The Family (32 page)

In the fall of 1970, Suharto did both. Coe often boasted that nobody but congressmen, himself, and maybe a special guest attended such meetings, but this time Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the Indonesian dictator.
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In October 1970, Coe wrote to the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry. Suharto had just become the first Muslim to join the Fellowship’s off-the-record Senate prayer group for a meeting “similar to the one we had with Haile Selassie,” the emperor of Ethiopia. Korry was too busy to celebrate; October 1970 was the month his plot to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, came to a botched end, opening the door to the more murderous scheme that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power three years later.
⁷
(“The sun is just now beginning to shine again,” the Family’s key man in Chile, the head of a right-wing civilian faction called the “Officialists,” wrote Coe, promising to tell him the “real story” of Pinochet’s coup in person.)

In 1971, Coe entertained a small gathering at the Fellowship House with stories from his most recent round of visits to international brothers, “men whom God has touched in an unusual way.” Among them was General Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam, who arranged for Coe to tour the war zone in the personal plane of his top military commander; the foreign minister of Cambodia, “most eager to carry on our concept”; and Suharto. In Clif Robinson’s telling, “Doug and I were escorted up the steps of the palace, no attempt to make any secret of it, and the president there so warmly welcomed us and the first thing he said as I walked into the room was to express his appreciation for what had been done, and to say that the
momentum
that we have seen started in this must not be allowed to slacken…Along toward the end, one of the men suggested it would be good if we had prayer together. And Darius Marpaung and Colonel Sombolem were present with us. And Darius Marpaung suggested that the businessman who was there would lead us in a prayer. And I think I have seldom been in a meeting where the prayer was so God-inspired.”
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Coe and Robinson weren’t the only representatives of the Fellowship to seek such inspiration with Suharto. In 1970, a memo to Fellowship congressmen from Senator B. Everett Jordan, a North Carolina Dixiecrat, reported that Howard Hardesty, the executive vice president of Continental Oil, listed as a key man in the Fellowship’s confidential directory, had traveled to Indonesia to spend a day with the Fellowship prayer cells and join Suharto for dinner.
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The following year, Senator Jordan himself traveled to Jakarta on the Family’s behalf, where a special prayer breakfast meeting of forty parliamentary and military leaders was assembled for him by the vice president of Pertamina, the state oil and gas company that functioned like a family business for Suharto. Such corporate/state/church chumminess was hardly limited to dictatorial regimes. Jordan may well have traveled to the meeting on an airplane provided that year for congressional members of the Family by Harold McClure of McClure Oil, and the year previous, he’d boasted in a memo to congressional Family members, oil executives and foreign diplomats had used the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington to meet for “confidential” prayers.
¹⁰

By 1972, some of Abram’s old hands were concerned about the moral vacuum the Family now called home. Elgin Groseclose, the American economist who’d helped the Shah run Iran in the 1940s, worried that Muslims who saw through the facade of the “brotherhood of man” would ask, “Down what road am I being taken?” And, perhaps, decide to take Americans for a ride instead. “This has been one of the aspects of the…movement that has long troubled me,” concluded Groseclose. “Where does politics end and religion begin?”
¹¹

Poor Groseclose. He could not grasp
power
. Suharto got it. “We are sharing the deepest experiences of our lives together,” Clif Robinson wrote of his brother the dictator. “It was at this point when I was with President Suharto of Indonesia that he said, ‘In this way we are converted, we convert ourselves—No one converts us!’”
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In the spring of 1975, Bruce Sundberg, a Family missionary to the Filipino government of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, began planning with Marcos’s chief financial backer for a summit in Jakarta. Included would be Marcos, Suharto, and General Park, the South Korean dictator. Sundberg called it “The Jakarta Idea,” the “Idea” to be pondered the same one that had come to Abram forty years earlier in Seattle. That it had not evolved since 1935 was, to the men of the Family, proof of its eternal truth: the Idea that God’s method is the “man-method,” that God chooses His key men according to His concerns, not ours. That conviction enabled Coe to ignore Elgin Groseclose’s concern about foreign nationals using them for their connections. People didn’t use people, according to the Idea. People didn’t
do
anything. Rather, they were used by God, and their only two choices were to struggle against the inevitable, or to allow God to pull their strings. Was Suharto using them? Only if God wanted him to. Everything the Family did for Suharto—the connections, the prayers, the blessings—they did for God.

On December 6, 1975, Gerald Ford blessed Suharto’s invasion of East Timor. Twelve hours after Ford left Jakarta, Suharto’s forces, armed almost entirely with American weapons, attacked East Timor’s population of 650,000 on the premise that the island nation was planning a communist assault on Indonesia, a nation of 140 million people.

Here are the words of the last broadcast from East Timor’s national Radio Dili, in the nation’s capital: “Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed, I repeat, we are all going to be killed. This is an appeal for international help. Please help us…”

T
HE CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE
of Suharto’s death toll, in East Timor and Indonesia proper, is 602,000, but most scholars of Indonesia believe it is two or even three times greater, ranking Suharto next to the Cambodian madman Pol Pot as one of the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century. What role the Family played, or did not play—which of their “deepest experiences” they shared—in the long occupation of East Timor that followed the invasion, a period during which it was transformed into “islands of prisons hidden with islands,” I can’t say. The Family restricted its archives before I could follow the story into the next decade. All I know is that in 2002 my Ivanwald brothers proudly proclaimed that one of Suharto’s successors, President Megawati, had bent her knee to the Jesus of the Cedars.

I shared some of Suharto’s story with Greg. I wanted to make some kind of connection. Not of politics to religion but between us, “man-to-man,” as the Family likes to say. I knew almost nothing about him, but his tone reminded me of Bengt Carlson, one of his successors as leader of Ivanwald, and that made me think that like Bengt, Greg was probably a decent sort absorbed into a movement the awful shape of which he simply didn’t see. It wasn’t that I wanted to school him. I wanted him to know that I got it. That I understood good intentions and where they could lead. That I appreciated that diplomacy requires doing business with bad men. That I knew there had been honorable Cold Warriors—my father, a Sovietologist who advised the CIA near the end of Eastern European communism, was one of them—who believed that the threat of the Soviet Union justified terrible alliances.

But what I wanted him to say—and I admit it, I wanted him to answer for Coe, for Carlson, for the whole goddamn bunch, because, after all, here he was, apparently asking me to
join
them—was that making Suharto a brother, at least, had been a mistake. Why hadn’t Coe risked his access, risked the Family’s friendships in big oil, risked even his certainty about the biblically sanctioned authority of whichever strongman ends up in charge, to tell Suharto—after a prayer, maybe—to stop killing his own people? To hold him accountable, as the Family likes to say. For if the Family had not done so—if they had, in fact, greased Suharto’s economic machine, voted for weapons, praised him to the world as a champion of freedom—they were accomplices. Brothers in blood, yes, but not that of the lamb.

Greg preferred to look on the bright side. “If not for Doug,” he said, “maybe Suharto would have killed a million.”

G
REG’S MATH WAS
the calculus used by Stalin when he said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million is no more than a statistic. Stalin, monster that he was, spoke not of flesh-and-blood murder but of politics by narrative, the stories to which even a dictator must resort if he is to wield the power he takes by the gun. As a human being, Stalin may have been worse than worthless, but as a fabulator, he was astute. A single death does make a better story. Suharto’s victims—602,000, 1.2 million, or 1.8 million—may never find a place in literature. But they deserve a place in history, and to win them that, one small problem must be solved here in America, that of Jesus plus nothing, the logic of faith that allows American politicians to contribute to the nightmares of other nations, and the rest of us to vote for them.

Jesus plus nothing.
Phrased like that, as Coe puts it, it doesn’t sound like a problem at all. One who preaches Jesus plus nothing claims to be in possession of pure Godhead. Not Jesus plus the history of his believers and what they’ve done in His name, or Jesus plus the culture through which we view Him now, or Jesus plus the best efforts of the minds God, presumably, gave us, or Jesus plus humanity itself. Not Jesus plus scripture, since scripture, after all, contains a great deal besides Jesus. No burning bush, no voice in the whirlwind, no Daniel, no lions. Coe and his inner circle do believe in the trinity; a Washington fundamentalist activist told me, “but they’ll give the Father and the Holy Ghost the weekend off. Because they clutter the conversation. Jesus is so easily presented.”
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And what is it about Jesus that Coe presents? Not the teachings of Christ; simply the fact of His being, “the Person of Christ,” as Coe called it in a four-part lecture series he presented to a conference of evangelical leaders in January 1989, recorded on two videotapes lent to me by an evangelical scholar distressed by Coe’s peculiar concept of God. The lectures took place at the Glen Eyrie Castle in Colorado Springs, the Navigators headquarters at which Coe first conceived of Jesus plus nothing. With a great stone hearth lit by two murky yellow lanterns behind him, Coe, in a dark suit and tie, his black hair slicked across his skull, doesn’t drive toward his points; he ambles up to them. He tells a story about touring forty-two small nations in the Pacific with a member of Reagan’s National Security Council, an Australian politician, and some American businessmen. On the tarmac of each country’s airport, they pray for a key man, a power broker, and then they go off to meet a top man, the one with the power.

What am I supposed to say to them? asks the Australian.

“We wanna be your friend,” says Coe.

Okay, says the Australian, but how?

“Tell ’em, ‘By learning to love God, together, centered around Jesus Christ.’”

The Australian, who used to work in the foreign ministry, doesn’t think he can say that. He’ll sound crazy. He’ll sound stupid. So Coe makes him a bet: if it doesn’t work after two countries, they’ll go back to Australia and play golf. But there’s to be no golf in his near future, because on every little island they visit, Yap and Truk and Palau, this delegation of First World power finds prime ministers, presidents, parliamentarians, strangely receptive to their message. The NSC man, David Locke, a veteran of a similar trip with Coe, described it once. “It reminded me of the story in World War II, where the British sent an OSS type into Borneo…And this guy parachuted out of the sky and they had never seen anything like this so they looked on him as—he had blonde hair and white skin and he was a white god who had come out of the sky to mobilize them. Obviously his side was going to win so they had no trouble aligning themselves. Well, from the point of view of a lot of these little island countries, we were something akin to that.”
¹⁴

“All through these last forty years,” Coe continues, “I’ve had the privilege of traveling to countries, I’ve been in China, in Vietnam with the Vietnamese, the Vietcong, Communists in Panama, Communists in Russia, the Red Guard in China, Nazis in Germany.” (Coe’s first visit to Germany was in 1959. Did he know more about the past of Abram’s key men in Germany than they liked to acknowledge?) “And you know, I discovered that the same things that they make people give vows to keep, are the same things that Jesus said…The only thing that was changed was the goal, the only thing that changed was the purpose. In essence, it was all the things that Jesus taught in private to the disciples. I began to realize why they were so successful in human terms.”

Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere. Actually, emotional and mental problems. Prisoners. From the street. But they bound themselves together in an agreement, and they died together. Two years before they moved into Poland, these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop, dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then to start on the rest of Poland.”

It worked, Coe says; they killed 61/2 million “Polish people.” (The actual sum was closer to 51/2 million, 3 million of whom were Polish Jews. But that, as Stalin would say, is just a statistic).

“These three men by their decision alone.” What he’s trying to explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship: between a man and Christ, between brothers in Christ. Once, he says, a friend who’d been France’s foreign minister during its war with Vietnam told him he should try to meet Ho Chi Minh. “‘Even though he was our enemy, he was amazing.’ He said, ‘[Ho] knows what it means, to be brothers.’” What does it mean to be brothers? It means, Coe learns when he finally meets one of Ho’s, a foreign minister Coe says he happened to bump into in Mauritania, to be willing to—happy to—die for your cause.