The political preacher of the Christian right was forced to come to public terms with past sins during his unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid. Pat Robertson was challenged on three fronts: military service, marriage, and resume.

In a controversy first broached in a syndicated column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, critics charged he had pulled strings to avoid hard combat duty in Korea, an allegation that Robertson steadfastly denied in the face of considerable testimony to the contrary. The Wall Street Journal discovered the reverend's marriage (in the period before his religious rebirth) to be of the "shotgun" variety, with the couple's first son born just 10 weeks after the wedding. And Robertson's resume was found to be padded with several exaggerations. These difficulties did not appear to affect his diehard fundamentalist supporters, but may have contributed to his inability to expand a limited base.