Billy Graham's private conversation with Richard Nixon: "Satanic left-wing Jews" control the media, destroying America, refers to "synagogue of Satan"

Billy Graham Responds to Lingering Anger Over 1972 Remarks on Jews

By DAVID FIRESTONE The New York Times March 17, 2002

It seemed impossible, when H. R. Haldeman's White House diaries came out in 1994, that the Rev. Billy Graham could once have joined with President Richard M. Nixon in discussing the ''total Jewish domination of the media.'' Could Mr. Graham, the great American evangelist, really have said the nation's problem lies with ''satanic Jews,'' as Mr. Nixon's aide recorded?

Mr. Graham's sterling reputation as a healer and bridge-builder was so at odds with Mr. Haldeman's account that Jewish groups paid little attention, especially because he denied the remarks so strongly.

''Those are not my words,'' Mr. Graham said in a public statement in May 1994. ''I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.''

That was the end of the story, it seemed, until two weeks ago, when the tape of that 1972 conversation in the Oval Office was made public by the National Archives. Three decades after it was recorded, the North Carolina preacher's famous drawl is tinny but unmistakable on the tape, denigrating Jews in terms far stronger than the diary accounts.

''They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,'' Mr. Graham said on the tape, after agreeing with Mr. Nixon that left-wing Jews dominate the news media. The Jewish ''stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain,'' he continued, suggesting that if Mr. Nixon were re-elected, ''then we might be able to do something.''

Finally, Mr. Graham said that Jews did not know his true feelings about them.

''I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know,'' he told Mr. Nixon, referring to A. M. Rosenthal, then the newspaper's executive editor. ''And all -- I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.''

Mr. Graham, who is now 83 and in poor health, quickly issued a four-sentence apology, but he did not acknowledge making the statements and said he had no memory of the conversation, which took place after a prayer breakfast on Feb. 1, 1972.

The brevity of the apology and Mr. Graham's refusal to discuss the matter further have angered many of the same Jewish organizations that for so long counted Mr. Graham as their best friend among evangelical Christians. The taped remarks have become the subject of synagogue sermons and columns in Jewish newspapers, with some Jewish leaders suggesting that Mr. Graham had hidden anti-Semitic views for decades.

''Here we have an American icon, the closest we have to a spiritual leader of America, who has been playing a charade for all these years,'' Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview last week. ''What's frightening is that he has been so close to so many presidents, and who knows what else he has been saying privately.''

Mr. Foxman urged Mr. Graham to return the award he won in 1971 from the National Conference of Christians and Jews -- one of many such awards presented to him.

Yesterday, Mr. Graham's organization issued a longer apology, in which Mr. Graham acknowledged making the statements, but repudiated them.

''I don't ever recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now,'' he said. ''My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people. I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval Office that day.''

Mr. Foxman subsequently issued a statement accepting the new apology, but for many Jews the damage had already been done. In a recent column in several Jewish newspapers, the Washington journalist James D. Besser said the remarks should awaken Jews to the intense dislike for them among many evangelical Christians, except insofar as Jews are useful to the fulfillment of Christian apocalyptic prophecies.

The tapes have been particularly disturbing to people and groups who have worked to find common ground between Jews and evangelical Christians, many of whom say that their progress has now been significantly set back. For years, Mr. Graham stood apart from other evangelicals in his refusal to proselytize Jews directly, sharply disagreeing on the issue with his own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Because of that stance, the American Jewish Committee presented Mr. Graham with its National Interreligious Award in 1977, calling him one of the century's greatest Christian friends of Jews.

The taped remarks, however, will only help perpetuate the stereotypes that Jews and evangelicals hold about each other, said Rabbi Yechiel Z. Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, based in Chicago.

''Jewish friends are coming up to me now and saying, 'See, we told you so -- they're all frauds,' '' said Rabbi Eckstein, an Orthodox Jew who has become a liaison between Israel and evangelical Christians.

Mr. Graham's friends and biographers have tried to come up with some explanation for an act that so sharply diverges from five decades of almost universally admired public behavior. Lewis Drummond, the Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at Samford University, a Southern Baptist institution in Birmingham, Ala., said he believed that Mr. Graham was referring throughout his conversation only to those few Jews he considered unethical for distributing pornography.

''There's not an anti-Semitic bone in his body,'' said Dr. Drummond, a longtime friend of Mr. Graham's who has written a book about him. Dr. Drummond recalled that Mr. Graham had always preached against intolerance, refusing -- in the South of the 1950's and 60's -- to hold his crusades in segregated auditoriums and inviting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to join him in the pulpit.

Another biographer, William Martin of Rice University, suggested that Mr. Graham was thinking only of liberal Jews with whom he disagreed politically. Mr. Martin said that just as Mr. Graham grew up in a culture of segregation and moved beyond it, he had also evolved beyond what his thoughts were in 1972.

Mr. Graham's statement yesterday expressed hope that he had grown past his words that day in the Oval Office. Describing himself as ''an old man of 83 suffering from several ailments,'' he said his life had been a pilgrimage of growth and change.

''Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness,'' he wrote. ''God's mercy and grace give me hope -- for myself, and for our world.''

In Nixon tapes, Billy Graham refers to 'synagogue of Satan'

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
Updated 6/24/2009

A 1973 conversation between President Nixon and evangelist Billy Graham about Jews, laden with critical references including a Biblical verse on the "synagogue of Satan," has put the aging, frail Graham back in unwelcome headlines.

The conversation is part of newly-released secretly recorded tapes from the Nixon presidency, from the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md., and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. A sampling of more than 150 hours of tape recordings and 30,000 pages of documents from two months in 1973 were made public Tuesday (download at Nixon.archives.gov/National Archives), culled from 4,000 hours of taped meetings and phone calls in a two-year period.

An earlier release of tapes in 2002 shocked fans of Graham, who is heard agreeing with Nixon as the president rails against liberal Jews' political activism and media clout. Graham tells Nixon how Jews befriend him but adds, "They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country."

On Wednesday, as he did in 2002, Graham's longtime spokesman A. Larry Ross said Graham has never been an anti-Semite and that the remarks should be understood in context, as part of a conversation with the president.

In 2002, Graham said he had no recollection of such remarks but apologized deeply for any offense they may have caused. Now, Graham, 90, and still mobile with a walker, is no longer doing media interviews, although he sent a message of greeting to a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, underway in Louisville.

The 1973 transcript is a wide-ranging conversation between Graham and Nixon in which Graham heaps praise on the president, telling him "Congratulations on everything," and "I believe the Lord is with you."

Nixon raises the news that Israel had mistakenly shot down a Libyan civilian airliner, killing all on board. Nixon says, "What I really think is, deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up."

Graham agrees that it will push anti-Semitism "right to the top." Then he turns the conversation to a report he read somewhere that Israel supposedly wants to "expel all the Christians." Graham mentions Jewish opposition to a Christian evangelical unified campaign, saying Jews are "going right after the church."

He also mentions an upcoming meeting with the interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, the late Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum. In 1977, the organization honored Graham, saying, according to Graham biographer William Martin, that "most of the progress of Protestant-Jewish relations over the past quarter century was due to Billy Graham."

In 1973, Graham calls Tanenbaum the "cleverest and most brilliant" of the rabbis.

Nixon mentions an upcoming dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and Graham, who said in earlier taped conversations that Israelis were the best kind of Jews, now brings up a biblical reference to the dense and difficult final book of the Bible, Revelation, which says in verse 3:9 that there are those who claim to be Jews who are liars, and that they belong to a "synagogue of Satan."

This is a prophetic book by John the apostle who, like Christ, was Jewish.

Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman on Wednesday blasted both Nixon and Graham, saying that, "while never expressing these views in public, Rev. Graham unabashedly held forth with the president with age-old classical anti-Semitic canards."

But Ross says the "synagogue of Satan" phrase in the Book of Revelation actually refers to anyone whose "lives and work are not in keeping with traditional Jewish values."