When Billy Graham Planned to Kill One Million People
by Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch MARCH 12, 2002
There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham’s various private dealings with Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s papers. I’ll come shortly to the recent flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander in chief Back in April, l989 a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, "could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam".
Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)
This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. I recall finding a small story in the Syracuse Herald-Journal. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter. Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the "stranglehold" Jews have on the media.
On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years in Nixon’s tapes, media, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which "we can’t talk about it publicly," namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.
Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who is executive producer of the NBC hit, "Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In," as telling him that "11 of the 12 writers are Jewish." "That right?" says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are "totally dominated by the Jews." Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite "front men who may not be of that persuasion," but that their writers are "95 percent Jewish."
CONTINUED...
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