The Family (54 page)

46.
Tony Judt,
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
(Penguin Press, 2005), p. 61.

47.
Dallas,
1945
, p. 615.

48.
Zapp to Abram, September 16, 1950, folder 6, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

49.
Carpenter,
Revive Us Again
, p. 149.

7.
THE BLOB

1.
Interview with Kate Phillips in Tom Weaver,
Science Fiction Confidential: Interviews With Monster Stars and Filmmakers
(McFarland, 2002), pp. 234–46.

2.
Joshua Muravchik, “Losing the Peace,”
Commentary
, July 1992.

3.
Quoted in Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” in
The Radical Right
ed., Daniel Bell (Anchor Books, 1964), p. 76.

4.
A revealing statistic overlooked by conventional historians of the Cold War: between 1935, the year Abram and his fundamentalist elite came in from the cold of domestic exile, and 1980, the commencement of the Reagan era, the average number of American evangelical missionaries overseas grew from 5,000, many of them engaged in small projects close to home, to 32,000 spread all over the globe. Carpenter,
Revive Us Again
, p. 184. The anthropologist David Stoll explores the interconnections—ideological and actual—between the U.S. covert operations and the network of evangelical missionaries connected to what was then the largest missionary organization in the world in
Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?: The Wycliffe Bible Translators in America
(Zed Press, 1982). Stoll takes pains to explain that such interconnections did not constitute a conspiracy, but rather, an overlapping worldview in which spiritual and imperial interests were not easily distinguished. As recently as 2006, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez expelled a group of evangelical missionaries he claimed were U.S. spies,
Christianity Today
felt compelled to condemn “The CIA Myth,” apparently persuasive enough to seduce even some of the magazine’s conservative evangelical readers. Deann Alford, January 2006.

5.
Quoted in Sara Diamond,
Roads to Dominion
:
Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States
(Guilford Press, 1995), p. 101.

6.
“Our press,” reads a memo in Abram’s files on Cuba and the American media’s ambivalence toward Castro, “is infested with crypto-Communists [and] intellectual prostitutes in their hire.” Whether the Fellowship would extend that charge to even the evangelical press is unclear, but there can be no doubt on their position with regard to détente with Castro.

7.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” 1958. Eisenhower accused the Soviets of waging “total cold war,” to which, he said, the United States must respond with “total peace” in which “every asset of our personal and national lives,” particularly religion, would be dedicated to the fight. Ike also believed in “progress” as defined by the Atlas, Titan, Thor, Jupiter, and Polaris missile programs. The fact that such literally totalitarian ambitions were considered calming is an indicator of the fear and loathing that infused the ostensibly bland 1950s.

8.
Kenneth Osgood,
Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad
(Kansas State University Press, 2006), pp. 270–75.

9.
Reverend John Collins, chairman of Christian Action, to Abram, September 8, 1950, folder 2, box 202, collection 459, BGCA.

10.
Osgood,
Total Cold War
, p. 40.

11.
“Government Curbs Scored,”
New York Times
, May 11, 1949.

12.
Grubb to Abram, August 21, 1953, folder 2, box 202, collection 459, BGCA.

13.
Perhaps they carried with them reprints of a
Look
magazine article Abram had had made, his chief piece of literature that year. The lead story was by Norman Vincent Peale, Abram’s colleague in the Twelve. Why was America experiencing a spiritual revival? Simple, said Peale: “for the first time in the country’s history, we are filled with fear.” Peale’s solution: “It is now widely recognized that prayer is a skill, that it is an actual power.” The demand of the hour, wrote Peale, was organizing such power into action, a “vital spiritual force.” His inspiration? “The Vereide Organization,” which inculcated “the country’s lawmakers” in “the importance of divine guidance.” Abram’s reprint of Peale’s May 22, 1951,
Look
article, “The Place of Prayer in America,” was titled “These Scandalous Years in Washington,” a reference to widespread suspicion that the Truman administration was riddled with red agents. Folder 51, box 585, collection 459, BGCA.
“Direct relationship…”
: Associated Press, “Wiley Trip Declared in U.S. Interest,”
Washington Post,
May 21, 1952. Particularly controversial was Wiley’s decision to bring his much younger new bride for a vacation, a practice that under Eisenhower would become unofficial policy, the chumminess of power couples meeting their peers used to cement “relationships” with foreign nations, as David F. Schmitz writes in
Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States & Right-Wing Dictatorships
(University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 183.

14.
Wilhelmina was at that point technically “princess,” having passed her throne to her daughter, Juliana, but she was still referred to as queen, and both women were strong supporters of the Fellowship, though whether out of religious sentiment or other motives—the royal family was responsible for the interests of Royal Dutch-Shell Oil—is unclear in Abram’s papers.

15.
Robert C. Albright, “Ike Can’t Find Titles for All His Talented Help,”
Washington Post
, June 22, 1952.

16.
“The June Brides,”
Time
, June 23, 1952.

17.
In
Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism
:
A Woman’s Crusade
(Princeton University Press, 2005), the historian Donald T. Crichtlow argues that this sense of betrayal led to the formation of the New Right that would propel Barry Goldwater to the GOP nomination twelve years later. See pp. 46–47.

18.
Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round: Taft Talks Way Back to the Top,”
Washington Post
, December 22, 1952.

19.
Two of the Democratic candidates for the nomination, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, were Breakfast Groupers. The eventual nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, was decidedly not, but his hawkish liberalism would lead him into even more militant expressions of faith. The “one supreme difference” between the United States and the USSR, Stevenson told a “Washington Pilgrimage” of Christian nationalists, “is that America and its leaders believe in God; the rulers of Russia have turned their back on God and deny His very existence.” “Presidential Candidates Speak Out For Religion,”
Washington Post
, May 3, 1952. Stevenson’s surprising piety may be understood as a sign of the times; the 1952 election was, according to the
Washington Post
, the first time all presidential candidates had publicly paid tribute to America’s ostensible religious—read, “Christian”—heritage.

20.
Graham’s account of his role can be found in “The General Who Became President,” chapter 12 of his autobiography,
Just As I Am
(HarperSan-Franciso/Zondervan, 1997), in which he says he met Abram during his Northwest Crusades. He does not mention the fact that Abram had been recruited by his own former Seattle cell—doubling as the sponsoring committee for the Graham Crusade’s visit—to seek federal funds for a cover for the city’s Memorial Stadium to ensure the Crusade’s success. “Graham wants this,” wrote Abram’s Seattle lieutenant, a wealthy lawyer named Warren Dewar. “Langlie and Devin”—the governor and the mayor of Seattle, both men whose careers had been made by Breakfast Group connections—“want it too.” Dewar suggests that $18,000, possibly federal funds, had already been directed toward Graham’s appearance. Dewar to Abram, May 16, 1951, folder 7, box 168, collection 459, BGCA. Reference to
Oiltown U.S.A.
may be found in the BGEA’s collection 214, the records of World Wide Pictures, Graham’s film production company.

21.
Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, quoted in Grubb,
Modern Viking
, pp. 130–32.

22.
Nick Thimmesch, “Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 13, 1974. Thimmesch, who admired the Fellowship, described it thusly: “They are secretive and guarded in discussing their experiences or activities…They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.”

23.
Ferguson:
Ferguson was a longtime inner circle member who regularly appeared in the Fellowship’s brochures for new prospects.
Bennett:
Bennett’s membership in ICL was reported in the July 1959 issue of
Moody Monthly
, the magazine of the fundamentalist Moody Institute in Chicago, in “Christians in Your Congress,” by Donald H. Gill. Other members cited included Strom Thurmond, James B. Utt—the Orange County congressman who believed that the United Nations was training Africans to conquer the United States—and Representative Bruce Alger, the Dallas Republican who would lead a “mink coat mob” made up of his wealthy female supporters in a spitting attack on Ladybird Johnson. Bennett, a signer of the infamous Southern Manifesto, remained close to the Fellowship for decades. “I ask too much of you already,” he wrote Doug Coe on January 27, 1987, “and therefore am not pressing for a particular appointment, but anytime that suits you I would certainly like to see you.” Folder 4, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.

24.
Hefley and Plowman,
Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power
, pp. 120–21.

25.
Associated Press, “Eisenhower Joins in a Breakfast Prayer Meeting,”
New York Times
, February 5, 1954. Eisenhower didn’t speak at the second breakfast, but Vice President Nixon did, initiating a tradition Nixon maintained for the rest of the decade. Personally indifferent to Abram’s piety, he recognized the value of the Prayer Breakfast’s pulpit and made it his own.
Guatemala
: Van Gosse,
Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left
(Verso, 1993), pp. 26–29.

26.
Seth Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia
(Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 60–62. “Wiley Would End Attack on Dulles,”
New York Times
, July 25, 1954.

27.
“McCarthy to be Asked to Aid Ike,”
Washington Post
, September 18, 1952. Ferdinand Kuhn, “McCarthy’s Charges in Speech Stir Angry Denials, Protests,”
Washington Post
, October 29, 1952.

28.
I. F. Stone, “The First Welts on Joe McCarthy,”
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
, March 15, 1954, reproduced in
The Best of I. F. Stone
, ed. Peter Osnos (Public Affairs, 2006).

29.
“For God and Country,”
Vanguard University Magazine
, the alumni journal of the former Southern California Bible College, Spring 2002.

30.
Osgood,
Total Cold War
, p. 315.

31.
Drew Pearson, “The New JCS—and the Old,”
Washington Post
, August 13, 1953.

32.
John Broger, “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning,” a presentation to Abram’s ICL, June 14, 1954, folder 1, box 505, collection 459, BGCA.

33.
Marquis Childs, “A Strange Film Shown to Soldiers,”
Washington Post
, January 27, 1961.

34.
“Militant Liberty Outline Plan,” November 5, 1954, Operations Coordinating Board Central Files, box 70, OCB 091, from the collection of Kenneth Osgood, Florida Atlantic University.

35.
Wayne’s USC football teammate Ward Bond joined forces with Broger as well, but although Bond appeared in some of the best movies Hollywood ever made, including
Gone With the Wind
,
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and Ford’s brilliant John Wayne vehicle,
The Searchers
, it wouldn’t be fair to include him in the same category as those two tremendously talented reactionaries. Of course, Ford would have disagreed with me. Sort of: “Let’s face it,” he once said of Bond’s anticommunist snitching, “Ward Bond is a shit. But he’s our favorite shit.” Frances Stonor Saunders,
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
(New Press, 2000), pp. 284–87.