A Conversation with Greg Prince About David O. McKay

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out. My name is Jim Bennett, and Ian Wilkes has been called away on a work emergency and has left me here to be able to have a conversation with historian and scholar Greg Prince that I've wanted to have. Since he first started coming on this podcast. And now I've got you all to myself here, Greg, and there's no escape.

You're putting the pressure on now.

Putting the pressure on. But welcome back. Very, very glad to have you here.

Thank you.

Just by way of background, and this is background that you obviously know, but I don't know if everybody else listening knows. You are the author of what I consider to be one of the most important books written about the church in the last 50 years, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. And I, uh, devoured that book upon release. My middle name is McKay. I am a McKay on my mother's side. My mother is the granddaughter of David O. McKay. Her father was David L. McKay, uh, L standing for Lawrence. My grandfather went by the name Lawrence throughout his life, and at one point Lawrence wrote a book called My Father David O. McKay. Are you familiar with that book?

Oh yes, with an assist from Lavina.

With this is an assist from Lavina Fielding Anderson, one of the September 6 who stayed active her entire life, even though she'd been excommunicated, petitioned for rebaptism and was denied, and has petitioned for posthumous rebaptism. And I think that has— that too has been denied. Is that true?

I don't know.

Okay. And that's a whole other— that's a whole other discussion. But I have never been able to read my grandfather's book all the way through. I find it extraordinarily tedious and boring because it's the kind of book where if you really want to know what David O. McKay's favorite pie was, or, you know, what, what his favorite color was or whatever else, I don't know if it talks about the color, but it does talk about the pie. It's, it's so bland and does not come close to addressing anything that is even remotely difficult. And, and some inside baseball on that. I was on my mission while it was being written, and I was serving my mission in Scotland where the McKays came from. And not only in Scotland, but in Thurso, Scotland, which is the northernmost point of the British mainland. And the home where William McKay lived is sort of still standing up there. My parents came to pick me up at the end of our mission, and we went and visited the Mackay Croft, it's called. And back then, there was still a wooden roof that had caved in. They've since removed the roof. I've seen recent pictures of it, and it's just really a crumbling bit of foundation. But that's where William Mackay, David O's grandfather, joined the church. And while I was up in Thurso, the mission president, there was nothing up there in terms of the church. There was a, we met in a community center and there was a woman who came and led the singing. And there was a primary kid who came without her parents. And there was a mentally disabled man who came and blessed the sacrament. And we had a missionary couple up there with us. And at one point they said to the mentally disabled man, "What is it that makes you so faithful, brother?" And he said, "Well, I don't have anything else to do." So that was the extent of the Thurso branch while I was up there. And they, the mission president said, "We've got to do something to, to attract some kind of attention." And we came up with the idea of of doing a public lecture about David O. McKay and the McKays that had come from Thurso. And I don't know why that fell through. I don't know if I had been transferred or whatever else, but that lecture never materialized. But, uh, my parents— the mission president contacted my parents and said, can you give Elder Bennett any material for a lecture that he could give on this that would be of interest? And They sent me drafts, early drafts of my grandfather's book, including excerpts from David O. McKay's missionary journal, which I just found to be a revelation because David O. McKay, whether people realize this or not, was kind of a lousy missionary by today's standards. Uh, he, he got depressed. He would stay home. He wouldn't go out if it was raining. And it rains pretty much every day in Scotland. He served his mission in Scotland as well. And it was really just kind of wonderful for me because I had grown up with this kind of— I'd grown up in a family that essentially worshiped David O. McKay. Uh, I don't think that's too strong a word. Uh, we called him Papa Dade. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Phrase, but Papa Dade was just the patron saint of the universe. He was, and, and it really sort of gave me a sense of inferiority and a sense of inadequacy that Papa Dade was this perfect person that I had to live up to. And I, you know, was not, still am not, and just felt that, that distance very keenly. Uh, one of the stories that you would hear very often whenever anybody talked about President McKay was a story he told about a time when he was a child in his home in Huntsville, and that he was scared by noises that were outside the window. It turned out to be a tree that was brushing up against the window, and he knelt down and prayed and heard an audible voice telling him, nothing will hurt you., and I can remember as a child being roughly, I don't know, 8 or 9 years old, spending the night in that same house. That house still is standing, sort of. It's kind of dilapidated and falling apart, and my mother used to lead tours through the house every week, and interest has waned as David O. McKay recedes further and further into history., and they still, I think, will give a tour of the house if somebody, uh, calls directly. But the house is, it's, the foundation is sort of, you walk up the stairs and they're leaning in one direction. Uh, there's only one working bathroom in the house anymore. But as a child, I spent the night in that house in, in what I think was the same bedroom where President McKay had that experience. And I can remember kneeling down. And praying and hoping to hear an audible voice and not hearing an audible voice tell me anything. And so that sort of reinforced all of this. So I tell all of that by way of background in that when I read your book, it was like a thunderclap. It was just so remarkable to see this man, as a human being and with many of the flaws that all of us have, and a man who was very much part of his time. You know, one of the stories that I was told repeatedly growing up is that the priesthood ban obviously came from God because Papa Dade really wanted to lift it, but God wouldn't let him. And, and I even told that story to investigators on my mission, saying, okay, well, here's, here's proof that this priesthood ban came from God because the president of the church wanted to lift it and never did. And I'm reading your book, it became very clear that that is a very facile sort of way to approach it, and that, um, President McKay's relationship with race is a whole lot more complicated than the family stories about Papa Dade would have you believe.

Going back to his mission in Scotland.

His racial attitudes go back to his mission in Scotland?

There is a diary entry about when he and other missionaries were on the ship going to Scotland and some fairly derogatory comments about a Black singing group that performed on board.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That didn't make it into the draft that my grandfather sent?

No, it did not. What I remember most about your grandfather's book was his foreword, which said, in essence, this is not the definitive biography because the church would not let me see my father's diaries. And he was really upset about that.

Oh, I didn't catch that either. They turn to go back and revisit that book.

Just read the prologue, you'll see that. And my understanding is that he changed his mind about where his own papers, which included David O.'s missionary diaries, would go, and they went to the University of Utah, not to the church.

Uh, well, the person who made that decision was my own mother. She was, uh, assigned to be the curator of all of the McKay papers and donated all of them to the University of Utah Special Collections. Except one item, which is sitting on my bookshelf about 6 feet away, uh, because I have quietly removed it from my mother's bookshelf. It is David O. McKay's signed personal copy of Man, His Origin and Destiny.

Ah, what a treasure.

And my mother did not, not only did not want to have that in the public, she still refuses to acknowledge it exists. I was contacted by Ben Spackman. Do you know Ben Spackman? Does that name mean anything? That's my name. He's a scholar, up and coming, and he did a doctorate on the church's position on evolution. And I told him I had this book, and the way my mother had described this book was that David O. McKay and Joseph Fielding Smith were just at loggerheads about evolution and that this book contains all kinds of angry marginalia where David O. is just ripping Joseph Fielding Smith to shreds, and the reality is much more tame than that. The marginalia is— there's some, but it's usually something like a question mark You know, there's, there isn't sort of lengthy, but there is a piece of paper in the middle of it in his handwriting that says misapplied scriptures. And it lists all these scriptures that he thinks that Joseph Fielding Smith has misapplied. And Ben Spackman said, oh, can I use that book? And I said, well, I'll ask my mother. I'm sure she won't mind. And she absolutely did mind and still does not want anybody to see that book. Uh, because it, it demonstrates that apostles and prophets did not always agree. Uh, but the disagreement here, I think, is fairly mild. There's nothing incendiary in this book, but I just think it's fascinating that she was so— and, and I think, I mean, that, that her same attitude is what torpedoed her father's book, is that when her father started showing parts of his manuscript to his brothers and sisters. They all said, no, you can't say that. No, you can't say that. Take that out. And so we're left with his pie preferences. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so your book obviously took a very different approach. So you did— you didn't necessarily have access— well, you did have access to his personal diaries because they But you also had access to Claire Middlemas's diaries.

Isn't that where— Oh, it's one and the same. Oh, okay. Claire Middlemas became his secretary in 1935, which was a year after he went into the First Presidency. She quickly saw that his efforts to keep a diary were always short-lived. Like by the end of January, the little pocket diary he had was blank. So she said, "Do you want me to keep it for you?" So for the next 35 years, that's what she did. It was typed. It included a lot of first-person things. She would also fold into it occasionally correspondence, minutes of First Presidency, meetings, a rich, rich trove of information, 40,000 pages. And people have said, well, it's too biased towards Clare. I take issue with that. Having read all 40,000 pages, she was pretty careful that when she wanted to have it in her voice, she would type at the bottom of an entry, note by CM. Colon. Mm-hmm. And then she would type her observation there. So it's a remarkable and highly valuable record of 35 years of his ministry. She also had secretaries working under her to keep massive scrapbooks. These are 8.5 by 14, so legal size paper. And they're each about 4 inches thick. There were 215 of those volumes. Wow. Yes. So the amount of—

when you were writing your book—

documentation of his ministry was probably unique. I don't know that there's been a president since then who has been that heavily documented., and we had access to all that. We were not given access to correspondence, uh, but what was the most important thing I think that we decided to do was to go after personal voices. So we did 200 interviews of people who had known him well enough to have something substantive to say, and those interviews are the gift that keeps on giving. I was at the Mormon History Association annual meeting last week in Las Vegas and had several people come up and thank me for something I didn't have direct connection to, and that was that when we finished the book, Bob Wright, who was the legal owner of Claire's copy of the diaries, asked me where I thought they should go. He had been the chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Utah, had strong ties to it. And I said, it's your call, but that would certainly be a good place to put them. So that's where they went. And it was because Bob ultimately decided that's where they should go. Hmm.

Well, can, can you sort of back up and, and explain, or just give some background as to what drew you to this project in the first place? How you got it launched and, and just kind of the, the process from the beginning.

Yeah, it wasn't what drew me to it, it was what drew it to me. I was seemingly minding my business back here. I had been an elders quorum president for 4 years in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is in the Washington, D.C. stake. I still live in that stake. Although in a different ward. Rex Lee, whose name you knew, who was the president of Brigham Young University and prior to that had been the U.S. Solicitor General, told one of my legal friends that he had calculated the glory-to-work ratio of various church callings. And the most favorable ratio was High Council. Oh. What he didn't say, but what I think is true, is the least favorable ratio is elders quorum president, because that's where you get all the work and none of the glory. But those 4 years were transformational for me, and I still consider them the highlight of any church calling that I've had. But they also raised a lot of questions in my mind about the nature of priesthood, both priesthood on the ground now and priesthood historically. So after ruminating on that for several years after I was released, and in the absence of the real historians in Salt Lake, taking up the bit on that. I decided to do it myself. I later found out the reason they didn't do it is that the professional historians in the Church History Division had been instructed by the Brethren, "You will not touch this topic," particularly the topic of priesthood restoration. I didn't know that at the time. So I was churning away on that having had Lester Bush as my best friend and role model, he, not having any training in historiography, wrote the monograph on Blacks in Priesthood that I consider the most consequential article on Mormonism in the 20th century. And that gave me enough confidence to think that maybe I could do this as a person without any training in history. But as I was working on that, there was a new mission president in town. And when I first met him, it was after I had given a lesson in the high priest group in June on priesthood rest, or the priesthood revelation of 1978, which was in June. Afterwards, he approached me. I hadn't met him prior to that. And I thought, he's going to lay into me for talking about something controversial in priesthood meeting. What he said was, that was fascinating. Is there any way I could meet Lester Bush? Hmm. So, Jolene and I had Janet and Bob over for dinner a couple of times. I gave him a couple chapters. From my priesthood book that was still in manuscript. And the next time he came over to dinner, he said, I want your help with the project. Do you know the name Clare Middleless? Well, I knew the name. I knew that she'd been the president's secretary, but that was it. He said, she was my aunt and she left me all her papers and I want to write a biography, but I don't know how to do it. So that's when I say, Jim, it came to me, it came to me. I was not looking for that kind of trouble.

Well, what made you say yes?

I couldn't turn it down. I gave him a provisional yes, not even knowing what the nature of those papers was. After he finished his mission, I flew to Salt Lake. He'd had the papers in his brother's basement while he was in D.C. So we went to his brother's basement. There were two pallets stacked about 3 feet high, covered with blankets. I lifted up the blanket and there were all these black notebooks with notes on the spine saying David O. McKay Diaries. And I thought I could immediately identify with Joseph Smith seeing the gold plates. It was at that point I realized this is something you have to do. At that point, the church didn't even know that there was a second copy. Clare had made a copy for herself. She wrote the whole thing anyway, and she did it all on her own time. She worked evenings and weekends. In 35 years, she didn't take a vacation. It was all devoted to keeping his record with the hope that she could become his biographer.

Why didn't she become his biographer? Did she?

Because while he was alive, she didn't have time. She would work a full day and then go home at night and work on the diaries and the scrapbooks and do the same thing on weekends. Once he died, her health deteriorated pretty quickly. She lived another 13 years, but her health just was not up to being able to do a definitive biography. I'm very grateful she did not, because I think she would have been way too protective, and we might have learned in a second source what David O's favorite pie was.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you've got this assignment, you've got access to these, to these records. Um, how did you go about this and how long did it take you?

It took in total 10 years, 9 years of research, 1 year of writing. Okay. And an easy way to describe it is I accumulated 15,000 pages of primary source material. Material that I inputted into my computer and then threw away 29 out of every 30 pages, and there's the book. Okay. It was, it was a little bit more complicated than that, but that's how much we accumulated. Nearly half of that consisted of diary entries. The next most important source was the 200 interviews we did. All of which I transcribed from beginning to end. And that alone is a lesson in, in patience. There is nothing exciting about using a foot switch to play a recording as you're typing the transcript into the computer. The technology is now good enough. That, for instance, on the interviews we do on this podcast, uh, you can press a button and it'll spit out a transcript almost instantaneously. Yep. That wasn't the case then. I had to do it the old-fashioned way.

Well, in reading the book, I would, I would hear, I think, the voice of some family members, uh, in those interviews. I, I, I I think I identified many times Howard Anderson. Oh yes.

The stories in that. Howard was great. He and Medine had gone to LA. Gee, I think it was like 1960 or '61.

He was called as a mission president.

Yes. Uh, in what was then, I think it was still just called the California Mission. It was a pretty big mission geographically. The mission home and the Bureau of Information, which is what they called it at that point, later the visitor center, and the temple and the Westwood Ward Chapel are all on the same piece of land. Yep. I grew up in the Westwood Ward Chapel, and so the mission president, because the mission home was on the ward grounds was a member of our ward. That's how I first met Howard Medine. Although I was, I was a kid in 1960, I was 12.

Yeah.

But later after my mission, when I was in dental school, I taught seminary for a year and a couple of his kids were in my seminary class. So I had a very long and lovely relationship with that whole family. When it came around to doing the McKay biography, I had lived in DC, gee, by that point, about 25 years. But when I went back to interview Howard and Medine, it was as if we'd never discontinued our relationship. So I got very, very good insights from them. There were no barriers like there may have been when I interviewed other people as complete strangers. And I interviewed, um, Catherine, is that your aunt? Um, I tried to interview as many of the family members as was possible. Uh, one of the really interesting ones was with Richard and Vivian. Oh yeah, sure. I think Richard was the first grandchild. He was a son of the second son of Llewellyn. Yes. They had been older than Medine.

Yes, I think that's right.

Uh, I had not wanted to go to the immediate family, meaning the children of Devereaux, because Bob Wright had said, you know, they've never liked people writing about their father. They feel that that's infringing on their turf. And he said, let's not go to them until near the end. Did you go to them at the end? No, because Never having done an oral history before, I started out cold, and the first one I did was with Sterling McMurrin, who I'd never met, but I knew by reputation. I sent him a letter with a monograph on priesthood that had been published by the John Whitmer Historical Association. It was essentially the first chapter of my subsequent book called Power from on High, which was the story of priesthood during the Joseph Smith era. But I said, I'm going to, I've been asked to do this biography of President McKay. Can I interview you? He wrote back and said, I read the monograph, yes. And so The time when I met with him, he was at his condo in St. George. His primary home was in Salt Lake. We're just into the interview, and he says, you know, a few years ago, he said, I sat down with all my notes and dictated the story from the early 1950s of when Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee tried to have me excommunicated for heresy. He said, I, I talked for 7 hours on tape and I've never had those transcribed. Would you like them? Oh, wow. First interview I'd done. But after that, if I was going to be in Salt Lake, I would send him a note and he wrote back. By the way, all his letters were handwritten. He never learned to type. Oh, okay. He said, oh, when you're here, I want to introduce you to my next door neighbor. Well, Sterling lived in a Devonshire Circle, so it was in a cul-de-sac. Across the street from his house was the home of his home teacher, Ed McKay.

Oh, sure. Okay.

So what am I going to do, say, no, I don't want to meet him yet? But because Sterling walked me across the street and knocked on the door and said, Ed, this guy is doing your father's biography. You need to cooperate with him. From that point on, I could do no wrong in Ed's mind. It was amazing. All right. And this just kept happening. The doors would open and I hadn't known that there were even doors there. In the middle of my recorded interview with Ed, he said, stop the tape recorder for a minute. Said, I want to go make a phone call. So he disappeared and he came back a few minutes later. He said, okay. You could turn on it again. And when we're done here, I want you to just go down the street. He gave me the address and he said, I just talked to Arch Madsen and I told him you're doing this and he needs to cooperate with you. Hmm. Arch Madsen had been brought in by President McKay in the '50s to rescue KSL, which was on the rocks financially. And he built it into a media empire. It was under Arch's direction that Bonneville Communications was created. Oh, okay. So it turned out to be a really important story of the McKay years. And because Ed had called him, Arch immediately was totally candid, probably overly candid at some point. But that was okay by me. That never offended me. And that just kept happening, Jim, of people I wouldn't even have known about. I, gee, I was talking to Lavina Fielding Anderson, the one who worked with your grandfather to do that book, and she said, oh, you need to go up and talk to Tom Parmley. And Tom was the husband of Laverne Parmley, who for over 20 years was the general president of the primary and was a real fixture in the McKay years.

So Tom Parmley's son married my mother's sister. So Dick Parmley married Teddy Parmley, who was one of the sisters. I think she may have passed away by the time I—

I never met Teddy. That's interesting. Tom was 97 years old when I interviewed him, and his mind was razor sharp. Hmm. Just incredible. And then towards the end of that, I said, anybody else you can think of I should interview? And he says, yeah, let me call Lee Stokes. Lee had been a professor at the university, as had Tom. Tom was a professor of physics. Lee was, I think a professor of geology. So I went over, interviewed him. He was in a hospital bed in his apartment and died just a couple of weeks later. But he told me the story of his sparring with Joseph Fielding Smith over evolution and gave me some of the correspondence. Uh, that kind of thing just kept happening. So by the time we had reached as far as we thought we could, we had 200 interviews and nearly all of those people had never put that information on the record. It wasn't because it was secret, it's just they never got around to it. Now, probably 98% of them are gone. Yeah. And that record is turning out to be solid gold, not just for that book, because I think we used probably 5% of the content of those interviews. The other 95% has a lot of nuggets that other authors will be able to use for their writings.

Uh, well, how would they get access to them? Have you made them publicly available?

Uh, the excerpts I have, they're in my research papers at the University of Utah. Okay. I have not posted the entire front-to-back transcripts of the interviews yet. That'll happen eventually. Oh, wow. But I would like to. I went through and all of the material that I thought was remotely related to the book, much of which I ended up not using, is in those research notes at the U that are available publicly.

That's amazing. I, I I may have to go take a look at some of those. I— so as you're going through this process, you're doing all of these interviews, um, and the book is starting to take shape after you've— I mean, you do 9 years of research, 1 year of writing. Um, what kind of sense did you have, uh, of the significance of this project? And what kind of sense did you have of President McKay himself? I remember hearing you, I don't know if you said this on this podcast or if you said this when you were being interviewed for An Inconvenient Faith, but you were talking about one of your assistants, I think, who said, who wasn't a member of the church and she's told you, oh, David O. McKay is my hero. Yes. And, and you said, well, what did you learn from this? And she said, power corrupts. Yes.

Mike, she was Catholic and never. Met a Mormon. I could explain to you what that used to be if you need to know.

What a Mormon was? Yes. Oh yeah. Well, I think I have the gist of it. We'll see what happens.

Okay. All right. It's in the dictionaries so far. But she helped me type a lot of the diary entries into the computer. And at the end, I said, You don't have a dog in this fight. What do you think? She immediately said, David O. McKay is my hero. And then I said, okay, what else? And then she said, power corrupts. That was the whole critique that she gave. It almost knocked me off my feet, but I can see where she was coming from. At the same general timeframe, my mentor in pathology from UCLA, was coming back a month each year to work in our biotech lab. He'd retired by then, and it was really helpful for him to interact with our junior scientists. But in the evenings, he didn't have anything to do. He had a little bit of experience with Utah because he'd collaborated with a scientist at the University of Utah. I said, if you want to read these, diaries at the night, during the night, go ahead. So he read a few volumes of them. And I said, what do you think? And he said, change the proper names, this is corporate politics, through and through. Which I would not have thought of myself, at least not at that point, but he was spot on. And that's really important to know. It's not digging dirt. It's trying to understand how does this massive organization really function? Because the way that it functions today, although it is certainly quantitatively an order of magnitude larger than it was in the McKay years, the playbook's the same. And once you understand that playbook, a lot of things fall into place. And I think that's a beneficial place to be in. It's not faith-destroying. It can be faith-affirming because it tells you how this system really works. And once you understand that, then you can say, okay, I get it. That on a good day, as Harold B. Lee told, um, your father, we're just mortals trying to do the best we can, right? If people could understand even that much in this church, we'd be a lot better off.

Oh, no question. And that's one of the reasons why I thought your biography was so significant, is that I agree that it's faith-affirming when you realize that these mortal men are able to accomplish this magnificent work, that they're not people, they're not, they didn't come down from Mount Olympus and these perfect people are doing these perfect things. They, they make mistakes, they stumble. There are sort of petty grievances along the way. There are difficulties, there's bureaucracy, there's all of these kinds of things. And yet somehow, uh, this work continues to go forward. And I think there are so many people, uh, and I think a lot of them are members of my own family or of the McKay family that don't want people to see that. They don't want people to see that David O. McKay was mortal. And, and what I, I think, I think my understanding, and, and you, I, I mean, David O. McKay died, uh, when I was a year old, a year, just barely a year old.

He died a few months after I came back from my mission.

Okay, so you have memories though of him as president of the church.

He was the only president I knew of until I was post-mission. Yeah, it was the David O. McKay church, and that was not a stretch to say that.

Well, so David O. McKay— I mean, I think there are a handful of presidents of the church that kind of did this, in that David O. McKay was iconic in a way that say George Albert Smith was not. But in my own experience, I see Gordon B. Hinckley as a figure like that, as sort of this kind of— and, and that I don't see Ezra Taft Benson, right, as a figure like qualitatively.

But I'd still quantitatively tip the scales in favor of McKay. I think that his effect, not just on the internal church, But in dealing with the non-Mormon world, even though President Hinckley was pretty good at that, I think President McKay was better.

Yeah, and he was charismatic, and he wore the white suit, and he had— I mean, there was something iconic about him that is not the case with so many of his successors or even his predecessors. Uh, Heber J. Grant is my great grandfather. I didn't know that until I was about 10 or 11, having marinated in David O. McKay worship up until that point. Yeah, yeah. And I remember asking my father, well, geez, how come we never talk about that? He says, well, President Grant has been dead a whole lot longer than President McKay has. But he also said that— I don't remember what words he used, but he sort of kind of defined the fact that David O. McKay was beloved in a way that President Grant was not. Yes.

You hear the term charisma. There's only one church leader who sat in the president's chair of whom I've heard that term used, and it was McKay. Yeah. There's somebody who's two heartbeats away from the president's chair now, Yeah, that has that term used, and it's Dieter Uchtdorf.

Yep. It will be interesting to see if Dieter Uchtdorf can have that, a similar sort of effect. But President McKay was, what, 75 when he took, when he became president of the church? He was 77. 77. Okay. Uh, so Dieter Uchtdorf is 85, but he has a vital 85.

Uh, only in the Mormon Church can an 85-year-old be considered young.

Yes, that's absolutely true. Um, so, but talk to me a little bit about the subtitle to your book, because I think it's really significant. Uh, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. I guess it's not a subtitle, it's the title. You look at the book though, and then you see the David O. McKay name and then, yep, and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, smaller text. But the, the idea that David O. McKay is the one who created sort of the modern church as opposed to, uh, the pioneer era church, uh, do you consider him sort of a transition figure? Oh, absolutely.

On a personal level, you look at a row of pictures of all the presidents of the church And once you had Brigham Young, everybody until David O. McKay was either a bearded polygamist, or in the case of George Albert Smith, a bearded son of a polygamist. Right. Now you've got this Hollywood star handsome guy, clean shaven, often wore a pure white double-breasted suit. Was totally a conscious of his own persona and of how important image was. That was one part of it, that just the image brought the church into modernity. But I think that the other thing that may have been equally important was his early realization upon becoming president that the church had been feeding itself in a way through its longstanding policy of gathering. That ever since the first missionaries went to England in 1837, the message was, if you convert and you are righteous, you will go to Zion and help to build the church. And if you looked at the demography of Utah Territory, which I have not done, I presume that there were times when the majority of the inhabitants were foreign nationals. But by the 20th century, in particular by the middle of the 20th century, that was still ongoing, though it wasn't emphasized as much. What it did was to drain all the strength from the foreign countries. The people who could afford to migrate to the United States generally were the upper half of whatever the church population was in that country. They were better educated. They were more affluent. They were more attuned to the idea. Of greener pastures. But as they left, then they left weakened branches behind them. So not until 1959, 8 years into his presidency, was there a stake ever created outside of North America. That's really an astounding statistic.

Well, I saw the, the The impact of that as a missionary in 1987, uh, in Scotland. The church has been in Scotland longer than it's been in Utah. Oh yes. But every member there, for the most part, was a first-generation member. Yeah. Because all of the people who joined the church in Scotland came to the United States, came to Utah, until President McKay said stop doing that.

Well, and even after he said stop doing that, they kept doing it. Yeah, I talked to Bill Bates, who was in the first stake presidency in Europe, that being, I think, in Manchester Stake. And he said, it took us years to try to stem the tide of immigration because that was still where the momentum was, despite President McGee having said that. And Bill himself migrated to the United States. Yeah. So he knew that drill. But that, in terminating the policy of gathering, President McKay simultaneously took temples to where they had not been. He was a very moral man in that sense. He was not about to say, stay here, and by the way, that means you'll never be able to get your temple blessings. Almost in the same breath, he said, we're bringing temples here. Now stay where you are. Grow where you're planted. And so with the announcement of the three temples in the early 1950s in England, Switzerland, and New Zealand, he not only brought the temples to them, he did so in an unprecedented fashion. That raised the eyebrows of some of his colleagues because it was the only time in the history of the church where they built a temple in the absence of an existing stake. Oh, it was the Field of Dreams moment before Field of Dreams was written. Build it and they will come. In this case, it was build it and they will stay. And so that did help to anchor the foreign Church. But if you look at the development of the church internationally, it really goes back to his decision in the early 1950s to cease that policy of gathering and instead to redefine Zion as a concept, not a geographical location.

Uh, well, what's What's fa— was fascinating to me when I got to Scotland, uh, one of my first areas was Dundee, Scotland, and the Bigham Terrace Chapel looks like it could have been built in Sandy, Utah. It's this big, massive thing with this huge basketball court right there in the middle of it. And nobody in Scotland has ever seen a basketball. I don't, maybe it's changed now. That was 40 years ago, but they would, they would play soccer or football, uh, in the cultural hall. And the only people that used the basketball standards were the missionaries. And, and that same thing in Brazil in the '60s.

Yeah.

But that was, that was very clearly sort of a McKay era thing is that he kind of came in full force and said, We're bringing not only the temples to you, we're bringing the Wasatch Front culture to you too. Yeah.

And I don't know how much of that was his idea. I think that may have devolved more from the bureaucrats. Yeah. But it took decades to move past that, and we're still not completely past that. Right. You talk to foreign nationals about the church in their area, And to this day, some of them will scratch their heads and say, why do we do it this way? Yeah, because it doesn't fit in their culture. So there were some downsides to it as well, for sure.

But I think that's to be expected because he's— he was the one who had the first foray into trying to build an international church, and nobody really quite knew how to do that well.

And one of the things that sensitized him to that more than his Scottish mission in the 1890s was the around-the-world trip in 1921 that President Grant sent him to do. Mm-hmm. Grant had wanted to do that himself and could never arrange it. The purpose was for McKay to tour all the foreign missions. Now, there weren't that many at that at that time, 1921. He almost got there. The one that he missed was South Africa because it was so far out of the way, he just couldn't fit it in. But in his diary of that trip, he talked about the deplorable conditions of meeting houses, all of which were rented spaces. I even saw that In my first city in Brazil in 1967, we rented a large room that was on the 3rd floor of a building, and the 2nd floor was a nightclub. And when we'd walk up the stairs, because there were no elevators, on a Sunday morning, we would go right past the open door of the nightclub and see all the garbage on the floor from the night before. Nice. And that was not atypical. That's one of the things that he wanted to do simultaneously with saying stay at home. So he brought Wendell Mendenhall in as chairman of the building department. And in the words of a later church chief financial officer, That program took off like a rocket, but it got overheated and that caused problems. They were building them too quickly. In some cases, they were putting them where they had no place being. Paul Dunn later told me he toured the South Pacific as part of his responsibility and said there was an island almost in the middle of nowhere that had a Wasatch Front chapel sitting on it. He said, how'd that happen? Well, they overcompensated, and it, it took the church not into a near-bankrupt position, but into a position where the cash flow was negative. They had plenty of assets, but they were tied up in real estate, so they had to put the brakes on the whole program to allow revenue to catch up with output.

Well, my father talked to me about that at one point and said that J. Reuben Clark had said to President McKay, okay, you need to keep one-third of the church's assets in reserve. And President McKay said, yeah, thank you very much. Now let's build temples here and here and here, and let's just go nuts and overextend everything. And my mother said that Her grandfather had only two vices. One, he was never able to stay out of debt, not just for the church, but personally. He was in debt his entire life. Two, he drove like a bat out of hell. Uh, so I don't know if you've heard any of that. Did that make—

I talked to, yeah, I talked to Judge Monroe McKay, who was a cousin. And his two were that he drove too fast and that he was vain. Oh, just not that far removed. In his personal appearance, you could see it.

Yeah. Well, I have David O. McKay hair. I, I'd like to point out to everybody. I mean, it's not as wavy as his was, but I have two bald My father is bald. I have— his father was bald. Uh, Heber J. Grant was bald. Uh, but this I think is a full head of hair that I thank my McKay ancestors for. So, but I don't know if I'm quite as vain. Maybe I need to, maybe I am, maybe I need to be more vain. I'm not sure, but it's, it's, it's just fascinating to me though, when you look at that and you look at those kinds of dynamics. And you look at where the church is now financially, uh, did— how at risk were we as David O. McKay was sort of spending and leveraging all this stuff? I mean, you say that there were plenty of assets because they had the real estate, but the liquidity crunch was pretty, pretty harsh there for a bit, wasn't it? It was.

Crucial for a while, Michael Quinn tried to make a case that the church was near bankruptcy. One of my richest sources for the McKay biography was Alan Blodgett. He had been in the church financial department after McKay's death. He eventually became the church's chief financial officer, never violated any financial confidences. But he put that to rest. He said, we were never near bankruptcy. He said, we were just overheated with the building program. And that's when Eldon Tanner came in as a counselor in the First Presidency when Henry Moyle died. Moyle was really pushing the accelerator on the building program and the missionary program. And both of them got him into trouble. Tanner immediately saw what the situation was and tapped the brakes. And Alan said, what we did was we just put the whole building program on hold for one cycle, meaning how long does it take beginning to end to do a chapel? And the answer was one year. So he said, by putting the brakes on for one year, our cash flow caught up and we were not in a problem after that. Now they didn't have anything resembling the reserves that they've got now, which are obscenely large. Right. But that's because they brought in some Wall Street gurus 20, 30 years ago and said, here, build our portfolio. And those guys did a job that I think has astounded everybody, probably astounded themselves. Yeah. No, that makes sense.

Well, In broader strokes, with regard to President McKay's life, President McKay's ministry, um, as your Catholic assistant said, power corrupts. Where, where does that figure into this? I mean, did, did power corrupt David O. McKay, uh, or are you talking about just the church in general, or is this specific to President McKay?

I don't think— no, no, it's not specific to him. I don't think it corrupted him personally. It certainly corrupted people around him. One of his faults was that he was susceptible to sycophancy. Yes. And that got the church into trouble. It created enormous problems within the hierarchy. It created a split in the First Presidency in 1965 that never was fully healed, where President McKay felt that he could no longer trust his two counselors, Hugh Brown and Eldon Tanner, in part because Thorpe Isaacson had been whispering in his ear, and he allowed him to keep doing that. That was a bad mistake on the part of McKay, and it caused irreparable damage.

My mother, uh, speaks that name, uh, with contempt. Thorpe Isaacson is the villain in, in her understanding of President McKay's presidency.

Yes, and when he finally was brought in as an extra counselor in the First Presidency, Within months, he had a massive stroke from which he never recovered. Yeah. One of the General Authorities, whose name I will not say on the record, told another General Authority, who told it to me, did you get the news? The Lord vetoed it.

I think my mother has actually said something along those lines as well.

It was a common thought because the timing was so clearly linked to his being brought in as an extra counselor. But when that type of stuff is going on at that level, yeah, there's corruption that shouldn't have happened, but it did happen. I go back to Section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants where Joseph Smith paraphrasing, it says it's the nature of almost all men that when they get power, they abuse it. I think he got it wrong because I don't think the word almost should be in there. Yep. It's the nature of all men and women. The question is, will they succumb to that temptation to abuse that power? And the good ones don't. I've known some of the brethren now on emeritus status, who I think were the epitome of doing it right. They never allowed themselves to be corrupted by power.

That's, that's a fascinating way to look at it. I, so in, in reading your book, there were two sorts of, two incidents particularly that really leapt out at me. Uh, one was the whole episode around Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine. And one of the reasons why that was just so fascinating to me is my mission president was Bruce R. McConkie's son, Joseph McConkie, who had even said to me that the McKays and the McConkies don't see the gospel the same way. He's just kind of said that. But in reading that and reading how President McKay handled that whole incident, that this book was published without any foreknowledge of the church, of President McKay, that President McKay went and asked people to review the book and discovered that there was, there were doctrinal errors on every page, and all of these things that demonstrated that this was an absolute mess. But then President McKay refuses to publicly sort of repudiate Elder McConkie and allows the book to continue to be published. And then there's the big controversy that you wrote about, that what happened in that final meeting when Bruce R. McConkie goes in and says, can I, can I do a new version of this? Can I do a new edition of the book? And insists that he came out with President McKay's approval. And members of my family insist that he manufactured President McKay's approval.

Well, and Claire's diary entry says that McKay said, should you decide to republish this, it will be your responsibility. McConkie's memo that Claire put in the diary said, the president said I should republish this. Yeah. Those are different messages.

They are different messages. But why wasn't the message, don't republish this? It was.

The first edition was taken off the market. Yeah. And it wasn't until 8 years later that McConkie pushed through the second edition, which still had a lot of errors in it. He didn't fix all of them. He didn't even fix a further printing of the second edition after 1978. He fixed the part that Blacks would never get the priesthood, but he didn't fix any of the racism was in there. No. So there were a lot of problems with it. There was a discussion, and between McKay and his counselors, should we release Bruce McConkie as a General Authority because of that book? And McKay ultimately made the decision no, because that would be too harmful to him and to his family. And he didn't want even to give him a public reprimand because he didn't want that to interfere with his ability to perform his ministry.

Well, so who called President— who called Dusard as an apostle? Was that, um, Spencer Kimball?

No, let's see. I think it was Kimball. The first apostle, the one who filled the vacancy created by the death of President McKay, was Boyd Packer. And McConkie may have been the next one. So I don't know if McConkie was chosen by President Lee, probably by President Kimball. Yeah. President Benson, in his first appointment, wanted to put his son in, and that got blocked at the last moment.

Yeah, Howard Anderson told me that story, that Joseph Worthland ended up being the compromise candidate.

A last-second compromise. Yeah.

How do we know that? How do they know that? Yeah. Are the records there that talk about that?

Uh, no, but you heard it from Howard. I heard it from Chase Peterson, and I heard it from Paul Dunn. Three independent sources all saying the same thing. And I heard it, another version of it, at Mormon History meeting last week.

Yeah, but there's no paper trail behind it.

Not that I'm aware of.

Okay. Well, the, uh, the other incident, or it's not necessarily an incident, but, uh, I would love to get your perspective on President McKay's perspective on race. Yes. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of this, that, uh, I was taught my whole life in family settings that Papa Dade desperately wanted to remove the priesthood ban, and that it was very clearly the Lord telling him, absolutely not, you can't do that. And reading your book, that really, that doesn't pass the smell test at all.

No, I think it still does, Jim. One of the 5 sources I had was Medin. Who talked about her mother.

Madine, just everybody to know, Madine is my mother's sister, my Aunt Madine. Yes. Uh, she's— who was Mildred? Yes, my grandmother.

Yes, who was married to Lawrence McKay. Yes. Mildred was on the general board of the primary, and she went to the president and said We have young boys in the primary who are black. And when they turn 12, the other boys get ordained and these guys don't. Can't you fix that? So that was one incident that I heard of. Another was Duff Hanks, who talked about meeting with McKay as he was going to Vietnam. Hanks had that assignment of being the servicemen's representative over there, and he took several trips to Vietnam. He said, I was telling him about a prior trip where I was comforting a Black Latter-day Saint soldier who had had part of his leg blown off, and it was being prepped surgery. And he said McKay began to weep and said, I prayed and prayed and prayed about that issue, but there's been no answer. So that's two. Number three was Leonard Arrington's autobiography where he talks about Adam Bennion, an apostle in 1954, telling the study group of which Leonard was a member, and that he had prayed about this, but there'd not been an answer. Number 4 was Lola Timmons, who was a secretary in the First Presidency's office, who said he came back from a temple meeting one time and told the secretaries, I have prayed and prayed about this, and the answer has been not yet. And then the 5th, the most dramatic, was the one from Richard Jackson, who was an architect. And that's the concluding paragraph in that chapter on Race, where he said that President McKay came muttering into the department offices one day saying, I'd taken it many times and I took it last night, late last night. And the answer with no discussion was, this will not happen in your time, don't bring it up again. Now, does that mean that this was instituted by God? I don't think so. If you look at the history of it, There's no collaboration of that. It started, and the churches acknowledge that, kind of, though some of the brethren seem to be crossing their fingers still, saying this was a product of mid-19th century racism. Duh. You mean in the 1840s, 1850s, this country was racist? Go figure. Right. I think what was happening was the church wasn't ready for it yet. I've spent time, even last week at Mormon History Meeting, I was talking to Camilla Smith. You probably don't know her, but you would know her namesake, Camilla Kimball. Spencer Kimball's wife was Camilla Smith's aunt. And Camilla talked about how Spencer had spent months and months and months working to bring the brethren in line on this. It was not a question of him gathering them one day and saying, guess what the Lord just told me. He was putting feelers out in multiple directions, going back years. And then the most difficult task was getting the recalcitrant 12 on board. You can tell a lot in this church once you know the playbook by seeing when the dog doesn't bark. When it doesn't bark, it means somebody's vetoing something that otherwise should have been done and could have been. Done. But it only takes one vote among the Twelve to veto anything. And that's what Kimball was working against. He had some racists in the Twelve who he had to bring over to get that thing through. His predecessor, Harold Lee, told his daughter, "Negroes will not get the priesthood during my lifetime." And he was right. But he wasn't the only holdout.

Well, Delbert Stapley was in the hospital when—

And Mark Peterson was out of the country. Yeah. Um, Delbert Stapley had strong racist strains in their past.

I, I, I don't think I've ever read anything more offensive written by an apostle than Delbert Stapley's letter to George Romney. Yes. Which is just repugnant beyond words about— anyway, so there was an incident, and we mentioned this in a previous podcast discussion with you, but you now are talking about Matt Harris as being one of the great historians now, or most important historians in the church. His book, Second Class Saints, Um, recounts an incident that is not in your book and which my mother insists did not and could not have happened, and which I am skeptical of it happening. And this is the idea that there was a, an employee. I don't know what his role was, but there was a Black employee at the Hotel Utah that my grandfather, David L. McKay, and somebody else. But anyway, they were trying to persuade David O. to ordain him to the priesthood, effectively ending the priesthood ban. And was it Harold B. Lee who caught wind of it? Or there was another apostle who caught wind of it and torpedoed it. But does that ring any bells at all? Did that come up at all?

Because that, that was news to me, and I don't know how authentic that is. It— I think it is documented, though I did not have the documentation at the time, so I didn't put in the book that Hugh Brown tried to change the policy administratively. Yeah, did it when Harold B. Lee was out of town and the president was ailing, and that when Lee came back into town shortly thereafter he reversed it. And Ed Firmage, who was Brown's grandson, told me flat out, that's the reason my grandfather was released from the First Presidency when President McKay died, because Lee was furious that he had tried to change that administratively.

Well, Brown also read that statement, that pro-civil rights statement, in General Conference. That, like, in, in the early 1960s, that talked about how every— that we support civil rights. And my understanding was that was very controversial as well.

Oh, it was very controversial. And that came about because the NAACP had threatened to picket General Conference, and Brown went to Sterling McMurrin, who was a member of that chapter of the NAACP, and they agreed that a statement should be done Sterling told me, I've got his handwritten note about it. He said, I've never told this to anybody before, but I wrote that. Oh, at Brown's request. He said there was only one sentence that Brown took out and he said it deserved to be taken out. He didn't tell me what it was. But Sterling Byrne did not get permission from the president to issue that as an official policy statement.

But he read it in General Conference anyway.

He read it in General Conference, and Sterling said the way that he did it, he got up the pulpit, assumed the authoritative posture, read that statement without context, set it aside, paused, and then went with his sermon. So all the body language was saying, listen up folks, cuz this is official. Wow. That's how he got around that.

Well, Sterling McMurrin was somebody I had never even heard of before I read your book. Oh, what an amazing man. One of the most colorful characters that comes from that book. And I love that story about how, so who was it that was threatening to excommunicate him? And David O says, well, I'm going to be the first, uh, witness at your, at your hearing.

Yes, well, that was what Sterling gave me after our first interview, the 7 hours of tapes describing that. It was Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee. And Sterling said, I was a heretic. I didn't believe some of the things that the church taught. And he said, President McKay called me up on a Sunday morning. Now imagine that today, church president calls a member and says, I'm going to drive over. I need to talk to you. That's what he did. And in that conversation that just involved the two of them, Sterling said, "I don't buy some of these things. One of them is I don't accept this policy on blacks and priesthood." And that's when McKay said, "It's a policy, it's not a doctrine, and it will change." Now Sterling didn't say anything about that to anybody. For years because he felt it was a private conversation. 1968, he wrote that in a letter to the McKay sons, and a copy of that letter fell into the hands of Hugh Brown and Alvin Dyer, who were on opposite sides of the issue. That's what gave Brown the justification, is saying, well, if it's a policy, let's just change it. And Dyer freaked out when he saw that Brown was doing that, so he reached out to Lee to counteract it. And then Brown and Tanner were forced to sign a First Presidency letter. McKay was not able to sign it at that point. This is just a few weeks before he died, reaffirming the church's discriminatory policy. But Brown told McMurrin, I was not feeling well at the time, and I was obliged to sign that statement, which I did not write. Harold B. Lee wrote it.

Yeah, that is fascinating. Corporate politics. Corporate politics. I— well, so if there's anybody listening to this that has not read David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, Uh, you are absolutely missing out. I think this is— it's such a vital part of anybody's education about how the church functions and how the church operates. I, I just— I'm so grateful for that book. I'm so grateful for the work you have done to make that— to bring that book into reality, because it, it gave me such a marvelous perspective not only on how the church functions, but on how prophets function. And that was just personally to me, um, so revelatory because of my experience growing up and feeling intimidated by, uh, my great-grandfather and feeling like, sheesh, there's no way that some schlub like me could sort of live up to the legacy of this perfect man. And ironically, or paradoxically, learning that he was far from perfect gave me much greater respect for him. It gave me a much greater appreciation for him that he was still able to do all of these wonderful things even as he struggled with whatever weaknesses he had or whatever mistakes that he made. And I think that he made a number of different mistakes. Uh, but second-guessing, you know, second-guessing a prophet is probably not all that great an idea. But it's, it's just, to me, I think this church would be on such a more solid foundation if everybody were to read that book and understand how it works, rather than try to prop up this illusion that everything is perfect, that everybody agrees behind the scenes, that, that this is a, you know, this is, this church is something that it never has been and never can be and never will be. Uh, it— do you get that sense? Do you think it would be helpful if people understood that? Oh my gosh, yes.

And a couple of things: if you read this book, the lessons come forward, they don't just go backwards, because there's only one playbook. And that was reinforced to me many times when Steve Snow was the church historian. And a member of the First Quorum of Seventy. He said, I would have new General Authorities come to me asking for reading lists so they could get up to speed on Church history. He said, your book was always near the top of that list, and I would tell them, if you want to understand how the Church functions, read this book. Now, I would also say, parenthetically, you don't have to read it because it's available as an audiobook as as well.

So there. Is it read? Do you read it? The audiobook? No, I don't know who the narrator was. You don't know who the narrator was?

No, but you can get it on Amazon in audio format or Kindle or print.

Wow. All right. So there it is. We, let's end with a plug. If you don't want to read this book, uh, you're missing out, but you can listen to the book. It's on audio. It's on Kindle. It's on Audible. And, uh, just, I, I, I would recommend this book to anyone, and I'm really grateful that you're taking the time here today to be able to give some background as to where this book came from and the labor of love that it was to bring it forth. Would you describe it as a labor of love?

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I suggested to Bob and he agreed, and that we forego any royalties from the book. Oh, so we've never received a nickel from it. It took a lot of expense on our part to do it, but the deal we made with the press was keep the price under $30. And with the difference that we are not paying us, give us a better quality book. So you look at that book now with its folio of covered colored photographs. Oh yeah. And the larger format. And you say, that's not a $29.95 book. That's the reason.

Oh, okay. I did not realize that. You have all those—

That's been the price since it was first published 21 years ago.

And is it the Arnold Freeberg paintings in the middle, in the portfolio?

That's part of it. Plus the COVID portrait is Freeberg's portrait of, uh, David O.

Oh, wonderful. I, I, um, I have performed as an actor at the University of Utah's Pioneer Theater, and there is a big portrait of David O. McKay right there in the lobby.

Alvin Gittins.

Is that Alvin Gittins that did that? Yeah. Mm-hmm. I always, every show I did there, I would go take a picture in costume standing next to David O. McKay. Okay. Yeah. That was sort of my, my ritual in doing that.

Jack Hittens, uh, according to the story I heard, was a lapsed Mormon. And he brought that painting in and left it in Clare's office. Oh. Before it got framed. And she looked at it and said, well, anybody who can paint like that can't be all bad.

Well, there you go. All right. Well, anybody who can write like you do, Greg, can't be all bad. Just so you know.

Well, you may have to be to me what McKay was to McBurn. You might be the first witness in my defense.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Happy to do it. Uh, and I think there are a lot of listeners out there that would be happy to line up behind me. So, uh, Thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss this. Ian, we missed you, but we look forward to having you come back in the next one. And we're grateful to all of you who are listening, and we look forward to seeing you on the next time and the next episode of Inside Out. Thanks very much. You're welcome.