The Church of Idaho

How our state produced one of the most stalwart liberal senators of the 20th century

In January 1940, with war on the horizon, Idaho’s lion of the US Senate William Borah died in Washington DC. His body was carried back to Boise where he lay in state beneath the Capitol rotunda. One of the many mourners to pay homage during those three days was a teenager named Frank Forrester Church III.

The Church family had moved to Idaho after the Civil War, drawn to our state by gold, and staying for the hunting and fishing. Young Frank Church grew up in a conservative Catholic family and had an interest in politics from an early age. As an eighth grader he wrote an editorial to the Boise Capital News in favor of remaining neutral in the European war, and as a junior at Boise High School he won an American Legion oratory contest which provided him enough prize money to fund his education at Stanford University. That term was cut short when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, plunging the United States into World War II.

Frank enlisted in the US Army after his 18th birthday and by the age of 20 he was a second lieutenant. He served as an intelligence officer in the Asian theater, returning home in 1946 to marry his high school sweetheart Bethine Clark, daughter of former Governor Chase Clark. Frank’s new father-in-law had an immense influence on the young man, and he immersed himself in Democratic philosophies to debate his father, a staunch Republican.

Frank and Bethine Church

Shortly after enrolling at Harvard Law School, severe back pains and poor health led him to come back west to Stanford. When his health did not improve, doctors discovered that Frank had cancer and they gave him six months to live. Frank and Bethine were devastated - they had just had a new baby boy, and considered leaving him with his grandparents and driving off a cliff in Italy. Fortunately they chose to get a second opinion, and Frank began painful radiation therapy instead.

Frank battled his way through treatment and came out the other side determined not to let fear stifle his dreams. He returned to Boise in 1950 to practice law and seized an opportunity to run for state legislature in 1952. Undaunted by his loss, he launched a campaign for US Senate in 1956. He defeated several Democratic opponents in the primary and then overcome the incumbent Republican Herman Welker to become the fifth-youngest Senator in American history at the age of 32.

Senator Church made an early mistake by opposing Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader and future president. LBJ punished Church by sidelining him for six months, but Church won his respect by supporting the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Senator Johnson took the young Idahoan under his wing, appointing him to the Foreign Relations Committee.

At just 36 years old, Senator Church became a national figure when he gave the keynote address at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles which nominated Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts for president and Senator Johnson for vice president. “We are Democrats,” Church said, “not because our party has done everything right, but because it has been the principal party of progress.”

Senator Church with JFK at the 1960 DNC

By 1964, President Kennedy was dead and Church’s old mentor Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. The conflict in Vietnam was heating up, and reports of North Vietnamese fighters attacking US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin caused many Americans to demand retaliation. President Johnson cited the attacks in asking Congress to authorize military force against North Vietnam. Only in the last decade or two have declassified documents revealed that the attack never happened. Those documents also show that Congress was skeptical at the time. Senator Church expressed his doubts to his old mentor in a classified meeting, saying, “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.”

Church’s opposition to the Vietnam War was consistent with the position he had articulated as a teenager against involvement in World War II. In 1965 he wrote an editorial in the New York Times where he said, “No nation - not even our own - possesses an arsenal so large, or a treasury so rich, as to damp down the fires of smoldering revolution throughout the whole of the awakening world.” Such a position was considered far right in 1939, far left from 1965 through 2010, but is now back on the right in the wake of our long failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 1975, Senator Church chaired a special committee to investigate the intelligence community. Originally called the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, today it is remembered as the Church Committee. The revelations of this committee remain shocking to this day. Senator Church and his colleagues uncovered evidence that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS, in the name of protecting America from threats, were engaged in secret projects that went against everything that America once stood for:

• MK ULTRA: Experiments to drug unwitting citizens to see if they could control their minds

• FAMILY JEWELS: Covert assassinations of foreign leaders

• COINTELPRO: Surveillance and infiltration of civil rights groups

• SHAMROCK: Surreptitious tapping of phone lines with the assistance of American telecommunications companies

• MOCKINGBIRD: A program to insert propaganda into domestic and foreign news reports.

  

Church’s warning back then rings ever more true today:

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

Senator Frank Church, Meet the Press, August 17, 1975

Edward Snowden’s revelation in 2013 that the NSA was spying on American citizens through the internet shows that, despite its good intentions, the Church Committee ultimately failed to stop this tyrannical surveillance. The committee’s findings led to the Foreign Service Intelligence Act, which was intended to provide oversight of the intelligence community. However, recent evidence suggests that FISA courts simply rubber-stamp whatever the CIA, NSA, or FBI wants, as demonstrated by their spying on the Trump campaign in 2016 and even the Trump Administration in 2017.

Senator Church ran for president in the 1976 Democratic primary, losing to eventual winner Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. In 1980, Church lost his bid for a fifth term in the Senate to Republican Steve Symms by less than five thousand votes. Church’s support for returning the Panama Canal as well as the red wave accompanying Ronald Reagan spelled doom, despite his efforts to keep Idaho water from being diverted to California. Less than four years later, Frank Church died of pancreatic cancer. Like William Borah, Church lay in state at the Capitol rotunda in Boise for three days before being buried in the same cemetery as his boyhood hero.

Frank Church was the longest serving Democratic senator in Idaho history, and remains the last Democrat to represent us in the Senate. On the one hand, he supported typical left-wing policies such as higher taxes and expanded welfare, and his influence on environmental regulations can be seen today, as he helped establish the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area as well as the Sawtooth Wilderness area here in Idaho.

On the other hand, Church opposed gun control and also sponsored the conscience clause, which prohibited the government from forcing Christian hospitals to perform abortions. It might be hard to believe but there were once principled and patriotic Democrats in our country. If they still exist today they are few and far between.

Church’s most controversial positions - opposing the Vietnam war and exposing corruption in the military and our intelligence community - look to have been correct in hindsight. His role in exposing the duplicity of our intelligence agencies will mark his place in history. In 1975 he said, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.” We are seeing his warning play out before our very eyes, as the intelligence apparatus that our country built after World War II, then supercharged after 9/11, has been turned against patriotic Americans.

Frank Forrester Church III served honorably in World War II and then stuck to his principles in the Senate for nearly twenty-five years. Like his hero William Borah before him, Church was a principled statesman who left his mark on our state and our country.

The encyclopedia.com entry for Frank Church was invaluable in my reading about this Idaho icon.