The Family (25 page)

The idea Carlson sold was the Idea: Abram’s dream of a big tent conservatism, a political philosophy that denied the reality of the political and disdained “philosophy” as the province of eggheads. In a September 1952 mass mailing, Abram had directed his two-hundred-plus prayer cells across the nation to devote themselves to spreading “alertness to the right choice and vote in the November elections.” God, he wrote, had spoken these words to him: “Your mission is to concentrate on a few men in leadership capacity.” One of his new lieutenants, a Lithuanian named Karlis Leyasmeyer who claimed to have escaped a death sentence at the hands of the Soviets (with the help of the Nazis), added that such men could become a “sixth column,” the secret counterweapon with which the establishment could fight communism. The sixth column would transcend politics. In a voter’s guide prepared for the state of Washington by Abram’s men—a tactic that would be repeated decades later by the Christian Coalition—God tapped both Democrats and Republicans. His slate, however, was of sufficient political conformity for a bipartisan coalition to raise charges of fascism. But the ‘
f’
word had lost its power. Most of Abram’s candidates won. “Red” was the new brown, against which all Christian soldiers must fight together. One God, one nation, one ideology.

D
URING THE WINTER
following Eisenhower’s election, the United States did not even have an ambassador in Moscow. It was in that particularly cold season that Abram—with the help of Carlson, Billy Graham, and Eisenhower himself—made his master move, following the president’s inauguration with what would become an annual political ritual, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later to be renamed the National Prayer Breakfast). Not for Abram the clash of politics or even the intellectual battle of theology. His ambition for the breakfast—hosted by Conrad Hilton, presided over by Carlson, blessed by Graham, and sanctified by Ike’s blandest speech yet—was that it serve as a chance to lop off the left end of the political spectrum and cauterize the wound. “Their differences,” wrote the
Christian Herald
of the several hundred assembled politicians, Democrats and Republicans, “are fused into a striking similarity.”

Billy Graham had been summoned to the Eisenhower campaign by Carlson. The senator had concluded that the young preacher would be an asset, especially given that some Democrats were actually floating the notion that it was Republicans who were soft on communism and cold toward Christ.
¹⁹
Although Graham himself was a registered Democrat, he had decided for Eisenhower before the general even announced, and had prayed on the matter with one of his supporters, an oil baron named Sid Richardson. (This period of Graham’s career might be called his oil phase. In 1953, with backing from yet another oil baron, he would release a feature film called
Oiltown U.S.A.
, a tribute to the free market’s ability to foster the virtuous exploitation of God-given resources.) Carlson called Graham to the Chicago GOP convention for an off-the-record meeting. “Carlson had sold Eisenhower on the idea that I could contribute a religious note to his campaign speeches,” Graham would recall.

“Frankly,” the preacher told the general, “I don’t think the American people would be happy with a president who didn’t belong to any church or even attend one.” (In fact, there have been several.)

“As soon as the election is over,” Eisenhower promised, “I’ll join a church.”

Graham wanted more. He’d been talking with Abram about a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, a parachurch ritual they hoped would settle the question once and for all of whether the United States was a Christian nation and the New Testament, not the Constitution, its ultimate authority. Abram had long dreamed of such an event, a public dedication of the governing class to the service of the Christian God, but no president previous to Eisenhower would cooperate. It was Graham, according to his own curiously immodest account, who made it happen. He arranged with Conrad Hilton (to whom he’d been introduced by Carlson) to sponsor the event, and he gave the main address—at most of the first fifteen annual breakfasts. But Carlson was Abram’s pipeline to the White House, and Abram’s invitation to the president-elect went through the No Deal Dealer. Ike declined. “He did not want to set a precedent,” Graham recalled. But Graham intervened, and Ike called Carlson over to say that he would show, after all. There were debts to be paid. Eisenhower was the first twentieth-century Republican to come to power in part through an alliance of populist evangelicals (led by Graham) and of elite fundamentalism. Now Graham and Carlson wanted their return.
²⁰

“The only one thing,” Ike warned Carlson, “let’s not have any television or radio around.” That suited the man to whom Carlson reported this news. Abram did not much care what the masses saw or did not see. He was playing to an audience of power; “up and out” went his spiritual broadcast. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was wary of advertising his foray into the no-man’s-land between church and state. “You can tell the Cabinet I’ll be there,” Eisenhower instructed Carlson. “I suppose that’s tantamount to telling them to come.” Come, they did, and with the exception of those tapped for Abram’s table, they found their own seating. There were no arrangements, Abram boasted; all were left to fend for themselves, “regardless of rank,” just as in the Kingdom of God—supposing, that is, that such a kingdom were inhabited only by men of high rank, the powerful pretending at egalitarianism within the confines of the most exclusive breakfast club in the land.

There were 400 such men at the first Prayer Breakfast. It was 8:00 a.m., Thursday, February 5. The theme was “Government Under God.” Abram wore his trademark bow tie. He was sixty-seven that year, and he would soon suffer a heart attack, and soon Stalin would die, and Kinsey would publish his report on
Sexual Behavior in the Human
, and
Fortune
magazine would crow over a “spiritual awakening” among top businessmen. At the Mayflower, Conrad Hilton hung above the dais a painting of Uncle Sam on his knees, “not beaten there by the hammer and sickle” but submitting America to Christ, a sentiment the Senate’s chaplain admired. “There are signs,” he observed of the painting-in-lieu of a cross, “that once again, as in the former days of the Nation’s true glory, America is bending its knees.”
²¹
Printed beneath Uncle Sam was a prayer of Hilton’s own composition. Hilton was a Catholic, but he thrilled most to the religion of anticommunism. “Be swift to save us, dear God, before the darkness falls.” There was no darkness in the Mayflower, only bacon. Abram presented Eisenhower’s cabinet to God. “Save them from self-deception, conceit, and the folly of independence of Thee, oh God.” Eisenhower mumbled up to the podium, the pulpit.

He said, “All free government is firmly founded in a deeply felt religious faith.” And then, “As long as you feed me grits and sausage, everything will be all right.” These were the twin doctrines of a prosperity doctrine.

“There is the sound,” observed the Senate chaplain, swept away by the deep spirituality of these words, “of a
going
in the tops of the mulberry trees,” a supernatural sound. He thought it might be Eisenhower’s prayers, winging up to heaven like B–52s.

T
WENTY YEARS LATER,
Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, would explain his predecessor’s calm at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast: “It is only one-tenth of one percent of the iceberg,” he’d say. “[It] doesn’t give a true picture of what is going on.”
²²
The Fellowship’s true work was always both great and small, an accumulation of symbolic gestures and actual legislation. Sentiment and policy cohered into a religiously motivated movement, mostly Republican but also Democratic, that absorbed politicians and ordinary businessmen into its mass so smoothly that the townspeople never noticed; never rallied to resist or to even question the growing blob of political fundamentalism. The Fellowship, wrote one of Abram’s field representatives, “should be primarily an organism and not an organization.”

“The idea of a Christian lobbyist program might well emanate through the Breakfast Groups,” one of Abram’s original Seattle brothers wrote him. It’s worth noting that the “Christian” issues of the day were not pornography or abortion; they were surveillance and weapons, the perceived need for more of both. Abram’s correspondent wanted “more unity on civil defense”—read, anticommunism—“and foreign policy.” Abram wrote back to say that he’d already moved the Fellowship beyond anything so crass and limited as a lobby. In the 1960s, it began distributing confidential memos to involved members of Congress on its progress around the world. The memos stressed that “the group, as such, never takes any formal action, but individuals who participate in the group through their initiative have made possible the activities mentioned.” The Fellowship was not a conspiracy; it was a catechism, its questions asked in the privacy of Abram’s prayer cells and answered in the public arena.

In 1954, “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, an initiative sponsored in the Senate by Homer Ferguson, a Republican ICL board member, and financed by ICLer Clement Stone, and “In God We Trust” was added to the nation’s currency by a bill sponsored by a Dixiecrat congressman named Charles E. Bennett, also a member of the Fellowship’s inner circle.
²³
Bennett, a self-styled ethics crusader, saw himself as a small-government man; God and the dollar would redeem the nation, if only Congress would unshackle them. “Congress can’t remake the soul of America,” he’d say, a notion he evidently thought justified his opposition to civil rights.
²⁴
It was Bennett who prayed the opening prayers at Abram’s second Presidential Prayer Breakfast that February, at which Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren—then still a conservative—declared that separation of church and state was fine, so long as “men of religious faith” were in charge of a country he described as “a Christian land, governed by Christian principles.”

That same year, Abram’s old ally Alexander Wiley, now chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well as the upper house’s weekly prayer meeting, decided to extend those principles southward. He declared a democratically elected government in Guatemala a front for communist invasion and quietly green-lighted U.S. participation in its overthrow, an action that culminated in a tickertape parade in New York City for the dictator installed in its place by America, and a banquet in his honor at Hilton’s Waldorf-Astoria.
²⁵

And that year a Vietnamese Catholic named Ngo Dinh Diem, “directly and personally aided by God,” by his own account, came to America to appeal to a nation in the grip of religious revival for its support in a fight against godless communism. A year later, Eisenhower obliged, installing Diem’s Christian—and profoundly corrupt—regime over a Buddhist nation when the French lost their hold, the first great step toward the American war in Southeast Asia that Robert Taft had feared. Wiley, a former Taft-style conservative transformed by Abram’s Christ and Ike’s Cold War into a militant internationalist, was the president’s point man in the Senate, bullying liberals and conservatives alike into backing “hard and fast military commitments” to South Vietnam, no questions asked.
²⁶

Nineteen fifty-four was also the year that several Fellowship brothers steered Joe McCarthy off the national stage. It was a matter of politics, not ideology; Tailgunner Joe—raw, red-nosed, thick-browed, uncouth, uncontrolled,
hungering
Joe—made anticommunism look low-class.

McCarthy’s downfall and Ike’s disdain for him have been chronicled at great length elsewhere. Less noticed was Eisenhower’s careful use of McCarthy during his campaign. Carlson was the middleman. “I fully expect that Senator McCarthy will be speaking vigorously for the ticket,” Carlson told the press in September 1952. McCarthy did so, lashing out at Ike’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, as surrounded by communist sympathizers. Weapon deployed. Mission accomplished. “Sen. Frank Carlson of Kansas,” the press dutifully reported, “commented that the General did not owe anything to McCarthy for the speech, and was still a ‘no deal man.’”
²⁷
After the election, the press assumed that Carlson would be rewarded for his services with a cabinet post. Instead, Carlson stayed in the Senate of his own volition, where he chaired a seemingly obscure subcommittee on civil service employees. It was a job that allowed him to quietly purge government of far more “security risks”—most of them guilty of no more heinous a crime than loyalty to the New Deal—than McCarthy had ever dreamed of, thousands erased from the rolls through backroom bureaucratic maneuvers.

Carlson also served on the special committee appointed to consider McCarthy’s censure after he went too far by slinging mud at other senators. But the man who first wrote the resolution to censure was Carlson’s predecessor as president of the Fellowship, Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont. Flanders was a genteel Republican, an engineer, an industrialist, a banker. His wife collected New England folk songs. Smooth-domed and whiskered, his spectacles slipping down his nose and his pipe in hand, he looked like a professor and was sometimes mistaken for a liberal. But his record was as right-wing as many of the Senate’s more outspoken firebrands. In 1954, the year he moved to censure McCarthy, he revived an old fundamentalist favorite: an amendment to the Constitution that would have rewritten the United States’ founding document to declare, “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ.” And yet, because of his resolution against raving McCarthy, he is remembered as a sane man in paranoid times, footnoted in histories of the Cold War as one who stood up for common sense.

Only the radical journalist I. F. Stone perceived otherwise. Flanders, he wrote in 1954, did not challenge McCarthy’s paranoia but rather his effectiveness in its promulgation. “To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches,” Stone wrote following Flanders’s ostensibly heroic gesture, is