← Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
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- [00:00]
Darrell Bock
This episode is brought to you in.
- [00:02]
Rick Emerson
Part by the Table Podcast from the Hendricks center at Dallas Theological Seminary.
- [00:06]
Darrell Bock
I'm Darrell Bock, one of the hosts.
- [00:07]
Rick Emerson
And I invite you to join us as we discuss issues of God and culture, which includes anything and everything. Listen on your podcast app or@dts.edu thetable.
- [00:18]
Darrell Bock
There's no denying that how our cities and neighborhoods are shaped have a deep impact on our lives. Even more so, the design of our neighborhoods reflect our values. So who gets to shape them? You see, while it's easy to recognize a city, identifying a just one is more challenging. The urban landscape tells a story of who's prioritized and who's marginalized, what's deemed worthy of investment, and what's considered expendable. In this podcast series, we'll explore the relationship between race and place. And together, in conversation with neighbors and experts, we'll unravel the threads that shape life in our cities. I'm Rich Perez, and this is this great and complicated place. Join us on Spotify, itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe today and join the conversation.
- [01:18]
Rich Perez
We'll see you there.
- [01:32]
Darrell Bock
This is CT Media.
- [01:37]
Rick Emerson
A note to listeners, this story contains sensitive content including sexual abuse, child murder, and dark sexual themes. It may not be suitable for all listeners. Please listen with care. When we think of the 1960s, we think of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, protests against wars, political assassinations, Woodstock riots, rock and roll, and the sexual revolution. And then there was Art Linkletter.
- [02:12]
Darrell Bock
Art Link, Letter and the kids. Join us for 15 minutes of unrehearsed, unpredictable fun with starring kids from 2 to 10 with the Pied Piper of TV and radio. The people are funny man. Art linkletter.
- [02:26]
Rick Emerson
In 1969, there were few celebrities on the planet more influential than him.
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Darrell Bock
Every time I do this program, I feel sorrier for the other people in television who have to have writers. They have to rehearse, they have to memorize the lines, they have to edit and watch their timing. And they always have to worry about new material. I have no such worry. Every morning I wake up, open the newspaper, turn to the birth column and say, well, some new programs were born last night that I'll use in about four or five years.
- [02:57]
Rick Emerson
A staple of American broadcasting, he'd been on the radio and television for two decades.
- [03:02]
Rich Perez
Art Linkletter was this celebrity that was just universally beloved. He was almost like a national dad.
- [03:08]
Rick Emerson
This is Rick Emerson, a former radio host and author of several books, including one called Unmask Alice. More on that in a Little bit.
- [03:16]
Rich Perez
And he just seemed like a good and decent person. And he just. Not unlike someone like Tom Hanks or not to overstate it too much, but someone like Mr. Rogers. Art Link letter kind of just made you feel good. And you were like, I like that guy.
- [03:30]
Rick Emerson
When Jack Parr left his role as the host of the Tonight Show, NBC tapped Art Linkletter to fill the chair until they could find a new host. He was America's dad, someone reliable, someone beloved by corporations looking for a celebrity spokesperson.
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Darrell Bock
Everybody likes Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Here are just three of my five little link letters who are Kellogg boosters. And like a lot of other kids all over the country, they're busy writing and drawing their own ideas for ads for Kellogg's Cornflakes. Diane, I see you want to be a Kellogg's Jr. Ad maker. What are you drawing? My biggest cornflake in the world. The biggest cornflake in the world and you're only three years old.
- [04:10]
Rick Emerson
That ad was from 1952. The Linkletter kids often appeared in Art's work, his TV shows and his commercials. Here's another one also featuring Diane.
- [04:20]
Darrell Bock
Circus nuts are really something special. Why? Well, because there's no air inside. They call it circus vac in a box. Dan, will you demonstrate please with this? Sure, dad, but listen closely. You pull the tear tape, then you take the brick hard pack and you tear it where it's notched. Ah, I can hear the air rushing in. Yes, isn't that great?
- [04:45]
Rick Emerson
This adds from 1968. Diane was about 19. A year later, she'd become even more of a household name. Though not because of her career. In fact, 20 year old Diane was frustrated by her career. At 17, she'd married a young actor, tried to set out and build a life of her own. But the marriage didn't last and her father used his connections to have it annulled. Somehow that made her feel even more trapped in show business. She lived under his shadow, and you can imagine why. To many, she was still that kid in the Cornflakes commercial. She'd always be eclipsed by that wholesome America's dad image. She felt like anytime she booked a job, the producers, the directors, they didn't take her seriously. They were doing her dad a favor. Around 3am on October 4, 1969, she called a friend, a guy named Edward Durston. He came over to her apartment on the sixth floor of Shoreham Towers in West Hollywood. She was despondent. They sat up all night and talked. Around nine Durston Said she actually seemed better. Went into the kitchen. Moments later he heard the window open and he found her climbing out onto the ledge. He rushed to stop her, but it was too late. He called the police. She was found on the sidewalk below and declared dead in a hospital shortly after that.
- [06:12]
Rich Perez
I think if you ask any psychologist if they will tell you that if your child kills themselves, the self recrimination and self doubt. What did I miss? What should I have done differently? What didn't I see? Is it my fault? And the. The instinct to blame yourself as a parent is so overwhelming and it will eat you alive. And so parents will reach for whatever gives them an answer. Whatever will answer the question of why.
- [06:37]
Rick Emerson
Deaths of despair come for all kinds of reasons. Three months earlier, Diane's brother in law shot himself after a series of professional failures. Durston even said they'd talked about it that morning. Durston himself is a strange figure. David Edward Durston was a car salesman and a kind of Hollywood hanger on. He'd write, direct and produce a few films, many of them exploitive slasher flicks, pornographic films. In 1985 he was also the last person to see Carol Wayne alive. Another Hollywood actress who went for a walk on a beach in Mexico and disappeared. Her body washed up three days later. But Art Linklater locked onto another answer to the why question. And he locked onto an issue that had become hotly debated in our nation's consciousness in the previous decade. The psychedelic drug lsd.
- [07:28]
Rich Perez
Overnight, the sort of caring every dad is gone and he becomes just this cold, avenging, anti drug crusading father who will scorch anything in his path to punish, you know, people who sell and people who distribute drugs. Because he has convinced himself that is what killed his daughter.
- [07:51]
Rick Emerson
No one was exempt from Art's wrath.
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Darrell Bock
Beatles are one of the worst offenders because they've been the most popular and the most listened to and have sold the most records. And they have included in a great many of their songs, as we all know, complete and total descriptions of drug trips and in mentions of it and in their own lifestyle. The Beatles have been a terrible, terrible illustration.
- [08:18]
Rick Emerson
And as far as he was concerned, the, the moral responsibility was crystal clear.
- [08:22]
Darrell Bock
And so anybody who has said anything which would encourage my daughter to take LSD was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.
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Rick Emerson
When you're Art Linkletter and you use rhetoric like this, people listen. Middle American families, people who are worried about their kids and people like the President of the United States who was elected a Year earlier, on a campaign of law and order, President Richard Nixon.
- [08:50]
Darrell Bock
America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all out offensive.
- [09:04]
Rick Emerson
Art Linklater wasn't introducing a new fear to American parents by 1969. Anxiety about young people, drugs, psychosis, hallucinations, it had permeated the culture. These were just a few of the fears that emerged with all of the social upheaval of the 1960s. But it's a pivotal crossroads. For Nixon, it meant having a powerful ally in a new initiative, what he ended up calling the War on drugs. For Linkletter, it meant having a story to tell, a battle to fight that would make meaning out of the death of his daughter. The only problem was there was really no evidence to suggest that Diane had taken lsd. No evidence was found in the apartment, and Ed Durston hadn't talked about it. No drugs or alcohol were found in her system. Though LSD is, even to this day, very hard to detect in someone living, much less someone who's already died.
- [09:58]
Rich Perez
The only real indication that this was the case was that Diane's brother made a comment. You know, it was sort of third hand at this point. He said, oh, I talked to her and she told me that she'd taken some LSD at some point. At that point there was also this very entrenched belief in LSD flashbacks. And so over the course of a couple of weeks, the Linkletter family really convinces themselves that, well, even if we can't prove it, and even if she wasn't high at the moment, she must have been having a flashback, because that's the only reason why this would have happened. Because the alternative is to say that you're never going to know why your child killed themselves.
- [10:38]
Rick Emerson
Joan Didion famously said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. That is to say, we make meaning of our lives, our experiences of grief and loss, as well as our hopes and failures and our romances by telling a story that connects the dots and makes sense of it, often in the face of agonizing grief. The need for that story is painful. So we craft a myth that makes it a little easier to cope with. We also do that in the face of uncertainty or anxiety. We mythologize. We name an evil that may not be real to insulate us from the truth that causes us pain. This podcast is about the Satanic Panic, a story we told to make sense of an uncertainty. And on today's episode, we're going back in time, back to Diane's world to look at what made ours feel so frightening and uncertain. From Christianity today. I'm Mike Cosplay, and you're listening to Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. This season we're looking at the satanic panic, how chasing phantoms distracted us from real devils in our midst. Today's episode, episode 2 Runaway Girls Runaway fears.
- [12:17]
Darrell Bock
But you spun around and you never hear it coming when you come.
- [12:38]
Rick Emerson
We often romanticize the 1960s, and no doubt there are elements of the 60s that are worth romanticizing.
- [12:47]
Darrell Bock
If I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon 2, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket to an unknown celestial body and then return it safely to Earth. Re entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that on the temperature of the sun, almost as hot as it is here today. And do all this, and do all this and do it right and do it first. Before this dictate is out, then we must be bold.
- [13:26]
Rick Emerson
Here's how ambitious we were in the 1960s. The stadium for that speech, the Rice University football stadium, was built for the speech. It was filled for the speech. And unfortunately for Rice University football, it's pretty much never been filled again. But the moment was so important for the nation, the cold war, the message it sent to the world, that they thought it was necessary to build a huge stadium and to fill it for just one presidential speech to tell the world. If you're not sure if you should bet on liberal democratic capitalism in the United States or authoritarianism and communism in the ussr, bet on us. Because look what we can do for just one speech. And then of course, very fine grained.
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Darrell Bock
As you get close to it. It's almost like a powder ground mass. It's very fine. I'm going to step off the limb now. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Oh, that looks beautiful to me. It has a stark beauty all its own.
- [14:42]
Rick Emerson
And it's not just the moon that we should romanticize when looking back on the 1960s.
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Darrell Bock
Freedom and justice. I have a dream. My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
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Rick Emerson
But because those moments were so significant, we often look back on the decade with rose colored glasses. It's all freedom marches and flower children winning the moon race and making the Soviets blink first on The Cuban Missile Crisis. We forget what else was going on during that decade.
- [15:24]
Daniel Silliman
I think a lot of people, like, forget how America was just exploding at the time.
- [15:30]
Rick Emerson
This is Daniel Silliman. He's senior news editor at Christianity Today and author of several books. Most recently One Lost Soul, Richard Nixon's Search for Salvation.
- [15:40]
Daniel Silliman
We, you know, you sort of look at the pictures of the Civil rights movement and it's, you know, it's John Lewis and it's Martin Luther King and it's very peaceful. But many, many young black people felt like the Civil rights movement failed and their response was violence and riots and burning stuff down, you know, or worse. They thought the Civil rights movement succeeded and it didn't matter. Like it had no actual effect their life. So like in 1964, there are 15 riots across the country, including one in LA that killed 34 people. And then in 1966, just a couple years later, there are 40 riots across the city. We haven't had anything like that in contemporary, like a few. A few years ago when Black Lives Matter was kind of causing all of this distress, it was in what, 6 cities, 10 cities, 40 cities across the country is, is massive. And, and these are places that are on fire. You know, stuff's burning down. And that's not even to mention, like there were bombs going off every week, like there were hijackings on airplanes happening on a like, monthly basis.
- [16:51]
Rick Emerson
It's also a time of dramatic social and economic change. People who came home from the war in the 1940s and started families, careers, they were building suburbs and exurbs, leaving cities. That prosperity made youth culture possible. Mass manufacturing, cheap and efficient distribution of goods, all things that had to be ramped up and perfected. Wartime could now give a generation of teenagers, record players, sneakers, clothes that functioned like tribal signals, cheap electric guitars and of course, cars. With this new world unfolding for them, they did what teenagers do, they rebelled.
- [17:30]
Daniel Silliman
It's also worth remembering that the 1950s is the most religious time in American history. Like more people identify as Christian than any other time. Like 1776 has got nothing on 1950 in terms of American religiosity. So that youth culture, if you think of youth culture as the Marlon Brando, that famous scene, hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
- [17:55]
Darrell Bock
What do you got?
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Daniel Silliman
Like what America has got in 1950, 50s is religion. So if you're going to rebel, like, that's a pretty normal. You're rebelling against middle class culture. You were rebelling against middle class norms. That is also nominal churchgoing.
- [18:13]
Rick Emerson
There are other factors beyond just teenage rebellion that contribute to the social, cultural and religious upheaval of the decade. Something as practical as new immigration policies.
- [18:23]
Daniel Silliman
1965, Lyndon Johnson ends the discrimination against Asian immigrants. And this does lead to a rapid increase in immigrants from China and India and Vietnam and Cambodia, and with it a sort of new religious diversity. So, so, you know, if you think of the Beatles suddenly being interested in gurus from India and lots of young hippies being like, what? What is going on with Hare Krishna? And maybe Buddhism and yoga is actually a better path to happiness than the pep pills and respectable methodism that my mom had to offer, or something like that. There's new religious options available and new religious ideas that are floating around, especially in California. Add that to youth culture, add that to a sense that American culture is broken, add that to trying psychedelics for the first time, and you're going to get a sort of wide range of spiritual experimentation.
- [19:32]
Rick Emerson
So let's think about this for a second. The 1950s is the most devout decade of American Christianity. The 60s roll around and this generation's kids get curious. They look outside the church right at a time when there's an influx of global religion. Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoist thought and all kinds of other stuff. This is also the era of the Second Vatican Council when the Catholic Church began to change the way it engaged in inter religious dialogue. Thomas Merton, a leading Catholic writer and social commentator, began engaging with Buddhism and struck up a friendship with the Dalai Lama. Spiritual experimentation went mainstream. Now, maybe if you live on one of the coasts, you're progressive, you're part of certain circles of elite academia, maybe you can welcome all of this for you and your kids. But if you were from the Bible Belt, or if you were from the Rust Belt or the Midwest, or if you lived anywhere and your family was devoutly Baptist or Lutheran or Methodist, and all of a sudden you woke up one day and your daughter's talking about her chakra and your son's growing his hair out and meditating. Well, it can feel like the world is kind of unraveling. And then of course, there's LSD. The drug was first synthesized in 1938 by a Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman, who was trying to make a respiratory stimulant. One day, experimenting with it, he got a little on his fingers and had some mild effects from it. He later decided to intentionally ingest some to see what would happen, what its effects were. So he took what he thought was a small dose, turned out to be a rather large dose, and rode home on his bicycle. The result was quite literally the world's first acid trip. Today, proponents of the drug, both for medicinal and recreational use, recognize April 19 as Bicycle Day. For a time, the drug was used experimentally tested on a variety of psychological disorders as well as addiction. In 1963, the patent on LSD expired, meaning that any lab with the right basic tools and raw materials could produce the substance to experiment with.
- [21:51]
Daniel Silliman
Turns out that any chem student, especially anybody who's doing like grad work in chemistry, can make a little money off the side putting some LSD droplets on blotter paper. And then you can take it to a party and people will pay you for it.
- [22:07]
Rick Emerson
We live in a time when there's a great deal of research into lsd. We're familiar with its effects, though some would say we haven't researched it enough. But it's important for this conversation to put yourself in the moment. Think of what you've seen science do in your lifetime and in your parents lifetime. The weapons of war created the tools of mass transit, the seemingly miraculous effects of drugs, whether they were opiates or antibiotics, things that couldn't have been imagined a generation or two before. And with lsd, science seems once again to be offering a new way to experience consciousness, maybe a new way to be human, a new way to encounter the world around us. That's why LSD wasn't just a recreational drug for hippies. There was then, like now, a serious group of intellectuals who thought that it might actually open up new ways of experiencing the world. Chief among them perhaps was Aldous Huxley, an English philosopher and author of the dystopian novel Brave New World.
- [23:07]
Darrell Bock
The point that interests me is that whereas the ordinary everyday experience is of course absolutely essential, most of the time it's not the only possible experience. There are also other types of consciousness, I mean the artist type, the mystic's type and so on, which have empirically an enormous value and may help people to live less self centered and more charitable lives and more understanding lives.
- [23:36]
Rick Emerson
Huxley advocated not only for experimentation with lsd, but also drugs like mescaline. He described their hallucinogenic effects as opening the doors of perception. A phrase that inspired the name of one of the more successful rock acts of the era as well. We live in a time where we're steeped in the language of psychotherapy. Our everyday conversations are peppered with talk about trauma and phobias, implicit biases. But not so long ago, all of this kind of talk was relegated to the academy and often to Obscure corners of it. There wasn't a therapist on every street corner in 1969. And even language like sexual identity. Or just identity as a way of talking about ourselves. All of this was new and suspect. So when those ideas are already new. And you're adding to it. The spiritual curiosity of the 1960s. People talking about altered states of perception and altered consciousness. Transcendent consciousness. Whether you were getting there by taking drugs or practicing yoga. Or doing Zen meditation. It all felt novel and destabilizing. Especially to the parents of those who were coming of age. Add to that the looming threat of nuclear war. The violence of the riots around the country. The Weather Underground exploding mailboxes right and left. And extraordinary levels of petty and violent crime in our major cities. Parents could only do what they knew how to do. Which was worry. If our consciousness could be altered. Transforming the way we comprehend and experience reality. If drugs or religion could alter them. Could take us into other places. Was it possible you could take a wrong turn somewhere and get lost? And if you did get lost. How bad could things get before you found your way home? Those questions and anxieties grew much more intense. Just a few months before Diane Linkletter leapt out of that window in West Hollywood. However worried parents might have been up until that point. This story proved that they couldn't possibly have been worried enough. We'll be right back. In December of 1968, the Beach Boys released a single. A cover of an older tune by Ursul Hickey called Blue Birds over the Mountains. It charted, sold well enough. But the B side of that single will become much more famous. It's called Never Learn Not To Love. It, Too was a cover written by a previously unknown singer songwriter. Discovered by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson earlier that year. Because of a dispute over the lyrics. He chose not to be credited on the release. His own version is much more tense, much more grim.
- [26:54]
Darrell Bock
Just come and say you love me Give up your work Come on, you can be.
- [27:08]
Rick Emerson
His partnership with the Beach Boys. Essentially started and ended with this song. But he'd go on to become as well known. If not more well known than the Beach Boys themselves. Inspiring a fanatical following. Especially among young women. If you hadn't guessed already, I'm talking about Charles Manson. And the singing you hear. Is just a handful of the Manson girls. On their way to witness his trial for murder.
- [27:48]
Darrell Bock
Turn around once, girls will.
- [27:50]
Rick Emerson
In almost every imaginable way. The Manson family murders are the stuff of nightmares. Taking place in August 1969. The crimes themselves are beyond description. And I won't go into the details here except to say that six members of the Manson family were ultimately convicted of nine murders, each of them carried out with maximum brutality, especially the murder of an eight and a half months pregnant Sharon Tate, a young Hollywood starlet who was married to director Roman Polanski. Manson himself was mesmerizing, seemingly the embodiment of evil in front of the cameras. But just as mesmerizing and in some ways more haunting were the Manson girls. Here's Rick Emerson again.
- [28:33]
Rich Perez
There's Squeaky Frome and there's, you know, Susan Atkins and these girls who to some degree seem to come from quintessentially American, you know, backgrounds and households, which in 1970 means that they are white and middle class. And there's all of this kind of anxiety about, like, how. Why is this happening? What is happening to these. These teenagers and these teenage girls who were formerly so virtuous and they were so, you know, you know, they were so respectful and so polite.
- [29:00]
Rick Emerson
Susan Atkins might be the most stark example. She was 21 at the time of the murders, but she looked and sounded younger. Her mannerisms made her seem retreating, girlish, immature. And yet she participated in a murder spree, including being personally involved in the murder of Sharon Tate. Even Years later in 1976, when this interview was recorded, she could have passed for a teenager.
- [29:26]
Darrell Bock
All I can remember seeing is people just scattering in different places and running in different places. And I was left sitting with Sharon Tate and she was talking to me. And I remember that I had absolutely. I could have. I felt nothing. I felt absolutely nothing for her.
- [29:47]
Rick Emerson
This is a long way from the Susan Atkins who stood trial for the murders a few years before. That version of Atkins was defiant cruelty. On the day of their sentencing, knowing that they'd likely get death sentences, Atkins and her co defendants came to the courtroom laughing, sneering. It was a media event and they were putting on a show. Not long after the trial, their death sentences were commuted to life in prison due to a court ruling that essentially eliminated the death penalty in California. In 1974, Atkins had a jailhouse religious conversion, claiming to have seen Jesus in a vision. That was two years before this interview, where she at least appears to look back, bewildered and horrified at the things she did as part of the Manson family.
- [30:32]
Darrell Bock
One of the people said, who are you in Texas? I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business. And I remember that in my conscience. It's so alive in me. I'm just recalling It. I remember that I had gone so far, and there was. There was no turning back. Even if I had wanted to run, even if I had wanted to leave, I couldn't. I was like I was caught in something that I had no control over. I had absolutely no say so as to what was happening there. I was just like a tool in the hands of the devil, is the only way I can put it.
- [31:04]
Rick Emerson
I believe this is actually the key to the hold the Manson family has on our collective imaginations. Five decades since these murders, they're still the regular subject of books and podcasts and films, and they're familiar enough to be casual references in pop culture, like this one from 30 Rock. Tracy, you are going to die.
- [31:27]
Darrell Bock
What? No. When I tell you who I'm dating.
- [31:29]
Rick Emerson
Squeaky Fromm.
- [31:31]
Darrell Bock
She is difficult.
- [31:34]
Rick Emerson
It's not just the horror of the crimes or the charisma, chaos, and hate that spews from Manson himself. It's the challenge we have reconciling those horrors, that evil, with a girl like Susan Atkins. She grew up in a middle class family with a childhood that was turbulent but not atypical. One can certainly think of similar families where the daughters didn't grow up to join a cult and slaughter innocent people. Charles Manson is scary, but he's an outlier, someone both evil and deeply broken. But Susan Atkins frightens us because we worry that what happened to her could happen to someone we love. And in 1969, there were actually a lot of girls just like her.
- [32:19]
Rich Perez
By 1964, the number of teenage runaways. So that's people who run away from home and they're gone long enough to be declared officially missing. That number had, you know, it had hovered at a pretty constant level, you know, for decades. And not only was, you know, the number constant, but the kind of demographics were constant. You know, runaways, you know, it was traffic. But they also came from predictable places in predictable situations and in predictable numbers. That starts to change in 1964. In 1964, that number jumps, and 200,000 teenagers are classified as runaways. They're classified as being gone long enough to be missing the next year, 1965, that more than doubles, and it goes to 450,000. And so that confusion kind of starts to turn to panic, because not only is that number increasing, but the person who is the archetypal runaway changes as well. Because for the very first time, you know, it's not young men who are running away, it's young women. And so by 1970, the average American runaway is a White suburban girl who is barely 15 years of age. And that had never happened before. And it really, really struck this note of terror with a lot of American parents and authority figures in institutions.
- [33:33]
Rick Emerson
This anxiety had been simmering before the Manson murders. It exploded afterwards. But let's back up for a second to the year before 1968. Because if the upheaval of the 60s was a kind of social and cultural revolution, and we haven't even touched on the role of the sexual revolution in all of this, the counter revolution began that year. Here's Daniel Silliman again.
- [33:58]
Daniel Silliman
So Nixon presents himself as the candidate for order, as the candidate for stability, as a candidate for a kind of we need to take a stand against permissiveness, and we need to kind of get back to normal a little bit. He has some amazing TV ads that really hit this. Like, he has one that sort of fades up on a scene of a riot, just like a newsreel of a riot. And he says it is time for.
- [34:30]
Darrell Bock
An honest look at the problem of order in the United States. States dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States this time. Vote like your whole world depended on it.
- [35:01]
Rick Emerson
Obviously, there's a menace to that ad, but I'm not sure its purpose was to scare people. I think instead it's about recognition. Nixon understood that people were already scared by what was going on in the world around them.
- [35:17]
Daniel Silliman
He really finds this rhetoric that comes to be really important in the trajectory of conservatism. Nixon was not kind of the forefront of the conservative movement. He had a kind of awkward relationship to Goldwater and Bill Buckley and those folks. But he does some kind of TV magic and some rhetorical jujitsu that finds a way to pull people into conservatism that haven't thought about themselves as conservative before and develop a kind of rhetoric of strong authority. I don't want to say authoritarian, but like authority emphasis, you know, concern for order, rejection of permissiveness. That becomes really important to conservatism for the rest of the 20th century, and I would say even into the 21st century to today.
- [36:15]
Rick Emerson
And this actually brings us back full circle to Art Linkletter. Art was one of those parents worrying about his kids growing up in this turmoil, living in Southern California. He'd seen all these factors up close the influx of runaways there and in San Francisco, the riots and unrest, the crumbling of social norms, and, of course, the rise of drug use. So when Diane died and he began his crusade against lsd, he discovered right away that he had an ally in the White House.
- [36:46]
Rich Perez
I think it was less than three weeks after Diane's suicide that Linkletter is standing in the White House still just clearly out of his mind with grief. I mean, you see when he looks haggard, he looks like he hasn't slept in days. And, you know, Nixon was not shy about taking an opportunity when he. When he had one. And, you know, and he brought Linkletter back several times. Because at that point, again, Linkletter is in absolute kill mode. Linkletter is in. We have to do whatever it takes to stop the flow of drugs, to stop drug pushing. You know, if it's capital punishment, then so be it. I mean, he is ready to go all out for this. And Nixon harnesses this and uses it to push the Controlled Substances act, which sort of gives rise to what we now know as the War on Drugs. And one of the things that Richard Nixon says to Linkletter, and I'll often sort of paraphrase this, because Richard Nixon was relentlessly profane. Nixon just says, like, the media is just doing a terrible job, you know, at selling this war on Drugs. You know, they are doing it. You know, they. We really need something that has some sizzle, some entertainment value to it, Something that really grabs the public. And so if you can help us out with that, you know, if you can help us, like, spread this word that drugs are evil, that'd be fantastic. And you'd be doing your country a service. And, you know, and implicitly, you would be something, you know, doing something to help avenge the, you know, the, quote, murder of your daughter. And Nixon, you know, says this. And Linkletter, of course, leaves the White House, I mean, emboldened. I mean, not only does he have. He not only has this sort of, you know, this inner fire, this zealotry of, like, I am avenging my murdered daughter, which, I mean, itself is enough to move mountains. I think he not only has that, but the president of the United States has asked him to do something to help fight the scourge of drugs. Can you do something? And it's like, well, you're damn right I can do something. And, you know, Linkletter is rich, he's famous, and he has Hollywood connections and show business connections for days. And Art Linkletter, who, among other things, also runs a Literary agency. You know, he himself is already a best selling author. He's published this book called Kids say the Darndest Things, which I think it sold 8 million copies or something. And so in addition to all of his other, you know, Hollywood connections and his show business connections, Art Linklater is a guy who can get a book in print like that, and he does.
- [39:10]
Rick Emerson
The name of that book was Go Ask Alice, which is the subject of Rick Emerson's book, Unmask Alice.
- [39:16]
Rich Perez
So parents are just there leaning their ears against this kind of heavy generational door, trying to figure out, what is my kid up to in there. Then in 1971, in September, this book arrives that says, well, if you want to know what your daughter is up to, if you want to know what sort of evil is out there, here's the answer. And it's not just a book that explains this. It is a book that purports to be the diary of a dead teenage addict. You know, it's the posthumous diary of this teenage girl who you can go back and just follow these beats all the way along. And this teenage girl who takes LSD is, you know, not just takes lsd, is given lsd. You know, she's dosed with LSD against, you know, without, without permission. You know, somebody slips it into her soda. She then falls into drug use. She runs away from home. She lands with the fabled bad crowd. She ends up on the street. She ends up turning tricks, doing all of these things, and then she ends up dead at 17. And she leaves behind this diary, which is presented as an actual, authentic, slightly edited, but still completely genuine diary of a girl who is killed by lsd. And this is exactly the thing that the, you know, the parents have been waiting for. They've been waiting for someone to sort of come along and pull the curtain back and say, if you want to know how bad it can get for your kid and what is lurking out, you know, outside your front door, here it is.
- [40:41]
Rick Emerson
The book was a runaway success. To date, it sold more than 5 million copies. And in 1973, it was made into a TV movie.
- [40:49]
Darrell Bock
I've got to stop. But I can't. I tried months ago. I can't. I can't stay off of it.
- [40:58]
Rick Emerson
The message to readers was, however bad you think it is out there for your kids, it's actually worse than that. And here's your proof. All of the fears for the previous decade turned out to be true. And it galvanized parents and politicians around the need to push back against the Counterculture and the dark underbelly of American life. The book itself is riveting, if only for the nature of its content. It's graphic, salacious, violent, like Flowers in the Attic or the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. And like those books, it also happens to be a work of fiction. As published, the book claims to be the actual diary of a teenage girl. Edited by a woman named Beatrice Sparks. Sparks had written to Linkletter's agency. Claiming to have been given the diary by this girl herself before she died. She was a housewife from Utah. Who'd first connected to him because of her work with something called the Family Achievement Institute.
- [41:57]
Rich Perez
The Family Achievement Institute, it pitches itself as. Would you like to earn more money from home in just a few hours a week? Would you like to set your own schedule and be your own boss and, you know, say, write to us for more information? And of course, the more information is always just a way for you to send the money to buy stuff that you then have to resell to your friends and family until they get tired of taking your phone calls. And the Family Achievement Institute, their product was these big box sets of vinyl records. And I think it cost. I think the entry level cost to get in on this ground floor opportunity was $3,000, which was. That was like the cost of a new car at that point. And what the product was, was all of these vinyl records that had all of this kind of bland parenting advice. Voiced by all of these very toothless celebrities of the time. So, like Pat Boone and Art Linkletter, who, you know, as good a guy as Art Linkletter was, he also liked being rich and he liked making money. And so they said, hey, Art, how about we give you some money and you just come down here and voice this, you know, this parenting advice? And he said, sure. So they needed somebody to start churning out all these scripts for all of these, you know, these records. And they hired a whole platoon of people to do it. And one of them was Beatrice Sparks. So she wrote the script that Art Linkletter then voiced. And for Beatrice Sparks. I mean, at that point, and this is in 1967, having any sort of professional contact with Art Linklater, that is. I mean, it's sort of like handing a song to some Sinatra. I mean, that is one of those things where if it goes well, like, your name is, like, that can change your life. I mean, your name can be made. And, you know, it didn't go well because as it turned out, there were not a whole lot of people who wanted to fork over $3,000 for a bunch of vinyl records they would then not be able to sell to people. But it was enough to get her this connection with our linkletter.
- [43:47]
Rick Emerson
I asked Rick what his sense of Beatrice Sparks motivation was.
- [43:50]
Rich Perez
It seems to be the. That a lot of her motivation came from, I think, what we would now call concern trolling. Which is, as she would describe it, her attempts to help people or to shed light on these problems or these social ills. That quickly became just a way to scold people, you know, and concern sort of became a cudgel pretty quickly. Which I think for her was sort of a nice two for or even three for. You know, it's the chance that, you know, it's, A, financially and professionally advantageous for her. B, she can lecture about things that she believes to be dangerous to society. And also she can set herself up as this sort of arbiter, this kind of paragon of, you know, objective virtue. And of, you know, knowledge and wisdom about these things, which I know. I mean, if you can get yourself in a position to do that, I would imagine that's a. You know, that's a pretty nice place to be in professionally, in your life. If you're Beatrice Sparks. And so I think that it was probably a mix of both of those things. There's a. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but there's. At a later point in the story, she moves from talking about the dangers of drugs. To talking about the dangers of, you know, the dangers of the occult and of Satanism and black magic and all of these things. And I think that there was an element of true believer with her. But I feel like, as is often the case, you know, as was the case with Linkletter to some degree, as was certainly the case with Nixon. You know, if you are a true believer. I mean, I think the more convinced you are of your own rightness, the more convinced you are of your own infallibility. In terms of what you believe and what you deem to be right and wrong. The easier it is to justify any sort of mechanism that allows you to advance that message. You know, it is the classic ends justify the means. And if you are absolutely convinced that what you believe or what you have been told is correct, it becomes really easy to justify anything that gets between you. And disseminating that message as acceptable collateral damage.
- [45:50]
Rick Emerson
One might wonder what the harm of a book like this is. Isn't it something that people read kind of like they watch Jerry Springer? Is it any worse than a piece of pulpy fiction like VC Andrews or Twin Peaks. And the answer is yes, especially given all that came before it and after intensified that atmosphere of fear and anxiety. It served to justify drug enforcement policies that are now widely considered overreach. It presented a false picture of addiction and recovery, including the idea that if a person was dosed one time without their knowledge, they would descend into the path that Alice took, which was ultimately not unlike that of one of the Manson girls. The reason truth matters, the reason you don't put fiction on the nonfiction shelves, is because we tend to call our understanding of the world based on the stories that we hear and believe. And as Rick hinted a moment ago, Beatrice Sparks wasn't done with fantastical teenage diaries yet. Her next one would even more directly pave the road for the satanic panic. But don't underestimate Alice's impact. Her portrayal of the drug scene, of hallucinations, of addictions, of sexual exploitation and abuse, all of it helped shift frame of what people were willing to believe about the evil in their midst. No doubt evil exists, and there are characters like Charles Manson out there. But when Beatrice Sparks creates a falsified version of it, essentially saying, this is happening everywhere in your neighborhood too, it trains the imagination to expect it to manifest in specific ways that might just distract us from other devils and different masks next door. We'll be right back. Parents weren't the only ones calling into question the revolutionary ethos of the 1960s. Many who were immersed in it, who chased what it offered, found themselves disappointed with the results. Here's Daniel Silliman again.
- [47:57]
Daniel Silliman
A thing that I think we often miss about this broader hippie movement is how much disillusionment was a major part of the experience. You know, there's a quote from the time that says rape was as common on Haight Ashberry as drugs were. Right. Free sex is also horrific, and the drugs are exciting, and then they're also addictive. Or you have friends who burn out on them and go to harder and weirder drugs, or have a psychedelic trip and never are normal again. My dad had a friend who thought she was a frog for several years. The excitement of let's open the doors of perception goes away pretty fast when that's the sort of response.
- [48:52]
Rick Emerson
As a political movement, the 60s counterculture was at best a mixed bag. They saw a major win in their support for the civil rights movement. But many of their own initiatives could never overcome the opposition. And in some cases, they turned violent and dark.
- [49:08]
Daniel Silliman
So suddenly you have the Weather Underground, and instead of like marching peacefully and ushering in the Age of Aquarius. You have your friends blowing themselves up while making bombs in the basement of an apartment, right? So, so like, the aspirations turn sour really fast. I mean, think about the Manson family loving Beatles lyrics, right? Like one day you're sitting in your home, you're listening to sergeant Pepper. You're like, this is it, man. We've like, we fixed it, here we are. And then there's a bunch of hippies that look like you. And they're planning a race war based on their interpretation of Beatles lyrics. Like, that's not. That's clearly not the answer. And the thing that you thought held so much hope. And the thing that you thought was going to change the world. And the thing that you thought was going to be your life has now left you sad and disillusioned and feeling deeply betrayed.
- [50:05]
Rick Emerson
For some, it's quite the transformation. Many went from pursuing meaning and purpose inside a whole culture defined by psychedelic drugs. A culture like this culture, and in this case a band that was explicitly condemned by Art Linkletter to something very, very different.
- [50:29]
Darrell Bock
No more LSD for me. I met the man from Galilee and he saved my soul. You made me whole and heaven is my home.
- [50:47]
Rick Emerson
This is Larry Norman. He'd been in a band called People and had toured the country playing shows with the likes of Janis Joplin, the Doors and Van Morrison, among many, many others. In 1967 they had a hit with a cover of the Zombies.
- [51:01]
Darrell Bock
I love you, I love you, yes I do. But the words won't come and I don't know what to say.
- [51:12]
Rick Emerson
He left the band in 1968 and shortly after had a kind of religious awakening. He started doing street evangelism, playing shows and singing songs with explicitly Christian evangelistic themes. He got signed to Capitol Records and put on an album in 1969 titled upon this Rock. And while the album was a commercial failure, it found an audience in a growing Christian counterculture that became known as the Jesus People movement. With that, Christian rock was born. Around this same time, all across the country, long haired, barefoot, bell bottomed hippies were gathering in coffee shops, Bible studies, churches, looking for something they hadn't found in that previous decade. Something larger than themselves. And they were finding it in Jesus. Here's Daniel Silliman again.
- [52:12]
Daniel Silliman
The vision of an acts to hold all things in common. Tell everybody about Jesus. Let's go pick up hitchhikers and tell them that they're sinners. But it's okay because God loves them and has a Wonderful plan for their that turned out to be a sustainable, radical alternative. It wasn't middle class normalcy. It wasn't pursuit of individual happiness and material gains. It wasn't the sort of rank hypocrisy that they felt they saw in the previous generations. But it also was sustainable and a way to live out the radicalism in a way that a lot of the other options didn't really present.
- [52:58]
Rick Emerson
There wasn't just one Jesus people movement, though there were several. Larry Norman, living in Hollywood, was actually part of that more radical sensibility. Like many in the counterculture of the 1960s, he was a critic of American culture and Christian hypocrisy. Here, for instance, is his 1972 song, the Great American Novel.
- [53:19]
Darrell Bock
You kill a black man, admit night just for talking to your daughter. Then you make his wife your mistress, and you leave her without water. And the sheet you wear up on your face is the sheet your children sleep on. And at every meal you say a prayer. You don't believe us.
- [53:50]
Rick Emerson
For people like Larry, Christianity was a counterculture not just to the ethos of the 1960s, but also to the conservative Christian ethos of mainstream America. That attitude led to a more radical vision of community generosity, self sacrifice and service. And it was shared in other places, like the Jesus people movement emerging in San Francisco and in Chicago in recent history. The more famous element of the Jesus people movement is the one that emerged in Orange County. Led by a pastor named Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, that element evolved into a more intentional effort at church planting and expansion. It more directly shaped contemporary Christian music and the modern church that we know today. The recent movie Jesus Revolution, starring Kelsey Grammer as Chuck Smith, told this movement's origin story. Maybe it's my job to make us uncomfortable. I haven't been doing it.
- [54:44]
Darrell Bock
Chuck, stop.
- [54:45]
Rick Emerson
This is a house of worship.
- [54:47]
Darrell Bock
And yes, we expect a certain level of dignity here.
- [54:49]
Rick Emerson
These girls are wearing halter tops and.
- [54:51]
Darrell Bock
Half of them aren't even wearing shoes. They're staining the new shag carpet with their bare feet.
- [54:56]
Rick Emerson
Oh, yeah, let's be sure to save the carpet. The distinctions between these elements of the Jesus people phenomenon are worth noting. What emerged in San Francisco and in Hollywood with people like Larry Norman was more rough around the edges. A lot of these people were formal radicals, ex drug addicts, drug dealers, Hell's Angels. The Jesus people in Chicago, like I said, was its own thing, both in its sound coming out of Chicago blues bars and Midwestern biker haunts, and in its emphasis. They had a kind of midwestern work ethic. And they built things. They formed Jesus People, us launched the Cornerstone Music Festival, Cornerstone magazine. They also practiced communal living together. Orange county was more church centric and as a result, had more influence on the broader church. They planted churches, they launched networks of churches, and they were often at the vanguard of the church growth movement of the 1980s and 90s. And because it was church based, it also had a lot more church folks involved. Many of the Jesus people themselves weren't so much hippies that had turned their backs on the revolutionary years, but kids who'd grown up in the church and never quite felt at home there. Kids drawn to some of that cultural and aesthetic change in the 1960s, but who maybe hadn't gone fully down the rabbit hole, hadn't entirely left their roots and their values. I mention all of this because it matters quite a bit for how we understand what came next. There were tensions between these different elements, whether they were ever expressed or noticed or not. To put it another way, there's an element of the Jesus people who wanted to be social radicals. They were talking about things like vows of poverty, forming quasi monastic communities, and there's another stream that was still in many ways radical, still transformative. But they were largely focused on transforming the aesthetics of the church and its attitude towards young people. But they weren't necessarily critics of its underlying values, convictions, its relationship to the broader culture. Here's Daniel Silliman Again, it's not entirely.
- [56:59]
Daniel Silliman
Fair, but appropriation, right? Borrowing these images and taking this stuff and making it work for the church and work for evangelism and make the coolest youth group possible.
- [57:12]
Rick Emerson
Now, before you write that email, like you said, it's not entirely fair to call it appropriation, and it certainly wasn't approached with that kind of utilitarian attitude. Remember that in many churches, even to this day, you can get fired for changing the carpet color without the right approvals from the right committees, much less letting a bunch of smelly hippies stand on it with their bare dirty feet. It took enormous courage to be one of the Chuck Smiths of the world. But it's also not hard to notice how some, like Larry Norman, saw themselves outside the evangelical Christian mainstream and for the next several decades remained outside of it, wanting to reform it. And others saw their conversion as almost an opportunity to assimilate into it. One way that shapes what follows is the reaction of the broader evangelical world. Is it better to fight for the old norms or for the sake of the evangelical movement, or for evangelism or in some cases, the evidence efforts of conservative political movements to try and co opt the Jesus people phenomenon. Perhaps the most significant moment when these questions and tensions came into the foreground was an event called Explo 72. Held in Dallas in June of 1972, the event was a partnership between the Billy Graham Evangelistic association and Campus Crusade for Christ. It was billed as a kind of Christian Woodstock for Jesus freaks and. And along with Billy Graham and Campus Crusade's Bill Bright, it featured Larry Norman, Andre Crouch, Kris Kristofferson, Lovesong, and of course the man in black himself.
- [58:43]
Darrell Bock
Jesus came to the shores of the beautiful Sea of Galilee, to the city of Capernaum, and he said, I perform miracles for you so that you believe.
- [58:56]
Rick Emerson
The event drew More than 85, 35,000 of them were high school kids, another 30,000 from college, and 10,000 young people came as visitors not affiliated with Campus Crusade or any of the trips that they organized, bringing kids in from across the country. The rest of the attendees were adults. Many of them were volunteers or were people in ministry coming to learn, to reach out to young people. Some of the tensions of the Jesus people movement were evident at explo72. The People's Christian Coalition, a group founded by Jim Wallace and a kind of predecessor to the organization he'd found later called Sojourners, showed up with plans to protest the Vietnam War, something that was to be expected at just about any other gathering of young people hippies in the previous decade. But they built no momentum and they were seen primarily as a nuisance by both the event organizers and the crowd. One night in the Cotton bowl, they unfurled a huge banner that read Cross or flag Got her country and began chanting Stop the war. But the crowd itself actually hushed them and shut it down. Here's Daniel Silliman again.
- [60:02]
Daniel Silliman
72 is an election year. Bill Bright's always a little bit interested in politics, but tries to keep it at bay. Billy Graham is really close to Nixon and is really interested in helping Nixon. And so the organizers for Expo 72 end up having this whole internal debate about whether to invite Nixon.
- [60:22]
Rick Emerson
For his part, Billy Graham certainly seemed to want him there. On February 1st of 1972, he visited the Oval Office and met with Nixon for a while. And among the many things they discussed was this upcoming event in Texas.
- [60:33]
Darrell Bock
We've got 100 and some thousand students coming in Dallas now. You are overwhelmingly invited. All of these will be committed. Many of them will have beards and all the rest of. But they believe something or not. So you Might put that down as something you might want to do. I think we should. It's a good way to go to Texas.
- [60:58]
Rick Emerson
Of course, as Daniel Silliman points out, not everyone associated with the event was excited about having Richard Nixon attend.
- [61:04]
Daniel Silliman
The staff under Bill Bright kind of revolts and really objects to this, and there ends up being a sort of whole kerfuffle internally about whether or not, would that ruin it, Would that politicize it? Not dissimilar to the kind of politic politicization questions that you see evangelicals talking about today. They end up not inviting Nixon. So Nixon, like, sends a telegram and somebody reads it, and that still upsets the staff. I don't think it, like, convinces any young hippies to, oh, man, Nixon's cooler than I thought. I should totally vote for him. You know, it's one of. It's just kind of a weird, awkward, anticlimactic moment. But it does show you how the evangelical movement in the 1970s is having this generational clash and is having a little bit of a political identity crisis. They're not quite sure where they fit, and different people have different ideas of it that are kind of running into each other.
- [62:07]
Rick Emerson
This is well before when the association between evangelicals and the Republican Party was a sure thing. So it's an interesting snapshot. For instance, in the pages of Christianity Today, Edward Plowman reported that a number of attendees he spoke to shared the antipathy for the Vietnam War expressed by the protesters, but thought that this wasn't the time and place for the distraction. It's not hard, then, to imagine why this crowd, 1976, might be drawn to an earnest evangelical peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter, whose platform emphasized concerns about poverty and racism. There's an interesting historical note that also helps to explain why they might have embraced Carter four years later. June 17, the day Nixon's telegram was read at Explo, also happens to be the day of the Watergate break. In the larger sense of where the Jesus people were at that moment and the place where they likely found common ground with Nixon was the sense that something was deeply sick about American culture. The dark forces had been at work reshaping it, and that the country needed to change course. The satanic panic was still a decade away. But by explo72, some of its key ingredients are falling into place. Visible. The runaway crisis gave us a new concern for teenagers and children falling prey to dark forces and figures ready to drug them and abuse them. The Manson family murders expanded what ordinary people could imagine was possible in terms of both evil and violence, including violence to an unborn child. Those fears got amplified with books like Go Ask Alice, where Beatrice Sparks plugged parents fears and anxieties into the wall and, as Nigel Tufnell might say, turned them up to 11. And in the midst of it all, Christian leaders themselves weren't immune to the allure of conspiratorial thinking. On this point, there's another historical note worth mentioning that's connected to explo72, if only marginally. It comes from the Nixon tapes, and it's a dark moment in the Billy Graham story, but it sheds some light on the story we're telling about the satanic panic about how and why it happened. A little background. Nixon himself was a quintessential populist. The law and order campaign that brought him into office was part of a larger effort to connect with Americans who felt like governing elites were out of touch with their concerns. That brand of populism ought to be familiar to anyone paying attention to our current environment. And it has a long tradition in the US One with some darker elements. For instance, when Nixon was coming of age in the 1930s, a populist movement gathered steam under the leadership of men like Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. They, too accused elites of being out of touch. But publicly they went further, blaming much of America's woes on Jews, whom they claimed had nefarious interests, shadowy power, control of the media, and divided loyalties. Nixon privately trafficked in similar tropes on a regular basis, according to both his biographers and the anecdotal evidence available on hours of the Nixon tapes. That includes this tape from February 1, 1972, the same one where Billy Graham asks Nixon to consider coming to Xplo 72, and Graham indulges in those tropes with him.
- [65:21]
Darrell Bock
There are two different kinds in those people. In the latter days, it's called the remnant of God's people, which will be Jewish people. And then there's the synagogue of Satan and nearly all of your religious deceptions in the latter days of what they call the synagogue of Satan. In other words, they are energized by supernatural power, called the devil. This is what the Bible teaches, whether you believe in or don't believe. Believe it. This is the biblical teaching. This is what I believe. And I believe that you have. They have a. They have a strange brilliance about them. They have a. They're smart. They're smart and they. And they are energized, in my judgment, by supernatural power. Well, Also, they do something else, but they're not. And you see. And of course, Hitler didn't. They had a stranglehold on Germany, on. On the banking of Germany, on everything in Germany. And they had the whole thing, you see. And. But he went about it wrong. But. But this stranglehold has got to be broken or this country is going to go down the drain.
- [66:21]
Rick Emerson
You believe that?
- [66:22]
Darrell Bock
Yes, sir. I can't ever say it, but I believe.
- [66:35]
Rick Emerson
The full audio of this clip, including the comments about Hitler's Germany, wasn't released until after Graham's death. But a portion of it, including Graham's comments about the Synagogue of Satan, were made public in 1994. At the time, Billy Graham reacted with a sense of horror and contrition and sought out the forgiveness of a number of Jewish friends and rabbis. Historian Randall Ballmer has argued that Graham, who was notoriously diplomatic, spoke this way to please Nixon. It's a fair argument, partly because there isn't much evidence of anti Semitism in Graham outside the Nixon tapes. In fact, outside of these comments, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Graham held deep affection for the Jewish people. He was a staunch advocate for the state of Israel. His visit to Auschwitz in 1978 seemed to really shock and sober him about the evils of the Holocaust. And he made a number of efforts to raise awareness about those horrors, as well as the fight against anti Semitism throughout the rest of his lifetime. But I include this moment because I do think it sheds light on the story we're telling. In a way, it actually brings us full circle in this episode. We started with the idea that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Art Linkletter told a story about LSD in the absence of hard evidence. Because even as a myth, it helped him make peace with the world in which his daughter took her life. Conspiracy theories work in similar ways. They make sense of a world that is often tragic, brutal, chaotic. The great trick of populist demagogues like Lindbergh and Coughlin is that they give us someone to blame for our suffering. In Nixon's case, the idea that the media didn't like him because they were Jews with twisted loyalties was easier for his ego to swallow than a more obvious possibility that the media didn't like him because, well, they just didn't like him. A conspiracy gives our misfortune a name and often a face, a direction for anger, fear, contempt. And in having that, we have a sense that, at the very minimum, we have a little bit more of a grasp on how the world around us works, we can make a little more sense of the senseless. This incident is a dark spot in the story of Billy Graham, but it also serves as a helpful reminder. Many of us look at conspiratorial thinking and moral panics, and we can't imagine ourselves getting caught up in them. And yet, if Billy Graham can be seduced by such a story, who are we to think we're immune? Somewhere in that stadium at Explo 72 was a young man from Southern California. He'd been traveling around with a local evangelist, sharing a testimony so wild and hair raising it would have made Beatrice Sparks blush. That testimony would give an enormous amount of credence to the Satanic panic a decade later, but it wouldn't be until the early 1990s that anyone would stop to ask if any of it really happened. Next time on Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Devil in the Deep Blue Sea is a production of Christianity Today. It's hosted and written by Mike Kosper. It's produced by Rebecca Sebastian and Mike Kosper with production assistance by Dawn Adams Sound Design, editing and mixing by TJ Hester with additional mixing and sound design by Mike Kosper Sound design, animation and video by Steve Scheidler Graphic design Nim Ben Ruven, Eric Petrick and Mike Kosper are the executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our paterfamilias. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to help more people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.
- [71:08]
Daniel Silliman
One side note, I can't imagine this makes it to the podcast, but but you'll find it interesting. Mike Nixon learns about the water grate break in from the newspaper. Like he doesn't know about it ahead of time. He's in Florida on vacation at Bibi Rebozo's house and picks up the Miami Herald and sees the Watergate break in on the same on the in the newspaper. And that's where he reads about it for the first time. That same issue has a big story about explo72 and how, you know, some of the hippies are actually really love Jesus. And there's this other it's not all Woodstock. It's also exploit.