Michael Beschloss: Finding Faith in the Oval Office
[Michael Beschloss is a presidential historian and author of several books, including Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 (Simon and Schuster).]
While writing “Presidential Courage,” I discovered that one of the biggest hidden influences on the nine Presidents in my book was religious faith – a faith that most of them concealed.
One story I tell is of Harry Truman deciding whether or not to recognize Israel in 1948. He had the power to decide whether the new Jewish state would survive. Truman's Secretary of State, George Marshall, was threatening to quit. I discovered that Truman's wife Bess was privately so bigoted that she would not even let Jewish people into her house in Missouri. On the other side, Truman's old Jewish haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, tearfully begged him to help his people resist another Adolf Hitler.
Truman never wore religion on his sleeve. His grandfather had warned him that if someone prayed too ostentatiously, “you better go home and lock up your smokehouse.” But as a quiet Baptist and Bible-reader, Truman was much affected by his favorite Psalm, Number 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
Another of my stories reveals Ronald Reagan showing the guts to turn his back on some of his oldest hardline supporters to try to end the Cold War. Few people knew how much Reagan was moved by the memory of his cherished mother Nelle, a saintly lay preacher, who had insisted to young Ronnie that Soviet Communism would one day be swept away by religion. Reagan’s daughter Maureen recalled that Nelle “had the gift for making you believe that you could change the world.”
Reagan feared that Armageddon was near. When the President told a Korean visitor that the Messiah’s second coming would be preceded by “armies invading the Holy Land” and a plague in which “the eyes are burned from the head,” aides begged him to keep his views to himself: he was scaring people!
When Reagan survived his near-fatal shooting in 1981, he felt God had spared him so that he could abolish the world’s arsenal of “immoral” nuclear weapons – which he and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost achieved in their 1986 Iceland summit....
Of my nine courageous Presidents, the one whose private religion I found the most captivating was Abraham Lincoln’s. Through his 30s, Lincoln was a religious skeptic and had to assure voters that he was not “an open scoffer at Christianity.” The trauma of the Civil War and the deaths of his sons Eddie and Willie pushed him toward reading the Bible as President. He told an old friend, “Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”
Lincoln did not cite God as authority for his policies. Quite the opposite. He felt his moral duty was to discover what God wanted him to do. In a handwritten, undated note found in his desk after his assassination, Lincoln gave us the best clue to his religious faith....
Read entire article at WaPo
While writing “Presidential Courage,” I discovered that one of the biggest hidden influences on the nine Presidents in my book was religious faith – a faith that most of them concealed.
One story I tell is of Harry Truman deciding whether or not to recognize Israel in 1948. He had the power to decide whether the new Jewish state would survive. Truman's Secretary of State, George Marshall, was threatening to quit. I discovered that Truman's wife Bess was privately so bigoted that she would not even let Jewish people into her house in Missouri. On the other side, Truman's old Jewish haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, tearfully begged him to help his people resist another Adolf Hitler.
Truman never wore religion on his sleeve. His grandfather had warned him that if someone prayed too ostentatiously, “you better go home and lock up your smokehouse.” But as a quiet Baptist and Bible-reader, Truman was much affected by his favorite Psalm, Number 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
Another of my stories reveals Ronald Reagan showing the guts to turn his back on some of his oldest hardline supporters to try to end the Cold War. Few people knew how much Reagan was moved by the memory of his cherished mother Nelle, a saintly lay preacher, who had insisted to young Ronnie that Soviet Communism would one day be swept away by religion. Reagan’s daughter Maureen recalled that Nelle “had the gift for making you believe that you could change the world.”
Reagan feared that Armageddon was near. When the President told a Korean visitor that the Messiah’s second coming would be preceded by “armies invading the Holy Land” and a plague in which “the eyes are burned from the head,” aides begged him to keep his views to himself: he was scaring people!
When Reagan survived his near-fatal shooting in 1981, he felt God had spared him so that he could abolish the world’s arsenal of “immoral” nuclear weapons – which he and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost achieved in their 1986 Iceland summit....
Of my nine courageous Presidents, the one whose private religion I found the most captivating was Abraham Lincoln’s. Through his 30s, Lincoln was a religious skeptic and had to assure voters that he was not “an open scoffer at Christianity.” The trauma of the Civil War and the deaths of his sons Eddie and Willie pushed him toward reading the Bible as President. He told an old friend, “Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”
Lincoln did not cite God as authority for his policies. Quite the opposite. He felt his moral duty was to discover what God wanted him to do. In a handwritten, undated note found in his desk after his assassination, Lincoln gave us the best clue to his religious faith....