The Doomsday Man

He's the most powerful player in Republican grassroots politics. He's Ralph Reed's boss. And he believes that the world will end in four years. Is this the man America wants dictating terms in this year's presidential election? WILLIAM PROGHNAU and LAURA PARKER investigate the fire-and-brimstone, cash-and-carry world of Pat Robertson

WILLIAM PROGHNAU

LAURA PARKER

A Sunday drive down Highway 3 offers escape from the grime of the industrial town of Manchester, New Hampshire, the countryside turning softly to Norman Rockwell family values. Clapboard farmhouses dot rolling snow-covered fields. Traditionalist church spires jut toward heaven. Five miles out, just past the lumberyard, the eight-o'clock service at the Faith Christian Center begins.

The state's largest charismatic church, Faith Christian is born-again modern, its altar arrayed with electric guitars and bongos, its hymns Christian contemporary from the Integrity Hosanna line. This morning, a mission to Liberia is back from a successful evangelizing endeavor: many converts were made, and with a laying on of hands a blind man was caused to see, a crippled penitent walked, and Satan was driven from a native drummer who had been barking like a dog. Next, assistant pastor John Fortin turns to more secular matters:

"We have an election coming up. It doesn't matter what we think with our natural mind. We lift this election up to You, Father. Let the man of Your choosing go on to win."

But the faithful must do God's work at home as well as in Africa, and so on this last Sunday before the New Hampshire primary, red-white-and-blue voting guides from televangelist-entrepreneur Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition have been tucked inside each worshiper's program. It is a sign of the times.

In the Virginia Tidewater country, where Marion G. "Pat" Robertson planted his roots 35 years ago, the weather can quickly turn biblical. Thunderheads form at sea before rumbling ashore to dampen the daily bacchanal at Virginia Beach, snapping a few bolts at the resort town's devilish New Age delis and T-shirt shops before roiling up Witch Duck Creek and moving inland toward God's compound.

Not since the days of William Jennings Bryan, a century ago, has religion moved into such a central location in an American election. And bedrock religion it is—faith healing, miracles, speaking in tongues, salvation for the saved, damnation for the rest, and a stem social agenda in our transitory domain here on earth. As the folks from Faith Christian headed homeward that Sunday, Pat Buchanan, the hero of the Christian rightists, hit the airwaves. "You may believe you're descended from monkeys," he thundered at ABC's Sam Donaldson. "I think you're a creature of God."

Actually, Buchanan was late to the game. Phil Gramm had already invoked the Second Coming to raise money, Lamar Alexander had already agreed to consider Robertson as a running mate, and Bob Dole and his wife, Elizabeth, had abandoned their traditional Methodist congregation to attend what a friend described as "several evangelical churches that more accurately reflect their Christian belief." By the time Dole wrapped up the nomination in April, the Christian Coalition had claimed credit for delivering the crucial votes, enhancing the notion that Robertson's troopers had become the most powerful political machine since organized labor's glory days.

Part of that claim was illusory—and keeping Robertson hidden was crucial to sustaining the illusion. As the 1996 election year progressed, the Christian Coalition would prove to be less powerful than its carefully contrived reputation. Even its much-repeated claim of having 1.7 million members appeared badly inflated. And Robertson's moneymaking pursuits were proving as interesting as his political maneuverings. But the broadcaster who parlayed 800-number religion and boiler-room business tactics into a multimillion-dollar empire has succeeded in thrusting himself back into the thick of American politics.

The comeback was slick. Eight years ago Robertson, who sees himself as a prophet anointed by God, was all but laughed out of a presidential bid made on orders from above. Back now as a power broker, Robertson is a little older, many, many millions of dollars richer, and totally untempered by time. Oddball views pop out of him like gum from a gumball machine. Satan moves the Ouija board. Feminists are witches.

None of his views is more provocative, however, than his increasingly frequent insistence on the approaching end of the world. Robertson, who is 66, says it will happen in his lifetime. He likes the sound of the year 2000, with its nice millennial ring.

In other words, the new political kingpin's candidate would not serve out a full term.

The place looks as if it can take it. Its buildings have been called neoGeorgian but appear neo-fortress, with red brick walls and small, restrictive windows. Housed within are a television network connected to the most powerful satellite dishes in Christendom; a university founded to prepare its students for business, law, journalism, and the Second Coming; and a luxury hotel that was as dry as Carry Nation's cupboard until Robertson yielded recently to the intemperate realities of the bottom line.

The centerpiece is the headquarters and studios of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which produces Robertson's The 700 Club religious talk show and spreads his word around the world. CBN has become the golden goose that has funded all the rest and more. By the end of the century it will have raised, from those 800-number donations alone, at least $2 billion.

"I made no threat against the life or safety of Mark or Andrea Peterson''Robertson said.

The frontispiece of the complex is the Founder's Inn, a 249-room hotel with a Monet as well as oil portraits of three distinguished Virginians—Washington, Jefferson, and Robertson. Behind the inn is one of Robertson's homes, a brick mansion built with his book royalties. Nearby, his prized Arabian horses graze. Beneath the manicured lawns, tunnels enable him to move from home to office in secrecy and safety. Robertson has a mania for security. The house is surrounded by a brick wall, which is surrounded by a wooden fence, which is surrounded by an electric fence, which is surrounded by sensors. Secret cameras, other security devices, and a private police force of 42 patrol the house and the 700-acre compound.

But Robertson's pride and joy is Regent University, which he is confident will produce the journalists, lawyers, and businessmen who will serve God and keep the coffers brimming. Outside the library, students mill about a striking metal sculpture of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Three of the horsemen have already ridden out of a background wall. All but the hindquarters of the fourth horse, a pale steed representing Death, has emerged.

Regent University is one of Robertson's paradoxes. He is an empire builder who builds even more furiously as the end nears.

Robertson operates under the blessing of "the prosperity gospel," and his moneymaking ventures are a vision to behold. "He's a businessman," says Ed Rollins, the political operative who has previously advised him. "The product that he sells is religion." By Robertson's own Lincolnesque account, he arrived in the Virginia Tidewater country in 1959 with $70 and a dream. Robertson likes myths. In fact, he was the child of Virginia gentry; his father, A. Willis Robertson, was a U.S. senator who did not think much of his son's discovery of Bible-thumping. The senator's opinion would fall further five years later when, locked in a tight reelection race, he was informed by his son that God had refused to let him help out. The senator lost by 600 votes.

Pat had returned to Virginia after graduating from Yale Law School but failing the bar. He would later speak with southern pride, often on The 700 Club, of his manly tests of combat in Korea. But Robertson's father had pulled strings to keep his son away from shots fired in anger. (His buddies called young Robertson "the liquor officer," since one of his duties was to ferry booze in from Tokyo.) Robertson's father also bailed his son out of some early business failures: young Pat had a wild, get-richquick gambler's streak that he would never quite subdue. There were other concerns. Pat had married beneath himself, the senator thought, and it didn't help that the young woman was seven months pregnant at the time.

The move to Virginia Beach changed everything. If Robertson had been wandering in the desert, now he had stumbled into the Lost Dutchman's mine. He bought a small, unsuccessful television station which by the early 1980s had become CBN, where his talk show was pulling in tax-free donations at the rate of $2 million a week. The volume in small checks and cash was so great, recalls Gerard Straub, a former CBN producer, that the bagged money was dumped on conveyor belts for separating and counting. By 1996, Robertson had become one of the richest men in a state known for quiet but expansive wealth.

Robertson runs his personal business in as much secrecy as the law allows and as much obfuscation as he can create. But no one doubts the fortune. In 1990, in the most public of his moneymaking deals, Robertson spun the Family Channel out of the charitable, tax-exempt world of CBN and into the profit-making world of Wall Street. Overnight, he and his son Tim turned a $183,000 investment into $90 million. They also got control of the new parent company, International Family Entertainment (I.F.E.), and became its top executives at combined salaries and bonuses now totaling more than $1 million a year.

Robertson's aides say he gives 75 percent of his I.F.E. salary to CBN and has drawn no salary from the religious network for five years. There are few public records or comments from his aides about salaries from other businesses he has spun out of CBN, but Robertson's books must be an accountant's dream. According to one pending lawsuit against him, Robertson charged one of his own companies for the speeches he made for it.

Some of the enterprises that have operated on the edge of CBN have left investors and buyers alike feeling as if the tin man had just come through the neighborhood. Robertson has sold Sea of Galilee mud masks to aging matrons and vitamins through a franchise setup that critics say had all the markings of a pyramid scheme. The business dealings are remarkably revealing of Robertson's private character. His public persona is documented more easily. Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign collapsed under a deluge of what his former campaign director, Marc Nuttle, called Pat's "funny facts." A taped 1982 faith-healing session at a businessmen's gospel fellowship quickly made the rounds:

"Satan, be gone!" Robertson exhorted. "A hernia has been healed. If you're wearing a truss, you can take it off! Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and varicose veins. . . . People with flatfeet, God is doing just great things to you ..."

Other problems come from his quasi-political pronouncements, which one observer calls "geo-biblical gibberish."

"[Saddam Hussein] is in Babylon," Robertson announced during the 1991 Gulf War. "Babylon is the center of false religion, and here the nations of the earth have gathered together in this armada to launch what they call the new world order. Now, Saddam Hussein is the opening act. This isn't the major struggle. The major struggle is going to be against Israel. The forces are assembled. We have set something in motion that's going to be used against Israel. Trust me!"

During the 1988 campaign, these videotaped flashes from The 700 Club fell like confetti at a funeral. Paul Weyrich, a prominent right-wing activist, wrote off Robertson's presidential campaign as so humiliating it embarrassed even Evangelicals and charismatics.

"The creek is deep and I swim better than you," said Robertsons bodyguard.

The Christian right is a diverse place. Confusing an Evangelical with a Fundamentalist not only infuriates both groups but is as wrongheaded as mistaking a Catholic for a Presbyterian. Robertson is hard to place in the lineup, a neo-Pentecostal Evangelical of loose theological moorings. In the world beyond his own loyal audience, he never has been wildly popular. Billy Graham, in his heyday, often showed up in polls as one of the most admired men in America. Robertson has never made the list, and one recent Democratic poll showed his "very positive" rating at 7 percent. Nor are his more extreme theological views widely shared by Christian rightists. Fewer than half, for example, believe that the battle of Armageddon is looming.

After 1988, a Robertson comeback seemed so unlikely that the Christian Coalition, founded less than 12 months later, made its debut with what its operatives called a "stealth campaign." The chief hireling, a tough young born-again political organizer named Ralph Reed, put it this way: "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag."

Soon the bags were full of Democrats—and Reed became a phenom, the new story, a Washington favorite drawn into the town's homogenizing orbit. To his fellow movers and shakers, Reed seemed a nice enough fellow who talked moderation in a suit a couple of sizes too large. The press adored him. Satan didn't move his Ouija board. Washington began to forget who was calling the shots. Reed offered few reminders. Floating a smoke screen over Robertson was always part of his job. "Robertson knows he agitates people when he is visible," Ann Stone, head of Republicans for Choice, has said. "It's sort of like a vampire who can't stand the light."

Neither Robertson nor Reed would agree to be interviewed for this article. Robertson, who lives in a closedoff world, soured on the secular press long ago. "Thank the Lord most of the Christians read neither The New York Times or The Washington Post," he once said.

Reed doesn't mind getting his name in either paper. He thrives on Washington's game of spin and bluff—and the media, he knows well, provide the game board. So he talks polls and percentages—until the subject turns to his boss. Then he runs like a rabbit to his hole. When Michael Lind wrote a scathing analysis of Robertson's conspiratorial tome, The New World Order, in The New York Review of Books in 1995, the Tidewater complex went into orbit. Reed ran for cover. He refused to appear on Crossfire with Michael Kinsley—unless the commentator promised not to bring up the book. Kinsley wouldn't promise. Reed stayed away until the controversy died down. When Vanity Fair sought an interview with Reed, his aide, Mike Russell, made a telling inquiry: "Ralph wants to know what percentage of this story will be about him." In the end Russell said Reed would submit to an interview if Vanity Fair agreed not to talk to Reed's opponents. Russell explained that he had cut the same deal with Ted Koppel on Nightline. When asked to confirm this, the producers at Nightline were not happy. "Conflict is the essence of our show," said Eileen Murphy of ABC News. The deal, she insists, simply did not happen.

It all amuses Lind, an irreverent former neoconservative who thinks Reed is getting a free ride from the press. "As the Bible says, 'Ye shall be free where no man pursueth,'" he laughed. Lind wants to debate Reed. "I'd ask him, 'Do you believe that all the animals walked out of Noah's Ark? Yes or no? Do you think this should be taught as science in junior-high-school geology classes? Yes or no?' "

But hiding Robertson and his views is an impossible chore. The boss seems unable to rein in his rhetoric. "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women," he wrote in a fund-raising letter in 1992, three years after forming his coalition. "It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Robertson wasn't Reed's only impossible task. Moderation didn't sit well with his foot soldiers, either. Reed favors Dole. ("Ralph wants to have dinner at the White 'House," said one catty G.O.P. colleague.) But most of the troops jumped ship when Buchanan's star flared briefly. Even in the South Carolina primary, when Dole finally blew past Buchanan, Reed produced less than a majority of the Christian right for his man. He rushed in to take the credit for Dole's win—and the press quickly gave it to him. But the return of monolithic big labor it was not, and it augured trouble between Reed, now a Washington power player, and his purist foot soldiers.

"Ralph Reed's a baby-faced Boss Tweed looking for a machine," said Kevin Phillips, the Republican soothsayer who thinks the hard swing to the Christian right means nothing but trouble for the G.O.P. Still, Phillips is not altogether unsympathetic to Reed's dilemma All of politics is a straddle, he said, and Reed's is tougher than most: "It's hard to wear a gray flannel suit around Georgetown if you have to talk in tongues in South Carolina over the weekend."

Robertson's failed presidential campaign in 1988 became more than a personal humiliation. It also rocked CBN. With its star off campaigning, The 700 Club nose-dived to half its normal audience of 1.5 million, and according to Internal Revenue Service records, contributions fell from $83.5 million in 1987 to $59.5 million in 1988. CBN was still making so much money that the I.R.S. began an investigation of its tax-exempt status which continues today. Under the tax laws, CBN is allowed to operate for-profit subsidiaries—but only if they produce an "insubstantial" portion of total revenues. The Family Channel, on which Robertson packaged inexpensive reruns around his 700 Club, produced anything but insubstantial revenues.

After the presidential fiasco, Robertson went on a new moneymaking, empire-building binge. He proceeded with the Family Channel sale, which became one of those magical Wall Street deals in which everyone got rich and no one in particular got hurt.

The Robertsons got their $90 million. CBN got $600 million, enough to make anyone believe in the prosperity gospel.

Robertson's deal was legal; its propriety was dubious. Jeffrey Hadden, a University of Virginia professor and Robertson biographer, said that, especially as a religious leader, Robertson was operating "at the edge of ethics." Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat, called the sale "self-dealing" by "insiders," and introduced legislation to close the tax-law loopholes that allowed it. When it comes to cutting corners, Robertson tends to take the view of the man from the countinghouse rather than the man from the chapel. He was a man of religion creating a personal fortune, in effect, out of the collection plate.

Gene Kapp, the official spokesman for CBN, wrote off all criticisms as "religious bigotry." It became a common defense.

Robertson moved on, hanging an array of new for-profit and nonprofit ornaments on CBN. He took the religious network into media, sales, travel, retirement, and high tech. Over the next few years, CBN evolved into a conglomerate of more than a dozen enterprises. Among the nonprofits, old and new, were the Founder's Inn hotel, The 700 Club, and Middle East Television, which beams religious programming into Israel from Lebanon.

CBN also built a small for-profit empire, largely through the creation of a holding company called United States Media Corporation (U.S.M.C.). Under the U.S.M.C. umbrella, CBN ended up with companies that owned the interactive rights to William Bennett's best-selling The Book of Virtues

and leased the famous headline board in the heart of sinful Times Square. CBN owns a jet-charter company. A Tidewater retirement community, Founder's Village, is in the planning stages and down payments have been taken. The

network also invested $10 million in the Asia Pacific Media Corporation and gained a partnership with the wealthy Pentecostal entrepreneur Kay Peng Khoo, a Malaysian who owns the religious theme park Heritage U.S.A.

Robertson bought and sold almost compulsively. Some of the companies were quickly unloaded or passed out of existence, and dollar figures on many are obscure. But by 1995, CBN was operating on revenues of $100 million, of which $83 million came from donations, an $8.7 million drop from 1994. It was big business.

At I.F.E. he bought Mary Tyler Moore Entertainment for $94 million, gaining in the deal a host of syndicated television shows, including Lou Grant, Rescue 911, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He also added a TV health club, an entertainment company, and other baubles. He bought and sold the Ice Capades. But Robertson extended his personal reach and wealth far beyond CBN and I.F.E. By 1996 he was running at least 24 for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including the American Center for Law and Justice, a high-powered advocacy law firm often described as the right wing's American Civil Liberties Union.

He was making a lot of money and it showed. He filled his house at CBN with fine Oriental rugs and antiques. "Opulent," said one recent visitor. In 1993 he built a fourfireplace, six-bathroom second home—mountain mansion11,136 square feet of living space on 27 acres in Hot Springs, Virginia. The house is so big that once when workmen left the lights on overnight the local fire department received reports that the mountain was on fire. Assessed at $1.26 million, it has several decks, a kidney-shaped pool, a pool house, and a tennis court.

During these years of plenty Robertson also founded the African Development Company, which he shrouded in secrecy, and acquired a marketing company, American Sales Corporation, which exploded in gushes of unwanted publicity. However, the visible part of his personal expansion program did not always match his well-cultivated "business genius" reputation: some of his deals quickly turned sour and others raised ethical eyebrows once again. None did more of both than his vitamin company and his diamond mine.

The vitamin company grew out of a $2.8 million CBN investment in the American Sales Corporation, which had originally marketed a home-study Bible course known as "Living by the Book." The company, however, quickly moved into vacation rentals, eye-care products, and long-distance telephone service. By the time vitamins and beauty products were added, American Sales had evolved into KaloVita, "the Good Life Company," and was peddling cosmetics and a variety of concoctions, including weight-loss pills that purportedly worked while you slept. KaloVita, using an Amwaystyle system known as multilevel marketing, bought the vitamins for $8 a bottle and resold them for $49.95.

The company is now closed and entangled in a lawsuit that could raise further questions about CBN's tax-exempt status. (The suit, brought by a former company president, is one of two that threaten to open the guarded finances of Robertson's empire to public scrutiny. The second suit involves CBN's for-profit holding company, U.S.M.C., whose fired president alleges financial improprieties. Kapp declines comment on the litigation.)

In 1991, American Sales offered the promise of making a lot of money for CBN. Crisscrossing the country, Robertson recruited distributors in suburban-motel meeting rooms, where he personally pitched to housewives and retirees eager to get in on his prosperity gospel. In one promotional videotape he extolled the company's multilevel marketing as "one of the greatest expressions of the biblical principles of prosperity that I know of."

Biblical prosperity was not so easily achieved. The new venture quickly lost $4 million. Four company presidents came and went in four years. The second was abruptly sacked, according to court documents, when an employee told Robertson the boss was operating the company as an illegal pyramid scheme. That official, Bill Newell, adamantly denies the charge and says the marketing plan had been approved by a company lawyer. But the employee making the charge, Mark Peterson, suddenly found himself promoted from a $6-an-hour shipping clerk to company president. Peterson lasted 12 months and was fired amid accusations that he was "under satanic influences," according to court documents.

Peterson, who had been broke, divorced, unemployed, and living with his sister when he started in the mailroom, remembers clearly the day he was promoted. He told Robertson about his "sinful life . . . legal problems, and bad debts," and recommended a more experienced person. But Robertson, according to Peterson's affidavit, wanted him: "Pat Robertson looked at me and said, 'I prayed to God about this all afternoon and God told me to make you president.' I, at that time, thought of Pat Robertson as a biblical prophet, like Moses. I accepted the

(Continued on page 147) responsibility." At the time, Robertson also was busy flying back and forth to Zaire. The country was in a shambles, its people driven from poverty to abject poverty by the abusive and corrupt 30-year rule of the right-wing dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. But Zaire was the world's thirdlargest producer of industrial diamonds and Mobutu had offered Robertson an interest in a mine.

(Continued from page 88)

"I think Mobutu gave it to him," said Harry Covert, a former director of the African Development Company. "He liked Pat. He wanted Pat to help market the diamonds around the world."

Courtesy of Mobutu, African Development also received concessions for rain-forest logging, farming, and other endeavors. Robertson said he would use profits for humanitarian efforts and to help Operation Blessing, CBN's relief organization. But the company was his, and the books too.

Operation Blessing has delivered tons of medical supplies and foodstuffs to Africa and elsewhere since 1978, but it often takes an original approach. During the 1994 Rwandan refugee crisis, other relief workers watched Robertson's missionaries proselytizing as people died. "They were laying on hands, speaking in tongues, and holding services while people were dying all around," an American aid worker told Time magazine.

Herman Cohen, who worked for the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs until 1993, understands the humanitarian needs but puzzles over why anyone would go into Zaire to save souls. "It's not a great place to push evangelical conversions and that sort of thing," Cohen said. "The country is heavily Christianized. Evangelicals have done an excellent job. Not much more value added. It's a good place to make money."

Meanwhile, Operation Blessing struggled with another of its founder's grandiose plans: growing corn on a failing 50,000-acre farm in Zaire.

"I was on the plane, Mobutu's plane, when we put the whole thing together," Covert said. "Pat had it all thought out. The idea was to use the farm as a starting point to feed Africa. That's what he wanted to do, feed Africa."

The diamond operation was near the frontier town of Tshikapa, on a tributary of the Congo River that drains out of the diamond fields of nearby Angola. By the time Robertson got involved, diamonds were the only hard-money commodity in Zaire that Mobutu, by then an incredibly rich man, had left unplundered.

Mobutu had been a Cold War friend at the time that the C.I.A. funded covert operations out of Zaire into Angola (then a Communist state supported by Cuban troops). When the Cubans pulled out and the Cold War faded, Mobutu's "kleptocracy," as critics called his governing style, became too much for the American government. The U.S. cut him off. Other countries joined in, making him an international pariah.

"For a time Mobutu was completely isolated," said Makau wa Mutua, former associate director of the human-rights program at Harvard University Law School. "It had been unacceptable for any important American to openly associate with Mobutu. Robertson was the first to go into Zaire and give Mobutu respectability again."

Back in Virginia Beach, according to allegations in court documents, Robertson astonished Mark Peterson one day by rolling uncut African diamonds out of their bags, saying that they had been "transported to the United States dutyfree via his private aircraft."

By then, the company had launched a jewelry line, Yafe Creations, which offered, through its catalogue, "fine diamond jewelry available direct from the Holy Land." The jewelry supposedly came from the National Diamond Center of Jerusalem. In actuality, Peterson charges, the National Diamond Center was a small New York company. According to court documents, Robertson told Peterson he wanted to sell his uncut diamonds in New York "for his personal gain."

Relations between the men were already strained. By Peterson's account, he had "openly questioned the ethics of Robertson's behavior" and noted that "there may be legal and moral consequences." Peterson was fired the week before Christmas in 1992, when his wife, Andrea, was in the ninth month of pregnancy.

Robertson ran through one more president before his new venture collapsed in 1994 in a blaze of bad press. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot broke the story in 1993, raising questions about KaloVita's finances and methods as well as CBN's ties to the operation. Newsweek and ABC's PrimeTime Live followed up nationally.

Robertson's explanation to the dreaded press ultimately landed him in court. During the Virginian-Pilot investigation, Robertson issued a press release blaming the company's huge losses on his shipping clerk turned president and expressing "shock" that Peterson had spent all the money Robertson had invested, plunged the company deeper in debt, and caused a host of internal problems.

Peterson was horrified to read such an assessment in the local newspaper. For a born-again Christian in the Tidewater country, criticism from Robertson carries a brutal sting. For the next two years Robertson and Peterson seesawed between friendship and enmity as Peterson tried unsuccessfully to get Robertson to publicly retract his statements and Robertson tried unsuccessfully to keep Peterson from talking to the media. The hostilities grew, eventually reaching the point where Peterson felt that Robertson's bodyguard, and then Robertson himself, had made threats on his life.

In May 1995, Peterson filed his suit for defamation against Robertson ahd CBN and brought the untidy details of their relationship and KaloVita into public view. But the merits of the suit itself may prove almost inconsequential when weighed against a public replay of Robertson's most embarrassing business deal. Robertson has won early battles to keep CBN's financial ledgers under court seal. But plenty is in the record already.

For Robertson, one of the more awkward court documents is a transcript of a telephone conversation between him and Peterson's wife, Andrea, who was taping the conversation.

The transcript reveals a highly emotional Robertson, a man with an angry fear of the media and an expectation that others will protect him at great cost to themselves.

ANDREA PETERSON: I had a personal feeling toward you that was betrayed and shot down and stuck in the mud. ... I want to know why it is so imperative to ruin little people like us.

ROBERTSON: Andrea, don't you understand that I am a prominent religious figure that the left-wing media has been trying for years to hurt, and don't you realize that you and Mark have just become torpedoes in their hand, launched right straight at me?

Moments later Mrs. Peterson tried again to make the point that her husband had been damaged within their own community. Robertson quickly cut her off.

PETERSON: There was a story published in The Virginian-Pilot, Pat, that stated . . . ROBERTSON: That's not America . . .

Mrs. Peterson said to Robertson, "I've told Mark we will not be held accountable for bringing an anointed man down. It's not in our, it's not in my soul." But the transcript also contains remarks that the Petersons took as a threat on Mark Peterson's life.

These remarks were part of a discussion of an earlier conversation Robertson had with Peterson's sister, Pam. Pam had described her brother as "a wild stallion without a bit" in his mouth. Andrea Peterson prodded Robertson to repeat what he had said in reply. Robertson obliged:

. . . and horses who break their legs get put down. 'Cause I've had to do that to a horse that got his leg broken, and that is an analogy about horses, and she's the one that said he was a wild ... his own sister said he was a wild stallion.

When Andrea Peterson persisted, asking Robertson what he had meant, he continued:

That's what might happen, I said. I uh— if—uh, if a stallion bites and kicks he might break his leg. . . . When a horse breaks his leg, they put him to sleep. This is a horse analogy. I meant nothing about Mark but— but—wild stallions can hurt themselves. They run over cliffs.

Robertson denied making any threats. "I made no threat against the life or physical safety of Mark or Andrea Peterson, nor did I intend to make such a threat," he said in his affidavit.

But Peterson regarded Robertson's remark as especially ominous because of the religious leader's influence on others. Peterson's sister, Pam, explained in her affidavit:

Mark was afraid because Dr. Robertson could again at any time lose emotional control and make the same kinds of statements in the presence of some of his religious followers. ... He believed that there were persons who were zealous enough in their allegiance to Dr. Robertson that they would interpret these kinds of remarks . . . as a sign of approval for them to harm Mark or his family.

Peterson also claims in the suit that he was threatened in a 1993 telephone call from the chief of security at CBN, Les Naghiu, a man also described as Robertson's personal bodyguard.

"The creek is deep and I swim better than you," Naghiu said, according to Peterson's allegation. "So watch who you accuse." (Naghiu calls the accusation "malarkey.")

If the case ever goes to trial, it promises to be explosive in other ways. Peterson makes allegations of several instances where CBN's resources were commingled with those of American Sales. CBN has repeatedly denied commingling funds or services, but, with the I.R.S. looking over CBN's tax-exempt shoulder, the issue is supersensitive.

Peterson also accused Robertson of making racist and ethnic slurs in their private conversations. In his affidavit, Peterson described one alleged incident in which he told Robertson about some potential Middle Eastern investors. Robertson allegedly "banged his fist on the table and said: 'You can never trust the Arabs. Those sand niggers are worse than the Jews, you just can't trust them with money.' "

In his own affidavit Robertson denied all of Peterson's charges and said that Peterson's "handling of corporate funds and records was questionable, if not outright dishonest."

Robertson had reason to be concerned about the financial condition of KaloVita. By 1993 he had invested $2.5 million of his own money to save the company and took it over from CBN. He subsequently repaid CBN its cash investment.

In his conversation with Andrea Peterson, Robertson sounded almost hysterical about his losses. "This company has been the most awful nightmare of my life," he told her. "I'm a busy guy and this is a little sideline. I would—I didn't think it amounted to a whole lot and the next thing you know it has cost me so many millions of dollars, I—I don't even want to talk about it. It is just—it has just drained every cent I've got."

Repeatedly, Robertson tried to make the point that he did not know what was going on inside American Sales. But Mrs. Peterson contradicted him: "Nobody spends your money. You have to O.K. everything."

Ironically, The Virginian-Pilot⅛ investigation was conducted by an evangelical Christian and graduate of Robertson's Regent University communications school. The assault on the reporter, Mark O'Keefe, became vicious. A Robertson aide told him he had turned "from good to evil." Friends say he was spurned and ostracized. O'Keefe was told that his photo was kept at the Founder's Inn with instructions that if he was spotted the security force was to be called immediately.

O'Keefe has since left Norfolk and works as the religion reporter at the Portland Oregonian. He is reluctant to talk about his experience beyond acknowledging that Robertson and his people play hardball. In his conversation with Andrea Peterson, an angry Robertson repeatedly returned to "that awful O'Keefe person" and the "wicked reporter." Robertson became even more emotional when he talked about Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter investigating KaloVita:

"The man named Mike Isikoff from Newsweek who interviewed Mark ... he is one of the most vicious anti-Christian bigots in the entire world. He is absolutely unbalanced and he is—uh—emotionally in my opinion uh—uh—stunted, but nevertheless he's the guy who is writing the piece."

Four days after PrimeTime Live went ahead with its broadcast, Robertson rid himself of KaloVita, selling it to a Dallasbased cosmetics firm for one dollar. It has since gone into bankruptcy.

The African Development Company pulled out of the diamond mine, the farm, and Zaire in the fall of 1995 after a spurt of publicity and rumors that Robertson's relations with his old friend the dictator had soured. Others with interests in Zaire said the place had become hopeless. Mobutu had milked the country dry and the demands for bribes had become intolerable even by African standards. "Anybody involved in the diamond business over there is in corruption up to their ears," said Robert Oakley, former U.S. ambassador to Zaire.

Robertson refused to discuss his relationship with Mobutu or the mine. Others didn't.

"It's outrageous," said Janet Fleischman, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch/Africa, the largest U.S.-based human-rights organization. "Mobutu has presided over the destruction of his people and made himself an extraordinarily rich man in the process. One wonders what kind of business dealings were involved, what kind of profits were involved, what kind of covers were involved, whether it was a religious cover."

The African Development Company has moved on to other frontiers. CBN's Gene Kapp said the company is pursuing mining, logging, agriculture, transportation, and power generation in other countries, including Russia, Tanzania, Kenya, and diamond-rich Angola.

Having abandoned the farm, Operation Blessing turned its efforts to another Robertson brainchild: the $20 million conversion of an old L-1011 jetliner into a flying hospital.

"This has never been done before ... a flying hospital that will revolutionize medical relief—and save lives," Robertson wrote in a fund-raising letter. "Can I count on your help?"

On The 700 Club, Robertson looks like an aging munchkin, cheeks rosy, eyes squinting amid wrinkle lines when he smiles. Cuff links and highly polished cowboy boots set off his welltailored, conservative suits. He shares the show with Terry Meeuwsen, a former Miss America, and his longtime sidekick, Ben Kinchlow, a tall minister with snow-white hair. The way Robertson hunches in his chair makes him look shorter than he is. It is as if age were squeezing him square. When he was younger, he was anchorman-handsome, although his voice has always lacked normal cadences, its accent undefined, not quite a Virginia drawl. Sometimes, in excitement, he squeaks. It adds to his appeal. But Robertson's bubbling cheerfulness belies his message.

"I just grieve to see this happening and we need to pray for them," Robertson said after thousands lost their homes and land during the great Mississippi flood of 1993. "But the Bible makes it very clear: when you take God out of your life, and the Supreme Court clearly mandated God out. . . and now we have a president who comes and appoints lesbians in positions of high office. . . . The Bible says that the blood of the innocents will cry out against us and the land will have to be cleansed ..."

Off the set the eccentric grandfather quickly becomes a tough but often thinskinned businessman. Ed Rollins once tested the thin skin. On one of Rollins's visits to Virginia Beach, a hurricane was brewing off the coast. By this time, Robertson's relationship with hurricanes had become legendary. In 1985, as the 700 Club camera zoomed in, Robertson had clenched his eyes in prayer and commanded in God's name that a hurricane turn away from CBN. It did.

The hype afterward was unrelentingpress releases, self-congratulatory accounts on The 700 Club. Robertson even said that his success was instrumental, along with God's request, of course, in persuading him to run for president. "I felt that if I couldn't move a hurricane," he said, "I could hardly move a nation."

Rollins had never required such a show of strength from a candidate. Now, as the skies darkened, he watched as workmen boxed up religious sculptures on the CBN grounds. Thought you could stop these things, Rollins said gingerly to Robertson. "A little pragmatism never hurt," Robertson replied.

Not every questioner gets off so easily. Another well-known Republican campaign specialist jokingly asked Robertson, at their first meeting, to heal one of his nagging ailments. It was their last meeting.

"Pat is humorless," says Mel White, a former ghostwriter for Robertson and Jerry Falwell. "He's not like Falwell. Falwell doesn't take himself too seriously. Falwell thinks it's all a lark. Pat is totally self-absorbed. He really sees himself as God's chosen person to purge the nation of its sin."

On the night of the New York primary Pat Robertson cut into the news segment of The 700 Club with a live report that his man, Bob Dole, led the race comfortably. Then the show cut back to one of its staples—three earthquakes that day. Low-grade rumbles ignored by the mainstream media become a CBN exclusive. Disasters are a mainstay. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, plagues, pestilences. Signs of the times. Signs of the End Times.

Robertson's preoccupation with the end of the world dates back to his early born-again days at a small New York Bible school. "I got an A-plus on my prophecy chart," he has said proudly, and he's been prophesying ever since.

Dating the apocalypse has been downright ruinous to reputations. A prophet named Hans Hut predicted it would occur on Pentecost in 1528. It didn't, but Hut had gathered together 144,000 saintly followers for the occasion. He died in jail for the letdown he caused. The result is not always so dire. A Baptist minister, William Miller, received wide attention and many followers when he decreed that the end of the world would come by March 21, 1844, a date which became known as the First Disappointment. The second was October 22, 1844, and cost Miller all but a handful of the faithful, those who hadn't sold all their worldly goods. Today he is known as the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which has 5.5 million members.

Still, few modern religious groups can match the Jehovah's Witnesses. Leaders of the Witnesses have predicted the end of the world in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1975, and 1984, and the flock is still knocking on doors.

Early in his career, Robertson was defensive about the whole business. "I don't want to appear like a mystical doomsday fortune-teller," he wrote in a newsletter 20 years ago. "I'm not. But look at the facts. Bible prophecies are no longer mere predictions."

A short time later he determined that he would be alive for the end. He further concluded that the Antichrist, who would lead the forces of evil, also was "alive today, approximately 27 years old," and was "being groomed to be the Satanic messiah." This would put the arch-enemy in his mid-40s now, the middle of the baby boom being a devilishly shrewd place to hide.

Robertson ventured into the minefield of doomsday dates on New Year's Day 1980 at a prayer meeting of CBN staff members. Gerard Straub, who later wrote the book Salvation for Sale, tape-recorded the session. "Playtime is over," Robertson told his troops, and he pegged the date at 1982. When that passed, he slid it to 1984. When that passed, he said what many a prophet has concluded before him: "We have to be careful with dates." But Robertson is now growing bolder again. In 1994 he said it would happen within six years. Last year he said five. This year he has said four. The year 2000 seems the date of choice.

As he grows older, Robertson also has taken on some of the Old Testament God's more wrathful attributes. Last year he published The End of the Age, which Gene Kapp had billed before publication as "examining the biblical prophecies. Where are we in the time line?" It did that, all right: the end, as expected, begins in 2000 and climaxes, after the biblical seven years of the Antichrist, in 2007.

Robertson decided—after he had completed the first chapter, he said—to write the tale as fiction, his first novel. Most saw this as another fig leaf for Reed and the Christian Coalition: the end of the world is not a strong plank in a political platform.

On his book tour Robertson enthused about what he considers his best public account of his vision. He calls the book a popularized version of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, which lays out the final events. "I really wasn't setting out to write fiction," he told Charlie Rose. "It's a true story."

The end of the world would seem to settle all grudges sufficiently. Nevertheless, Robertson manages to kick a few people on their way down. The precipitating event—a huge meteor hurled by angels—occurs just off the coast of California, quickly getting rid of those occultist New Agers, demonic Hollywood people, and, of course, the gays in San Francisco. The media get their whack as they go under ("It was one of Washington's dirtiest little secrets . . . [The Washington] Post was so powerful that it routinely operated above the law"). Presidents are killed by cobras provided by Satanic Hindu Shivas who have been training the Antichrist. A Christian Resistance forms in New Mexico under a rather familiar former preacher who did a lot of work on television (and owns a magnificent house with a satellite-transmission dish); the unsaved citizenry spend months in horrible pain; two billion people are killed; more die in a neutron-bomb explosion in Israel; and, finally, with the Lord's victory assured, the saved rise into the air to meet Him while the others make a swift and final descent.

The Second Coming is an article of faith in all Christian denominations. Most mainstream churches, however, view the event and the Book of Revelation in a more allegorical vein. These churches, using common sense and heeding a holy warning, also back away from picking dates. You can't have Hans Huts and Pat Robertsons repeatedly revving up the masses for disappointments and expect to keep any institutional continuity going, surely not for 2,000 years, as the Catholics have done. As for the holy warning, Jesus cautioned future prognosticators about predictions: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Robertson floats by that one. "The Bible tells us to be careful with dates," he says, and marches to the blackboard to begin the toting.

The Book of Revelation, written in the first century A.D., describes a sequence of signs and events that will transpire before Christ's return. Unfortunately for later generations, it was written in a kind of poetic code in order to hide its real meaning from the Romans.

First-century Christians suffered terrible persecution, including the sacking of Jerusalem by Roman armies in the year 70. Because of these ordeals and Christ's promise to return, they expected him back in their time. By the end of the first century, however, despite repeated predictions, Jesus had been gone 70 years. The faithful had become dispirited and began to relegate Revelation to the safer province of symbolism and, much later, the catechism.

In the sixth century, Saint Augustine, the church's first great scholar and the man who became known as the father of Christian theology, concluded that the Book of Revelation should be read only as allegory. Most modern theologians agree, seeing Revelation as a vividly imaginative mix of history, current events, and reflections of those early expectations of an imminent return. But it is the author's code and signs that the prophecy seekers, including Robertson, have been trying to crack ever since.

The most significant event to modem apocalyptic thinking was the 1948 return of the Jews to Israel, a requirement for Christ's return. This set off an avalanche of prophetic visions, including Robertson's.

To Robertson, the advent of television also fulfills a prophecy—and has made him, through CBN, an anointed one. Jesus, according to Revelation, will not return until His word "is spread to the ends of the earth." Nothing could do that better than satellite TV, and The 700 Club is now seen in 70 countries.

Some read the wording of another prophecy—"There would no flesh be saved"—as predicting the advent of nuclear weapons. This one has been tricky for Robertson. He widely predicted the end would come in a nuclear holocaust— until he ran for president. That wasn't a good plank for a political platform, either. So he changed his mind. But he returned to the use of neutron weapons—which destroy life but not property—in his novel.

Robertson's apocalyptic visions trouble many people deeply, primarily because of his political influence. "Somebody like Bob Dole, essentially he's a secular," says James Tabor, a University of North Carolina biblical scholar. "He might believe the Bible, but he's not sitting there poring over the Book of Revelation to figure out the Gulf War. George Bush wasn't, either. But I guarantee you Pat Robertson would. He says, 'Well, this must be what is prophesied.' It's scary that anybody in any position of power would be reading that stuff, believing that maybe they would tip the hand a little bit, be an instrument of God."

Tabor says that any kind of activity in the Middle East starts the prophetic wheels spinning. "These people begin to just jump out of their skins," he says. "It's like bees buzzing."

To understand the meaning of the biblical text, the words must be read in context, says Father Richard P. McBrien, a distinguished Catholic theologian and former head of the theology department at Notre Dame. "You don't read the texts as if they came out in The New York Times yesterday," McBrien says. "You have to read them in contemporary context. You also have to read them remembering that what is printed on the comics page has a different context than what is printed on the editorial page. The Bible is poetry and comics and editorials—lots of editorials and news and statistics—lots of numbers. Only scholars can figure that out, and they can spend a lifetime on it and not finish."

The prophecy seekers are stuck in the Dark Ages, McBrien says, because they insist on reading the words literally. That rigidity rules out answers, he says, adding sardonically, "If you're a Fundamentalist, you're not a scholar."

Robertson has an answer to smartalecky Catholic thinkers and Saint Augustine too.

"The silly so-called intellectuals of academia will find themselves first irrelevant and then expendable when the real power begins to operate," he has exclaimed. Meanwhile, Robertson devotes a week of 700 Club shows each spring to the coming end: Signs of the Times week, which he runs telethon-style. It's the club's biggest moneymaker.

"It does seem an inconsistency, doesn't it?" says McBrien. "It's all coming to an end, and there's that 800 number running across the bottom of the screen."

TT* or Marion G. "Pat" Robertson, it had X1 been one bad weekend. His plane had lost its hydraulics shortly after takeoff from Norfolk, and at the Washington Hilton hotel, where the Christian Coalition was holding its fourth annual Road to Victory Conference, PrimeTime Live had "ambushed" him in the lobby. Still, as he looked out over the crowd at the gala dinner, he felt good. The 1994 congressional elections were only weeks away and Pat Robertson was one of the few people in Washington who believed the Republicans would take Congress for the first time in 40 years. The young faces looking up at him from their banquet tables were the cadres that would do the job.

He told them what they wanted to hear.

"Although we have no intention of advocating bizarre positions which will lose elections, let me make this clear," Robertson proclaimed.

"We have no intention of surrendering our deeply held moral stands just to please a handful of timid moderates who don't stand for anything."

The 3,000 delegates rose, thundering their approval.

It is self-revealing remarks like this that trouble Robertson's critics most. He does take bizarre positions. Norman Lear, the Hollywood producer and political activist, said Robertson reminds him of an old comedy routine. "When he got a laugh," Lear said, "Milton Berle would put up his hand to say, 'Stop!' But the other hand below it was motioning, 'Come on, come on.' Robertson, on the one hand, is saying, 'I never said that,' and on the other, 'Listen to me.' "

He often gets away with it. Washington's conventional wisdom has Robertson moderating, thanks to Ralph Reed's never-ending spin. But ask political operators if they have watched The 700 Club lately and the answer is a blank stare. "Narrowcasting," Mel White calls the phenomenon. Given the information explosion of cable television, he says, "you can narrowcast and have no danger of being seen by your enemies, because only your friends are watching."

People for the American Way, which has taped 700 Club broadcasts since 1980, was instrumental in catching Robertson in some embarrassing episodes. During his presidential campaign, the press printed that Robertson had once said that only Christians and Jews should be allowed to hold public office. He angrily denied it. Out came a 1985 videotape. A decade later Robertson rarely fires shots at the bad guys on the Potomac without saving a slug for the People for the American Way.

When the G.O.P. took control of Congress shortly after the gala, 44 of the 52 new Republicans in the House were supported by pro-life groups and the Christian Coalition. The group also had established functioning control of the Republican Party apparatus in at least 31 states.

"The feminist agenda'' wrote Robertson, encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, and become lesbians."

Ralph Reed immediately began his spin. The American people had taken a significant and lasting turn rightward—"a conservative tidal wave," he called the election.

"Let me say this to our critics and the pundits, to the prognosticators, to those in the media who have tried to demonize us, stereotype us, and silence us," Reed taunted. "You better get used to us for a long, long time."

Few poked holes in the logic. Taking Congress for the first time in four decades was one of the stunning events in modem American political history. But was the vaunted landslide of 1994 the overwhelming mandate that the Republicans and Reed quickly billed it? Many of the new Republicans had won by the slenderest margin—the kind that Reed's hard-nosed troops can produce in a low-turnout election but that often disappears in the heavier voting of a presidential election. "The people who get to the podium first define an election," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. "They got to the podium first, and it has become a landslide, an historic sea change in American politics."

Almost everybody fell for it, even Democratic leaders, who moped around so long that their people began crawling into the body bags before they were dead. One after another longtime Democrat retired, making the G.O.P.'s tough 1996 battle easier. It was a spectacularly successful con job. But bluff and deception have been part of Reed's game since the stealth days. The size of his army—Reed claims 1.7 million—may be the biggest deception.

The number is fuzzy, at best. The Coalition circulates only 310,000 copies of its magazine, Christian American. Spokesman Mike Russell says the larger number is based on a computerized mailing list of members and "activists." The founder of the Coalition's New York chapter, Jeff Baran, however, told the National Catholic Reporter last year that the chapter's claim of 90,000 members included everyone who had ever been contacted by the group.

Suitably, one of the most penetrating 1994 post-election analyses came not from the Times or Post but Adweek. Reed had pulled off his triumph, the advertising journal wrote, by "repackaging his product in warm, fuzzy wrapping—fine-tuning an ideology that had previously terrified as many people as it attracted." Perhaps sensing their commonality, Reed was unusually frank with Adweek. The Coalition's predecessor, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, had made "a major marketing error" by pretending it represented a majority, Reed told reporter Alicia Mundy. He knows he represents a minority, Mundy wrote, and is "going for vertical saturation of the market."

Reed is trying to make his minority large enough to control the majority. To enlarge their constituency, Robertson and Reed have a natural target—Catholics. Theologically, the two groups have almost insurmountable differences and, with the fall of the atheistic Soviet Union and the rise of global television, frequently find themselves in worldwide hand-to-hand combat for souls. Evangelicals are pouring into the religious void left behind by the fall of Communism in territories once considered strongholds of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The Pope has made two trips to Latin America, where the Evangelicals are making inroads into a region held by the Catholic Church for centuries. Robertson always speaks in flamboyant numbers, but he predicts CBN will make half a billion converts before the end of the century.

In domestic politics there is more common ground between the two groups. The Coalition's abortion litmus test is a starting point, and many Catholics are of a mind with the Evangelicals on other social issues as well. Catholics have always had a hard-right contingent—Reed claims that 16 percent of the Christian Coalition is Catholic. American Catholics also have been falling away from the Democratic Party—in 1994 a majority voted Republican for the first time.

"If the pro-family Roman Catholics and the conservative Evangelicals unite together," Robertson said, "there is no candidate that we cannot elect anywhere in the nation."

Still, American Catholics are pluralistic, and it is easier to find a vocal liberal than a vocal conservative among them on social issues. Robertson is not an easy sell. Nor is his shoot-from-the-lip reaction to ecumenism: "You say, 'You're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing.' Nonsense! I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist." Robertson made that statement on the 700 Club broadcast on January 14, 1991, two years after his official "moderation" began.

The Coalition began laying the groundwork for a working relationship with Catholics in New York in 1993 by joining forces with conservative cardinal John O'Connor in local school-board elections. The issues were properly electric: support for candidates who favored school prayer, opposition to candidates who promoted condom distribution and discussion of homosexuality. The new partnership seemed an instant success. Christian Coalition voter guides were distributed throughout 213 parishes, and pro-prayer candidates made large gains.

When Pope John Paul II visited New York last October, Robertson reaped a surprising payoff: he, along with 30 other religious leaders, was invited to meet the pontiff in O'Connor's private residence. Afterward, Robertson described the meeting to The 700 Club in an almost childlike gush. "The Pope took both my hands in his," he said. "There was a real bond between us."

During the meeting Robertson gave the Pope an unusual three-page letter, outlining CBN's evangelizing and suggesting that they set aside their "minor differences" and join forces to accomplish the task. The letter set off fireworks. Some of the language was presumptuous: "I must tell you the power of the Holy Spirit is very much alive." Some was pushy: "I would be honored to meet with you again—perhaps at the Vatican—for further discussions and prayer."

The Pope did not reply.

Father McBrien, the Notre Dame theologian, has read the letter and calls it "gooey" and "ingratiating to a fault." He asks, "Maybe I'm being too cynical, but why would he write such a letter? It's all about Robertson's business. He wants something from the Pope. He wants a reply that he can use in his business." ("That's absurd," Robertson's spokesman, Gene Kapp, retorted.)

After that, other efforts to recruit Catholics hit some bumps. "Poor children and immigrants. That's not on their agenda," said Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, New York. "It's a major part of ours." But the Christian Coalition was still struggling to form Catholic Alliance chapters as the election year began. Then came Pat Buchanan, a hard-right Catholic so close to the Robertson profile that 54 percent of the Christian right voted for him in New Hampshire. But Reed and Robertson didn't want Buchanan. They wanted a minority that controlled the majority, not a minority that controlled the minority. Buchanan couldn't win. He was one of them.

As the summer conventions neared and Bob Dole weakened in the polls, Reed tried again to give some help—"wiggle room," The New York Times called it. In his new book, Active Faith, Reed called upon his activists for "charity" toward their opponents. Then he hit the rawest nerve of all: he suggested new language for the Republicans' rigid, noexceptions anti-abortion plank. The Times played the story as its page-one lead.

All hell broke loose. The anti-abortion activists, many of them from his own group, landed hard. Within hours he was issuing correctives and denials, heading for the rabbit hole again. The gap from political pragmatism to his backers' passions was too wide to straddle. The Republican Party began to worry that its ballyhooed alliance with Reed's right could turn the miracle of 1994 into the disaster of 1996.

Had the media been looking at recent comments about abortion by Reed's boss they would have found a gap that had become a gulf. "God Almighty is going to exact from this nation one adult for every baby we've killed," Robertson said on June 20, 1995, on The 700 Club. "And right now the total is up somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 to 35 million. That's how many adults are going to die in America before God's wrath is finished on this nation."

To the president of People for the American Way, Carole Shields, the comment was curdling. "If you take those attitudes and couch them in the language of values and religion," Shields said, "you've got something pretty sinister."

Religion and politics have been inseparable since the founding of the nation. Before George Bush, the country had three successive "born-again" presidents. The last, Ronald Reagan, believed that Armageddon was coming, perhaps in his lifetime.

The Founding Fathers were religious men, but most of them were profoundly suspicious of dogma, organized theology, and demagogues. It is unlikely that any of them could be elected in a world constructed by Pat Robertson.

Ben Franklin believed in God but had doubts about the divinity of Jesus. Pressed about it at age 83, he answered that it was "needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble."

John Adams was also deeply cynical on the subject of born-again awakenings. He called John Wesley, the famed evangelist and founder of the Methodist Church, "one of the most remarkable characters that enthusiasm, superstition, fanaticism ever produced." Thomas Jefferson had doubts about the entire New Testament. He rejected the resurrection and discarded the Book of Revelation as "the ravings of a maniac." The Robertsons of Jefferson's day denounced him as "the howling atheist."

It's enough to make old Tom hang uneasy in the Founder's Inn.

Across the thick green grass, inside the broadcast center, the founder is standing at a blackboard doing the prophetic numbers for his television audience.

"The end is drawing nigh," he says.

It is the fifth and final day of Signs of the Times week. No news on The 700 Club today. No hemorrhoids healed.

"I want you to go to your phones ..."

There is a saying in the business: Nothing brings it in as fast as the end of the world. Last chance to make things right with the Lord. Money time.

The 800 number appears on the bottom of the screen.

"We need $5,000 every minute ..."

A phone rings.

"And now to Ben and Terry."

The camera switches to Ben Kinchlow and Terry Meeuwsen, who stand before a bank of jangling phones. Ben is grinning.

"The calls are coming in from all across America, Pat!"

Terry reads from a fistful of pledges.

"Battle Creek, Michigan, at $20 a month! Forty dollars a month from Bladensburg, Maryland! Hesperia, California, it's the $1,000 Club, Ben!"

Ben grins. Pat beams.

Four more years . . .