The Blob
The most unexpected early fruit of Abram’s prayer breakfasts
was The Blob, a 1958 B-movie about the creepi ng horrors of
com munism. “Indescribable . . . Indestructible! Nothi ng can stop
it!” warned the tagline. It is mindless glop f rom outer space. T he Blob
absorbs the residents of a small town, growing bigger, grosser, and
more ravenous until the townspeople discover they can defeat the
Blob by freezing it—the Cold War writ small and literal. The Blob
was the result of an unlikely collaboration between a screenwriter
named Kate Phillips and an evangelical m inister named Irvi n “ Shorty”
Yeaworth. The two met at the 1957 Presidential Prayer Breakfast.
Phillips, a former actress who’d appeared in forgotten lm s such as
Free, Blonde, and 21 and Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, wasn’t known for
her faith. She attended the Prayer Breakfast as a guest of a friend
from Islip, Long Island—probably Abram’s patron, Marian Aymar
Johnson, at whose Islip estate Abram did much of his planning.1 Phil-
lips was accustomed to Hollywood glamour, but she felt lost am id the
crowd of congressmen and business titans gathered for breakfast in a
ballroom of Washington’s May ower Hotel. “All of a sudden,” Phil-
lips later told a fan, “a chap came out of the hotel and said that some-
body had suggested he talk to me because I was a writer.”
The chap was Yeaworth, a di rector of “Christian education” lms
looking to subliminally broadcast his message into the mainstream.
Shorty had backi ng for a full-length science ction ick. The catch
was that it had to be “wholesome.” And as if by providence, here was
182 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
a screenwriter at a prayer breakfast. “I would like to have you be a
part of the picture,” Shorty declared, and a few days later he traveled
up to Phillips’s Long Island home to show o a two-pound co ee can
full of the blob stu that would come to serve as the Cold War’s most
ridiculous metaphor for communism.
If picturing the Red Army as a carnivorous mass of Jell-O was ab-
surd, the symbolism t the bigger concept of Co ld War, an amorphous
ght that absorbed ideological nuance as it grew bigger, grosser, and
more ravenous for the hearts, minds, and economies of two dueling
empires. Between the rebirth of fundamentalism in the 1930s and ’40s
and its emergence as a visible force during the Reagan years sits the
historical blob of the Cold War, an era as bewildering to modern minds
as any in American history. There is, to begin with, the question of
whether the United States won this war or the Soviet Union lost it. A
third school of thought wonders if both sides were losers. And then
there is the more vexing question of just what we mean by Cold War.
To today’s conservatives, it was a philosophical stance—better
dead than red—that resulted in “our bloodless victory.”2 For liberals
eager to reclaim a mantle of muscular progressivism, meanwhile,
Cold War refers to an abstract strategy of containment—as if the Cold
War didn’t explode into dozens of “regional” con icts strategized in
Moscow and Washington, “civil wars,” fought with the empi res’
weapons, that killed m illions. Most memorably, the dead, American
and otherwise, of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but also the
forgotten losses of the Shah’s Iran, Suharto’s Indonesia, Mobutu’s
“Zaire,” Pinochet’s Chile, Papa Doc’s Haiti, the United Fruit Com-
pany’s Guatemala, and many more. One could draw up just as long a
list to lay at the Krem lin’s door or Beijing’s, but it’s our own sins that
most require recollection, that fade to nostalgia in the sepia-toned
memories of both liberals and conservatives.
Even those terms—liberal and conservative—befuddle us. Which
was which, for instance, when Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson
in 1952 on a campaign promise of decreasing military spending, while
Stevenson boasted that “the strange alchemy of time has somehow con-
verted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country”?3
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 183
How do we categorize Cold Warriors such as Senator Mark Hat eld—a
Republican from O regon, vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and
staunch advocate of evangelical political power—versus his colleague
to the north, Senator Henry “ Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a “god-
less” Democrat whose relentless mil itarism inspired neoconservative
protégés such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the
Iraq War?
That the ideological spectrum in America more closely resembles
a Mobius strip, left and right twisting into one another, than it does a
radio dial is a basic truth of political history. But what of religious
history?4 What of the role of Christianity, and particularly that branch
of the faith dedicated to “fundamental” principles, whether they’re
those of Christ’s sovereignty over all, or of America’s divine destiny?
How did American fundamentalism intertwine with the new inter-
nationalism to create the DNA of a Cold War in which one of the
nation’s most militant commanders in chief—I am thinking here of
Kennedy, not Reagan—reduced the issue to one of a belief in God,
“ours,” versus the Soviets’ lack thereof?
The Christianity of American fundamentalism is a faith for futur-
ists, the sort of people who delight in imagining what is to come
next, even if it’s awful. World War II had changed the steady plod of
Christian futurism, quickened it. Christendom had at times raced
toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its
disposal—no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes
were higher in the new era, the enemy stronger. Fundamentalism
responded with great imagination, not just following the popular
trend of spotting ying saucers and aliens among us, but driving it.
The al iens among us were not green men from Mars; they were red,
at least on the inside, and they could be your neighbors. On the out-
side, they looked just like good Christian Americans. Many of them
were Christians, in fact, or so supposed the conservative m ind. By
the end of the decade, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would declare that
com munist stealth operatives, “schooled in atheistic perversity,” had
184 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
made Christian pulpits a main objective—and tool—of their propa-
ganda. A “ deadly radioactive cloud of Marxism-Leninism,” he preached,
was fogging America’s liberal houses of worship.5
Hoover kept les on liberal churches; Abram kept friendlier les
on Hoover, a man who seemed to naturally speak the language of
holy cause- and-e ect Abram had re ned before the war. “The crimi-
nal is the product of spiritual starvation,” Hoover was quoted in a
pamphlet Abram saved, The J. Edgar Hoover You Ought to Know. The
pamphlet’s author was an ally of Abram’s, Edward L. R. Elson, a
mainline Presbyterian whose paranoia placed him at the far end of
the religious spectrum. Elson joined another friend of Abram’s,
Charles Wesley Lowry, to create the Foundation for Religious Ac-
tion in the Social and Civil Order, and Lowry, in turn, joined Abram
in behind-the- scenes council of upper-crust Christian conservative
leaders known as “the Twelve.”
Before the war, such initiatives were the stu of the fringe, disaf-
fected Babbits, America Firsters. After the war, they were main-
stream. In the 1950s, the soldiers of Christ didn’t wear armor; they
wore cu inks. Consider this convention of Fellowship worthies,
gathered in a hotel lobby for a group portrait. On the left is Abram in
his customary double- breasted suit, lapels like bat wings, his silk ker-
chief neatly folded in his breast pocket and a slim leather Bible spread
open in his right hand. To his right stands Billy Graham, his famous
blue eyes glowering between his rock jaw and a wave of blond hair,
almost good looking enough to play a gun ghter. And rising between
them stands a fascinating character named Kenneth M. Crosby.
Crosby was literally our man in Havana, or at least one of them.
He’d been a spy throughout Latin America during the war. O cially
retired at its end, he took over Merrill Lynch’s Cuban operation in
1946 and stayed until 1959, when Fidel Castro drove out the dictator
Fulgencio Batista, reporting all the while back to U.S. intelligence, a
happy double posting which also allowed him time to set up prayer
cells for Abram. His “ Havana Group” consisted of American embassy
personnel, representatives from American banks and the United
Fruit Company. Cuban sugar cartels boasted openly in the Havana
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 185
Pos t of the prayer cell’s use as a lobbying tool, noting that one of the
International Christian Leadership o cers, Congressman Brooks
Hays, returned home from a spiritual session in Cuba ready to ght
for Cuban sugar in the House Foreign A airs Committee. Crosby
was even more loyal to the regime, serving as an i ntermediary be-
tween Batista’s Palacio Presidencial and American businessmen in
Havana and New Orleans.
At the time, eve n Christianity Today considered Fidel preferable to
the profoundly corrupt Batista.6 But to Crosby, Castro was “another
Hitler.” It was Crosby, brie ng CIA director Allen Dulles, who laid
one of the rst bricks in the Cold War construction of the island na-
tion as one of America’s greatest enemies. These were the days of
citizen soldiers, spooks and “psyops” commandos, and, for the rst time
in American history, preachers on the front lines. Front lines of what?
“Total cold war,” Eisenhower would call it, a battle not of bullets—
although plenty of those would y—but of ideas, many of which
wouldn’t.7 Against communism’s promise of “People’s Democracy,”
for instance, Madison Avenue, at the behest of Eisenhower, coined
“People’s Capitalism,” a catchphrase that somehow failed to inspire
even the Americans who practiced it, much less Soviets supposed to
be seduced by it.8
Preachers provided the ammo capitalism couldn’t manufacture.
“Your government,” one of Abram’s British protégés wrote, “ is aware
of the need of much greater propaganda to Rus sia and her satellites if
we are to control the Communist menace.” The Brit hoped to obtain
Abram’s help with a plan to smuggle New Testaments into the East-
ern Bloc under diplomatic cover. The aim was “to place dynam ite
just where it is needed.” 9 Bible smuggling boomed in the 1950s, but
very few e orts to sneak Western wisdom into the Soviet bloc made
as much impact on their intended targets as on the West itself, which
reveled in its crusades. Some of the schemes were truly quixotic: the
use of hot- air balloons to drop lea ets on Albania, for i nstance, an
e ort that probably did more to spread the American love of UFO-
logy than the Cold War double- dogma of God and private property.10
Such is one of the overlooked legacies of the Cold War: the weirding
186 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
of American fu ndamentalism. Abram’s was a space- age faith, thrill-
ing to the vibrations of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” and throb-
bi ng to the conviction that God would guide our missiles, if only we
could conform our national will to His. That was the stated goal,
repeated over and over: conformity. Conform or die. Nuclear anni-
hilation, should it occur, would be the result of rebellion, the “e ect
of the tragic choice of disobe dience.”
Abram’s religion was sleek and powerful, an aerodynamic update
on the clumsy bombs dropped by fundamentalism’s old angry ranters.
Two of Abram’s “ eld representatives,” Dr. Bob Pierce and J. Edwi n
Orr—both to achieve fame of their own as major twentieth-century
revivalists —coached young Billy Graham in the mores and manners
of overseas operations and educated society. Harald Bredesen, another
eld representative who’d go on to build a powerful ministry of his
own, performed a di erent service for a youthful Pat Robertson,
teaching the senator’s son a fol ksy appeal that would complement his
political acumen. One Abram understudy, Dr. Elton Trueblood, made
a career of packaging militant fundamentalism in the language of
country club banal, churning out best sel lers that con ated spiritual
war with Cold War; he also drew a paycheck from the United States
Information Agency, for which he headed up the O ce of Religious
Information. On his watch “spiritual roots”—Christian ones, that
is—as the foundation of American democracy became government
policy, channeled through private organizations so that the o ce’s
plans would not look l ike a “propaganda gimmick.”
Abram’s closest ally in the Senate, Frank Carlson, Republican of
Kansas, coined the Fellowship’s slogan, “Worldwide Spiritual O en-
sive.” Carlson was a farmer from Cloud County, Kansas, who rst
made a national name for himself in 1936 when as a young congress-
man he double-crossed his patron, Governor Alf Landon, by ripping
into the New Deal as a subversion of American principles. Landon
had hoped to pitch his policies as a more moderate version of FDR’s
vision, and here was his protégé, declaring the sitting president un-
American. Not that Landon had a prayer, anyway; he became the
losingest presidential candidate in American history. But Carlson
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 187
prospered. Over the next decade, he rebuilt the Landon machine
under his own name. He took the governor’s o ce in 1946, and
when three years later one of Kansas’s senators died in o ce, Carl-
son inserted as a placeholder a unky who then dutifully stepped
aside when Carlson was ready to return to Washington in 1950 as a
member of the nation’s most exclusive club.
In the early days of his career, Carlson cultivated a myth of him-
self as a modern-day Cincinnatus who entered politics only at the be-
hest of a delegation of smal l businessmen that found him literally
tilling his elds and begged him to help stop Dictator Roosevelt—the
“destroyer of human rights and freedom,” as Carlson called him. By
then, Carlson was chairman of the Interstate Oil Compact and he had
denounced not only the New Deal but also Hoover’s business-friendly
policies before it as an “insidious attack” on “free enterprise” —by
which he meant government subsidies for Big Oil.11
And yet Carlson enjoyed a reputation as a moderate and even, in
the surreal political landscape of the 1950s, a “liberal” Republican. His
face was tanned and leathery, anked by white wings of hair and
almost-pointed ears, framed by arched eyebrows and a broad, lipless
mouth, all of it centered on a nose the shape of a mushroom; he looked
like a sunburned Bela Lugosi. It was hard to imagine this comically
featured man as an ideologue in the mold of hammerhead Joe McCar-
thy of Wisconsin. Carlson was a backslapper, an arm gripper. A Baptist
teetotaler himself, he presided over the end of “Dry Kansas” and joined
two other Fellowship senators in raising funds for a Republican club in
Washington that would feature the best cigars and the nest Scotch
whiskey. He was a Republican wise man, “sagacious,” according to the
columnist Drew Pearson, “the ‘No Deal’ Dealer,” in the words of an-
other pundit. It was Carlson who in 1951 coined for his friend and fel-
low Kansan Ike the double-duty slogan of “No Deal.” Eisenhower, then
the electoral underdog even though he was the most popular man in
America, meant that he wouldn’t horse-trade with crooked local GOP
organizations, most of which were in the back pocket of “Mr. Republi-
can,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the presumed front-runner. But the
slogan also implied a none-too-subtle rebuke to FDR’s New Deal and
188 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Truman’s more conservative Fair Deal. No Deal meant more than the
“rollback” of progressivism, as Carlson claimed, a conventional conser-
vative assault on social welfare. By No Deal, Carlson and Eisenhower
meant no politics. That is, they hoped to capitalize on Eisenhower’s
popularity as a victorious general, incorruptible in peacetime, to replay
the Cincinnatus story on a national scale.
Carlson spread the rumor that he and a shadow cabinet of more se-
nior senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts were push-
ing Ike for the White House without Ike’s permission. Eisenhower
privately wondered, meanwhile, whether it would be legal to win the
nominations of both political parties. It wasn’t that Eisenhower tran-
scended ideology—history has revealed him to be one of the most
masterful politicians of the postwar era—but rather that he believed
that he could best achieve his goals by pretending not to have any.
Eisenhower was the great literate of midcentury politics, the
man who knew how to parse a moment, to respond to the masses as
if they were all individuals, each unique in his sameness. Eisenhower
was a PR man; he had learned on the battle eld the secrets of psyops,
of psychological warfare. “Don’t be afraid of that term,” he advised
the voters. He was a bridge player; he knew how to blu and win. He
blu ed the Republicans, in whose traditional ranks he did not prop-
erly belong, and the Democrats, who, having lost thei r chance to
nominate him, dismissed him as an amateur. Eisenhower knew what
Americans were looking for and he let them see it in him, a hero both
grand and ordinary. “The sort of prince who could be ordered from
a Sears Roebuck catalogue,” as Saul Bellow described him.
In 1952, Carlson and a small group of like-minded Republicans
put i n their order, and Ike delivered. The ri ngleader was ostensibly
Senator Lodge, but Carlson ran Ike’s Washington campaign head-
quarters, and his sidekick and former senatorial substitute, Henry
Darby, ran the nominal HQ on the second oor of the Jayhawk Hotel
back i n Topeka. Carlson’s abandoned patron Alf Landon brie y tried
to swing his state to Taft, but Carl son e ectively smeared Taft—and
Landon, his more moderate former mentor—as reactionaries none-
theless too soft for “total cold war.” Carlson had laid the groundwork
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 189
for his new middle-ground reputation the year before. And he did it
with the help of Abram.
In April 1951, Abram enlisted ICL president Ed Cabaniss, a
wealthy manufacturer, to round up some businessmen interested in
the Idea who could help create an advisory prayer cell for every gov-
ernor who wanted one, to be organized by Carlson. Cabaniss, a hold-
over from the pre–1950s Fellowship, was an Old Guard conservative.
He had a V-shaped head, a tiny jaw, and a giant brow; he looked like
a praying mantis, and his a ect was that of one as well, slow and
chilly. For his latest undertaki ng, Abram wanted more dynamic men.
He speci cally requested that two of the most e ective red hunters
in his circle be included: Howard Coonley, the former president of
the National Association of Manufacturers who’d helped win him ac-
cess to big business during the 1940s, and Merwin K. Hart, a wealthy
member of his board of directors who recruited businessmen for the
Fellowship through his pet project, the National Econom ic Council.
The council was little more than letterhead, a desk in the Empire
State Building, and Hart himself, a goggle-eyed, tuxedoed blue blood
with a fringe of hair around his narrow skull and more than a hint of
fascism around his politics. “ If you nd any organization containing
the word ‘democracy,’ ” Hart declared, “ it is probably directly or in-
directly a liated with the Com munist Party.” Hart wasn’t kidding;
e ective in his deregulation crusades, he was never able to achieve
one of his fondest ambitions, the disenfranchisement of the poor,
whom he considered spiritually un t for voti ng.
The war had made Hart toxic for a spell, si nce unlike Lindbergh,
who’d abandoned his own fascist incl inations to y for the United
States, Hart never repented for his prewar fascist position. But the
Cold War changed everything, Cabaniss wrote Abram. “It seems to
me there is a growing proportion of the public, particularly in the
political world, who are coming to a realization that Merwin Hart is
not so far ‘o the beam’ in his thinking.” The business world was
coming around, too; Hart counted among the supporters of his Na-
tional Economic Council’s program of God and laissez-faire capital-
ism top men from Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors.
190 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
This theology of the dollar was not quite as cynical as it sounds.
Abram was expanding his Europe an operation into Greece’s upper
crust, an experience that was teaching him to re ne the stealth evan-
gelism he’d learned in Germany. First came capitalism; then came
Christ. Capitalism, preached his friend Norman Grubb, was the
wedge. “ICL,” he commented to Abram, “is a bold attempt to reach a
certain unreachable class with Christ, and is therefore not primarily
concerned with presenting itself as sound in a ‘fundamental’ doctri-
nal basis; it is after sh who might refuse the bait if this fundamental
doctrinal basis was aunted in front of them.”12
Hart, Coonley, and Cabaniss were to line up nancial backers for
the group (who, as it turned out, agreed to raise $100,000 for the proj-
ect); Abram would explain the Idea; and the public face of the initiative
would be two former governors who’d made the leap to the big leagues,
Carlson and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. Kerr was a Democrat,
thus blunting the growing concern within the Fellowship that it ap-
peared to be simply a subsidiary of the Republican Party, and he was
Carlson’s kind of Democrat—“the chief of the wheelers- and-dealers,”
according to the journal ist Milton Viorst, “a self-made millionaire who
freely and publicly expressed the conviction that any man in the Senate
who didn’t use his position to make money was a sucker.”
Like Carlson, Kerr was an oilman. Or, more precisely, oil’s man.
He knew a good investment when he saw one; he sent Abram a check
for $50 0. Other senators fell in li ne: Robertson of Virgi nia contrib-
uted a fund-raising letter, Republican Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont
gave $200 and the use of his name, and Pat McCarran of Nevada,
McCarthy’s Democratic m irror, wrote asking what would be most
helpful—money or contacts (or both). That fall, the president of the
ultraright William Volker Fund chipped in $500 from his own
pocket. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until
then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in
America by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom. First published
in the United States by the University of Chicago Press, the book ap-
peared in shortened versions produced by Reader’s Digest and Look
magazine, which illustrated Hayek’s argument that any attempt at
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 191
“central planning” (including FDR-style government regulation of
big busi ness) would send a society down a “road to serfdom”—and
mass murder along the lines of Hitler and Stalin—from which there
was no return. Hayek’s economic ideas were considerably more
complex than the uses to which they were put, but as understood by
the American public —and by Abram, who recoiled from serfdom
even as he embraced what he happily termed slavery to God and his
markets—they seemed to lend a scienti c i mprimatur to the Man-
ichaean worldview of the country’s most rabid red hunters. A decade
later, the Volker Fund would hire Rousas John Rushdoony, a theolo-
gian who was to the far right of fundamentalism what Hayek was to
economic conservatism; it was Rushdoony who helped marry the
two with extensive writings on theonomy, a jargony term for what
Abram’s descendants would come to call biblical capitalism.
Both theonomy and biblical capitalism suggest an equal yoke be-
tween scripture and currency, but there can be l ittle doubt about
which was the driving force behind this new plan to surround gover-
nors with prayer warriors vetted by Abram and his friends in corporate
America. And yet it was Carlson, who disliked even acknowledging
the existence of dollars, who quietly climbed Abram’s chain of com-
mand. The following spring, he took time o from Eisenhower’s
still- uno cial campaign to travel to The Hague, where Holland’s Queen
Wilhelm ina anointed him as the new chair of International Council for
Christian Leadership, the overseas division of Abram’s ICL composed
at that point mainly of Germans who didn’t want to talk about their
pasts and French businessmen just as eager to smooth over history in
the service of pro ts. Three fellow GOP congressmen, al l Abram dis-
ciples, accompanied Carlson. They ew on the public tab, and the trip
occasioned sharp questions from the press. Why had the secretary of
defense given the four use of a U.S. military plane for private travel?
The ICLer’s mission, said a spokesman for the secretary, was in “ direct
relationship to the national interest.”13
At The Hague, Queen Wilhelmina, a strong monarch famous for
bypassing Holland’s parliamentary system,14 presided over this Amer-
ican interest, and the inner circle of the Fellowship’s trans-Atlantic
192 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
organization elected Carlson their new chairman. Carl son looked
like a stand-in, though, for the general running the Allied command
in Paris. That seemed to be as Carlson wanted it; he was in Holland
to recruit allies for an American campaign. Besides Abram, there
were industrialists who’d line up behind Eisenhower, including the
automobile titan Paul G. Ho man, who’d become one of Ike’s eco-
nomic advisers; a pair of ultraright congressmen to shore up Ike’s
conservative ank; and, in addition to GOP heavies such as Senators
Wiley and Flanders, a delegation of “Dixiecrats,” Southern Demo-
crats to the right of most Republicans. That summer, Carlson declared
that Eisenhower would contest the traditional ly sol id-Democratic
South, a quixotic quest that anticipated Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
by more than a decade.
Far more troublesome to Eisenhower than the Democratic South,
though, was a singular m idwestern Republican, the de facto party
boss, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. To the uninitiated, Taft did not
appear be a form idable obstacle. He was a dull speaker, unmemora-
ble in appearance, indi erent to the public. But no politician could
claim a more perfect pedigree: grandson of a secretary of war, son of
a president, rst in his class at Yale and Harvard Law. “The best m ind
in Washington,” went a popular Democratic jab, “until he makes it
up.” And yet he played the part of a common man. Not li ke Roo se-
velt, who’d disingenuously claimed to be a farmer, but rather, in the
name of an ill-de ned middle class —in reality, the managerial class,
small businessmen and second bananas who dreamed one day of be-
ing bosses themselves —that would become a template for conserva-
tive “populism” long after Taft’s name was forgotten.
If Taft was hardly just another Rotarian-on-the-make, he truly
was in every sense a provincial man, and proud of that fact. A son of
Ohio beholden to neither the New England aristocracy nor the solid
South, wary of Wall Street, contemptuous of Europe and its wars, he
was a conservative at the last time in American life when such views
connoted a kind of paci sm. His enemies murmured of fascist sym-
pathies because he did not want to ght Hitler, but it was war itself
that he loathed. When World War II ended and the Cold War began,
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 193
he opposed it even more strongly, opposed the draft and opposed
military spending and opposed what he feared, correctly, was the
com ing age of American empire, an era in which the United States
would wage the wars the old colonial powers could no longer a ord.
In 1952, Taft was known as the champion of the “Old Right,” an
anachronism in the day of the atom. He was the engineer of the New
Deal’s deconstruction, the author of the 1947 Taft- Hartley Act which
spelled the end of labor’s brief reign as the de nitive power in American
life. Taft- Hartley reduced labor to an “interest group”—eliminated the
vision of solidarity as a force that gave people meaning. Maybe Taft
dreamed that with labor rebound, the nation’s economic life would re-
turn to its pre- Depression condition. But that world was as long gone as
the fantasy of the United States as an island, immune from the troubles
of other nations. A New Right, New Liberalism, New Middle were ris-
ing, shaped by the war and by Europe, by the hunger of an economy that
had grown fat on weaponry, by the idea of totalitarianism. Total Cold
War was coming. Ideology, technology, and—overlooked by the man-
darin historians of the period—theology were converging.
Taft had the support of the old GOP local party operations, but
he did not have God and he did not have Fran k Carlson. He would
not recruit public piety as a banner for his campaign. His lieutenants
were not wily; they were hedgehogs, nudging Taft’s Old Right views
along, decrying the possibility of a “garrison state” as if the Cold War
hadn’t already led the United States to embrace a permanent m ilitary
footing, spiritual warfare thinly secularized as “psyops” and arms
races against a godless enemy. Such was the method of foxes. Carlson
slinked from delegate to delegate behind the scenes, the “ ‘No Deal’
dealer” smili ng and speaking of spiritual things, one nation under
God, unity, a general (not a politician!), never speaking ill of old
“Mr. Republican” but prom isi ng patronage to those who’d abandon
him. “The Kansan is clearly the man to see if you want an ‘under-
standing,’ ” cooed an admiri ng reporter.15
At the Republican convention in Chicago, enough delegates “ca-
ressed by personal letters, wined & dined at party shindigs, promised
a secure future by politicos,” reached such “understandings” with the
194 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
general’s lieutenants and sold out their man to the new order.16 To
the populist Right, the activists who’d sent delegates to Chicago to
stop Ike from entangling America i n more of Europe’s troubles, the
convention took on “mythic proportions,” a stab in the back of con-
servatism by Ike and his internationalists.17 Carlson, as conservative
as Taft, understood that anger—and how to turn it to his man’s ad-
vantage. Jesus, Carlson believed, had been a “psyops” man like Ike,
and Christ and the general both taught the same lesson: it was the
spi rit, not the material, that mattered. Emotions, not facts. Carlson
and Eisen hower did not need to crush the anger in Taft’s supporters;
they only had to redirect it toward international communism.
After Eisenhower routed Adlai Stevenson—the electoral vote
was 442 to 89, with Ike poaching four states of the Old Confederacy—
Carlson set about ensuring Taft’s loyalty to the new regime. His
method, though, left some wondering about Eisen hower’s loyalty to
the broad middle ground he’d staked out in his campaign. First,
Carlson brokered a breakfast between his man and Taft, at which
Taft agreed to stand aside while Eisenhower waged Cold War abroad
if the general would commit to a war on the New Deal at home. Taft
had decided that if he could not be president, he would like to be
majority leader; after all, he and Ike shared a distaste for organized
labor, indi erence to civil rights, and a rm conviction that capital-
ism constituted a natural law more certain than the physics of nuclear
ssion. The next afternoon, Carlson met with Taft after church and
cut a deal. His—and, implicitly, Ike’s—backing for Senate majority
leader, a betrayal of promises already o ered to Senator Styles Bridges
of New Hampshire. “An amazing political feat,” the columnist Drew
Pearson wrote of the Taft revival. “Carlson sold the idea.”18
The idea Carlson sold was the Idea: Abram’s dream of a big tent
conservatism, a political philosophy that denied the reality of the politi-
cal and disdained “philosophy” as the province of eggheads. In a Sep-
tember 1952 mass mailing, Abram had directed his two-hundred-plus
prayer cells across the nation to devote themselves to spreading “alert-
ness to the right choice and vote in the November elections.” God, he
wrote, had spoken these words to him: “Your mission is to concentrate
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 195
on a few men in leadership capacity.” One of his new lieutenants, a
Lithuanian named Karlis Leyasmeyer who claimed to have escaped a
death sentence at the hands of the Soviets (with the help of the Nazis),
added that such men could become a “sixth column,” the secret coun-
terweapon with which the establishment could ght communism. The
sixth column would transcend pol itics. In a voter’s guide prepared for
the state of Washington by Abram’s men—a tactic that would be re-
peated decades later by the Christian Coalition—God tapped both
Democrats and Republicans. His slate, however, was of su cient po-
litical conformity for a bipartisan co alition to raise charges of fascism.
But the ‘f’ word had lost its power. Most of Abram’s candidates won.
“Red” was the new brown, against which all Christian soldiers must
ght together. One God, one nation, one ideology.
During the winter following Eisenhower’s election, the United
States did not even have an ambassador in Moscow. It was in that par-
ticularly cold season that Abram—with the help of Carlson, Billy
Graham, and Eisenhower himself—made his master move, follow-
ing the president’s inauguration with what would become an annual
political ritual, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later to be renamed
the National Prayer Breakfast). Not for Abram the clash of politics
or even the intellectual battle of theology. His ambition for the
breakfast—hosted by Conrad Hilton, presided over by Carlson,
blessed by Graham, and sancti ed by Ike’s blandest speech yet—was
that it serve as a chance to lop o the left end of the political spec-
trum and cauterize the wound. “Their di erences,” wrote the Chris-
tian Herald of the several hundred assembled politicians, Democrats
and Republicans, “are fused into a striki ng sim ilarity.”
Billy Graham had been summoned to the Eisenhower campaign
by Carlson. The senator had concluded that the young preacher
would be an asset, especially given that some Democrats were actu-
ally oating the notion that it was Republ icans who were soft on
com munism and cold toward Christ.19 Although Graham himself
was a registered Democrat, he had decided for Eisenhower before
196 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
the general even announced, and had prayed on the matter with one
of his supporters, an oil baron named Sid Richardson. (This period of
Graham’s career might be called his oil phase. In 1953, with backing
from yet another oil baron, he would release a feature lm called
Oiltown U.S.A., a tribute to the free market’s ability to foster the vir-
tuous exploitation of God-given resources.) Carlson called Graham
to the Chicago GOP convention for an o -the-record meeting. “Carl-
son had sold Eisenhower on the idea that I could contribute a reli-
gious note to his campaign speeches,” Graham would recall.
“Frankly,” the preacher told the general, “I don’t think the Amer-
ican people would be happy with a president who didn’t belong to
any church or even attend one.” (In fact, there have been several.)
“As soon as the election is over,” Eisenhower promised, “I’ll join
a church.”
Graham wanted more. He’d been talking with Abram about a
Presidential Prayer Breakfast, a parachurch ritual they hoped would
settle the question once and for all of whether the United States was
a Christian nation and the New Testament, not the Constitution, its
ultimate authority. Abram had long dreamed of such an event, a pub-
lic dedication of the governing class to the service of the Christian
God, but no president previous to Eisenhower would cooperate. It
was Graham, according to his own curiously im modest account,
who made it happen. He arranged with Conrad Hilton (to whom
he’d been introduced by Carlson) to sponsor the event, and he gave
the main address—at most of the rst fteen annual breakfasts. But
Carlson was Abram’s pipeline to the White House, and Abram’s invi-
tation to the president-elect went through the No Deal Dealer. Ike
declined. “He did not want to set a pre ce dent,” Graham recalled. But
Graham i ntervened, and Ike called Carlson over to say that he would
show, after all. There were debts to be paid. Eisenhower was the rst
twentieth-century Republican to come to power in part through an
alliance of populist evangelicals (led by Graham) and of elite funda-
mentalism. Now Graham and Carlson wanted their return.20
“The only one thing,” Ike warned Carlson, “let’s not have any tele-
vision or radio around.” That suited the man to whom Carlson reported
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 197
this news. Abram did not much care what the masses saw or did not
see. He was playing to an audience of power; “up and out” went his
spiritual broadcast. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was wary of advertising
his foray into the no-man’s-land between church and state. “You can
tell the Cabinet I’ll be there,” Eisenhower instructed Carlson. “I sup-
pose that’s tantamount to telling them to come.” Come, they did, and
with the exception of those tapped for Abram’s table, they found their
own seating. There were no arrangements, Abram boasted; all were
left to fend for themselves, “regardless of rank,” just as in the Kingdom
of God—supposing, that is, that such a kingdom were inhabited only
by men of high rank, the powerful pretending at egalitarianism within
the con nes of the most exclusive breakfast club in the land.
There were 4 00 such men at the rst Prayer Breakfast. It was
8:00 a.m., Thursday, February 5. The theme was “Government Un-
der God.” Abram wore his trademark bow tie. He was sixty-seven
that year, and he would soon su er a heart attack, and soon Stalin
would die, and Kinsey would publish his report on Sexual Behavior in
the Human, and Fortune magazine would crow over a “spiritual awak-
ening” among top businessmen. At the May ower, Conrad Hilton
hung above the dais a painting of Uncle Sam on his knees, “not beaten
there by the hammer and sickle” but submitting America to Christ, a
sentiment the Senate’s chaplain admired. “There are signs,” he ob-
served of the pai nting-i n-lieu of a cross, “that once again, as in the
former days of the Nation’s true glory, America is bending its knees.” 21
Printed beneath Uncle Sam was a prayer of Hi lton’s own composi-
tion. Hilton was a Catholic, but he thril led most to the religion of
anticommunism. “Be swift to save us, dear God, before the darkness
falls.” There was no darkness i n the May ower, only bacon. Abram
presented Eisenhower’s cabinet to God. “Save them from self-
deception, conceit, and the folly of independence of Thee, oh God.”
Eisenhower mumbled up to the podium, the pulpit.
He said, “Al l free government is rmly founded in a deeply felt
religious faith.” And then, “As long as you feed me grits and sausage,
everything will be all right.” These were the twin doctrines of a
prosperity doctrine.
198 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“There is the sound,” observed the Senate chaplain, swept away
by the deep spirituality of these words, “of a going in the tops of the
mulberry trees,” a supernatural sound. He thought it might be Eisen-
hower’s prayers, winging up to heaven like B–52s.
Twenty years later, Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, would explain
his pre deces sor’s calm at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast: “It is only
one-tenth of one percent of the iceberg,” he’d say. “[It] doesn’t give a
true picture of what is going on.” 22 The Fellowship’s true work was
always both great and small, an accumulation of symbolic gestures
and actual legislation. Sentiment and policy cohered into a religiously
motivated movement, mostly Republican but also Democratic, that ab-
sorbed politicians and ordinary businessmen into its mass so smoothly
that the townspeople never noticed; never rallied to resist or to even
question the growing blob of political fundamentalism. The Fellow-
ship, wrote one of Abram’s eld representatives, “should be primarily
an organism and not an organization.”
“The idea of a Christian lobbyist program m ight well emanate
through the Breakfast Groups,” one of Abram’s original Seattle broth-
ers wrote him. It’s worth noting that the “Christian” issues of the day
were not pornography or abortion; they were surveillance and weap-
ons, the perceived need for more of both. Abram’s correspondent
wanted “more unity on civil defense” —read, anticommunism—“and
foreign policy.” Abram wrote back to say that he’d already moved the
Fellowship beyond anything so crass and li mited as a lobby. In the
1960s, it began distributing con dential memos to involved members
of Congress on its progress around the world. The memos stressed
that “the group, as such, never takes any formal action, but individu-
als who participate in the group through their initiative have made
possible the activities mentioned.” The Fellowship was not a con-
spiracy; it was a catechism, its questions asked in the privacy of
Abram’s prayer cells and answered in the public arena.
In 1954, “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, an
initiative sponsored in the Senate by Homer Ferguson, a Republican
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 199
ICL board member, and nanced by ICLer Clement Stone, and “In
God We Trust” was added to the nation’s currency by a bill spon-
sored by a Dixiecrat congressman named Charles E. Bennett, also a
member of the Fellowship’s inner circle.23 Ben nett, a sel f-styled eth-
ics crusader, saw himself as a small-government man; God and the
dollar would redeem the nation, i f only Congress would unshackle
them. “Congress can’t remake the soul of America,” he’d say, a no-
tion he evidently thought justi ed his opposition to civil rights.24 It
was Bennett who prayed the opening prayers at Abram’s second
Presidential Prayer Breakfast that February, at which Supreme Court
chief justice Earl Warren—then still a conservative—declared that
separation of church and state was ne, so long as “men of rel igious
faith” were i n charge of a country he described as “a Christian land,
governed by Christian principles.”
That same year, Abram’s old ally Alexander Wiley, now chai r of
the Senate Foreign Relations Com mittee as wel l as the upper house’s
weekly prayer meeting, decided to extend those principles south-
ward. He declared a democratically elected government in Guate-
mala a front for communist invasion and quietly green-lighted U.S.
participation in its overthrow, an action that culminated in a ticker-
tape parade in New York City for the dictator installed in its place by
America, and a banquet in his honor at Hilton’s Waldorf-Astoria.25
And that year a Vietnamese Catholic named Ngo Dinh Diem,
“directly and personally aided by God,” by his own account, came to
America to appeal to a nation i n the grip of religious revival for its
support in a ght against godless communism. A year later, Eisen-
hower obliged, installing Diem’s Christian—and profoundly corrupt—
regime over a Buddhist nation when the French lost their hold, the
rst great step toward the American war in Southeast Asia that Rob-
ert Taft had feared. Wiley, a former Taft- style conservative trans-
formed by Abram’s Christ and Ike’s Cold War into a militant
internationalist, was the president’s point man in the Senate, bully-
ing liberals and conservatives alike into backing “ hard and fast mili-
tary commitments” to South Vietnam, no questions asked.26
Nineteen fty-four was also the year that several Fellowship
200 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
brothers steered Joe McCarthy o the national stage. It was a matter of
politics, not ideology; Tailgunner Joe—raw, red-nosed, thick- browed,
uncouth, uncontrolled, hungering Joe —made anticommunism look
low- class.
McCarthy’s downfall and Ike’s disdain for him have been chronicled
at great length elsewhere. Less noticed was Eisenhower’s careful use of
McCarthy during his campaign. Carlson was the middleman. “I fully
expect that Senator McCarthy will be speaking vigorously for the
ticket,” Carlson told the press in September 1952. McCarthy did so,
lashing out at Ike’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, as surrounded by com-
munist sympathizers. Weapon deployed. Mission accomplished. “Sen.
Frank Carlson of Kansas,” the press dutifully reported, “commented
that the General did not owe anything to McCarthy for the speech, and
was still a ‘no deal man.’ ”27 After the election, the press assumed that
Carlson would be rewarded for his services with a cabinet post. Instead,
Carlson stayed in the Senate of his own volition, where he chaired a
seemingly obscure subcommittee on civil service employees. It was a
job that allowed him to quietly purge government of far more “security
risks”—most of them guilty of no more heinous a crime than loyalty to
the New Deal—than McCarthy had ever dreamed of, thousands erased
from the rolls through backroom bureaucratic maneuvers.
Carlson also served on the special committee appointed to
consider McCarthy’s censure after he went too far by slinging mud at
other senators. But the man who rst wrote the resolution to cen-
sure was Carlson’s pre deces sor as president of the Fellowship, Sena-
tor Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont. Flanders was a genteel Republican,
an engi neer, an industrialist, a banker. His wife collected New En-
gland folk songs. Smooth-domed and whiskered, his spectacles slip-
ping down his nose and his pipe in hand, he looked like a professor
and was sometimes mistaken for a liberal. But his record was as right-
wing as many of the Senate’s more outspoken rebrands. In 1954,
the year he moved to censure McCarthy, he revived an old funda-
mentalist favorite: an amendment to the Constitution that would
have rewritten the United States’ founding document to declare,
“This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 201
Christ.” And yet, because of his resolution against raving McCarthy,
he is remembered as a sane man in paranoid times, footnoted in his-
tories of the Cold War as one who stood up for common sense.
Only the radical journal ist I. F. Stone perceived otherwise. Flan-
ders, he wrote in 1954, did not challenge McCarthy’s paranoia but
rather his e ectiveness in its promulgation. “To doubt the power of
the devil, to question the existence of witches,” Stone wrote follow-
ing Flanders’s ostensibly heroic gesture, is
to read oneself out of respectable society, brand oneself a
heretic, to incur suspicion of bei ng oneself i n league with the
powers of evil. So all the ghters against McCarthyism are
impelled to adopt its premises . . . The country is in a bad
way indeed when as feeble and hysterical a speech [as Flan-
ders’] 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 pro ts.” 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 coun-
tries are bei ng taken over.”28
This last, si ngular 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 Eisen-
hower believed it should be reserved for the construction of empire.
The ethos of Abram’s “Worldwide Spiritual O ensive” 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” Eisen-
hower himself would lament at the end of his presidency—embraced
Abram’s Idea of strength through spiritual conformism, al lowing
prayer cells to proliferate within the Pentagon and signing o on a
202 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Fellowship project called “Militant Liberty,” developed by a fundamen-
talist propagandist on Abram’s payroll named John C. Broger. Broger,
also an ill-de ned “consultant” on the Pentagon payroll, was promoted
to the Department of Defense’s O ce of Information and Education, a
post from which he’d control the Pentagon’s propaganda on more
than 1,00 0 military radio and television stations and in 2,000 news-
papers for almost three decades. In 1958, Abram made him a vice
president of the Fellowship, bringing Broger’s propaganda to the elites
even th e Pentagon couldn’t reach. “Th e seed,” Br oger would say, speak-
ing 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 guerril-
las in World War II. In December 1945, he turned those talents to-
ward 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 rst 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 y over China, Vietnam, Cambodia. In
1950, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, a zealous Presbyterian, asked for
a brie ng; 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 blue-
print 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 gol ng with the admiral and i ntroduce him to General
Motors CEO Charlie Wilson, about to become Ike’s defense secre-
tary.31 In 1953, with Wilson’s sponsorship, Radford came in from
the islands to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta , and a year
later he brought Broger to join him. By then Broger was working for
Abram. The adm iral and the preacher bankrolled Broger’s ideologi-
cal c rusade.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 203
A statement of its goals can be found in the Fellowship’s archives:
the recruitment of “ indoctri nated personnel who will form nucleus
groups for the implementation of . . . the highest concepts of free-
dom, whether socially acceptable or not.”32 By highest concepts of free-
dom, 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 lm clips which, through a series of unconnected images, im-
plied that Abram’s old foe, the union organiz er Harry Bridges, was
behi nd a plot to violently assault the House Un-American Activities
Com mittee. 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 commu-
nists bent on taking over the m inds of American teenagers.33
Operation Abolition was a bust; even the most ardent red hunters
fou nd 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 u nable to furnish an acceptable compre-
hension of existence.”34
If O peration Abolition was aborted, Broger had better luck with his
other lm ventures. Early on, he managed to recruit more talented
collaborators. Some of the most talented in America, in fact: the di-
rector 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 guer-
rilla warfare in occupied Europe; Cooper had fought Pancho Vil la in
Mexico and own against Germany i n World War I; and John Wayne
was John Wayne.35 In 1955, Broger ew to Hollywood for a series of
204 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
daylong meetings with the moviemakers, and Ford asked for eighteen
copies of the Militant Liberty program to distribute to his screen-
writers. 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 ier battling naive paci sts in Congress for
funding. Broger obliged; thankfully, the movie has disappeared from
l m h i s t o r y .
As has Broger’s most successful e ort: the big-screen, epony-
mous adaptation of Militant Liberty, nanced by the Fellowship and
shown not just to the m ilitary but to schools, church groups, and
prayer cells ac ross the country, and made available to all of Abram’s
disciples. Blunt in his beliefs—the Constitution, Broger once lec-
tured 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, i n 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 declas-
si ed 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 nd a copy of the lm; I have only the rec ords
of its existence in Abram’s les, the press reports of the day, and that
picture of Broger with Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, accepting
the “ Spi ritual Values” award at the Freedoms Foundation’s headquar-
ters i n Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Standing with them are Carlson
and the two producers of the lm, an assistant to Abram, and a hand-
some, 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.
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