The Preacher and the Presidents by Nancy Gibbs & Michael Duffy

Author:Nancy Gibbs & Michael Duffy [GIBBS, NANCY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781599950389
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2010-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE WORST MEETING EVER

Three months later, on January 31, 1972, Haldeman took notes at a staff meeting: he knew Graham was in town for the prayer breakfast the next day and planned to see Nixon afterward. “Get Billy Graham in re politics today w/some of us,” Haldeman noted, “then see P later.”

At the prayer breakfast, Graham read the gospel for thirty-one hundred lawmakers and Supreme Court justices and foreign dignitaries, while Nixon talked about the challenge of his forthcoming trip to China, and the possibilities of peace. Afterward Graham went back to the White House and spent a long time with Nixon in the Oval Office. The tape recording of that meeting contains a number of long gaps, which make it impossible to be certain of all that was said and intended. But Haldeman was there and took his own notes, and by any measure, it was a conversation Graham never should have had.

He told Nixon how well he’d done. “There were a lot of people in tears when you finished this morning,” he said. They talked about Graham’s schedule in the coming months, according to Haldeman’s notes, “and of the states in which it would be most helpful for him to be active during the balance of this year.” They agreed that time spent in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New York could all be useful for the president, since he had California and Texas already covered.

It was agreed that Graham would be given political and foreign policy briefings, and after the China and Russia trips should “invite his elite group in for a Kissinger briefing,” meaning the key religious leaders whom Graham thought should hear directly from the White House. “There was a great deal of general discussion on political outlook, and the opportunity that Graham feels he has to be helpful, which he indicates he will do in every possible way.”

But that was not the worst of it, the pretense of neutrality abandoned. In his diary Haldeman noted one more topic that he did not include in his official memo of that long meeting. “There was considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media, and agreement that this was something that would have to be dealt with.”

And indeed in this longest of all his Oval Office meetings, at this critical moment in both men’s careers, something poisonous was in the air, and Graham was lost in the toxic fumes. He mentioned that he’d been invited to have lunch with the editors at TIME—the first he’d heard from them since Luce’s death five years before. “You meet with all their editors, you better take your Jewish beanie,” Haldeman said. “Is that right?” Graham remarked, noting that he no longer knew any of the editors. This inspired Nixon to complain about how much of the press was “totally dominated by the Jews.” Since it could be said of Nixon that some of his best friends were Jews, he qualified this by saying he didn’t mean that all the Jews were bad; in fact the Israeli Jews were the best ones, he said.

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