Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

5. Billy Graham’s Southern Strategy [Includes Image Plates]

chapter five Billy Graham’s Southern Strategy Yes, there is a ‘‘quiet revolution’’ going on, and every one here tonight is a candidate for this revolution. —Billy Graham, 1967 Charlotte and the changing South are in difficult struggle, much of which has a moral dimension to which people are blinded. Mr. Graham ’s court in Washington plays it, almost always, as nothing more than a political drama. —Charlotte Observer, 1971 Billy Graham’s optimism about the South in the aftermath of landmark civil rights legislation did not extend to the rest of the nation. His concerns about the increasing social and racial chaos in America ultimately dovetailed with the electoral prospects of Richard Nixon. In December 1967, Graham received the Great American Award, given by Atlanta business leaders and radio station WSB, the self-described ‘‘Voice of the South.’’ Recovering from a serious bout with pneumonia, the evangelist used the opportunity to deliver the kind of sermon his illness would prevent him from making for another three months. His acceptance speech reprised his preference for avowedly Christian marches as alternatives to more explicitly political demonstrations. Now, however, he distinguished his preferred demonstrations not from civil rights or antiwar protests but rather from the ‘‘rioting and rebellion’’ of the previous summer. In contrast to this turmoil, which had enthralled the Billy Graham’s Southern Strategy 125 media, Graham celebrated those Americans who were responding to the tumultuous times by turning to Christ and, hence, returning to the nation’s moral foundations. These persons, whom the evening news ignored, were candidates for what Graham touted as a ‘‘quiet revolution.’’ He included the same phrase in a nationally syndicated newspaper commentary released that holiday season.1 Graham’s sermon foreshadowed a major theme in the presidency of Richard Nixon. In a 1968 campaign commercial, Nixon invoked another body of quiet citizens: ‘‘the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the nondemonstrators ’’—and, once in office, he famously labeled them the ‘‘silent majority.’’2 Nixon strategically tapped the anxieties of those citizens who had sat out the decade’s progressive movements and needed reassurance that their version of America remained viable. In differing yet complementary ways, Graham and Nixon honored sociopolitical communities they had spoken into existence. The thematic overlap between Graham and Nixon was no coincidence, just as the collaboration between Graham and Nixon was far more than episodic. Graham spent the better part of two decades assisting Nixon’s political ambitions primarily because he supported Nixon’s values and style of leadership. He believed in Nixon the political leader, in addition to Nixon the man. Nothing revealed this fact more than Graham’s persistent and public support for the Nixon presidency, which began at a time when the evangelist had reached the height of his national and international stature. Graham supported Nixon well after his evangelistic enterprise stood to benefit substantially from close proximity to power. From the moment the evangelist spoke before bowed heads at the 1969 presidential inauguration, his backing of Nixon became, for many observers, the defining moment of his public career, a period that tarnished his reputation and threatened to damage his ministry. Graham’s intimacy with Nixon far surpassed his closeness to other political figures, including Eisenhower and Johnson. With those presidents, Graham had served alternately as a consultant, liaison, or politically useful chum. For Nixon, Graham was all of these things and more. In a public capacity, he served as ‘‘White House chaplain’’ and ‘‘court prophet,’’ among the labels his many detractors affixed to him. Behind the scenes, Graham was a strikingly candid, occasionally incisive, and periodically overwrought political adviser, offering the president and his aides insights they valued and selectively applied. To assume that Nixon simply ‘‘used’’ Graham, then, is to underestimate 126 chapter five the political side of an evangelist who during three presidential elections acted as an honorary member of the Nixon campaign team. Emphasizing Graham’s naı̈veté also does not adequately explain why, well before the Watergate scandal , he knowingly risked his reputation on behalf of Nixon. If Nixon politicized Graham, Nixon also provided the forum through which the evangelist played out his political dreams. While Graham perhaps believed that he had gazed into the soul of the famously aloof Nixon, his steadfast support for the politician derived from a perceived political (and, at times, spiritual) synergy between the two. Graham believed that Nixon embodied the Christian statesman ideal, not...