Billy Graham
Don’t let the anti-Semitism on the Nixon tapes define him.
So how should we Jews remember the Rev. Billy Graham, who died today at 99 at his home in Montreat, N.C.?
As America’s pastor, Gallup’s most-admired American public figure, or closet anti-Semite?
Rev. Graham’s sharing of vile anti-Semitic stereotypes with President Nixon in 1972 did not endear him to Jewish collective memory. In secretly taped telephone conversation, when Nixon complained that Jews controlled the influential New York Times and Washington Post, Rev. Graham responded: “This stranglehold has to be broken, or the country is going to down the drain.” He invokes the pejorative term from Revelations — “synagogue of Satan.” Sure, say some, Rev. Graham apologized — not once but twice — but only because he was caught. His true colors confirm a popular Yiddish aphorism: “Scratch a goy (a non-Jew), uncover an anti-Semite.”
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