The passing of the Rev. Billy Graham, who spent more than six decades as the nation’s most prominent Christian evangelist before retreating from the public spotlight in recent years, has occasioned both glowing appreciation for his life’s work and fierce condemnation of the social and political movements he led. One particular point around which that condemnation has clustered has been Graham’s support for America’s wars, and specifically the tactics he encouraged in Vietnam. In his authoritative account of Graham’s personal evolution and public significance, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, historian Grant Wacker writes that Graham “displayed an uncanny ability to adopt trends in the wider culture and then use them for his evangelistic and moral reform purposes,” but that he also “brought to the table a long list of liabilities: conventional beginnings, serious mistakes of judgment, mordant criticism from others, shifting public identities, and elusive mythic dimensions.” In the following excerpt from America’s Pastor, we see evidence of both in Graham’s views on communism and the Vietnam War.
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One of the most durable conventions about Graham is that he was a hawk of the fiercest kind. The convention bears a large measure of truth for the Graham of the late 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s. To a great extent the early Graham defined himself not only politically but also culturally and even theologically as a warrior against communism. As with millions of Americans, Graham’s hatred and fear of communism was palpable, profound, and pervasive.
The story is long and complex. Before plunging into it, however, four generalizations are helpful. First, Graham’s attitudes toward communism not only changed but also zigzagged. The changes unfolded in different ways in different times and places. Second, Graham did not do it alone. The culture changed—and zigzagged—right along with him. Third, Graham and the West did not do it alone, either. The Soviet Union changed at the same time, and so did the Eastern Bloc nations, and, to a lesser extent, so did China and North Korea. Finally, Graham’s star remained high long after the Cold War died. The Cold War helped propel him into public visibility but it did not keep him aloft. Other factors, including the culture’s needs and his personal skills, did.
In the early years of his career Graham hammered the communist threat constantly. Next to the gospel message, by his own recollection, he preached about it more than anything else. In 1953 the Chicago Daily News dubbed Graham “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One,” a view echoed by Soviet newspapers. Graham famously ridiculed “the pinks, the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” The alarmist words on the front page of a “News Letter” of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, mailed to listeners of the Hour of Decision in July 1953, represented hundreds if not thousands of paragraphs in Graham’s preaching and writing of that era. “This is no time to be lulled by the constant talk of ‘peace’ by the Communist spokesmen,” he cautioned. “Their program of world conquest is moving ahead at a steady pace.” British Guiana and Guatemala effectively have fallen, Graham warned. Communists intend “to bring Japan to her knees economically,” then all of the Far East. “Other countries are to follow. We are being gradually encircled.” Many of the most memorable lines Graham ever preached targeted the communist enemy: “Stalin’s fixed purpose is to holster the whole world for communism”; “They have knifed their way across Laos”; “Communism is a fanatical religion that has declared war upon the Christian God.” Communism framed his image of the world, aroused his listeners’ anxieties, and prompted them to take action.
Graham’s attacks on communism started slowly but quickly gained momentum. The first comments turned up here and there in his preaching in the late 1940s. They appeared forcefully in his opening sermon in his first major urban crusade in Los Angeles in 1949. They reappeared with equal force in his first major outdoor meeting in the East: the revival sited on the Boston Common in the cold wet spring of 1950. The continually swelling audiences on both coasts and pretty much everywhere else suggested that the people eagerly embraced them.
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Graham shared other Americans’ fears about the danger communism posed, but as a Christian he also brought concerns born of religion to the table. Communism threatened the American way of life at its roots. It represented a total system, encompassing and threatening every aspect of the culture, just as any authentic religion did. It drew its force from a sense of revelation, just as Christianity and Judaism did. Communism paraded as actively anti-Christian. More precisely, communism was not simply an alternative religion like Zen but an aggressive destroyer of souls. It manifested missionary zeal, with a track record of winning converts’ hearts and souls. It employed deception and fostered treachery.
Communists added military might to missionary zeal. They possessed the power to destroy or at least inflict vast damage on the United States and other Western nations. When they acted, they acted with cruelty and inhumanity. And many Americans refused to see it. Still worse, America was unprepared. The nation had proved hapless after the Korean truce, shackled by its commitments to the United Nations. Individuals within the nation proved more interested in materialism and recreation than in moral rigor and hard work. Like a demonic religion—or even as a demonic religion—the communist threat was real, lethal, imminent, and violent. Subtle, too. The communists quietly infiltrated churches and other institutions, working behind the scenes, invisibly. Communism represented the most grievous combination of threats imaginable, for it portended the annihilation of all that Americans held most dear.
Graham held all of these views, and many other men and women who commanded respect held some or all of them too, including such worthies as Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles. Far from being a voice crying in the wilderness, Graham found himself in good and strong company. Possibly he made communism more fearsome than any politician could do. He possessed the tools to leverage a political and military threat into a godless attack on an essentially Christian or at least Christian-influenced American way of life.
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On April 15, 1969, he dispatched a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon. Declassified in 1989, the letter became one of the most important and controversial documents he ever wrote.
Though Graham’s view of the Vietnam War was tangled, several overall comments seem warranted. First, he moved from jut-jawed support for the administration’s policies in the mid-1960s to professed neutrality, born of deep uncertainty, by the time the U.S. involvement ended in 1973. In the beginning his main fear centered on the domino effect: we must stop communist expansion now, over there, before it materializes here, on our doorstep. Graham pointed out that President Kennedy made the initial commitment of sixteen thousand soldiers and Johnson had inherited the burden. In these respects Graham mirrored the views of many high-ranking figures in the United States government and millions of Americans too. Despite some congressional misgivings, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the use of conventional military force, won resounding support in the U.S. Congress.
By the very end of the 1960s, however, Graham’s support for how the administration was prosecuting the war started to waver, at least in his private communications. On April 15, 1969, he dispatched a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon. Declassified in 1989, the letter became one of the most important and controversial documents he ever wrote, at least in retrospect. It purportedly reflected the views of a group of American missionaries in Vietnam, but it almost certainly expressed his own views too. Graham acknowledged that the missionaries spoke from “hawkish” sympathies, but they also expressed deep dissatisfaction with how the administration had executed the war.
The missionaries—presumably Graham too—outlined several possible scenarios. The majority of the options assumed that the Paris peace talks, which had started the previous year, would not end productively and honorably. Under those circumstances, the thrust of the recommendations involved five steps. First, turn the war over to the South Vietnamese government and military. It was, after all, their war. Second, withdraw “rapidly!” The American presence corrupted the economy and poisoned the culture. Third, empower South Vietnamese Special Forces for guerilla warfare. Their methods might seem “brutal and cruel in sophisticated Western eyes,” but the Viet Cong used those methods every day to “spread terror and fear to the people.” Fourth, emphasize propaganda, especially psychological. And fifth, “Use North Vietnamese defectors to bomb and invade the north. Especially let them bomb the dikes which could over night destroy the economy of North Vietnam.” The import was clear: attack and demoralize the civilian population.
One sharply critical biographer of Graham wrote that the fifth part of the plan would have taken a million lives. Correct or not, there could be little doubt that many civilians would have suffered and died. In the light of the group’s hawkish views, and its lament, stated earlier in the letter, that the bombing of North Vietnam had stopped prematurely, waging war on the civilian population made sense as a strategic assumption. But the plan made little sense morally, for it surely violated Christian principles of just war as well as the Geneva Conventions.
Replicating a life-long weakness for speaking beyond his knowledge, he was simply out of his depth.
There is no way to know if the document influenced anyone with power, but it could not have instilled restraint. One interpretation of the event is that Graham knew the consequences of the recommendation and pressed it anyway. Another interpretation is that he did not know the consequences and pressed it anyway. Either way, there was scant evidence that he possessed the training or experience to advise the president of the United States about military strategy. Replicating a life-long weakness for speaking beyond his knowledge (a fault he admitted), he was simply out of his depth. Moreover, the letter undermined his repeated claim that he did not offer Nixon—or any other president—specific policy recommendations. And it arrived at a time when Graham was entering the height of his political influence.
A second overall observation is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s Graham oscillated between noninvolvement and involvement. On one hand, in public he spoke very little about the geopolitical details of the conflict. On the other hand, in public, with rare exceptions, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Graham felt that God had authorized civil authorities to do their job. Citizens should support them unless they saw clear evidence of incompetence, moral turpitude, or violation of religious liberty. Besides that principled point, Graham projected a pragmatic one. Presidents usually knew things that ordinary people did not. Graham apparently did not suspect that his close friendship with Johnson and Nixon might have clouded his judgment about their judgment.
As the 1970s wore on, Graham, like millions of Americans, grew increasingly ambivalent about the reasons for the war. He admitted that he was profoundly perplexed yet saw no way out. Repeatedly he said that he would keep his thoughts to himself and not take sides. Many Americans doubted that his neutrality was genuine or that his uncertainty ran very deep. They took his professed neutrality as tacit or even covert support for the war, especially in light of his refusal publicly to challenge the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 or the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. Dr. Ernest Campbell famously used the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church to accuse Graham of a “moral ‘cop-out’” on the Cambodian bombing.
Into the 1970s, Graham made statements that appeared to minimize if not trivialize the human cost of the fighting by universalizing the problem. In November 1969 the story of the My Lai massacre hit the headlines. According to the story, U.S. forces had gunned down some five hundred men, women, and children in cold blood. A military court convicted Lieutenant William Calley of killing twenty-two Vietnamese civilians. Graham claimed that the lieutenant represented the evil in everyone: “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.” From a Christian theological or human rights perspective the statement may have been factually true, but the way he framed it—in the highly visible venue of the New York Times, no less—appeared to thin out the atrocity by spreading it.
The early 1970s saw a man in turmoil. The lesson of the war, Graham told the British correspondent David Frost in 1970, was that “we should do more talking and less fighting.” In the spring of 1973, Graham supported Nixon’s plan for an orderly withdrawal, yet he worried that the Paris peace talks would leave the South Vietnamese in peril and betray a nation that had trusted the United States. America, after all, had made promises. Fidelity remained an enduring American value. There, Graham undoubtedly touched a chord of approval. In June he told reporters that the Vietnam War had taught Americans that “we are not all-powerful and that America is not the Kingdom of God. We can go into it with a lot more humility. We have a lot to be proud of in the past; we have a lot to be ashamed of in the past.” Later, he said that America never should have gotten into a no-win land war in Asia in the first place. In 1997 Graham told Larry King that he regretted that he had not spoken against it.
Graham’s position on the Vietnam War merits reflection. Considered whole, it placed a stain on his record. The problem was not that he took the wrong stand on the war by the light available to him (and many others) at the time, or that his views changed, at least to the point of finding the rationale for American involvement unconvincing. So did those of the journalism icon Walter Cronkite. The problem was different. First, he waffled. If he had taken a clear prowar stand, or a clear antiwar stand, or offered a clear explanation for changing his mind, then, all right, people differed on weighty matters of public policy. And sometimes they changed their minds. But his waffling looked like he was just putting his finger to the wind. Second, he dissimulated. Or at least he appeared to do so. On one hand, after 1970 or so he repeatedly said he was neutral about the war. On the other hand, his fervent public support for Nixon, continually paraded in front of the press without any hint of distancing, let alone criticism, left all but the most ardent partisans scratching their heads.
