John Huffman, the one minister who told US president Richard Nixon he should confess during the crisis of the Watergate scandal, has died in California at the age of 85.
Huffman was the minister of an evangelical Presbyterian church in Key Biscayne, Florida, where the president frequently went to relax in the 1970s with his close friend businessman Bebe Rebozo.
Nixon rarely attended church outside of the White House services that he closely controlled. He was always afraid a minister would use the pulpit to say something critical and embarrass him. But the president went to Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church when he was in town, partly because he was more relaxed in Florida and partly because he trusted Huffman, who had trained with evangelist Billy Graham and popular New York preacher Norman Vincent Peale.
Huffman had a reputation for being young, good-looking, fun, and “with it,” preaching sermons that were upbeat. But he also addressed sin from the pulpit and frequently spoke of the temptations faced by his affluent congregation on the sun-drenched Florida coast.
“Many of us today don’t want Christ around,” he said in one sermon, which was reported in Miami News in 1968. “We may pretend to worship him and call ourselves Christians but we don’t want to disturb the comfort of our lives.”
In 1973, the young minister grew concerned by reports that Nixon was preventing the investigation of underlings who had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters during the presidential campaign and bugged the office phones. Nixon appeared to be covering up a crime—a suspicion that was later confirmed by the secret recordings the president had made of all his conversations in the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building.
Huffman decided he would have to disturb the comfort of his own life and Nixon’s, saying something pointed about the need to confess. He knew it would be awkward and felt the temptation to flatter the president. Many ministers at the time attempted to use their access to Nixon to say something important and then quailed, choosing instead messages that were benign or fawning.
Huffman decided he had to speak up. He believed this was his responsibility as a minister and as someone with deep affection for Nixon.
“I really loved the man,” he told Christianity Today in 2024. “If I have a real, good friend—forget public life—if I’m his friend and he’s my friend, I hope he’s a friend enough to me to point out things, gentle, and help me be better. So that’s what I tried to do.”
Huffman told Rebozo that Nixon should “step before the nation and say exactly what he knew or didn’t know about the Watergate break-in and coverup, asking the forgiveness of God and the American people.” The businessman blocked him from speaking to the president directly. Then, when Nixon sat in a pew that Easter, Huffman preached on Acts 26 and how the Judean king Agrippa was judged for feigning ignorance.
Nixon fled the church without stopping to shake hands and retreated to Camp David. A year and a half later, he resigned in disgrace.
“Rebozo never forgave me, but Nixon knew I told the truth,” Huffman told CT. “Every human being is a human being. And every human being is afraid of being discovered.”
Huffman later served at First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and then accepted a call to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in 1977, an ECO congregation in Newport Beach, California, where he pastored until his retirement in 2019. Huffman served on the board of Christianity Today from the late 1970s until 2015.
Former CT president Harold Smith recalled Huffman as an example of faithful leadership and a dear friend.
“John walked alongside me and the board during some of the hardest days to hit our ministry and publishing generally. His wisdom and well-timed words of encouragement got me through more than a few dark nights of soul, and kept the board ever focused on our vision and mission,” Smith said. “John consistently sought to walk and talk the twin watchwords of Christianity Today’s founder Billy Graham: conviction and love.”
Huffman was born to Dorothy Bricker Huffman and John Huffman Sr. on May 24, 1940. His father was an assistant minister at Park Street Church in Boston, where he worked under Harold J. Ockenga, one of the key institution-builders in American evangelicalism after World War II.
The elder Huffman, along with ministers Torrey Johnson and Billy Graham, helped found the evangelistic outreach ministry Youth for Christ the same year the junior Huffman was born.
Some of Huffman’s first memories included traveling with his father and his father’s friends on ministry trips and listening to evangelical leaders, including future CT editors Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, and Kenneth Kantzer, talk at his parent’s table. In his self-published memoir, A Most Amazing Call, Huffman recalled being a child and walking on a beach in Massachusetts with Graham and hearing someone call Graham, then in his 20s, a “young whippersnapper” still “wet behind the ears.”
Huffman accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior at age five. At school, he told his teacher they should move his birthday celebration from May to September because that’s when Huffman had been born again.
The family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, when Huffman was a teenager and his father accepted the presidency of Winona Lake School of Theology in Winona Lake, Indiana. Much of the job involved traveling to raise funds from rich businessmen, including J. Howard Pew, “Colonel” Harland Sanders, Pierre du Pont, J. C. Penney, and Eli Lilly. The younger Huffman traveled with his father frequently and learned a lot, he told CT, about interacting with powerful people.
“You treat people with respect, but you don’t bow and scrape,” he said. “Never think a person is that much higher than yourself. We’re all equal.”
Huffman felt a strong draw to politics and dreamed of being an elected leader himself one day. He idolized the young, smart, scrappy, and aggressive vice president: Richard Nixon. When Huffman attended Wheaton College, he became president of the campus chapter of Young Republicans. His big project, as he later recalled, was bringing Nixon to campus to speak during the presidential campaign of 1960.
Nixon addressed a crowd of about 30,000, according to the Associated Press, and spoke about the importance of putting truth above private ambition.
Huffman had questions about easy that was to do in politics. He felt the drive he saw in the vice president—an instinct to shoulder his way to victory—but was cautioned by a prominent evangelical to take care lest he waste his life or lose his soul.
Samuel Shoemaker, considered one of the best preachers of the era, warned him politics was a dangerous game with great temptations and it did not guarantee he’d accomplish anything of significance. Shoemaker, who was in his 60s at the time, urged young Huffman to consider following his father into ministry.
Huffman hesitated, even considering going into journalism and becoming a TV news anchor, but ultimately decided he was, in fact, called to ministry.
He attended Princeton Theological Seminary and took a position on the staff at Marble Collegiate Church, working under Norman Vincent Peale. Huffman met his future wife, Anne Mortenson, while traveling with Peale in Hong Kong. They were married in 1964, Huffman got ordained, and they accepted a call to the church in Florida.
It wasn’t his first choice, Huffman told CT. Or his second. Or third. But the congregation in Key Biscayne gave him a chance even though some members were concerned he was too young and others were worried he might be too liberal. He was, for his part, a bit disappointed.
“I thought I was heading into oblivion,” he said. “It was scary—and exciting.”
Huffman thrived in Florida, though, getting an opportunity to minister not only to the president but also to an island of young professionals who wanted to grow in their faith and a rotating cast of powerful people spending time on Florida’s beaches and golf courses.
He was careful to “just preach the gospel,” he said, regardless of who was in church, and to remember he was preaching to everyone, not just the most powerful person in the room.
“There may have been someone else in the congregation who needed to hear what I said more than the president,” he said. “You’re there to serve the Lord. That’s the important part. Let the chips fall where they may.”
The year after Huffman told Nixon to confess, he accepted a call to be pastor at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh, a prestigious pulpit at a respected and historic congregation. Decision magazine did a photo essay on the church while Huffman was there, naming it “one of the great churches in America.”
Huffman struggled a bit at the church, though, feeling caught in conflicts between denominational loyalists, transdenominational evangelicals, Presbyterian charismatics, and Reformed traditionalists. He fought with church trustees and had sometimes-weekly meetings with lay leaders who told him he was a disappointment.
After a few years, Huffman decided to accept a call to an unknown church in Newport Beach, California, known at the time as a sparsely populated sand spit with some rundown vacation houses.
People in Pittsburgh were shocked he would leave, Huffman later recalled. No minister in the church’s two-century history had ever left. Prominent evangelical leaders including Graham, Peale, and Ockenga warned him he would lose influence.
But Huffman prayed that he would be in the center of God’s will and accepted that the move was right. He ended up serving at that church from 1978 to 2009, when he retired. Then he joined St. Andrew’s as a member and continued to worship with the congregation until his death.
“I will never fully understand quite how it all happened,” he told CT. “But I can now say with full assurance that God knew precisely what he was doing.”
Huffman joined the board of Christianity Today shortly after moving to California. He helped steer the ministry into the digital age, backing president Harold Myra’s “print plus” plan to get CT online. He became chair of the board in 2006 and helped president Harold Smith manage CT’s response to the financial crisis of 2008, which “directly threatened” the existence of the magazine, Huffman recalled, and required the layoffs of 60 percent of the 165-person staff.
The ministry survived, and Huffman welcomed a new era of CT when Timothy Dalrymple became president in 2019. Huffman said he hoped CT would “remain strong” for years to come, “fulfilling for future generations the essence of the Billy Graham vision.”
His wife, Anne, and their daughters Carla and Janet survive him. The couple’s eldest, Suzanne, died in 1991 at age 23.
