A Religious Journey With Twists and Turns

Without exploring his sacerdotal turns, according to some of Bradley's closest friends, it is not possible to understand his political career or the shape his presidency might take. "I think he's always had a sense of the transcendent in life," said Tom Singer, a California psychiatrist and lasting friend since Princeton. "Early on, he experienced it in Christian terms. Later, I think he has expressed it through political and civic life."

Bradley's sense of mission, according to Princeton roommate and close friend Daniel I. Okimoto, took on greater importance with his near-defeat for reelection in 1990.

"He became enamored of the idea he could play a truth teller's role--in the Old Testament sense of a prophet," Okimoto said. "I remember him saying, 'I'm going to speak on certain issues that may be the ugly underbelly of American society. If my career evaporates, so be it.'"

Bradley will have no part of a conversation these days about faith and politics, rejecting attempts to cross what he sees as a private line. "Everything I'm going to say about it, I've said in writing," he repeated four times, with slight variations, during interviews for this series.

For all Bradley's silence on religion now, there are still echoes of his devotional writings in the language of his presidential campaign. When Bradley forecast his future in his 1964 application for the Rhodes, he dwelt on his religious convictions and said voters who chose his brand of politics would "stand for moral as well as material progress." That is a line he still uses, 35 years later, on the stump.

'Pentecostals and Holy Rollers'

Crystal City's Grace Presbyterian Church, where Bradley's parents baptized him and where he laid them to rest, takes a somewhat cerebral approach to faith. Church secretary Aline Spence summed up the ethos as "sprinkle, immersion by request," a neglect of rigor that leads her elsewhere to worship on her days off.

Warren Bradley, Bill's father, joined the church as a charter member in 1926. Susie Bradley, raised a Methodist and inclined to a more passionate conversation with God, joined her new husband's church in 1941 but brought some of her childhood fervor to its choirs. When the Baptists held summer tent revivals in a sultry parking lot a mile down Bailey road, she often brought her boy.

"I think she just wanted Bill to hear the Gospel preached in a different way than the Presbyterian minister preached it," said Grace Trautwein, Warren's cousin, who attended the revivals. "You'd get people from every religion, Pentecostals and holy rollers, a lot of people walk off the streets. And if they seem to feel the power of the Holy Spirit working in them, then they will shout."

Writing from a 12-year-old's perspective two decades later, Bradley described those meetings as occasions of dread.

"The preachers frightened me," he wrote in his 1976 book, "Life on the Run." "I couldn't carry a tune. The tents were dry and the wooden folding chairs pinched my behind. During the excessively long prayers, I kept thinking of baseballs, basketballs, and tigers in cages."

What seized Bradley's attention, not long afterward, was an appeal to his competitive drive. In Red Bryant's Boy Scout Troop 549, Bradley and six friends rose to the challenge of what Bryant called the hardest honor they could earn, the maroon and white badge of God and Country.