Billy Graham tried to stop John F. Kennedy from becoming president in 1960 for one reason: He was Catholic

JFK and Jackie on election night, 1960

While he tried very hard to change his public vision regarding other religions in his later years, the evangelist Billy Graham is prevented from doing so by his personal history that revealed serious bias.

Graham has been accused of being anti-Catholic and anti-semitic, and some factual information over the years has illustrted that he practiced both of those in his early days in the public eye.

So, taking a look at history will show that he exhibited both of these. Let’s take a look at some of them, particularly the Catholic people since so many today believe that Graham supported Catholicism.

The JFK plot

Sen. John F. Kennedy was the second Catholic to run for the presidency in 1960. In 1928, Al Smith was the first, and he lost to Herbert Hoover in a landslide because of the anti-Catholicism in the electorate.

During those years, the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated against Catholics because they believed that they were not 100 percent Americans like white Protestants were. During this time, the government led by Calvin Coolidge passed an immigration bill to restrict Catholics and others from entering the US, and they attempted to shut down parochial schools since they considered them to be un-American.

The KKK and other Protestants believed that Catholics would rule based on what the pope in Rome believed, meaning that they were not 100 percent Americans.

Bill Graham was one of those Protestants in the 1960s, and they met in Europe to devise a plan to derail the election of John F. Kennedy,

… Graham and other leading Protestant church leaders tried to stop JFK from becoming president because he was a Catholic.

On August 18, 1960, with Kennedy showing unexpected strength, Graham convened a meeting in Montreux Switzerland, far from the media and prying eyes. Among the invited guests was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, whose 1952 book "The Power of Positive Thinking" is still a bestseller today. Peale was also a notorious Catholic hater.

In all, about 25 Protestant leaders took part, with Graham leading the discussion.

Niall O'Dowd, Irish Central, July 12, 2022

This did not work because JFK, the most articulate president of the past century, went to Houston and explained his faith to the ministers there.

On the campaign trail, 1960

The Philosophical chasm

Graham and other Protestants held many views that were diametrically opposed to those of Catholicism,

While Billy Graham and Catholics share common ground in the basic tenets of Christian beliefs (e.g., belief in one God, the Trinity, etc.), there remains a wide chasm on the issues of how one becomes a Christian and assurance of salvation …

The idea that you receive salvation and eternal security by simply “accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” is contrary to Catholic teaching, not to mention unbiblical.

Yet this is the core message at the Billy Graham Festivals. It should interest Catholics to know that, according to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, prospective counselors are required to fill out an application that asks questions that are very different from those of Catholics.

The problems with the gospel according to Billy Graham,

Catholic Answers.com, Jan. 31, 2023

These are basic philosophical problems that Graham and others had and were fundamental to both religious groups.

The Meeting

This meeting was a secret until some of Peale’s relatives made a revelation,

That secret meeting was never divulged until 1992 when Peale’s biographer Professor Carol George discovered it among his papers.

As George discovered, “it was clear that the Montreux gathering set in motion plans for a one-day conference in Washington to rally concern about the possibility of a Roman Catholic in the White House. Before August was over, Dr. Peale agreed to preside.”

There is no doubt that Graham was the prime mover but he stayed in the background. At a news conference after the meeting, Dr. Peale said the participants had held a "philosophical" discussion of "the nature and character of the Roman Catholic Church" and he found it wanting.

That religious bias was too much even for the media at the time. They attacked Peale, forcing him to recant, and the entire affair rebounded on them with Kennedy's religion quickly fading as an issue because of the extremism of his opponents.

Niall O'Dowd, Irish Central, July 12, 2022

The anti-semitism

The problems that Graham had with Catholics were evident in Britain and Ireland for centuries. Once the tenets were placed on a door that started the Protestant Revolution, hatred existed in Europe and found its way across the Atlantic.

However, the Protestant minister had some other animus. Just as he hid his meeting that tried to destroy JFK, he also tied in with Richard Nixon. Little did he know until after Watergate that Nixon was taping his conversations with everyone in the Oval Office.

As a result, his conversation with Nixon that turned out to be anti-semitic was recorded in the 1970s but not revealed until the courts ordered the tapes released decades later.

Here is what happened,

His most infamous “bonding” with Nixon happened in 1972, when a White House conversation turned to the subject of Jewish domination of the media. Nixon was a notorious anti-Semite—a fact that became clearer after the Watergate tapes—and Graham played to the president’s prejudices with enthusiasm.

He called that alleged media control “a stranglehold,” mused about “doing something about it” in a second Nixon term, and added, “A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,’’ Graham said. ''They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.''

''You must not let them know,” Nixon replied.

Nixon and Billy, Franklin and Donny

The Grahams have not changed. The younger one, Franklin, does not have the following or reputation of his father, who was charismatic and brought people to religion.

However, Billy was just as right wing politically — and perhaps morally — as his son, certainly not a person who could be considered as pro life,

(Graham’s) support for the war in Vietnam was so enthusiastic that on April 15,1969, after meeting with missionaries from Vietnam, Graham sent a memo to the White House urging that, if the peace talks in Paris failed, Nixon should bomb the dikes that held back floodwaters in the North.

This, said Graham, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.” It would also have destroyed countless villages, sending as many as a million civilians to their deaths.

“When Richard Nixon used Billy Graham”

Later, Billy toned down his rhetoric and tried to make himself palatable to the Catholics and Jews, which Franklin has just as much animus as his father did.

The difference is that the son is abrasive and lacks charm and charisma.