by Jeff Sharlet
Only the radical journalist I. F. Stone perceived otherwise. Flanders, he wrote in 1954, did not challenge McCarthy’s paranoia but rather his effectiveness in its promulgation. “To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches,” Stone wrote following Flanders’s ostensibly heroic gesture, is
to read oneself out of respectable society, brand oneself a heretic, to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil. So all the fighters against McCarthyism are impelled to adopt its premises…The country is in a bad way indeed when as feeble and hysterical a speech [as Flanders’] is hailed as an attack on McCarthyism. Flanders talked of “a crisis in the age-long warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men.” He spoke of Italy “as ready to fall into Communist hands,” of Britain “nibbling at the drugged bait of trade profits.” There are passages of sheer fantasy, like this one: “Let us look to the South. In Latin America, there are…spreading infections of communism. Whole countries are being taken over.”28
This last, singular point would soon be made true in Guatemala, albeit the result of a more genteel anticommunism expressed through a U.S. bombing campaign. Whereas McCarthy used anticommunism to promote himself, men such as Flanders and Carlson and Eisenhower believed it should be reserved for the construction of empire.
The ethos of Abram’s “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive” ran parallel to and often infused American Cold War tactics. Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson—whose “New Look” policy of nuclear weapons and air power consolidated the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower himself would lament at the end of his presidency—embraced Abram’s Idea of strength through spiritual conformism, allowing prayer cells to proliferate within the Pentagon and signing off on a Fellowship project called “Militant Liberty,” developed by a fundamentalist propagandist on Abram’s payroll named John C. Broger. Broger, also an ill-defined “consultant” on the Pentagon payroll, was promoted to the Department of Defense’s Office of Information and Education, a post from which he’d control the Pentagon’s propaganda on more than 1,000 military radio and television stations and in 2,000 newspapers for almost three decades. In 1958, Abram made him a vice president of the Fellowship, bringing Broger’s propaganda to the elites even the Pentagon couldn’t reach. “The seed,” Broger would say, speaking of his fundamentalist faith, “was dropped thousands of times.”29
A tall, jowled man, balding and mustachioed, a squinter, Broger learned how to propagandize as an American aide to Filipino guerrillas in World War II. In December 1945, he turned those talents toward the Gospel, incorporating the Far East Broadcasting Company to bring the Good News to Asia. In 1948, from a patch of Philippines jungle littered with the scraps of war, he first sang “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” live on KZAS, “Call of the Orient” radio. He built more stations, scouting them out himself from planes made of corrugated tin in which he’d fly over China, Vietnam, Cambodia. In 1950, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, a zealous Presbyterian, asked for a briefing; Broger would now get his chance to combine his passions for propaganda and evangelism.30
The year before, Radford had been caught circulating a secret memo tearing down Truman’s defense secretary. That led to exile in Honolulu, where he met Broger. But in 1952, he caught President-Elect Eisenhower’s attention with a plan for battle by proxy, a blueprint for decades of dirty wars. Let’s use Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Korea, he told Ike on a walking tour of Iwo Jima. Ike liked the idea enough to go golfing with the admiral and introduce him to General Motors CEO Charlie Wilson, about to become Ike’s defense secretary.31 In 1953, with Wilson’s sponsorship, Radford came in from the islands to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a year later he brought Broger to join him. By then Broger was working for Abram. The admiral and the preacher bankrolled Broger’s ideological crusade.
A statement of its goals can be found in the Fellowship’s archives: the recruitment of “indoctrinated personnel who will form nucleus groups for the implementation of…the highest concepts of freedom, whether socially acceptable or not.”32 By highest concepts of freedom, Broger meant the American Jesus, a Christ of strict order; “Social Order,” “Law and Order,” “Economic Order,” and “Religion” were among the main topics of indoctrination. But Broger’s own sense of order was more than a little skewed, as evidenced when he came under scrutiny for a peculiar Pentagon scheme to recut a movie called Operation Abolition, itself already a dizzying collage of newsreels and film clips which, through a series of unconnected images, implied that Abram’s old foe, the union organizer Harry Bridges, was behind a plot to violently assault the House Un-American Activities Committee. Broger wanted to make Operation Abolition into an even weirder movie, modeled on a theory of his that behind even Harry Bridges was yet another, more insidious enemy: Japanese communists bent on taking over the minds of American teenagers.33
Operation Abolition was a bust; even the most ardent red hunters found it kooky. But throughout much of the 1950s and ’60s, Broger broadcasted his notions into the hearts and minds of millions of U.S. troops and an unknowable number of foreign nationals—“articulate natives,” as Broger referred to his “targets.” These would be either Christians or those who were willing to convert to the faith, located across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, “traditional cultures [that] have become unable to furnish an acceptable comprehension of existence.”34
If Operation Abolition was aborted, Broger had better luck with his other film ventures. Early on, he managed to recruit more talented collaborators. Some of the most talented in America, in fact: the director John Ford, John Wayne, and Merian Cooper, the producer who paired Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers.
Ford had worked as a spy during the war, photographing guerrilla warfare in occupied Europe; Cooper had fought Pancho Villa in Mexico and flown against Germany in World War I; and John Wayne was John Wayne.35 In 1955, Broger flew to Hollywood for a series of daylong meetings with the moviemakers, and Ford asked for eighteen copies of the Militant Liberty program to distribute to his screenwriters. He also suggested that Broger insert Militant Liberty into the movie he was directing at the time, The Wings of Eagles, in which Wayne played a navy flier battling naive pacifists in Congress for funding. Broger obliged; thankfully, the movie has disappeared from film history.
As has Broger’s most successful effort: the big-screen, eponymous adaptation of Militant Liberty, financed by the Fellowship and shown not just to the military but to schools, church groups, and prayer cells across the country, and made available to all of Abram’s disciples. Blunt in his beliefs—the Constitution, Broger once lectured in the Pentagon’s “Protestant Pulpit” series, was “hewn and shaped to the spiritual concepts of biblical truths,” a guarantee of “Christian freedoms”—he subscribed to Abram’s philosophy when it came to the exercise of power. Each key man spreads the Idea through the means available to him: the Senate, the Pentagon, a radio tower in the Philippines. “Christian Action,” as he and Abram called their activities, should be behind the scenes, in the air.
That ephemeral sense, along with the legacy of the Cold War to which it contributed some small portion of fear and misinformation, appears to be all that remains of Militant Liberty, the movie. A declassified Defense document tells us that it was in color and hints at its story. Broger was its hero, presenting Militant Liberty to an all-star panel of brass and political power that included Congressman Charles Bennett, Frank Carlson, and Abram.36 Beyond that, nothing more. I have not been able to find a copy of the film; I have only the records of its existence in Abram’s files, the press reports of the day, and that picture of Broger with Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, accepting the “Spiritual Values” award at the Freedoms Foundation’s headquarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Standing with them are Carlson and the two producers of the film, an assistant to Abram, and a handsome, sandy-haired man, visibly proud to be counted among such august company: Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth, just months away
from the Prayer Breakfast at which The Blob will be born.
8.
VIETNAMIZATION
RIVALS
Saigon, 1966. At the Hotel Caravelle, the swankiest address in the city, a middle-aged missionary named Clifton J. Robinson slips out a page of hotel stationery to write a report on his conquests for Christ in Vietnam. Robinson is big and broad-chested, dark-browed, looks good in a suit, at the rooftop bar popular with reporters from NBC, CBS, and the New York Times, flashing a smile of absolute certainty. He’s associate secretary general for the Fellowship in Southeast Asia. That means he’s Abram’s man. He’s writing back to Abram’s headquarters in Washington—although Abram, his beautiful voice gone soft and sleepy with age, spends most of his time in a retirement community called Leisure World. Robinson is writing to thank Senator Carlson, who’s sent a string of letters of introduction to precede Robinson on his grand tour of the region’s friendly regimes. In each country Robinson visits, the American ambassador stands ready to receive him and pass him along to local power brokers. Robinson feels as if Jesus himself is opening doors, a neatly trimmed savior in a linen suit. He knows, however, that the name of a U.S. senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, not Christ’s, is the reason the diplomatic corps genuflects before him. A “capital” notion, thinks Robinson. “Invaluable ‘inside’ help they’ve been able to be to us,” he scrawls beneath the Hotel Caravelle’s logo.1
Among his most fruitful meetings was time spent with William H. Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Laos. As chair of the State Department’s Vietnam Working Group in 1963, Sullivan had been one of the architects of the war, a de facto “field marshal,” according to General William Westmoreland.2 Such a man was an unlikely source of inspiration for Robinson, who called himself a Quaker. But preaching Abram’s Idea overseas had put him at odds with the Society of Friends. Like another lapsed Quaker, Richard Nixon, Robinson had no patience for pacifism. He saw himself as a man of action, a “jungle” missionary on the move. He spoke with the quick velvety voice of an old-time radio announcer and used it to dispense axioms and analogies about the need for key men in the Cold War, Bruce Barton jingles as interpreted by James Jesus Angleton, top man religion as geopolitical strategy. Sullivan provided fodder for Robinson’s commando theology.
“He said the strategy of the VC was the same as International Christian Leadership’s,” gushed Robinson, “except applied physically and militarily.” Robinson’s vision of Worldwide Spiritual Offensive could not yet accommodate Ho Chi Minh’s tactics, but Sullivan convinced him their enemy was a worthy one. “They spend hours, days, weeks, whatever time is necessary setting up for the LEADERS and then either by ambush, assassination, or other intrigue, they do away with them—not the people, the leaders. He said to kill 32 top level people”—as the Vietcong had done the previous month—“was tantamount to immobilizing thousands.”
The lesson was that the Fellowship should understand itself as a guerrilla force on the spiritual battlefield. Specifically, Sullivan, who directed the CIA’s “secret air war” in Laos and turned its Hmong minority into cannon fodder against the North Vietnamese, wanted the Fellowship to recruit Buddhist businessmen to collaboration by matching them with Jaycees under the guise of a “‘brotherhood of leadership’—or some such slogan.” But Robinson also took Sullivan’s words as an endorsement of Abram’s key man strategy.
“The strength of the wolf is the pack,” Abram reminded his disciples that year, retreating into parable as he advanced into his last days, “but the strength of the pack is the wolf.”3
Evangelical steamrollers such as the Billy Graham Crusade might win millions, but the Fellowship could neutralize the enemy—“bold Satanic forces,” as Abram described it, the Vietcong’s “sweep of communism,” America’s “secular cyclone”—by conquering the select few souls of the strong. “Assassination” was just a figure of speech to Robinson; Abram wanted elites to “die to the self,” to submit totally to Jesus of their own volition even as they held on tightly to the power that could advance His kingdom. Long after Abram’s death—and Ho’s total victory in Vietnam—the Fellowship would distribute a tract purporting to be “ten steps to commitment from a Viet Cong soldier.”4
Robinson was writing not to Abram but to Doug Coe. Abram was technically retired, although he still maintained top spiritual authority in the Fellowship. The question of succession was one nobody discussed, but Robinson was surely thinking of it. He’d recently opened a wedge for the Idea in India by recruiting the nation’s minister of defense productivity into a Christian prayer cell. Whether that led to the kind of results Abram would have called “tangible”—a relationship with a Fellowship-approved defense contractor, a commitment to pulling India’s left-leaning government rightward—it at least provided the Fellowship with the kind of bragging rights that impressed American congressmen: the Fellowship had connections everywhere, even in non-Christian nations. Robinson may have imagined himself the man for Abram’s job.5 But three years earlier, he’d angered Abram when he wrote that Indians are “more adept than wet eels in squirming out” of responsibility. “I feel we need to let the Indians know the ‘world’ is our battlefield.” With the stakes so high, they were “expendable.”6
Abram agreed—except for the part about letting the Indians know their place in the Fellowship’s hierarchy. As the Fellowship grew along the military trade routes of the Cold War, its “field representatives” learned to ape and polish the politics of flattery by which powerful nations make weak ones feel crucial to the cause. But Robinson was too hot for the Cold War Christ. He genuinely believed he was spreading old-time religion revamped for the space age, not a new empire in democratic disguise. “Is this ICL message a kind of Christian fringe benefit, a casual sophistication, a pink tea variety of discussion subject?” he demanded of the Fellowship. “Or is it a revolution?”
Writing for Abram, a third would-be heir named Richard Halverson responded sharply. 1. Stop challenging Abram’s vision. 2. You don’t understand Abram’s vision, anyway. 3. Here’s what it’s really about: “A revolution can be anarchy, Clif, or it can be tyranny. It can be noisy and rambunctious and spectacular like a Fourth of July fireworks celebration, or it can be quiet and penetrating and thorough like salt, like benevolent subversion.”7
That was the key—subversion. There was bad subversion, like that of the Vietcong, and good subversion, also like that of the Vietcong, only in the name of Jesus, a subtle practice of persuasion. Robinson took the lesson, committing himself to raising funds directly for the Indian work so that its costs wouldn’t be on the Fellowship’s books, and inviting in Fellowship speakers, such as a British member of Parliament named John Cordle, who lectured the Indians on “Corruption,” a subject about which he knew more than he let on. He would later be exposed as one of Britain’s most flamboyantly crooked politicians.
Another speaker was Halverson, who lectured to a five-man “core cell” of U.S. embassy personnel on “Infiltrating Secular Society with the Spirit of Christ.”8 It wasn’t a matter of proclaiming the gospel boldly; it was a trick of getting the heathen to fight your battles for you.
ROBINSON FAILED IN his succession bid; as would Halverson. Robinson’s mistake was to take the Fellowship’s internationalism too literally—far off in Asia, he failed to court Abram’s favor personally. When he swept in from the field, he’d regale rooms full of Fellowship men with his adventures, forgetting that his audiences were composed of politicians used to being the center of attention themselves. Robinson extended the Fellowship’s reach across Asia at a time when American power most wanted behind-the-scenes men in the Far East, but never understood that he also needed to be a behind-the-scenes man in Washington, too. The details of Doug Coe’s victory are murky—at the time, few suspected quiet Coe would be Abram’s heir—but Coe, alone, seems to have understood that in an organization that denies being an organization, power goes to the man least visibly concerned with pomp and circumstance. And yet Robinson
and Halverson still matter to the story of the Fellowship. In part because they remained significant players, representatives of American fundamentalism to government around the world. And in part because they illustrate the different streams feeding into Coe’s vision. Robinson was the public man, the character you put in the front of the room to tell stories. Halverson was more complicated.
Halverson’s story, like that of the Family’s, began in 1935, when he got off a bus in Hollywood fresh from North Dakota, where he’d grown up with the unlikely ambition of being an actor. Blandly handsome by small-town standards, in Los Angeles he hardly looked like movie star material: his lips were too full, his cheeks too chubby, his eyes too deeply set. He wasn’t bad looking, but he wasn’t Clark Gable, either. His strength was a certain gee-whiz sincerity, an earnestness augmented by intelligence. Dick Halverson wasn’t a good guy because he didn’t know any better; he was a good guy because he’d calculated the angles and concluded that decency was his best bet in this world.9
Thereafter, he pursued it mightily. In later years, Halverson would help build up one of the world’s largest relief agencies, World Vision, a Christian outfit that supplies food for the starving and medicine for the wounded and gospel tracts only to those who ask. Although it has long been plagued by accusations of serving as a CIA front, World Vision’s verifiable record is admirable—the sort of Christian effort to which Abram paid lip service and nothing more. But Halverson also helped build the Fellowship into a network of truly international scope, introducing the American Christ to any number of nations. Halverson, in other words, was an imperialist of the old school, bringing light to the natives and clearing the way for other men to extract a dollar. He was no hypocrite. He believed with all his heart he was helping, and he never thought too deeply about whom. Halverson loved public speaking, and he was good at it, too, invited to preach in pulpits around the world. He wrote popular books and mailed out newsletters and presided over a conservative Presbyterian church outside of Washington that was popular with politicians. In 1981, Ronald Reagan would make him Senate chaplain, the pinnacle of his career.10