Pat Robertson: A Life and Legacy is the first sweeping overview of the vast international media, business, humanitarian, educational, political, legal, and religious empire created by one of the consummate — and most controversial — American visionaries of the twentieth century. / Based on thousands of documents from the files of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the private correspondence of Robertson himself, this meticulously researched book will become the definitive account of Pat Robertson’s life and legacy. Author David Edwin Harrell Jr. has conducted more than 100 hours of interviews with 75 people in seven countries — including extensive interviews with the Robertson family. He brings these numerous resources — covering everything from Robertson’s unique position of influence to his son’s drug addiction to the truth behind the caricature often painted of him — together in one captivating biography.
Pat Robertson
A Life and LegacyBy David Edwin Harrell Jr.William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2010 David Edwin Harrell Jr.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8028-6384-3 Contents
Preface..........................................................................................viiAcknowledgments..................................................................................xii1. Origins.......................................................................................12. Christian Broadcaster.........................................................................263. Personal Life: Family, Fame, and Religious Identity...........................................624. From Television Entrepreneur to Presidential Candidate........................................785. Completing the Political Journey: The Christian Coalition.....................................1256. Rebuilding the Christian Broadcasting Network.................................................1797. New Frontiers: WorldReach and Operation Blessing..............................................2128. Home Front: Regent University and the American Center for Law and Justice.....................2419. Multiple Incarnations: Entrepreneur, Author, Controversialist.................................27310. Religious Life: A Charismatic Middle Way.....................................................30811. The Man, the Empire, the Legacy..............................................................334Bibliographical Note.............................................................................353Endnotes.........................................................................................357Index............................................................................................417
Chapter One
Origins
It has been a matter of pride and meaning in the thinking of Pat Robertson that the "first landing" of English-speaking settlers in the New World, planting the seeds that would grow into the most powerful nation in the world in the twentieth century, was in Virginia, not Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. At Cape Henry, on April 29, 1607, a group of English settlers came ashore and planted a cross on the Atlantic coast in what is now Virginia Beach. Reverend Robert Hunt knelt in prayer and claimed "this nation for the glory of God and propagation of the gospel from these shores to the uttermost parts of the earth." That remembrance of beginnings has surfaced repeatedly in the thinking and rhetoric of Robertson; to him, it is a matter of great consequence.
Home and Family
Robertson's childhood memories of Virginia are rooted in the village of Lexington, situated near the center of the Valley of Virginia in a setting rich in both beauty and history. In 1774 Thomas Jefferson was granted a land patent that included the nearby natural rock bridge, a site where as a young man George Washington had carved his name. In 1796 Washington end owed a college that had been established in Lexington forty-seven years earlier, whereupon grateful trustees renamed the school Washington College. In 1839 Virginia Military Institute joined Washington College in Lexington; it became the oldest state-supported military college in the nation.
Other names forever associated with Lexington made it a hallowed place in Southern history. Thomas J. Jackson became professor of natural philosophy at Virginia Military Institute in 1851 before becoming one of the martyred heroes of the Confederacy. After the Civil War, Washington College became the last home and final resting place for Robert E. Lee. He accepted the school's presidency in 1865, and after his death and interment on school grounds in 1870, trustees changed the college's name again, to Washington and Lee. Thereafter, the adjoining campuses of VMI and Washington and Lee stood sentinel over the memory of the Confederate cause for generations to come.
In the years that followed, change came slowly to Lexington, befitting its status as a repository of cherished regional memories. In the census of 1930, the population of Lexington was still less than 3,800. It took another twenty years for the town to install its first traffic light. Churches raised money to support Bible teachers in the local public schools. The Lexington Gazette featured generous helpings of Christian teaching along with a regular column on "The American Way."
In spite of the deepening Depression around the world, on March 25, 1930, the weekly edition of the Gazette related mostly Lexington's local news. The weather had been unseasonably warm, Virginia Military Institute had begun its spring sports activities, and local merchants were disturbed by the recent invasion of "chain stores." Anticipating the coming Easter season, the weekly Sunday School lesson featured in the newspaper took its "Golden Text" from Isaiah 9:6: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder...." And a brief note in the "Personals" section reported that "Mr. and Mrs. A.W. Robertson are the proud parents of a son, who arrived Saturday, March 22nd."
Senator Absalom Willis Robertson, Pat Robertson's father, was born in Berkeley County, West Virginia, in 1887 and moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, at age three. From the beginning, Absalom Willis Robertson was a larger-than-life figure. Physically, he was an extraordinary specimen - tall and muscular, a college athlete who in later years was often seen in the United States Senate gymnasium. He was a lifelong outdoorsman who loved hunting and fishing. His affection for the outdoors extended to his political life; he introduced legislation establishing the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries in his first year in the Virginia Senate, where he served from 1916 to 1922, and ten years later he was appointed chairman of the commission. He was formal but warm and charming, known to close associates as a captivating storyteller and to audiences around Virginia as a spellbinding orator. It was his personal charm in such settings that accounted for what would prove to be a long career in politics; one local journalist commented that by the end of his career Robertson had "hunted and prayed with everyone in the state." Never part of the Virginia Democratic Party machine, he nonetheless managed to serve six consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives and three in the U.S. Senate, winning his final term with an unprecedented 81 percent of the vote.
Senator Robertson's political career followed the arc of Southern regional politics. An early supporter of the New Deal, by 1935 he became deeply suspicious of the deficit spending the program required, and thereafter he kept a careful eye on government expenditures. Over the course of his career he claimed credit for removing billions of dollars from the federal budget, and his staff annually notified his constituents of just how much money he had saved taxpayers that year. Still, in the years immediately following World War II, he supported the Truman Doctrine granting aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe. Writing to his close friend Douglas Southall Freeman, editor of the Richmond News Leader, Robertson revealed the deeply moral context of his support for postwar economic aid for Europe:
Like yourself, I am an Internationalist, believing that it is our manifest destiny to assume world leadership. Like yourself, I believe that a Christian nation should...
