One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (43 page)

As the political purpose of the White House church services became obvious, criticism from the press increased. Originally, Nixon thought it would be “very useful” to win the media's approval for the new tradition and decided to invite several prominent reporters, pundits, newspaper publishers, and network presidents to a service early in his administration. Guests included CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and newspaper publisher Samuel I. Newhouse, as well as prominent reporters from major dailies. For his sermon to the press, Reverend Louis H. Evans Jr. dwelled on the dangers of passing judgment without having the full facts at hand. “Can we be accepted for what we truly are, can we accept others for what they are,” Evans asked, “or will they cling to stereotypes, to distorted
priori
portraits?” Such blunt entreaties did not, of course, keep the press from passing judgment. In July 1969, the
Washington Post
challenged the sincerity of this “White House Religion.” “Unfortunately, the way religion is being conducted these days—amid hand-picked politicians, reporters, cameras, guest-lists, staff spokesmen—has not only stirred needless controversy, but invited, rightly or not, the suspicion that religion has somehow become entangled (again needlessly) with politics,” the editors chided. “Kings, monarchs, and anyone else brash enough to try this have always sought to cajole, seduce or invite the clergy to support official policy—not necessarily by having them personally bless that policy, but
by having the clergy on hand in a smiling and prominent way.” In the end, the
Post
gently suggested it might be best “to avoid using the White House as a church.”
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Religious leaders began to denounce the East Room church services as well. Reinhold Niebuhr, once an outspoken critic of Spiritual Mobilization, now targeted its apparent heirs. For an August 1969 issue of
Christianity and Crisis,
the seventy-seven-year-old theologian penned a scathing critique titled “The King's Chapel and the King's Court.” The founding fathers had expressly prohibited establishment of a national religion, he wrote, because they knew from experience that “a combination of religious sanctity and political power represents a heady mixture for status quo conservatism.” In creating a “kind of sanctuary” in the East Room, Nixon committed the very sin the founders had sought to avoid. “By a curious combination of innocence and guile, he has circumvented the Bill of Rights' first article,” Niebuhr charged. “Thus he has established a conforming religion by semi-officially inviting representatives of all the disestablished religions, of whose moral criticism we were [once] naturally so proud.” The “Nixon-Graham doctrine of the relation of religion to public morality and policy” neutered the critical functions of independent religion, he warned. “It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties, thereby confirming the fears of the Founding Fathers.”
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Other theologians echoed Niebuhr's concerns. “The President is talking about a religion of social control where Christian worship is explicitly linked to national values,” Reverend Harvey Cox wrote. Even if his motives were pure, the Harvard theologian continued, the divisive president might not be the best person to lead a revival. “Frankly,” Cox noted, “we have enough problems persuading young people to become interested in religion without having Nixon support it.” The Catholic lay theologian Daniel Callahan, meanwhile, criticized the Nixon White House for digging up the “corpse of civic religion” in a clear effort to push back against the radicalism of that same younger generation. He believed both sides were equally deluded. “What the underclasses—students, blacks, jaded intellectuals—seek in sexual revolution, drugs, revolution, the overclasses seek in a return to the old sources,” he wrote in the
National Catholic Reporter.
“The former want to create new gods, labeled
freedom, self-fulfillment, liberation, while the latter are willing to propitiate and invoke the old ones: law, order, discipline.”
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In spite of criticism from liberal critics and the press—or perhaps because of it—the East Room church services continued for the remainder of Nixon's term in office. According to social secretary Lucy Winchester, they were “the most popular thing we do in the White House.” “People don't identify very well with state dinners, but they are familiar with prayer,” she noted on another occasion. “The honor of being able to pray with the President is something that they regard as special.” And, by all accounts, the East Room church services were immensely popular. “Congressmen have flooded the White House with the names of clergymen constituents wanting a turn in the Presidential pulpit,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported. “Hundreds of ministers have written directly, some enclosing photographs and programs of services they have conducted.” Critics continued to scoff. “It gives the White House an unpleasant touch of Mission Inn,” Garry Wills wrote with disdain. But for many Americans—especially the ones whose support Nixon so avidly desired—there was nothing unpleasant about it, or the Mission Inn hotel and spa, for that matter. “And so they come,” a
New York Times
reporter noted in 1971, “not the poor and oppressed or the minorities that make for discomforting headlines, but the powerful in Washington and a healthy sprinkling of the people who put Mr. Nixon in office, and they sit around him, in worship of the Almighty.”
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I
F THE
E
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services provided the president a “kind of sanctuary” from his critics beyond the walls of the White House, they couldn't shield him entirely. This became abundantly clear in the spring of 1970, when antiwar protests exploded after revelations that Nixon had widened the Vietnam War into Cambodia and the subsequent shootings of student demonstrators by National Guardsmen at Kent State and Jackson State. Protests spread across 350 campuses that May, with estimates suggesting that a quarter of all college students in America were taking part. Some turned ugly, with thirty ROTC buildings burned or bombed. National Guard units were deployed to restore order in sixteen states, but not even they could end the revolt. Ultimately, more than seventy-five colleges and universities decided to shut down entirely
for the rest of the academic year. Rather than end the unrest, however, the closures only channeled demonstrators to Washington, where they sought congressional support for the antiwar cause. In some cases, entire college populations migrated to the capital. Virtually everyone at Haverford College came down to Washington: 575 of 640 undergraduates, 40 of 70 faculty members, and 10 of 12 administrators.
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On May 9, 1970, roughly seventy-five thousand antiwar protesters gathered on the Ellipse, the fifty-two-acre park located just south of the White House, for a massive rally with Jane Fonda, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Coretta Scott King, among others, giving speeches. With his fiercest critics camped at his doorstep, Nixon became unnerved. In the early morning hours before the rally, the president snuck out of the executive mansion with his personal valet and some “petrified” Secret Service agents in tow, to engage the activists face-to-face. The results were surreal. “After a nearly sleepless night in an empty and barricaded White House, President Nixon emerged early yesterday morning to talk to student demonstrators about ‘the war thing' and other topics,” the
Washington Post
reported. The embattled leader told students it was “all right” that they had come “to demonstrate and shout your slogans on the Ellipse,” as long as they kept it peaceful. He awkwardly tried to relate, asking campus radicals from Syracuse about their football team and making small talk about surfing with a California activist. Realizing that no common ground could be found, Nixon beat a hasty retreat. As the presidential limousine pulled away, a bold student ran alongside, flashing a middle finger to the glass. “Right in the same window, right in the bearded young face, Nixon put up his own fist and extended his middle finger, too,” Tom Wicker later recalled.
“They
understood each other.”
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The next morning, the president sought solace at the White House church service. Nixon had ordered his staff to schedule the service in late April, as he prepared his speech announcing the Cambodian invasion, apparently hoping to blunt criticism of his decision. Tellingly, ambassadors from a dozen nations were invited to attend the service. Following Nixon's order to get “a good conservative Protestant minister” to serve as the “pastor of the day,” his aides selected Reverend Stephen T. Szilagyi of the Philippus United Church of Christ in Cincinnati. “He was an active member of the Ohio Clergy for Nixon-Agnew, and delivered
the invocation at the rally held in Cincinnati during the fall of 1968,” an internal memo noted. “He is a recipient of the DAR Americanism Award and is now Chaplain of the Ohio American Legion. He is described as very patriotic and very articulate.” Predictably, Szilagyi urged the attendees to stay the course, “to give not away your God, give not away your country, to those who would toss it aside and give it to others.” Even the visiting choir from Calvin College, whose arrival had been prefaced with a formal statement from the school's faculty and students that their appearance should not be construed as “either an endorsement or a repudiation of any policies of our national administration,” ultimately offered kind words for their host. “When asked by the press for their opinion of the President's stand on Cambodia,” an aide reported excitedly, “they said he was our President and we stand behind him.”
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Whatever comfort Nixon found in the sanctuary of the White House services, he soon realized that outside support for his administration was growing alongside the burgeoning antiwar movement. The day before the Ellipse rally, construction workers had disrupted another antiwar demonstration in New York's financial district. Wading into the protesters and striking them with their hard hats and heavy work tools, they managed to disperse the crowd and reraise the American flags that had been lowered by Mayor John Lindsay in honor of the students slain at Kent State and Jackson State. (“Wow,” an insurance underwriter said from the sidewalk. “Just like John Wayne taking Iwo Jima!”) For those involved, the “hard hat riot” represented the nation at its best. “The whole group started singing ‘God Bless America' and it damn near put a lump in your throat,” a construction worker recalled. “If I live to be a hundred, I don't think I'll ever live to see anything like that again.” A week later, Peter Brennan of the city's Building Trades Council built on the momentum, bringing more than a hundred thousand construction workers together for a huge pro-administration rally, complete with signs reading “God Bless the Establishment” and “We Support Nixon and Agnew.” On May 26, an appreciative Nixon brought Brennan to the White House, where the union head presented him with a custom-made construction hat, labeled “Commander in Chief.” Visibly moved, Nixon announced that the hard hat would long “stand as a symbol along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country.”
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The White House, as always, complained that the media was against it. In a conversation with the president, Graham commented that “CBS in its coverage of the construction workers march gave approximately a minute of time to the 150,000 who demonstrated in New York and two to three minutes to the 1,000 left-wing lawyers who came to Washington.” Nixon devoted himself and his staff to finding ways to counteract such “unbalanced coverage.” Throughout May, Bob Haldeman chronicled in his diary the president's obsession with the issue. “Wants to try to implement Billy Graham's idea about a big pro-America rally, maybe on 4th of July,” he noted after the Ellipse rally. “Thinks we're still too timid on mobilizing the Silent Majority,” he added a week later. “Feels he should probably go out into country and draw crowds and show popular enthusiasm.” Plans for the Fourth were forming, but Nixon wanted to take action sooner. Once again, his spiritual advisor rode to the rescue, inviting the president to address an upcoming Billy Graham Crusade at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville at the end of May.
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Nixon accepted, sensing the chance for a political masterstroke. College campuses contained the administration's harshest critics and, as a result, the president largely avoided them. Over his first year and a half in office, he had spoken at only two colleges—a tranquil state school in South Dakota and the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. A speech at the largest public university in the South would, Graham suggested, allow Nixon to “show the younger generation that the President is listening to them,” but in the safest setting imaginable. Both the campus and the city were “Big Orange Country,” an especially conservative corner of a conservative state. “Town, gown, bank, church and Crusade were of one mind,” Garry Wills wrote in
Esquire.
“If this was not Nixon Country, then what is?” If protests were unlikely in such a setting, the protective bubble of the Billy Graham Crusade made them even less so, as a Tennessee statute made “disrupting a religious service” a criminal offense.
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And so on May 28, 1970—just two days after he welcomed the hard hats to the White House—Nixon traveled to the University of Tennessee to address the crusade. Graham publicly promised that there “will not be anything political, I hope, in his visit,” but the signs of partisanship were perfectly clear. As the presidential motorcade roared down the four-lane
highway from an Air National Guard airport, thousands of supporters lined the route, holding aloft posters with the words “Cambodia Was Right,” “Win in Vietnam—Right On,” and “Happiness is a Republican President.” The guest list showed similar politicization. “All the state's Republicans seemed to have got religion at the same time,” Wills wrote. An array of GOP candidates had been invited to join Nixon on stage, the most prominent being Congressman Bill Brock, whom the president had personally recruited to run against Senator Albert Gore in the upcoming midterms. (Gore was actually in Knoxville that day, but like the state's other Democrats, he had been excluded from the nominally nonpartisan event.) Sitting alongside Graham and Nixon onstage, according to White House aides, would provide “just the right touch” for Brock's campaign. Indeed, he capitalized on the crusade publicity in his race that fall, contrasting it repeatedly with Gore's vote against the Dirksen prayer amendment. Not surprisingly, the Republican won.
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