David O. McKay diaries charts his life as a prophet

"Confidence Amid Change: The Presidential Diaries of David O McKay," (Signature Books, 2019), edited by scholar Harvard S. Heath, contains endearing examples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' prophet. In one passage, McKay expresses how much he enjoyed an evening at the movies, watching "All About Eve." Throughout the diaries, McKay reveals his quiet pride in being treated graciously and with respect by U.S. presidents and other major political figures, notably presidents Dwight David Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

His personal emotions are revealed in diary entries. He hated the task of approving temple sealing cancellations. In another example, after what must have been a contentious meeting with his apostolic peers over a church personnel issue, McKay bristles that he had never been treated so harshly before in such a setting.

McKay served as LDS prophet from 1951 until his death in early 1970. His tenure was a bridge between Mormonism's foundation as a North American religion into its now global structure. A very conservative leader, fiercely anti-communist, McKay nevertheless served as a successful moderating influence to the political extremism of Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who after serving as Agricultural Secretary to Eisenhower nursed national political ambitions. McKay also kept in check the ambitions of Brigham Young University, and church education leader, Ernest L. Wilkinson. A significant portion of the diaries include a long, back-and-forth saga over whether to retain then-named Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, or move it to Idaho Falls. McKay eventually chose to keep it in Rexburg, contrary to Wilkinson's wishes.

There are dozens of issues the diaries recall, often capturing the most private discussions in the highest councils of the LDS Church. They include concerns over the publication of Bruce R. McConkie's iconic "Mormon Doctrine," which McKay and others fretted contained more than 1,000 errors; quelling a fundamentalist rebellion among LDS missionaries in Europe; dealing with mismanagement; lobbying politicians on issues the church considered to be moral issues; trying to find a solution to several thousand black adherents in Nigeria who had already formed an unofficial church branch; dealing with Hollywood over a potential film adaptation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre; working with a financial expert -- successfully -- to improve the church's finances; debating the need for correlation in Sunday School and Priesthood lessons; planning the growth of temples, including some outside of the United States; and more.

We learn from the diaries the conversations McKay had with Utah leaders over policy, including the head of the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce and the publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune. With the Deseret News, McKay enjoyed considerable editorial power, and the diaries include one instance of his anger at a Deseret News editorial piece critical of Eisenhower that apparently slipped in without knowledge of higher ups at the paper. Another early incident in McKay's tenure was helping a U.S. congressman who had lied about his record arrange his resignation. He was deferred to by Utah's most senior politicians although his dealings with iconoclastic Utah pol J. Bracken Lee was more complex.

The diaries are excellent example of transparency that has been needed and -- in recent years -- of which we have seen a commendable increase of. Also captured are moments of unity and love expressed between the members of the First Presidency, Apostles, and others in the meetings. It's a reminder that despite the many debates, the group would function as supportive team once decisions were made. McKay, for most of his tenure, retained a strong independence, which weakened in his final years.

The diaries do no shirk from the racism of the period. While McKay was pragmatic on the black exclusion policy, allowing baptisms in cases where African lineage could not be conclusively proved, he did follow a cardinal policy at that time. It is distressing to read passages in which church leaders fret over Utah State University allowing black athletes, whom the leaders fear will date white young women, or read discussions to discourage the Armed Forces from moving African-American families to the Tooele area. The best that can be gleaned from this issue are indications from McKay, and others, that the policy would eventually be overturned via a revelation. In the diaries, it is sometimes justified using the context of the early apostles denying gentiles the opportunity to hear the Gospel, until the Lord determined otherwise.

Portions of the Heath-edited diaries include observations and notes from others, including McKay's longtime secretary Clare Middlemiss. Her entries become more poignant through the latter 1960s, as McKay's health slowly but consistently declines. One strength of the diaries is we experience the passage of a prophet's life. The initial burst of enthusiasm. The consistent energy of the leader's prime years, including highs and lows. We experience the personal strengths of his life, his relationship with his wife, Emma Ray, and the quiet fortitude his home in Huntsville often provided him. And we are witnesses to his decline, the more-frequent health problems and the longer periods of rest that are needed as his end nears.

These are poignantly captured, often by Middlemiss, with McKay's -- and occasionally his secretary's frustration -- with the prophet being excused from church duties by family members understandably concerned at the toll it was taking on his life. One of the more heart-rending accounts is very late in McKay's life when the prophet, with eyes closed, clutches his secretary Middlemiss' hand, saying he wants her with him. She recalls in the diaries that it would be the last time she was in his office.

Stephen L Richards, J. Rueben Clark, Benson, Harold B Lee, N. Eldon Tanner, Hugh B. Brown, Wilkinson, Alvin R. Dyer, a young Thomas S. Monson, all and many others occupy the diaries. I haven't done justice to how important this collection is to learn more about McKay's life, his role in the continuing evolution of the Latter-day Saints, and insights into how a church is governed. The best solution -- read it. The dead-tree book is expensive, but the Kindle version is an excellent buy at under $10.

-- Review by Doug Gibson

With Fawn McKay Brodie, there was little neutrality among Mormons

It's been more than 100 years since the birth of Fawn McKay in Weber County. It’s pretty safe to say that there is no one left who witnessed the extremely intelligent Huntsville youngster who moved through college in her mid-teens and was teaching English at Weber College by age 19.

Even today, there’s precious little neutrality among Mormons over Fawn McKay, who later, as Fawn Brodie, published “No Man Knows My History,” a biography of the Mormon church founder Joseph Smith. The biography tagged Mormon’s most-revered latter-day leader as essentially a fraud. “No Man Knows My History” was the first biography of Smith that wasn’t either a hagiography or a cumbersome anti-Mormon hatchet job. The biography angered and stung Mormon leaders, and led to a formal excommunication of Brodie from the church, although she had ceased activity in it several years earlier.

Many decades later, Brodie’s biography of Smith remains highly regarded. In fact, it took 60 years for another biography of Smith, Richard Lyman Bushman’s “Rough Stone Rolling,” to supplant Brodie’s book as the finest account of Smith’s life. (Even today, I’m sure my previous sentence will invite controversy.)

Thanks to my friend Cal Grondahl, I had the opportunity to read “Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life,” by Newell G. Bringhurst. Published 18 years ago, it’s a relatively short work and can be read over a weekend. It’s a sympathetic, but not sycophantic, biography that was a very interesting read, particularly if one’s only knowledge of McKay Brodie is as the “heretic” who wrote “No Man Knows My History.” She accomplished much more.

Brodie grew up in the now-iconic McKay family home in Huntsville. Her father, Thomas McKay, was a brother of the Mormon apostle and prophet David O. McKay. Her mother Fawn Brimhall McKay, was the daughter of Brigham Young University president Richard W. Brimhall. As Bringhurst notes in his biography, Brodie grew up as part of LDS royalty but also in “genteel poverty.” Her father was not an assertive man, and allowed his brother David and four sisters to control the McKay family affairs, even as Thomas was dealing with a crushing family mortgage. An example cited by Bringhurst of the domination Fawn witnessed as a child was the refusal by the five strong siblings to allow Thomas and his large family to use more than two bedrooms or even install plumbing in the home. As a child, Fawn and the other family members used an outhouse (“Mrs. Grundy“) to relieve themselves. In winter, the house was so cold the kitchen was the preferred room.

Bringhurst describes a young teenage Fawn as a pious, believing Mormon who bore her testimony in church, taught Sunday school and was engaged to a returned missionary. Nevertheless, she abandoned Mormonism soon after moving to the University of Chicago for graduate work. By the time she married Bernard Brodie, a Jewish man who would go on to a prominent career in foreign policy and military strategy, Fawn, 20, was a hostile critic of Mormonism, expressing, Bringhurst writes, “‘great bitterness’ over the deceit of her childhood.”

Ironically, the only parent to attend Fawn and Bernard’s nuptials was Fawn’s mother. The groom’s parents had long split and their family ties were weak. On the bride’s side, emissaries were sent to dissuade her without success. Fawn’s romance with Bernard is accurately described as “whirlwind.” They were married six weeks after meeting. It’s not unreasonable to analyze the hastiness of the marriage as a defiant gesture on the bride’s part against her Mormon upbringing. Nevertheless, it was a successful, loving marriage that survived one instance on infidelity on Bernard’s part.

Fawn’s research leading to her biography of Joseph Smith correlated with her father’s rise into the elite ranks of the Mormon Church. Thomas E. McKay became an assistant to the 12 Apostles. Bringhurst relates that “in a painful, acrimonious encounter, David O. McKay forbade Brodie from doing further research in the Mormon Church Library-Archives.” McKay later relented and offered her the use, but his niece declined and never used the church library again for research.

One irony of Brodie’s Smith biography is that it also encountered fierce opposition from Reorganized LDS leaders, who had not at that time reconciled themselves to Joseph Smith’s polygamy. In fact, as Bringhurst relates, Fawn received empty threats of lawsuits from RLDS leaders. Reaction from LDS church leaders was initially subtle, but eventually included rebuttal pamphlets such as Hugh Nibley’s “No Ma’am, That’s Not History.”

Reading Bringhurst’s biography, I wondered if Fawn’s Joseph Smith biography was an effort to get Mormonism out of her system. If so, it was doomed to failure. To grow up in the Mormon faith is to be tethered to it for a lifetime. The bonds, good and bad, are too strong to completely sever. For the rest of her life, Brodie remained both a commentator of Mormonism-related issues and a McKay, visiting the family, and dealing with her parents’ painful aging process. Her father languished for years as a near invalid.

Her mother, Fawn Brimhall McKay, suffered from psychological problems late in her life, eventually committing suicide by fire. It was eerily similar to Fawn’s maternal grandfather, former BYU President George H. Brimhall, who elderly and pain-ridden, committed suicide by shooting himself. Perhaps these events, including earlier suicide attempts by her mother, prompted Fawn to seek psychoanalysis. As Bringhurst relates, the therapy was moderately successful, and helped Fawn deal with problems of sexual frigidity and depression, problems which had also afflicted her mother. In fact, as Bringhurst notes, Fawn believed her mother was a “secret heretic” who did not believe in her faith and suffered from what was expected of her as the wife of a prominent Mormon.

I have neglected Fawn’s other accomplishments. She was far more than just the author of a strong biography of Joseph Smith. As Bringhurst relates, she had a mostly successful, loving relationship with her husband Bernard. Both earned esteem and success in their diverse fields, and they raised three children. They lived on both coasts, eventually settling in Southern California, where, as Bringhurst notes, Fawn recalls being described as the “fleshpots of Egypt” when she was a child in Mormon Huntsville. Both Bernard and Fawn taught at UCLA.

Brodie’s interest in psychological therapy prompted her to write several more psychological biographies after “No Man Knows My History.” They covered the lives of Civil War and Reconstruction-era politician Thaddeus Stevens, the British explorer Sir Richard Burton, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and President Richard Nixon. All were controversial and reviewed pro and con, but the most successful was the Jefferson work, one of the earliest to link him to a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings. That book made Brodie famous.

Brodie was a plodding, conscientious researcher, taking several years to write her biographies, and willing to put her research aside if family matters, personal or extended, became pressing. If she had a flaw to her method it may have been a trend toward confirmation bias, the tendency to search for information that confirmed her initial opinion on a subject. Bringhurst relates an event in Fawn’s childhood in which she bet a sibling that cobwebs were the result of dust rather than spiders’ webs. After learning she was wrong, Fawn was so angry she refused to pay the bet.

Fawn Brodie was a confrontational liberal, who loved a good fight, whether in politics, environmentalism or religion. Much of Bringhurst’s research comes from her correspondence with two close friends, her uncle Dean Brimhall and her mentor Dale Morgan. Both were disaffected Mormons, and the accounts of their correspondence, and others,’ with Fawn’s candor, are fun to read.

Fawn loathed Ronald Reagan, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, and most things conservative. Her interest in completing a Nixon book before her death was prompted by her revulsion for what she saw as his lifetime proclivity for deceit. Ironically, her book on Nixon came out as he was enjoying a temporary season of positive re-appraisal.

Cancer was cruel to Bernard and Fawn Brodie. Bernard languished for a year before dying in 1978, contracting cancer just as he was hoping to enjoy his retirement. Fawn’s case was even crueler. In September of 1980, while nearing completion of her first book of a planned two-book series on Nixon, Fawn, a non-smoker, learned she had lung cancer. The 65-year-old was dead within four months, dying on Jan. 10, 1981. She finished her Nixon book a few days prior to Christmas, and entered the hospital.

On New Year’s Eve 1980, Fawn, in desperate pain from a cancer that had invaded her bones, asked her brother Thomas, from whom she was semi-estranged, for a priesthood blessing. He obliged. A few days later, Fawn, in her last public statement. clarified that her request was linked to a family sentiment of her father providing blessings. “Any exaggeration … that I was asking to be taken back into the [Mormon] church at that moment I strictly repudiate and would for all time.” That statement is accurate. Fawn Brodie was disgusted by organized religion, and was not a self-professed Christian. If there’s any debate as to her beliefs, they lay between agnostic or atheist. Bernard was an atheist.

The blessing request, however, underscored the strong cultural and familial pull Mormonism always had on Fawn McKay Brodie. Bringhurst writes, “But while Brodie may have hated Mormonism, she couldn’t shake it. It dogged her to the end of her life — as evident in the last meeting with her brother.”

Brodie’s influence as a biographer, except for the Joseph Smith book, has faded. Psychobiographies are fascinating to read, but they do retain a pop atmosphere to them. I recommend her books though, particularly the Smith and Burton biographies. Fawn Brodie had the ability to look at a subject’s life and find questions to ask them that other biographers’ either wouldn’t think of asking or wouldn’t dare to ask. That she provided often-controversial answers to some of her questions adds to the interest.

-- Doug Gibson

This review was originally published at StandardBlogs.