By 0, 3/5/2002

IT WAS A TEACHING moment as much as a preaching moment for the Rev. Billy Graham in 1972 when he joined President Richard Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman in the Oval Office after Graham and Nixon had presided at a prayer breakfast. Haldeman made an anti-Semitic crack about the staff of Time magazine, and the floodgates of his and Nixon's bigotry opened up.

Graham, the preeminent Christian preacher of the day, could have set the president straight and told him that his crude conspiracy theorizing about Jews was part of a paranoid style that might lead to his downfall someday (as it did). Graham might even have suggested that the president, instead of stereotyping his critics in the media, might have turned the other cheek. But Graham did no such thing.

In fact, thanks to the most recent release of the Nixon tapes, the nation now learns that Graham actually egged Nixon on. After Nixon decries what he sees as the malevolent influence of Jews in Hollywood and the media, Graham says, ''This stranglehood has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain.'' Seconds later, Graham says ominously, ''If you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.''

On Friday, Graham, now 83 and ailing, issued a weak apology for the remarks, saying he did not remember them and that ''they do not reflect my views.''

That is reassuring. But even in 1972 there was a sharp divergence between Graham's public relations with Jews and his private beliefs, as expressed to Nixon and Haldeman. Many Jews, Graham said, are ''great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country.''

According to Haldeman's diary account of the conversation, Graham also expressed the ''strong feeling that the Bible says there are satanic Jews and that's where our problem arises.'' The tapes show no such comments, but there are long deletions, and the remarks might have been excised.

The revelations of that poisonous morning in the Oval Office serve useful purposes now. For one thing, they give the lie to any pretense that the anti-Semitic scapegoating that goes on in the Islamic world, where many believe that Israel attacked the World Trade Center Sept. 11, could never happen here after the Holocaust.

The tapes also help explain why Nixon so long persisted in his dark dividing of the world into enemies and friends. He was encouraged to do so by a religious leader he had been friends with since he served as vice president in the 1950s. Given a chance to speak truth to power, Graham spoke garbage.

This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 3/5/2002.
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