Just two days before becoming President of the U.S., amid the tense expectation of a Nixon resignation, Vice President Gerald Ford visited the office of House Republican Leader John Rhodes. What new political turn was being hatched, newsmen wondered, in this pivotal day of Ford's career? When the session was over the incredulous press heard that Ford had simply taken time out for a short prayer meeting with Rhodes, a Methodist, and a longtime Republican colleague from the House, Congressman Albert Quie of Minnesota, a Lutheran.
The prayers were not something special for that tumultuous day. The three men, plus former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, a Presbyterian, had been holding similar meetings weekly for three months, reviving a custom Ford, Laird and Quie had first begun in 1967. Quie says confidently that "we expect to continue," even with Ford in the White House—though the place and time will change.
Satan's Power. The Ford group is only one of an intricate web of groups and individuals—almost an underground network—stretching well across religious and political boundaries, all of them part of a small but growing spiritual renaissance in Washington. It involves both those who have been hoisted to power through Watergate and those who were toppled by it. Quie, for instance, also prays with a Monday morning group that includes Senator Harold Hughes, occasionally Senator Mark Hatfield, and—from January to July—Charles Colson. When Colson went off to prison last month to begin serving a one-to-three-year sentence for obstruction of justice, he carried with him three Bibles and the promise that his prayer-group fellows would keep in touch. Other members of the Watergate cast who have recently re-examined their faith:
> James W. McCord Jr., 50, whose letter to Judge John Sirica burst the Watergate dam, has told friends that sermons in suburban Washington's Fourth Presbyterian Church had a powerful impact on his decisions that winter. On the first Sunday of January 1973, McCord, a Methodist who had started attending the church only weeks before, heard the Rev. Richard Halverson, Washington's best-known evangelical preacher, talk about the power of Satan that tempted leaders to play God. The next week, when approached by White House Aide John Caulfield, McCord refused to plead guilty and remain silent.
> Jeb Stuart Magruder, 39, was accompanied by the Rev. Louis Evans Jr., of Washington's National Presbyterian Church, when he was sentenced in May for conspiring to obstruct justice. Last year after the Watergate affair had begun to unravel, Magruder joined one of the intimate "covenant" groups that Evans had started in order to feed the "spiritual hunger" in Washington. Jeb's wife Gail joined another (also attended by Mark Hatfield's wife Antoinette). The groups are small—typically only a dozen people who bind themselves to each other through eight principles or covenants. The principles include a broad sharing of time, ideas and possessions when another member needs them. His group is continuing Bible studies with Jeb by mail and visits while he is in prison.