generous with her time.

Thanks also to everyone who gave me their voices for this episode including my friends Jackie Hart and Chris Sloan.

Truce is listener-supported. To learn how to help via check, Paypal, Venmo, whatever, visit trucepodcast.com. There you can find previous episodes as well as show notes, sources used, an email list, pictures… so many good things. Please also take some time to tell your friends and family about the show. This is a small, independent operation. There is no marketing staff. Give a little bit so I can get one step closer to doing this show full time which would mean more and better episodes for you and a healthier work/life balance for me.

Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC.

S6:E3 Billy Graham and Nixon

S6:E3 Billy Graham and Nixon

by | May 14, 2024 | Episodes

The Grim Reality of the Watergate Scandal: Billy Graham’s Loyalty Tested – guest David Bruce

Have you heard these myths about Billy Graham’s continued support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal? Myth 1: Graham blindly supported Nixon without question. Myth 2: Graham’s support of Nixon was solely based on their personal friendship. Myth 3: Graham’s support of Nixon undermined his credibility as a religious leader. In this episode, our guest speakers, David Bruce and Frances Fitzgerald, will shed light on the truth behind Graham’s actions and provide valuable insights on navigating the delicate relationship between religion and politics.

In this episode, you will be able to:

  • Gain insights into the complex relationship between American evangelicals and politics, revealing the challenges and opportunities for engagement.
  • Examine the concerns surrounding the influence of religious groups in politics, cultivating a greater understanding of the potential implications and the need for discernment.
  • Discover the powerful role played by Billy Graham in shaping national policies and how his approach to faith and politics still resonates today.
  • Uncover the parallels between the Watergate scandal and current political corruption, shedding light on the importance of ethical leadership and its impact on religious communities.

My special guests are David Bruce and Frances Fitzgerald

David Bruce is the Executive Vice President of the Billy Graham Library and the new Billy Graham Archive and Research Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. With over 40 years of experience working closely with Dr. Billy Graham, David brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the podcast. His expertise and firsthand experience make him a trusted source when exploring the complex relationship between religion and politics, specifically in relation to Billy Graham’s continued support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. David’s unique perspective offers a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by American evangelical leaders and their engagement with political figures. Get ready for an engaging and thought-provoking conversation with David Bruce on this episode of Truce.

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 – Introduction

00:00:27 – Reverend Harold Ockengay’s Controversy

00:01:19 – Pope Pius XI and Mussolini

00:02:59 – Catholicism and the 1960 US Presidential Election

00:08:11 – Billy Graham and Politics

00:15:41 – Billy Graham’s Support for Nixon

00:16:42 – Nixon’s Civil Religion

00:17:57 – White House Church Services

00:19:35 – Graham’s Influence and Criticisms

00:21:42 – The Watergate Scandal

00:30:40 – The Importance of Prophetic Distance

00:31:41 – Franklin Graham’s Support for Trump

00:32:27 – Strange Bedfellows and the Separation of Church and State

00:33:22 – Humility and Proximity to Power

00:33:44 – Acknowledgments and Resources

Sources

  • “The Surprising Work of God” by Garth M. Rosell
  • An article from The Atlantic about the Pope and Mussolini
  • “The Popes Against the Protestants” by Kevin Madigan
  • NPR interview with Kevin Madigan
  • “A Prophet With Honor” book by William Martin
  • “The Invisible Bridge” by Rick Perlstein
  • “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald
  • “The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen” book of essays accessed on Google Books
  • New York Times article about how the Watergate break-in was financed
  • Pat Buchanan hearings during the Watergate investigation
  • Frost/Nixon transcript

Discussion Questions:

  • Was Billy Graham being a good friend by supporting Nixon after Watergate?
  • Should religious leaders maintain a certain distance between themselves and people of power?
  • Why do we like to see our governmental leaders as religious people?
  • Was Nixon’s church service in the Whitehouse wrong to be a gathering place of the rich and famous?
  • How bad was the Watergate break-in? How does it change your mind about Nixon to know about the other criminal activity?

Transcript (generated by AI)

00:00:00
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some American evangelicals tied themselves to the Truce Podcast. This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season six. In 147, the Reverend Harold Ockengay went on a tour of Italy. He was part of a delegation of religious leaders viewing the destruction after World War II. Upon returning home, he argued that the devastation was the result of Europe turning its back on God.

00:00:27
And for a second there, it seemed like Akangei might bring some of that destruction home. First, there were the accusations. Supposedly, while in Europe, he attended the opera, purchased cigarettes, and then resold them. That was the whole controversy. This may seem quaint, but Akangei’s background was in the holiness movement, where Christians were to be holy, pure, undefiled by the things of this world.

00:00:52
All the rumors hinted that the famous minister from Boston was living a double life in the process. Akangei had to admit that while his character was upright in Italy, he did indeed sometimes go to the movies with his wife. The cigarettes he was seen with had been given to him for free, and so he passed them on to someone else. That there was the entire American hullabaloo. Yet in Italy, Protestants were upset with Akingay for another reason.

00:01:19
Akange, along with other members of the clergy, had met with Pope Pius XI. Pius XI was an interesting guy. His predecessor, Number eleven, openly criticized Hitler and the secularization of Germany. Not a good thing for Hitler, who was trying to expand his influence. So when eleven died and Number twelve was brought in, Hitler and Mussolini wanted to cozy up to him.

00:01:42
And they had plenty in common. Hatred of communism, a distrust of democracy. Mussolini had been fiercely anti cleric, but once he got to the Italian parliament, he gave a speech calling for intertwining Italy with the Catholic Church to make it a Christian nation. No separation of church and state. And why?

00:02:01
The better to gain power if an influential group is behind you. In the early 19 hundreds, Protestantism spread to Italy, in part because Protestants were focusing their efforts on reaching the poor. Italians who immigrated to the US might return to the old country equipped with a new faith. After World War I, Italians grew uneasy with the power held by Americans and the British, and also that Protestantism was spreading to Europe even as Catholicism waned in the fall of the Austrian Empire. Their solution?

00:02:33
Use the power of the Italian government to persecute Protestants and stifle the wave of evangelism. That is why Italian Protestants were upset about Akingay and other religious leaders visiting with the Pope. Because that very pope was persecuting Protestants. This whole mess trickled down to something you may never expect. The US presidential election of 1960, when a Roman Catholic, John F.

00:02:59
Kennedy, was a serious contender for the highest office in the land. Books and articles like this one cropped up. When we raise the question, should a Catholic be the President of the United States? We should not be accused of bigotry. It is a legitimate question, and to deny us the right to raise it smacks of the intolerance of which the questioner is accused.

00:03:19
This is from an article published on August 15, 1960, in the Church of God’s Evangel magazine. It’s a question that haunted some Christians in that time, Americans in general. Can the United States have a Catholic president? To our modern ears, as the author suggests, that seems like a bigoted question. In 1960, though, there were other considerations.

00:03:41
When we consider these limitations, religion is not the basic issue. Rather, it is the political action of the Roman Church. Religion is the means used to demand the loyalty to put the political action into operation. What if, say, John Kennedy is president of the United States and then gets the call from Rome that he has to use his power to benefit the Church or silence Protestantism, as Pius XI and Mussolini had in Italy? Now, today, that sounds crazy, but it was very much in the air in 1960.

00:04:12
This was not the first or the only publication to question Kennedy’s suitability as candidate for public office. In June of 1960, Akankay himself gave a speech at his Boston church asking just that. Could a Catholic president separate his official duties from his beliefs? Or would that constitute a failure of separation of church and state? In the separation of church and state argument?

00:04:37
Who is being protected in the deal, the church or the state? Or both? It depends on who you ask. A decade later, when the United States found itself embroiled in scandals involving bribes, wiretapping, illegal searches, and a break in at the Watergate Hotel, the most famous evangelist in the country found himself backing a corrupt president. Billy Graham had done plenty to encourage the head of state to identify as Christian.

00:05:05
Now, would his efforts to mix church and state backfire on the US with the church? You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause in the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron, and this is truth.

00:05:30
Okay, so we need to spend a little more time with Billy Graham. I did a whole episode in season three, but we need one more. Look, Lord, do with me as you will. That was Graham’s prayer early in his career, before he became pastor to presidents and before the big crusades. And, of course, out of that then would come the final parts of his education, his call to preach in a local church as a pastor, and then eventually to feel the pull of the Holy Spirit, to become an itinerant preacher of the Gospel.

00:06:03
By the way, this is David Bruce. I’m the executive vice president of the Billy Graham Library and the new Billy. Graham Archive and Research center in Charlote, North Carolina. He’s been with the organization for something like 40 years. Mr.

00:06:17
Bruce toured and worked closely with Dr. Graham and was a lot of fun to talk to. So this young preacher, Billy GraHam, goes on to do these huge rallies during the 1940s. That notoriety, that ability to preach in so many places, put Mr. Graham in to the national psyche.

00:06:37
And soon he met Mr. Truman. He’s consulting for presidents of the United States. It would often begin with his knowledge of them as friends before they ever either ran for public office or certainly ascended to the presidency. It was that way with Dwight Eisenhower, who was a general when they met.

00:06:56
He met Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 1950s, he met Mr. Reagan’s actor. This notoriety, as we’ll see, was a blessing and a curse, pushing Billy to walk a tightrope between politics and faith. So these things happened not by design, but often by the. We would call it the backstroke of.

00:07:15
His life by simply doing ministry, attracting large audiences. Over the course of time, people are going to want to get involved. That’s what David Bruce says. And, you know, this is coming from someone who works at an organization bearing Graham’s name. To balance that out, let’s read what one biographer said of Billy Graham.

00:07:33
Billy Graham enjoyed proximity to power. He liked being able to have a hand, or at least a finger, in shaping national and international policy, in helping a friend gain and remain in the White House, in abetting the defeat of those whose religious and political views he believed to be mistaken. This is the story of a guy walking a tightrope. One of the founding members of the National association of Evangelicals, which, if you’ll remember from last episode, was designed to lobby for neo evangelicals to gain access to radio waves, military chaplaincies, and similar things. Graham was not a political, and he didn’t quite chase power, either.

00:08:11
Instead, he used his notoriety to do things like lobby for evangelicals. He would end up, over the course and arc of his own life and his own life history, meeting 14 different presidents, 14 successive administrations, from Mr. Truman. To Mr. Trump, quite a career, though not all of those guys were upstanding.

00:08:33
He met Mr. Nixon very interestingly in the Senate dining room very early on in Mr. Nixon’s Senate history, Richard Nixon. Served as Senator from California. Funny enough, Graham actually met Nixon’s parents.

00:08:48
First, but they really began as friends. They spent a lot of time together. The Grahams and the Nixons sometimes played golf. From 1953 to 1961, Nixon served as vice president under Eisenhower. Ike wasn’t a fan of Nixon, nor the prospect of Nixon being president.

00:09:04
In their eight years in the executive branch, Eisenhower never invited his VP to visit the residents. Biographer William Martin wrote about the Nixon Graham friendship in his excellent book A Prophet with Honor. Here is an actor reading from it. Billy always found fewer faults in his friends than others, managed to see if they liked him. He liked them and was inclined to think the best of them and to regard patent shortcomings as little more than a failure to let the sterling character he was sure they possessed manifest itself with sufficient force.

00:09:35
He wanted to believe the best of his friends, and Nixon was his buddy. That optimism would blind him to the man’s true character. Graham showed his support for Nixon’s 1956 bid for president, and Nixon attended Graham’s 1957 rally in Yankee Stadium. Billy nudged Nixon to demonstrate faith so that the voters could see and hear him, though he was often hesitant to do so. Graham said, there are many, many reasons.

00:10:01
Why I would strongly urge you to attend church regularly and faithfully from now on. I am convinced that you are going to have the backing of the overwhelming majority of the religiously minded people in America. It would be most unfortunate if some of your political enemies could point to any inconsistency. Nixon generally declined to demonstrate his faith in public. Meanwhile, Graham did more than just give religious advice, going so far as to suggest a VP nomination or to urge him to meet with Dr.

00:10:28
Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon declined to meet MLK, possibly because of his Southern strategy, which we’ll cover next time, but also out of a bit of bravado. He didn’t think that black people would leave the party of Lincoln. After all, in 1956, 60% of the black vote went for the Republican Eisenhower. Why wouldn’t they choose him, too?

00:10:50
Nixon’s first run for the big chair was against the Catholic JFK. Protestants of many stripes worried about Rome’s potential control over Kennedy. In fact, the pamphlet read to you at the beginning of the episode was written by the director of the National association of Evangelicals, an organization that Graham helped to found. They also released a letter to evangelical pastors drumming up concern about the dangers of Roman Catholicism and, of course, communist infiltration. Public opinion is changing in favor of.

00:11:20
The Church of Rome. It is time for us to stand. Up and be counted as Protestants. Similar concerns were expressed in Christianity Today, which Graham also helped to establish and in full disclosure, serves ads to this podcast. The Billy Graham Evangelistic association put out a flyer in the first edition of Decision magazine reminding evangelicals, we Christians must work and pray as never before in this election, or the future course of America could be dangerously altered and the free preaching of the Gospel could be endangered.

00:11:51
Even theologically, liberal leaders, like those of the Federal Council of Churches showed fear. According to William Martin, Graham himself waffled down his opinions. He urged Eisenhower in a letter to support Nixon, because if Kennedy in public, Graham all but endorsed Nixon, often saying things along the lines that he was the man for the job but never quite making an official declaration. Of course, Nixon lost his bid for the presidency in one of the closest elections in US history. And opposition to Catholics dissipated with Vatican II, the Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965 that determined that the Roman Catholic Church would now be more tolerant of other faiths, including Protestantism.

00:12:53
Billy Graham had the ear of presidents, sometimes to give advice and sometimes to offer spiritual guidance to those on both sides of the aisle, even JFK. This elevated position meant not only holding rallies with tens of thousands in attendance, but also bending the ear of those in charge. But walking that line is just not easy. Soon, his public stances, his career in political circles, would have him backing a criminal, a man partially responsible for steering the party of Lincoln away from African Americans whose team was involved in spying, corruption, bribery, money laundering, and breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Convention. I’ll continue the story after these messages.

00:13:42
Welcome back. This episode, we’re talking about Billy Graham, who spent much of his life close to power. Yeah, he kind of had to walk a fine line, which, as you said earlier, kind of nipped him in the backside a few times. Well, it did, because we’re all human. And so every one of these presidents is a sinner, like I am and you are.

00:14:00
Some were, of course, saved by grace, and others were still trying to find a spiritual meaning to their lives. But the common denominator in those 14 administrations was Billy Graham. That’s an important thing to keep in mind as we get into some hard stuff. Those in power are people, too. It doesn’t excuse their crimes, if there are any, but they need spiritual guidance as much as anybody else.

00:14:24
Like, for example, President Johnson. Johnson wrote him a letter after he left office and that letter is here in our archives. He says rather poignantly, Billy, you will never know how you lifted my burden by your visits. Well, that’s poignant. We don’t really know what all that means down inside, those men had conversations we’ll never know about.

00:14:46
But to hear the president say, you’ve lifted my burden, you’re helping me, that’s a remarkable thing. President Johnson attended a crusade, this one in Houston in 1965. Though Johnson apparently was a little distracted, Graham blasted Vietnam protesters, much to the president’s delight. He supported Johnson’s Great SocieTy measures, which provided aid for Americans, programs that would be disassembled by Nixon and Reagan. Graham was nothing if not all over the place when it came to party platforms.

00:15:15
As close as he was to the JOhnsons, he still believed that Nixon was the man of the hour. Around Christmas 1967, Nixon invited the evangelist to vacation with him in Florida as he considered whether or not to run again. Despite having pneumonia, Graham flew down. They studied the Bible, watched football, and walked on the beach, hashing out Nixon’s next move. At the end of the visit, Nixon said, you still haven’t told me what I ought to do.

00:15:41
And Graham responded, well, if you don’t. You’Ll worry for the rest of your life whether you should have, won’t you? According to Martin, more than anyone else, it was Graham who convinced Nixon to campaign a second time. Again, Billy dodged and weaved when the press asked him who he was going to support. Still, it’s hard to deny what side he was on.

00:16:01
At a Portland cRusade, he said, there. Is no AmerICan I admire more than RIChard Nixon. He offered the prayer at the Republican National Convention after Nixon was nominated, then attended the meeting to choose the vice president. Graham’s choice was not picked. Instead, Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew got the job.

00:16:19
Though he’d served only one year as governor, he’d caught Nixon’s eye after ruthlessly putting down urban riots. Neither man had patience for protests. Graham also stated in an interview that he cast his absentee ballot for Nixon. Again, not an official endorsement, but, you know, an endorsement. RiChard Nixon’s presidency ushered in a new era of civil religion.

00:16:42
With the usual prayer breakfasts and such, the president expressed his desire to see the Ten Commandments read in schools, things to signal to the public that the government is seeking the face of God. The flip side of civil religion, of course, is that events like these open opportunity for leaders to play church while currying political favor. For example, Richard Nixon was the first President of the United States to institute a weekly church service in the White House. It began his first Sunday in office with Billy Graham preaching. It became much less about piety and more about creating another it place to see and be seen.

00:17:20
Charles Coulson, special counsel to the president, was instructed via memo of 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. Future attendees included presidents and board chairs of companies like At T GE, General Motors, PepsiCo, Republic Steel, and more. Of course, those people need to know about Jesus as well. But it’s in defiance of James, too, which commands us not to offer the seat of honor only to the wealthy. NonVIPs, like wives of POWs were limited to 25% of attendees.

00:17:57
Preachers were instructed to keep things light, not act like a prophet. They were sometimes invited for political quid pro quo, like with Fred Rhodes, who sought the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. A visit to the White House would make him seem like an important man, while also giving Nixon a bump with the 12 million members of the SBC. All of this to support a man with shaky credentials. When it came to faith, Nixon, according to an advisor, didn’t even believe in Christ’s resurrection.

00:18:28
Still, it gave Graham access. Remember, he liked being close to political power, and this access did not go unnoticed. Members of the liberal clergy criticized him for not urging Nixon to end the Vietnam War fast enough. Graham went a long stretch without speaking about Vietnam until Reverend Ernest Campbell of New York’s Riverside Church publicized an open letter to Graham calling on him to use his influence. We believe that the only way you or any of us can minister to the troops and inhabitants of Vietnam is to prophesy to the Pentagon and the White House.

00:19:02
In the tradition of Micaiah, son of ImLA, and you, our brother, have been and will be the prophet summoned to those halls. Graham often responded that he was not a prophet like Nathan of the Old Testament, but he did use his influence. Some modern writers critiqued the evangelist, saying he didn’t do enough for African Americans, though he did push for integration at some of his crusades and arranged a meeting between Nixon and a group of black ministers. Apparently, they let Nixon have it for three and a half hours. So went their relationship, helping each other.

00:19:35
Apparently, though, Graham was not aware of Nixon’s true character, the side of the president that, with the benefit of hindsight, we all know well. Remember, like most Americans, nearly all Americans, so much of that was hidden. And while things began to unravel for them and there was a reflection in this country of the duplicity in that office. Mr. Graham, of course, was heartsick.

00:20:01
On June 17, 1972, a security officer named Frank Wills was working the graveyard shift at the Watergate complex. He noticed something fishy. He found tape over the door locks. Wills called the police, who turned up a group of five men. They had lock picks, door Jimmies, $2,300 in cash, 40 rolls of unexposed film, tear gas, guns, and a short wave radio.

00:20:25
The break in was significant already, but what drew national attention is that these men had links to the re Election Committee of President Richard Nixon. In the following months, a litany of charges that’s almost too long to believe came to light. We generally think of the break in as the main event, but it was far from the only immoral act. There were lesser infractions, like just icky shenanigans, stuff like buying up thousands of copies of the Washington Post to fake votes in a poll for the paper. Then there were more serious charges.

00:20:58
Destruction of evidence that tried to frame JFK for the assassination of a South Vietnamese president. Or when a defense intellectual named Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, they broke into a psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt on him. This was the work of the notorious plumbers, Nixon’s hatchet men. Vice President agNew, himself a hatchet man, became the White House’s attack dog against liberals, lambasting the Watergate Committee for McCarthy tricks and for acting on, quote, unquote, the misguided zeal of a few individuals. Well, it turns out that as governor and Baltimore county executive, he’d accepted literal bags of cash in exchange for government contracts, a habit he continued while vice president.

00:21:42
These men ran on law and order. Yet Agnew was given only one reduced charge of income tax evasion. He spent no time in jail and got a $10,000 fine, even though that was less than the IRS said he owed in taxes. On the graft he’d taken from a single Maryland building contractor, the vice president was knee deep in bribes and walked away with a slap on the wrist. That angst you feel about that?

00:22:09
Imagine how it felt at the time. Trust in government crumbled. You could get more serious charges by breaking a window during a protest. When called to testify, Pat Buchanan, then a speechwriter for Nixon, revealed tactics used by the campaign. One mission was to ensure that Nixon ran against the weakest Democrat, who they judged to be George McGovern.

00:22:30
He admitted to arranging fake demonstrations against Democratic candidates, planting letters to the editor in newspapers, having fake protesters duck into photographs with opponents to make it look like there was a demonstration going on when it was just one guy with a sign. Nothing illegal about that, perhaps, but it certainly erodes one’s confidence in the electoral process. Then there was the way they financed the burglary. Some of it was laundered through a Mexican bank, and $199,000 was paid to G. Gordon Liddy for supplies.

00:23:01
Money was hidden in wads of $100 bills stuffed into lockers and airports, hotel rooms and telephone booths. John Dean, White House Counsel, testified about his attempts to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Watergate and arrange payoffs for defendants to perjure themselves. Nixon was found to have hidden profits from a land sale. He claimed California as his voting residence, but paid no state taxes there. Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, went on the warpath after all the negative coverage and blamed the Eastern press establishment, not unlike recent attacks on the mainstream media.

00:23:36
Chuck Colson went so far as to threaten to revoke the broadcast licenses of the major networks if they didn’t comply with what he considered balanced coverage, I. E. Coverage that didn’t make the criminals look so bad. And the list continues. The president’s personal attorney, Herbert Kumbach, pled guilty to setting up fake political committees in 1970 to launder Senate campaign contributions.

00:23:59
Then there was Nixon’s obstruction of justice, one of the articles of impeachment leveled against him. As you know, he had an audio recording system in the Oval Office. And the president stalled and stalled when handing over the tapes, offering edited transcripts instead of the originals, eventually leaving out entire sections or covering them with a buz. Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor, was in charge of the investigation, and Nixon ordered his attorney general and deputy attorney general to fire Cox. But both men resigned instead.

00:24:30
The next attorney general followed the order, and then less than a half hour later, the White House sent the FBI to close off the offices of the special prosecutor, an incident known now as the Saturday Night Massacre, when the president ordered the end of an investigation of himself. The list goes on and on. My point here is to impress upon you how bad this was and how drawn out was. The process from the break in to Nixon’s resignation was almost two years and two months. Imagine the kind of mental burden that was on the country.

00:25:01
I also want to dwell on the depth of the corruption because there are people out there who want to downplay this event. Nixon himself believed that the chief executive could do stuff like this simply because he was the chief executive. There’s a fascinating moment from an interview with David Bruce after this whole affair was over. Where Nixon says something remarkable. He plays up the difficulty of the era.

00:25:22
Airline hijackings, intelligence agencies not working together, bombings, student protests, all of these stresses against national security. And what follows here is a recreation. The interviewer tries to clarify what, in. A sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston plan, or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide what’s in the best interest of the nation or something, and do something illegal. Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal by definition.

00:25:53
Exactly. If the president. If, for example, the president approves something, approves an action because of the national security, or in this case, because of the threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. I know that’s kind of a jumble of words, but in Nixon’s opinion, if the chief executive deemed it a matter of national security, a president should have orders carried out without fear of breaking the law. The president, in other words, in Nixon’s opinion, is above the law.

00:26:32
The Nixon administration entered us into a constitutional crisis where the executive branch tried to deny the other branches the right to check its power. It was more than just a break in. It was an attempt to assert control. Some notable figures stood with Nixon. One was Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and we’ll get to him later this season.

00:26:53
The other was the REverend Billy Graham. He didn’t participate in WAtergate, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was aware of any of it before the public was. But he was still supportive of Nixon until it was all but impossible. As things began to break, Mr. Graham tried to reach out to his friend.

00:27:12
He was basically cut off from Mr. Nixon in the final months of his presidency. He couldn’t get a call through. They didn’t call him. He would later believe that they were trying to shield him in some way.

00:27:23
So the president did not return calls. Graham’s remembrance of this changed over time. White House logs actually show that the two men talked four times in the last months of Nixon’s presidency. He never condoned what Watergate was. He always dealt with it as it was.

00:27:39
It was a sin. It was a transgression in this country’s history. It was a rip and a tear in our fabric. But Mr. Graham never lost his friendship.

00:27:47
One of the peculiar bits of this story is how Graham reacted in public to the transcripts of the Oval Office tapes which were published in newspapers. Many accusations of wrongdoing were made clear by then, and according to Martin, what he found there devastated him. He wept, he threw up, and he almost lost his innocence about Richard Nixon. Graham’s response was visceral at first and then OD in the process. Rather than talk about Nixon’s crimes, he focused on his use of salty language and taking God’s name in vain.

00:28:17
It seems OD to us that Graham was shocked by Nixon’s use of foul language. But many other commentators picked up on the same thing. Graham wasn’t the only one, and the fallout from Graham’s continued support is somewhat up for debate. I asked Frances Fitzgerald about this. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of several books, including The Evangelicals.

00:28:38
That relationship with Nixon was one that was fraught with some difficulties and certainly seems to have maybe hurt his public image. Yes, it did. Certainly in the end, because he kept with Nixon right through Watergate. He really thought he had to save Nixon, and he believed that Nixon never done any of these things again. He was trying to keep a middle ground, and Nixon was sort of promising him that.

00:29:10
But then along comes Watergate, and it destroys Nixon, but it also really destroys Graham as a moral force for a while, and he goes off on crusades abroad. He spends a lot of time abroad after Nixon. In 1980, while other evangelical leaders were vocal supporters of Ronald Reagan, Graham held back, probably because he’d been burned before, and we’ll get there soon. He continued to participate in major crusades as well as officiate at national events like the memorial Service for 911. Graham was on the list of Gallup’s most admired men 41 times from 1955 to 1998.

00:29:54
If he lost any credibility from his friendship with Nixon, it’s hard to quantify. It seems that Graham did have some thoughts about his entanglements with power later in life. He told Christianity Today in 2011, I. Would have steered clear of politics. I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places.

00:30:13
People in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back, I know I sometimes cross the line, and I wouldn’t do that now. He regretted when he crossed the line, and I think we can cut him some slack from time to time. I mean, if you were asked to give spiritual guidance to a person in high standing, wouldn’t you? I mean, presidents, queens, kings, dukes, and members of Congress, all need Jesus as much as the next person.

00:30:40
Of course, if that crosses into doing politics or endorsing morally questionable candidates, that tends to get one in trouble. As a guest on this show said in season one, godly people should maintain prophetic distance when ministering to those in power, like Daniel refusing to eat the King’s food. We have to keep separate when we’re talking to those in high status or risk being unable to see the truth and call them out on it. It seems, for the most part, Billy Graham figured that out. At the same time, Graham’s son Franklin has not.

00:31:14
As ongoing investigations reveal more about President Donald Trump and his administration, Franklin looks a lot like his father during Watergate. When Fox News tweeted about the verdict against Donald Trump in his sexual assault case last spring, Graham responded by writing, it is a disappointment that our illegal system has become so politicized. Pray for our nation, he called out. The old chestnut from the Nixon years. When the court system prosecutes your crimes, speak out against the judicial branch.

00:31:41
Now here’s a different one. From April 9, 2021, Donald Trump became president not to make money, but to do his best to preserve the great things about this nation for future generations. He put America first. I’ve never seen anyone work harder. Thank you, President Trump, for your service to this nation, or this one from March 20, 2023 we need to pray for our country and where it is headed.

00:32:03
The left in Washington and across the country just can’t get their fill of attacking Donald Trump. They are so paranoid of him. The onslaught against him is continual. There is no question the media and the left manipulated the last election, and they are scared to death of Donald Trump’s possible return. This brings me back to the beginning of this episode where I discussed the role the Catholic Church played in persecuting Protestants in Italy in the 1940s.

00:32:27
What did American evangelicals say was the problem there? The failure to separate the church and the state. The Roman Catholic Church tied itself to a dictator in order to accomplish its goals. While nobody claims that Graham wants to wipe out another Christian movement, as the pope did in the 1940s, politicians and preachers make strange bedfellows, a theme we’ll see a lot this season. Yet we also kind of want preachers to speak out on injustice, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

00:32:55
Did. We ask them to walk a tightrope, to be involved in politics without also getting soiled by their proximity. What do we really think about the separation of church and state, and when does it apply? When we’re confronted with hard truths about those in power, like Harold Ockengay was when he visited the Pope? Are we going to fixate on details like whether or not he did or didn’t attend the opera, or are we going to be honest about the bigger issue?

00:33:22
If a politician we back is caught red handed, will we humble ourselves or get distracted by their dirty language? Are we seeking righteousness or are we really looking for proximity to power?

00:33:44
Special thanks to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and David Bruce. You can hear more of our interview by going to patreon.com Slash Trucepodcast and giving a little each month to help me make this project. For a list of my sources, check your show notes or the website at www.trucepodcast.com There you can sign up for the email list, listen to old episodes, and find out how to help via Venmo PayPal check or whatever. I relied heavily on the Evangelicals by Francis Fitzgerald, who was also kind enough to join me for an interview. I also recommend a prophet with honor, the Billy Graham Story by William Martin.

00:34:17
It’s well-written and a great resource. Thanks also to all the people who gave me their voices for this episode. My friends Chris Staron, Jackie Hart, and Marcus Watson of the Spiritual Life and Truce Podcast is a production of Truce Media, LLC. I’m Chris Staron and this is Truce.