The officiant at both Nixon's mother's and his
own funeral, the Reverend Billy Graham was also a lifelong friend of Richard
Nixon. Before eulogising him in death, Graham was one of Nixon’s closest
confidants, playing a role in many of the key events which defined Nixon’s
life.
In 1967, with Nixon still seen as a perennial
loser, he turned to Graham for advice on whether to run for President
a second time. Graham told Nixon, “Dick, I think you should run … You are
the best prepared man in the United States to be President.” Graham added,
“I think it is your destiny to be President.”[1]
Graham also played a key role in Nixon’s
subsequent victory, acting as a go-between for the candidate and the
disaffected and aging Lyndon Johnson to secure the Democrat President’s
clandestine support. Nixon told Graham to tell Johnson, “I promise never
to embarrass him after the election … I will do everything to make you
a place in History because you deserve it.” [2]
Almost three decades later, the Reverend Billy Graham
performed a similar favour for his friend. In his eulogy for Nixon, Graham
engages in his own brand of historical revisionism, reinterpreting each
of Nixon’s reincarnations as coherent components of a single evangelical
vision of the dead president: “a great man
has fallen."
What Graham ignores is that Nixon fell many times in his
life, and each time resulted in a new improved version of Nixon. Rather
than acknowledge these different incarnations, Graham only alludes obliquely
to "the great events of his life" that
"have
already been widely recounted by the news media this week."
For Graham, there is no Watergate, only a vague reference
in his religious argument that “the only
thing that really counts is not how others see us here, but how God sees
us and what the record books of heaven have to say. For the believer who
has been to the cross, death is no frightful leap into the dark, but is
an entrance into a glorious new life.” For the historical image of
Nixon, however, death is only another opportunity for
reinvention, as Graham well proved.
[1]. Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon,
MacMillan, Melbourne, 1978, 293
[2]. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon - Volume Two: The Triumph
of a Politician 1962-1972, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989, 184