There were many clergy in and out of the White House in those years, as Richard Nixon scrambled to cover up the fact that his men had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters and bugged the Watergate office phones to try to give him an unfair advantage in the 1972 presidential election. Various ministers preached to Nixon as the conspiracy unraveled and everything he had done—the casual criminality, disregard for morality, dirt, skullduggery, expletives, compounding lies, secret tapes, and obstruction of justice—came into the light.
But they didn’t address it. They didn’t follow the path of the Old Testament prophet Nathan, who went to King David after David tried to cover up his sin. Nathan spoke in a way that convicted the king—“You are the man!”—and gave him a chance to repent (2 Sam. 12:7).
Nixon also met privately with clergy from a whole array of evangelical churches, plus mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Some were famous. Leaders with authority and prestige, comfortable in the halls of power. Almost to a man, they said nothing.
Except John Huffman.
The evangelical Presbyterian pastor spoke simply and directly about the moral dimensions of the Watergate scandal and spoke with a clarity that Richard Nixon could hear.
Huffman was not well known and still isn’t. Even in the apparently endless writing about evangelicals and politics and all the debates about the proper way to engage in the public square, his name is essentially forgotten.
But I had to know: Why him?
It’s not obvious that Huffman should have had some special dispensation of moral courage. He was the young pastor of a seemingly average church. What gave him the power to resist the flattery and the promise of access that seduced so many?
So I found his phone number. He is still alive and an active church member in California. I called him. Huffman, now 83, was surprised at the questions. He promised to try to answer, but it has been a half century and people don’t ask much about Nixon anymore.
“Now, what is this story that you’re working on?” he said.
For the past several years, I’ve been writing a religious biography of Richard Nixon. He was a Quaker, as many people know, but he wasn’t very devout. He wasn’t pious. In fact, he was amoral, driven by ambition and resentment, his actions moderated only by his shame.
That didn’t serve him well. He ended his presidency in disgrace. To date, Nixon is the only US president forced to resign—making him an odd choice for a religious biography.
But his story is a religious story. Religion was at the root of who Nixon was, the struggle beneath all his successes and failures. Like Jacob in the Bible, Nixon wrestled with God. But he couldn’t accept God’s blessing, wouldn’t accept that the Creator of the universe loved him and he didn’t have to earn that love.