One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (42 page)

Naturally, Graham presided over the initial White House church service, held the first Sunday after the inauguration. As worshipers entered the East Room, they picked up liturgical programs adorned with the official presidential seal and found their way inside while a Marine master sergeant played soothing hymns on the organ. Soon every one of the 224 seats in the room was taken, with two-thirds of the Cabinet and several
senior staffers on hand; still more stood at the rear. As large portraits of George and Martha Washington looked on, Nixon strode to the podium, welcomed the assembled to “this first worship at the White House” and invited up his “long-time personal friend.” Graham graciously returned the compliment, using the president's inaugural address as the basis for his remarks. He urged the country to heed Nixon's warnings about the “crisis of the spirit” that was sweeping across college campuses and asked God to guide the administration as it dealt with that problem and others. When the service concluded, White House waiters ushered guests into the State Dining Room for coffee, juice, and sweet rolls. As they went, they passed through a receiving line made up of Nixon, Agnew, Graham, and their wives. Shortly after, Graham and the Nixons posed for photographers on the north portico. The delighted chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, raved about the day in his diary: “Very, very impressive.”
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Some outside the White House were less impressed, denouncing the church services as crassly political. One minister, for instance, complained to the
New York Times
that “the president is trying to have God on his own terms.” The administration and its allies replied indignantly to allegations that Nixon was politicizing religion. “The President would be appalled at the thought,” insisted Norman Vincent Peale. “The White House, after all, is Mr. Nixon's residence. And if there's anything improper about a man worshiping God in his own way in his own home, I'm at a loss to know what it is.” Graham agreed that the White House services were simply a private means of sincere worship. “I know the President well enough to be entirely sure that the idea of having God on his own terms would never have occurred to him,” he protested. White House communications director Herb Klein likewise maintained the services were “never political” but merely “a social thing” that allowed Nixon's family and friends to pray in solitude.
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Behind the scenes, however, the ulterior motives were clear. “Sure, we used the prayer breakfasts and church services and all that for political ends,” Nixon aide Charles Colson later admitted. “One of my jobs in the White House was to romance religious leaders. We would bring them into the White House and they would be dazzled by the aura of the Oval Office, and I found them to be about the most pliable of any of the special interest groups that we worked with.” The East Room church services were
crucial to his work. “We turned those events into wonderful quasi-social, quasi-spiritual, quasi-political events, and brought in a whole host of religious leaders to [hold] worship services for the president and his family—and three hundred guests carefully selected by me for political purposes.” Notably, Haldeman was deeply involved in the planning. Before joining the administration, he had been an advertising executive at the J. Walter Thompson Company, back when it handled promotions for events such as Spiritual Mobilization's “Freedom Under God” ceremonies and the Ad Council's “Religion in American Life” campaign. Well versed in the public relations value of public piety, Haldeman exploited the services to their full potential. At his suggestion, for instance, the supposedly private programs were broadcast over the radio, with print reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen on hand to record the spectacle for wider distribution.
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Ultimately, though, all this activity originated with Nixon. “The President is very much personally involved in these services, and the impressions they create among the people and in the press,” Haldeman lectured the White House staff. “He gives a great deal of time and attention to this.” Nixon sent Haldeman a steady stream of memos about the services. Typically, he focused on the choice of clergymen or congregants for a coming church service, but often the president micromanaged mundane details such as the proper protocols for the receiving line. Even with his oversight, mistakes were still made. One weekend, Nixon became so concerned about an error in the program for the Sunday service that Haldeman noted that “the phone calls from the President started at 9:00 o'clock Saturday evening, and continued until 1:30 Sunday morning.”
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Nixon's aides relied on Graham in planning the services. Despite assumptions that the preacher served as a regular officiant in the East Room, Graham led only four services there over the next five years, though he appeared at others in a supporting role. Behind the scenes, however, he gave more practical support. He advised the planners on the format and frequency of the services, musical groups that might be used, and, most important, potential speakers, selected with an eye to both denominational diversity and political loyalties. On the last point, Graham's intervention was vital, as he provided the White House staff with the names of conservative Protestant ministers who would readily answer the president's call.
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The pastors who followed Graham to the White House's pulpit were largely cut from the same cloth as the conservative preacher. The second service in the East Room, for instance, featured Reverend Richard Halverson from the prestigious Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland. Halverson was, not coincidentally, vice president of Vereide's International Council for Christian Leadership and a vocal supporter of the Presbyterian Lay Committee that J. Howard Pew and other businessmen had created in the 1950s to criticize clergymen involved in liberal causes. As a fellow minister noted, “Presbyterians of Halverson vintage have resented the pro–civil rights, antiwar stance which their denomination has taken in recent years.” Halverson's sermon in the East Room, “The Loneliness of a Man in Leadership,” urged Nixon and other administration officials to understand that the Lord stood by them, even if earthly critics did not. Other officiants were even more direct in blessing the president. In June 1969, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, concluded his sermon with a bold prophecy. “I hope it is not too presumptuous of me, in the presence of the President,” he noted, “to say that future historians, looking back at our generation, may say that in a period of great trials and tribulations the finger of God pointed to Richard Milhous Nixon, giving him the vision and the wisdom to save the world and civilization.”
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Such comments were no accident. The White House staff went to great lengths to ensure that clergymen invited to the East Room were conservatives connected to a major political constituency. In recommending Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati as officiant for a service before St. Patrick's Day, a cover memo noted bluntly that “Bernardin was selected because he is the most prominent Catholic of Irish extraction and
a strong supporter of the President. We have verified this
.” Harry Dent, a former aide to Strom Thurmond who directed the administration's “southern strategy,” likewise forwarded a list of “some good conservative Protestant Southern Baptists” who could be trusted to preach a message that pleased the president. Graham helped as well. When Nixon sent an emissary to the Vatican and unwittingly upset Baptists, Graham suggested that inviting Carl Bates, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, to preach in the East Room “might negate some of the criticism.” Likewise, in 1971, Graham encouraged the White House to invite Fred Rhodes, a
lay preacher who seemed sure to run for the SBC presidency that year. An internal memo enthusiastically noted that Rhodes was a “staunch Nixon loyalist.” “A White House invitation to speak would aid greatly in his campaign for this office,” the memo continued, “and if elected, Colson feels that Rhodes would be quite helpful to the President in 1972.”
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Political considerations dictated the selection of speakers in more obvious ways. In September 1969, for instance, Reverend Allan Watson of Calvary Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, served as the East Room officiant. After the services, Watson posed with the president for the now customary photograph on the North Portico. They were joined by his twin brother, Albert Watson. A congressman who had abandoned the Democratic Party over its support of civil rights, he was at the time running for governor of South Carolina as a Republican, at Agnew's urging. To the delight of Harry Dent, who had made arrangements for the visit, the photograph circulated widely in the campaign. Likewise, in February 1970, Reverend Henry Edward Russell of Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis was given the honor of leading the East Room services. Many of his family members attended, but reporters paid particular attention to his brother, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who happened to chair the committee that would soon pass judgment on Nixon's prized plan for an anti-ballistic-missile treaty. Even choirs were selected with political affairs in mind. During the 1970 midterm election campaign, Nixon aide Bill Timmons “strongly recommended” inviting a particular Presbyterian boys' choir from Memphis, as it would “be
very
helpful to Bill Brock in his attempt to unseat Albert Gore in the Senate race.”
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Political concerns also dictated who attended each service. Low-level members of the White House staff, such as switchboard operators or limousine drivers, were occasionally invited, to support the illusion that these were private affairs for the larger White House “family,” but internal policies instructed that no more than a quarter of the attendees should be “non-VIPs.” Instead, the congregation was composed of prominent members of the White House and its supporters, so much so that the
New York Times
joked: “The administration that prays together, stays together.” Invitations usually went to the administration's allies in Congress, but occasionally they were used to lobby more independent members about particular bills. In July 1969, as the Senate deliberated the
anti-ballistic-missile treaty and the House considered an anti-inflationary surtax proposal, Nixon instructed his aides to invite legislators who would cast crucial votes on both. “The President would like to have a heavy ‘sprinkling' of the Senators who endorsed the ABM program and ‘four or five other Senators'” who were “marginal,” explained Dwight Chapin, special assistant to the president. “In regard to House Members, he would like to have conservative Republicans—he said ‘some who have not been here previously and supported the surtax.'” Notes to the president explained how to finesse each member in the receiving line after the services.
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With the bulk of the seats reserved for administration officials and congressmen they might sway, the remaining few were precious political commodities. Potential campaign donors were always given preference. An early “action memo” to Colson ordered him to follow up on 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.” At this, Colson had quick success. The guests for an ensuing East Room service, for instance, included the heads of AT&T, Bechtel, Chrysler, Continental Can, General Electric, General Motors, Goodyear, PepsiCo, Republic Steel, and other leading corporations.
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Occasionally, the presence of a particular guest at the East Room services had special political importance. In March 1969, for instance, the White House welcomed Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, the president of San Francisco State College, who had recently made headlines for his ruthless handling of student protesters. (“There are no more innocent bystanders,” he had announced, before ordering police to clear the entire campus.) Seeking to make good on the tough law-and-order rhetoric of the presidential campaign, Nixon had been preparing a major statement on campus disorders to be given later that week. He made sure the controversial college president was available to reporters for comments after the church services. “My principle for dealing with disturbances is ‘Have plenty of police,'” Hayakawa explained. “Many say that it destroys the academic atmosphere, but it does not destroy it as much as the goon squads roaming campus.” The publicity helped make Hayakawa a conservative celebrity. In 1976, he won a US Senate seat in California, beating an incumbent Democrat.
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Nearly a year after Hayakawa's visit, the White House used another East Room service to score political points. Graham served as the pastor
of the day, but the
Chicago Tribune
noted that “two controversial persons took the spotlight” away from him—Judge Clement Haynesworth, whose nomination to the Supreme Court as Nixon's “law-and-order” candidate had failed the previous November, and Judge Julius Hoffman, who had presided over the notorious Chicago Seven trial that had concluded the month before. Both had become heroes for conservatives who complained about lenient treatment of criminal defendants in the courts. Nixon welcomed them warmly, signaling his sympathies. As Haynesworth neared the president in the receiving line, Nixon grabbed the judge's hand, threw his other arm around Graham's shoulder, and announced loudly enough for reporters to hear: “This is one of your supporters!” Hoffman was likewise lavished with attention and given a chance to make self-deprecating comments before reporters. “Well, you had quite a performance in your court,” noted Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns. “I wouldn't choose it for a summer vacation,” Hoffman replied.
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