One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (41 page)

With Graham's involvement, the Nixon White House gave new life to old public rituals and, more important, created religious ceremonies of its own. These new manifestations of public religion—most notably, regular church services held inside the White House and a pair of giant rallies for God and country outside it—proved far more overtly partisan than their predecessors. “Every president in American history had invoked the name and blessings of God during his inauguration address, and many . . . had made some notable public display of their putative piety,” religious scholar William Martin observed, “but none ever made such a conscious, calculating use of religion as a political instrument as did Richard Nixon.” Not even Eisenhower came close. While his purposely bland public religion had helped unite Americans around a seemingly nonpartisan cause, the starkly conservative brand of faith and politics advanced by Nixon and Graham only drove them apart.
⁹

T
HE INAUGURATION OF
R
ICHARD
M
ILHOUS
Nixon involved an unprecedented display of public prayer and formal worship. The organizers, led by the Mormon hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, worked diligently to evoke the spirit of Eisenhower's first inauguration sixteen years before. The retired president issued a press release asserting that Nixon's inauguration should be a day of rejoicing “because it is a clear promise that our faith in him will be vindicated, our prayers for America.” Reporters noted that Eisenhower was convalescing at the Walter Reed Medical Center but otherwise would have gladly taken part in the day. Though he was absent, his influence was everywhere.
¹⁰

For months, a special Religious Observance Committee had been working feverishly to establish a spiritual tone for the inauguration. Led by Judge Boyd Leedom, a North Dakotan who had headed both Eisenhower's National Labor Relations Board and Abraham Vereide's International Council for Christian Leadership, the committee called for religious observances to be held in all churches and synagogues in the weeks before the inauguration. This period of prayer, Leedom explained, would culminate in a national moment of worship on Inauguration Day, when Americans would pause at exactly 11:00 a.m. for three minutes of prayer “to commemorate with joyful reverence this peaceful transfer of
authority and to proclaim to all the world our faith in God and our spiritual rededication.” As the inauguration neared, the committee distributed a special collection of prayers, Bible readings, and quotations to encourage the revival. While selections were purportedly chosen to illuminate links between faith and freedom, several advanced a decidedly conservative vision. A passage from 1 Peter, for instance, called to mind law-and-order themes of Nixon's campaign: “Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right.” Another prayer, attributed to George Washington, evoked conservative complaints about antiwar protesters, asking God to inspire in the citizenry “a spirit of subordination and obedience of government.” Elsewhere, the Religious Observance Committee was even less subtle. Ten thousand cards depicting a pair of hands clasped in prayer, for instance, were distributed for display in the windows of homes and businesses across Washington. Upon the cards ran the words “
THANKSGIVING
.
BLESSING
.
REDEDICATION
.
GUIDANCE
.” And then Nixon's campaign slogan: “
FORWARD TOGETHER
.”
¹¹

The committee's greatest achievement was its creation of a religious service as an official part of the Inauguration Day festivities. “It was one of the few times, possibly the first since George Washington,” the
New York Times
noted, “that a full-scale worship service had been part of an inaugural program.” While past presidents had prayed privately at churches around the capital, Nixon's rites were held in the West Auditorium of the State Department, a huge room three stories high. At 9:00 a.m., a capacity crowd of 750 supporters joined the Nixons in prayers led by figures from five different faiths. The clergymen included prominent leaders, such as the head of the Synagogue Council of America and the Catholic archbishop of Washington, as well as lesser-known individuals such as the former pastor of Nixon's childhood Quaker congregation. The highlight of the service, though, was Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's “Call for Spiritual Renewal,” an address that was reprinted widely and even disseminated to military chaplains for the benefit of armed services personnel.
¹²

Following the five clergymen in the morning, another five offered blessings during the swearing-in ceremonies at noon. “Never before,”
marveled a Presbyterian minister, “had so much prayer been invoked to place this nation's Chief of State in office.” As with the morning services, one clergyman stood out from the crowd. Following a rendition of “This Is My Country” by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Billy Graham strode to the podium, bundled up against a windy thirty-degree day. Graham had been invited by Nixon to deliver the invocation, but his comments ranged much more broadly than that.
Time
called it “Billy Graham's mini-inaugural address,” while the editors of the
Christian Century
were harsher, denouncing his “raucous harangue.” The preacher reasserted the old religious nationalism of the Eisenhower years and applied it to the new political ends of the Nixon era. “Our Father and our God,” he began, “we recognize on this historic occasion that we are ‘a nation under God.' We thank Thee for this torch of faith handed to us by our forefathers. May we never let it be extinguished. Thou alone hast given us our prosperity, our freedom and our power. This faith in God is our heritage and our foundation!” Graham warned that the religious “pillars of our society” had “eroded in an increasingly materialistic and permissive society,” and the nation was “now reaping a whirlwind of crime, division, and rebellion.” The departing president Lyndon Johnson winced visibly at these words, but Graham assured the crowd that all was not lost. “We recognize, O Lord, that in Thy sovereignty Thou has permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of our history.” He asked God's blessing in helping the new president lead a “moral and spiritual restoration” across the nation. Eschewing the ecumenical tones of past invocations, Graham specified that Americans needed to be “born again” though a renewed faith in Jesus Christ. “We pray this humbly in the Name of the Prince of Peace who shed His blood on the Cross that men might have eternal life. Amen.”
¹³

After Graham's invocation came the oath of office, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren and Nixon had a long and complicated relationship, stretching back to their early days as California Republicans jockeying for position on the national stage. Warren had been the party's vice presidential nominee in the near-miss 1948 campaign, and after the GOP won the White House in 1952 with Nixon as the vice presidential nominee, Warren was placed on the Court. Initially he seemed an ally of Nixon and Graham, but they drifted apart over the next decade. In his
1968 presidential campaign, Nixon turned his old ally into a punching bag, making repeated criticisms about the “permissive” rulings of the Warren Court. Many expected the swearing-in to be a tense moment—there would only be “a Bible between them,” as a
Washington Post
piece worried—but it went smoothly. In truth, there were two Bibles between them, as Nixon again mimicked Eisenhower by resting his left hand on a pair of open Bibles as he recited the oath.
¹⁴

In his first address as president, Nixon delivered a sermon. His text, one clergyman later said, was “replete with references to God and the Bible, the American spirit, the spirit of Christmas, our virtues and vices—even the angels.” These grace notes were gathered together in a message that echoed Graham's prayer. “We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on Earth,” the president claimed. “We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks that need doing, waiting for hands to do them.” Much like Graham, the president professed to see a nation—“one nation, not two,” he insisted—in dire need of religious revival. “To a crisis of the spirit,” Nixon observed, “we need an answer of the spirit.” He urged his fellow Americans to join together with him to “build a great cathedral of the spirit—each of us raising it one stone at a time, as he reaches out to his neighbor, helping, caring, doing.” After the president's address, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir offered a stirring rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At the end of the performance, the solemnity of the moment was ruined when a joker in the press stands yelled: “Okay, play ball!”
¹⁵

All in all, the day seemed a deliberate throwback to the Eisenhower era. “With the prevalence of clergy, including Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham, with the sturdy Mormon entrepreneur, J. Willard Marriott, as the inaugural committee chairman, with George Romney and Guy Lombardo the principal attractions at one of the balls, and with all the nicely groomed Junior League type women handling the chores,” a
Newsday
columnist concluded, “the inauguration comes off as square, earnest and right.” “It was almost as if the sixties had never happened and there had been no riots or assassinations or demonstrations or marches on the Pentagon or draft trials,” marveled Tom Wicker of the
New York
Times.
But perhaps that was fine. “It may well be that the old values, re-examined and ably preached, are what the country really needs; there was something reassuring today in the determination with which religious faith and patriotism and brotherhood were cited again and again by earnest men.”
¹⁶

The themes of the inauguration were repeated a week later when Nixon presided over the annual National Prayer Breakfast. “He has been one of the most regular and faithful supporters of the movement since its inception in 1953,” a Presbyterian minister wrote at the time. “In fact, he has attended these functions more consistently than the services of any denomination, including [his own childhood tradition of] the Friends.” With a deep appreciation of the event's importance, Nixon had strategized with Graham beforehand. The preacher recommended that the president's remarks “should be very low-key and appear to be impromptu,” with general discussion of “the impact of religious people on his life.” Nixon followed his advice to the letter. On the morning of January 30, 1969, after first taking part in another prayer breakfast with six hundred worshipers, the president joined two thousand others in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton Park Hotel. Flanked by perennial prayer breakfast participants such as Graham and former senator Frank Carlson, as well as First Lady Pat Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, the president told the crowd that letters he received from ordinary citizens demonstrated there was still a “deep religious faith” in the United States. “Even in this period when religion is not supposed to be fashionable, when agnosticism and skepticism seem to be on the upturn,” he reflected, “most of the people seem to be saying ‘We are praying for you, Mr. President, and for the country.'” He appeared sincere, but later, when an aide praised his performance, Nixon laughed it off. He'd simply fed the crowd some “church stuff” to keep them happy.
¹⁷

If Nixon had been more focused on performance than penance, Graham was not that different. In his formal remarks, he called on Americans to recognize the good things about the nation. There was “a crisis of the spirit,” he said, echoing the president's inaugural address, but perhaps Americans were guilty of “too much introspection.” They needed to move away from “the over-self-criticism” of the era and remember “we have a great government and a great way of life.” The preacher followed his own
advice, exuding a confidence and complacency that some friends found disturbing. North Carolina's Governor Bob Scott, for instance, recalled his unease at all the pomp and pageantry and, more so, Graham's delight in it all. “They had all those guards around in those silly little uniforms Nixon had designed for them, played ‘Ruffles and Flourishes' when Nixon came in, all those trumpet fanfares they used back then,” Scott remembered. “And then Billy came through the door with his own entourage, and you'd have thought he was some high office-holder himself—running around greeting everybody with his great grin and shaking everybody's hand just like Nixon. It just seemed he'd gotten caught up in that aura of power—just completely caught up in it.”
¹⁸

N
IXON AND
G
RAHAM WERE SO
enamored with the National Prayer Breakfast that they resolved to replicate the annual tradition with a more regular one: Sunday services at the White House. Despite the public religiosity of past presidents, this was something altogether new. “I've never heard of anything like it happening here before,” White House curator James Ketcham told
Time.
(In fact, religious rites had previously taken place at the presidential mansion, but only in unusual circumstances. The Sunday after John F. Kennedy's funeral, for example, Lyndon Johnson invited the cabinet, senior staffers, and a few personal friends to join him for a service there.) The new White House church services took place in the East Room, a showcase space noted for its sparkling chandeliers and gold silk tapestries. Instead of pews, oak dining room chairs with seats of yellow brocade were arranged in rows of twenty. A piano and an electric organ, donated to the White House by a friendly merchant, were positioned at the north end of the room, with space to the side for a rotating cast of choirs to perform. Between them stood a mahogany lectern where the president and the “pastor of the day” would make remarks.
¹⁹