On a recent evening, a colleague of mine at the Baltimore Sun arrived back at the office, her face aglow, from a ceremony on Capitol Hill where the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth were given the Congressional Gold Medal. She was impressed by Graham’s noble presence, and surprised to be impressed, and turned to me for confirmation that Billy Graham was indeed ” the real deal.” It’s a question journalists have been asking themselves for nearly half a century.
Fifteen years ago, when I was working as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, Graham came to town for one of his crusades. This southern evangelist seemed a relic and a curiosity to me and my editors, living as we did in the heart of Silicon Valley just 50 miles from San Francisco — one of the most progressive places in America. Go find out what makes him tick, I was told, and who comes to see his “crusades” and why.
By the time Graham’s revival show arrived in California, I had read the half-dozen biographies of the man, had interviewed scores of people and Graham himself, and come to the same conclusion so many others had before me – – that Graham was worthy of respect. I ended up attending every night of his eight-day crusade, and kept coming after my articles were published and my editors wanted no more.
I was drawn to the man just like the throng who filled the city’s municipal stadium — among them thousands of Latinos from San Jose’s east side whom our newspaper and other civic institutions were struggling to reach. Reaching them was not diffcult at all for Billy Graham, whose crusades have led him to the Iron Curtain, into every corner of the Third World and nearly every major city in the United States, North and South.
His ability to connect to a minority population reminded me that he was one of the first prominent white Protestant leaders to see the sin in Jim Crow. One day, long before most people were looking for it, Graham began peppering his sermons with homilies on race. “Jesus Christ belongs neither to the colored nor the white races,” he would say. “He belongs to all races . . . and God looks upon the heart.” Once, on a hot day in 1952 in Houston, Graham insisted that the part of the stadium segregated for blacks be in the shade. In 1953, he stood up to a hotel management when it tried to bar a black friend from riding on the elevator with him. On March 15, 1953, a year before Brown v. Board of Education, he insisted that seating for a revival in Chattanooga, Tenn., be integrated. The same month in Dallas, offcials there would not agree to his terms. So Graham made a special point during the final part of the service, when those who want to convert “answer the call,” that blacks and whites should come down together. And they did.
Graham did not march and he did not protest — something he is still occasionally criticized for — but instead tried to provide an example. ” Martin Luther King and I had an understanding between us,” Graham told me in 1981. “I said, “Mike” — I always called him Mike — I said, “You go into the streets and I’ll stay in the stadiums, but I’ll demand total integration in all the committees and everything else.”
In 1958, a crusade in his hometown of Charlotte, N.C., drew more blacks than had ever come to hear him before. Some of the whites answering the call were met by black counselors when they arrived in front of the pulpit. A few miles away, in Columbia, S.C., this subversive activity was viewed dimly by authorities in the state capitol. Graham, scheduled to go there after Charlotte, was denied permission to hold integrated revivals anywhere in the city. A permit to use the state-capitol grounds was rescinded by Gov. George B. Timmerman, Jr., who denounced Graham as a “well-known integrationist.” Graham did not back down, and rallies were held denouncing him. Miraculously, the commanding general at Fort Jackson in South Carolina suddenly offered Graham the use of the base. There, in the autumn of 1958, 60,000 people showed up, the first integrated mass meeting in the state’s history.
Perhaps the general’s intercession wasn’t divine intervention, but something only slightly less exalted: The occupant of the White House was an old Army five-star, who’d met Graham while stationed in Europe. The year before, President Eisenhower had asked for Graham’s show of support when he dispatched federal troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Graham had obliged, and, in fact, went to Arkansas himself, not only then but two years later after the city was wracked by two bombings. (Little Rock’s ranking Baptist preacher, Worley Oscar Vaught, Jr., later credited Graham with calming racist passions in that city. In 1989, one of those in Vaught’s congregation, then — Gov. Bill Clinton, took Graham to see Vaught as he lay dying.)
Throughout his life, Graham has exhibited a remarkable ability to maintain friendships with presidents and statesmen. They have golfed with ” him, talked about religion, invited him to spend nights at their residences, invariably trying to get some of his popularity to rub off on them even as he used his associations with them to further his own fame and ministry.
Still, it took time for Graham to get the hang of these politicians. During an Oval Office visit in 1950, Graham was a little dismayed to hear Truman, a nominal Baptist, swearing freely about many subjects, particularly his press coverage. “If it just weren’t for these goddamn newspapers after me every day, ” Truman complained. “And that columnist Drew Pearson, the sorry s.o.b?”
At some point, Graham asked if the group could pray. “Well, I don’t suppose any harm could be done by that,” Truman replied. Outside the Oval Office, Graham violated protocol by discussing everything the two men had discussed, save Truman’s profanity, then compounded his faux pas by kneeling for photographers on the White House lawn.
After drawing a crowd of 120,000 in 1954 to London’s Wembley Stadium in a cold rain, Graham was summoned to No. 10 Downing Street by Winston Churchill. An unlit cigar in his mouth, Churchill greeted the young evangelist with the words, “I am an old man without hope for the world.” Graham took this as an invitation to preach the New Testament. This time, he knew better than to debrief reporters immediately afterward, though he did blurt out, “I felt like I had shaken hands with Mr. History.”
John E Kennedy, privately seething over Graham’s open support of Richard Nixon in 1960, nevertheless sought out the preacher, inviting him for a game of golf five days after being inaugurated. He hoped that Graham would use his influence to make sure the anti-Catholic sentiments some Protestant leaders had expressed against . . . Kennedy would not be an issue in the 1964 campaign. It surely would have worked, too. Graham resolved after that meeting to maintain his custom of dropping by the White House after his foreign trips and reporting to the president. Lyndon Johnson once took Graham on a walk on his spread in Texas and pointed out where he wanted to be buried, and predicted — ordered might be a better word — that Graham would preach at his funeral.
Nixon, perhaps aware of his own demons, did the most to cultivate Graham in the White House. For his part, Graham didn’t simply respect Nixon, but actually loved him, a sentiment shared by few of those even in Nixon’s inner circle. Graham defended the president far past the point of no return on Watergate; he broke down in tears and became physically ill when he listened to the Watergate tapes with their profanity and bigotry and anger.
Place not your trust in princes, the Psalms say, and it was precisely this wisdom that had eluded Graham for a long time. Nixon’s fall was a painful lesson, but it may have saved Graham. Although he remained a fixture at White House prayer breakfasts for presidents both Republican and Democratic, Graham learned to keep just a bit of distance. He was careful not to become too closely identified with Ronald Reagan, though he plainly admired Reagan and cherished the direction in which he took the country. Last month, when meeting with President Clinton, Graham told him bluntly that he thought the president had erred on his veto of the partial-birth abortion ban. But he spoke without rancor and was offering spiritual, not political, counsel. Ike followed Graham’s advice, but on a religious question — what Bible verse to use in his inauguration. Nixon asked Graham for the most political of advice, whom to select as his running mate. Nixon ignored Graham’s astonishing recommendation-Mark Hatfield of Oregon, one of the most liberal Republicans in the U.S. Senate, whom Graham knew to be a deeply religious man.
In October 1932, a group of Christians in Charlotte, worried about the spiritual condition of their city, called for a day of prayer and fasting. The location was a family farm just south of the main part of town, though it is now in the midst of Charlotte’s urban sprawl. The event was deemed a success and subsequent vigils were held there. One of those in attendance, a man named Vernon Patterson, told me in 1981 when he was 89 years old that at the fourth such meeting, which occurred in May 1934, he led the group in a prayer asking God to “raise someone up from Charlotte to preach the gospel around the world.”
If the scene were in a movie, as it one day surely will be, the camera would cut from the prayer group to a cattle barn across the dirt road where a laborer and the son of the man who owned the farm were pitching hay. “Who are those men in the woods over there?” the farm hand asked the son, then 16. “I guess they’re some fanatics that talked Dad into letting him use the place,” answered the son.
The 16-year-old was William Frank Graham, Jr., called “Billy Frank” by his family. His own spiritual awakening came gradually, according to members of his family. When young Billy went to Bob Jones College in Tennessee, a Spartan facility run by its namesake, he found the atmosphere too strict and confining. When he transferred to Florida Bible Institute, Jones told him, in one of the great erroneous predictions of modern Christianity, “Bill, you leave . . . you’ll never be heard of.”
By 1943, Graham had earned a degree in anthropology from Wheaton College in Illinois, met and married his wife, and settled down, it seemed, to the life of a pastor in a Chicago Baptist church. But Graham felt confined. Partly this was due to his restless nature. Mostly it was because of Ruth, who had grown up in China, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Ruth would not give up her denomination for the Baptists, something that helped lead Graham into his ecumenical ministry.
“He would have been some local yokel,” their daughter Ann Lotz said. ” Mother freed him.”
After World War II, Graham left his church and hooked up with the new Youth for Christ. In 1947, he took the plunge, announcing to his family that he would become a full-time traveling evangelist, following in the footsteps of men like Jonathan Edwards, D.L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and countless others who roamed the country, pitching their tents wherever they could get a crowd and warning that God was displeased by the sin and excess He saw in a raw young country.
After the end of the Second World War, America was suddenly an older nation — and one learning to fear an adversary, the Soviet Union, which, like Lucifer, had once been a friend. Billy Graham did not shy from this comparison: Three decades before Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire, Billy Graham was equating communism with Satan.
Two days before a fateful four-week revival in Los Angeles in 1949, Truman announced that the Russians had exploded their first nuclear bomb. “Do you know the area that’s marked out for the enemy’s first atomic bomb?” Graham asked his audiences. “New York! Secondly, Chicago! And third, the city of Los Angeles! Do you know that the Fifth Columnists, called Communists, are more rampant in Los Angeles than any other city in America? God is giving us a desperate choice, a choice of either revival or judgment. There is no alternative! If Sodom and Gomorrah could not get away with sin, if Pompeii and Rome could not escape, neither can Los Angeles!”
To the Arkies and Okies and Texans and other transplanted fundies who came to hear Graham preach in California — Billy called himself a “hillbilly” in Los Angeles — this was heady fare. But one didn’t need to be a hick to appreciate the power of the thin young preacher with the Hollywood good looks and that deep voice with its distinct North Carolina lilt. In fact, one could possess strong anti-Communist views and have an eye for the theatrical. William Randolph Hearst had both. At the age of 86, he issued from his San Simeon castle a two-word directive to his editors that would change Christendom: “Puff Graham.”
Thus, in the waning days of the Los Angeles crusade, as the crowds were beginning to thin out, Graham noticed a horde of reporters show up at his tent one night. As a flashbulb went off in his face, the young preacher asked what had happened. “You’ve just been kissed by William Randolph Hearst,” he was told. From Los Angeles he went to Boston, where there were Hearst reporters waiting, and from there to South Carolina, where he was welcomed as a hero. Forty thousand showed up to hear him preach in Columbia, where The State newspaper printed his sermons verbatim every day. His curiosity piqued by old man Hearst, another conservative giant of the publishing world, Henry R. Luce, showed up in South Carolina, along with a team of Life reporters. Graham’s critics love the Hearst story, but the reverend himself never shied away from it. “I am convinced,” he once explained, “that God uses the press in our work, and it has been one of the most effective factors in sustaining public interest through the years.”
Graham never ran for offce, but most lifelong politicians could learn much from how he dealt with the press, especially those hostile to him. Frye Galliard, a North Carolina author and journalist, once told me that Graham ” chews on criticism,” but in a constructive way. “He takes a piece of criticism, and if he can’t find a way to dismiss it, he invalidates it in another way, by changing his behavior.”
A dramatic example occurred in 1950, when the Atlanta Constitution ran two pictures that embarrassed Graham. The day after the closing of a successful crusade in that city, the most influential paper in the South ran the pictures on Page One. The first showed a smiling Graham, then only 32. Next to it was a photo of crusade ushers, grinning as they held aloft four bags bulging with money. In so doing, the paper had exposed, without comment, the seamy underbelly of traveling evangelists. For a hundred years, the tent preachers had followed a tradition of asking for “love offerings” on the last day of a revival. The crowd and the preacher understood that this money would go to the preacher. But with Graham drawing record crowds wherever he went, the Atlanta Constitution picture painted a devastating portrait. Worried that such questions would stunt his rapidly growing ministry, Graham sought the advice of Jesse Bader, secretary of evangelism for the National Council of Churches.
Until Graham, there had been a historic enmity between the tent preachers and their more staid counterparts who tended established flocks. To draw crowds, the tent preachers would lump the establishment ministers into their list of villains, along with bar owners, corrupt politicians, and various phonies and sellouts. Naturally, this didn’t endear them to the ministers, who argued back that the evangelists were great for stirring folks up, but not real good (once they’d pocketed their “love offerings”) at the unglamorous follow-up work that was required to keep new converts on a Christian path.
Graham found the rivalry between evangelist preachers and the church pastors pointless. He circumvented it by calling on the local ministers in the towns where he preached and by plugging their congregations in his sermons. Thus, it was to the Protestant establishment that Graham turned in 1950 when he decided that questions about finances might haunt him. Jesse Bader’s advice was to follow the simple formula of the ministers: “Pay yourself a salary and don’t take “love offerings,” and you can make history in evangelism. You can lift it to a place of confidence and high regard.”
Graham put himself on a salary of $ 15,000 as president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a non-profit corporation with tax-exempt status chartered in Minneapolis. The pay rose gradually through the years and is now $ 135,000, counting his housing allowance. It is a handsome salary, but one comparable to the salary of a chief pastor in a large church, though Graham’s tastes are so simple he has always been hard-pressed to spend anything close to what he makes. The day I interviewed him, he showed up in a company-issue Oldsmobile wearing a polyester suit with a small tear in the back and loafers with a hole in one of the soles. He donates the royalties from his books to charitable causes, and from 1950 on, no money collected at any crusade has gone into his pockets. He quotes D.L. Moody, who said, “God will allow millions to pass through my hands for the work of God — if none of it sticks to my fingers.”
It would be another 27 years before Graham was questioned about finances. Again, it was a respected southern newspaper, this time his hometown Charlotte Observer, that detailed the existence of a huge and little- known fund quietly earning interest in a Dallas bank. The story, written chiefly by a journalist named Robert Hodierne, was picked up and carried by hundreds of newspapers across the country. It told of a “secret fund” of some $ 23 million that Graham had failed to disclose in interviews with the paper. The implication was that Graham had not been truthful, and it jolted his ministry.
Later, Graham told me that the money in question, held in the name of a charity called the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund, wasn’t part of his ministry and that he didn’t mention it because he assumed the paper knew of it. Graham also said that the fund’s existence was hardly a secret because he’d held a press conference to announce it in 1971, and that the story had moved on the wire. I checked, and he turned out to be right about that. But he wasn’t angry at the Charlotte Observer, and didn’t lash out at it. In fact, he told me that he considered Hodierne “a friend.” In the process, he won over Hodierne some four years after the original expos. “I think Billy is a sincere Christian,” he told me. “I think he incorporates into his life some of the best tenets of Christianity, and chief among those is “love thy neighbor.'”
Hodierne’s conversion was mild compared with that of Associated Press reporter George W. Cornell, who as a young man covered Graham’s 1954 crusade in Madison Square Garden. At one point, while the choir sang Graham’s trademark hymn, “Just As I Am,” and people started filing down from the stands answering the call, Cornell flung down his pen and went with them. AP chief Wes Gallagher took Cornell off the story, though he remained with the AP and went on to become the dean of American religion writers.
Graham told me this story himself, and when I was doing my articles on Graham for the San Jose Mercury, I called George Cornell to ask him if it was true. He confirmed it, but then asked me, in the secular tradition of reporters, not to use it, as he was still covering the beat.
I acceded to his request, but now I wish I hadn’t. The trouble with newspapers is hardly that there’s too much religion in them. Besides, if I had told the story, I’d have done George Cornell proud.
Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun.
