A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Whatever the precipitant, the coverage was remarkable. Graham was the hottest thing around in the dead of a typical New England winter, and newspapers outdid themselves to see who could depict him and his crusade in the most vivid terms. Describing him as a “swashbuckling southerner” whose “chic gray suit with draped lapels and bright blue and orange tie” made him look “as if he belonged in the star’s dressing room of a musical comedy rather than in a pulpit,” they gave every service extensive space, in editorials and cartoons as well as news stories, and frequently printed his words in bold type, a journalistic equivalent to a red-letter New Testament. In return he rewarded them with some of the most colorful preaching of his career—so colorful, in fact, that although he began to disown some of his statements within a year or two, he had not completely lived them down four decades later.

  Railing against communism as “a fanatic religion supernaturally empowered by the devil to counteract Christianity,” he predicted the “imminent deification of Joseph Stalin” in the Soviet Union, with “his birthday celebrated as we do Christ’s.” While being careful not to set precise dates, he predicted Christ would return within ten to fifteen years and offered a memorable image of the tumult the rapture would cause: “Wait till those gravestones start popping like popcorn in a popper. Oh boy! Won’t it be wonderful when those gravestones start popping?” Graham could look forward to the rapture with such joyful anticipation because he had no doubt he would be caught up with Jesus in the clouds to flourish during the millennium, and would have no reason to shudder when, at the Last Judgment, God gives the awesome command, “Start up the projector!” Because he had accepted God’s gracious gift of salvation, he felt certain he would spend eternity in heaven, which he regarded as a place “as real as Los Angeles, London, Algiers, or Boston.” He informed his Boston audience that heaven is “sixteen-hundred miles long, sixteen-hundred miles wide, and sixteen-hundred miles high . . . as much as if you put Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, and half of Russia in one place. That is how big the New Jerusalem is going to be. Boy, I can’t wait until I get up there and look around.” His view of how the redeemed would spend eternity was equally concrete: “We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties and the angels will wait on us and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible.” Food for these parties would be plucked from “trees bearing a different kind of fruit every month,” and Graham himself might provide entertainment and organize the recreation since he “hoped to be able to sing, play the trombone and violin, and play football and baseball as well as the best.” He also depicted hell in vivid terms, asserting that its denizens would meet regularly to hold prayer meetings, begging for mercy and remembering the times they had passed up the chance to respond to the invitation at an evangelistic meeting.

  Graham also amazed his Boston audiences with his use of a technique George Whitefield had used to good effect in these same environs two hundred years earlier, that of dramatizing biblical stories by slangily updating the lines and acting out all the parts. Appearing in the title role of “The Feast of Belshazzar,” a favorite sermon he had honed and polished on the YFC circuit, he preened and strutted and boasted that “I’m going to put on a party that will be the biggest shindig in Babylon.” Slipping deftly into the role of narrator, he observed that Belshazzar “was one of those smart fellows who think they can do as they please and forget all about God. But, brother, that’s where he was wrong. That’s where everyone is wrong who thinks he can get away with any kind of living. It makes no difference if you are the king of Babylon or the President, or anybody important. You are no exception to the law of God. He don’t care how big your name is or whether you came over on the Mayflower.” Then, introducing Daniel, who interpreted “the handwriting on the wall” that foreshadowed Belshazzar’s imminent assassination, Graham explained that “Daniel was a pal of the boss—the King of the Medes and Persians. Some jealous guys were out to get him, so they trained their spyglass on him one morning when he was praying and had his Venetian blinds up. They tattled to the King. The King was on the spot, so he said to his lawyers, ‘Find me a couple of loopholes so I can spring my pal, Dan.’ They just couldn’t find a loophole and the King had to send Dan to the lions.” Matching actions to words, he described what happened next: “Old Daniel walks in. He’s not afraid. He looks the first big cat in the eye and kicks him and says, ‘Move over there, Leo. I want me a nice fat lion with a soft belly for a pillow, so I can get a good night’s rest. . . . “In another sermon he recreated the plight of the Prodigal Son, tossing imaginary slop to invisible hogs with such flair that “hundreds of persons who had never fed a hog nor seen one fed felt sure that Billy Graham must have learned firsthand how that was done.” Then he pranced around like an uppity pig to make the point that “even if you gave a pig a bath, gave it a Toni, and sprinkled it with Chanel No. 5, it would still, like an unregenerate sinner, revert to the mud puddle as soon as you let it loose.”

  Graham’s theatrics captivated some observers. After hearing him deliver several such sermons, one reporter wrote admiringly of the evangelist’s dramatic range: “He prowls like a panther across the rostrum. . . . [H]e becomes a haughty and sneering Roman, his head flies back arrogantly and his voice is harsh and gruff. He becomes a penitent sinner; his head bows, his eyes roll up in supplication, his voice cracks and quavers. He becomes an avenging angel; his arms rise high above his head and his long fingers snap out like talons. His voice deepens and rolls sonorously—the voice of doom. So perfect are the portrayals that his audience sits tense and fascinated as his sermons take on a vividness, a reality hard to describe.” Others admitted the tension but had little difficulty describing the reality. Ruth Graham, for one, thought it an unseemly display and did not hesitate to let him know it. “As an actor,” she volunteered, “I’m afraid he is pretty much a ham. When he starts that kind of acting sermon, I usually start to squirm. If I’m anywhere in sight, he is sure to see me and know what’s the matter.” Her counsel to him was simple and direct: “Bill, Jesus didn’t act out the Gospel. He just preached it. I think that’s all He has called you to do!”

  Reporters loved Ruth’s candor on this and other matters, such as her husband’s penchant for bright clothes—“We have a domestic compromise,” she revealed. “I buy my hats. He buys his ties”—and gave her ample opportunity to fashion responses she would use again and again over the years as their counterparts all over the world asked her what it was like to be the wife of a famous evangelist. She conceded that “the kids get so they don’t know what their daddy looks like” but contended that having her parents live just across the street made her job easier and allowed her to slip away to spend a few days with her husband during most of his meetings. People often asked, she acknowledged, how she and the wives of Graham’s associates could stand to have their husbands away from home for so long. Her answer was a blend of piety and pragmatic realism: “We know how important their work is. Then, too, we are spared the monotony of ordinary married life. . . . When we do have a chance to talk together, there are so many things we want to say. Every conversation is important. It’s more than news about the office or what happened at the grocery store, so I always get a lift in talking with Bill.” She and Billie Barrows, both quite lovely women still in their twenties, also pointed out that good conversation was not the only pleasure provided by reunions with their husbands. “Every time we get together,” they agreed, “It’s like another honeymoon,” though Ruth revealed that the hectic pace of crusades so tired Billy that he typically slept through most of his first few days at home following a campaign. “It’s like being married to Rip Van Winkle,” she said, but she reiterated her now-standard declaration that “I’d rather have Bill part-time than anybody else full-time.”

  Graham professed to feel resistance to his efforts: “There are thousands in Boston who wish his revival would hurry and get over. . . . They don’t want a revival.
They don’t want people to be saved. They hate the gospel.” But if such animosity existed, it was either suppressed or voiced only in private; among the five daily newspapers, not one published a negative article about either Graham or his campaign. The Globe ventured that he was “perhaps the lowest-paid evangelist of modern times,” and a Herald-Traveler editor wrote that “Graham is not mercenary. He takes the stigma of money off evangelism. . . . He should have the support of every Christian church in America.” As the campaign continued, the papers treated him not only as an evangelist but as the public figure he was rapidly becoming, complete with appropriate myths. In a special souvenir edition, the Boston Post reported he had played professional baseball in North Carolina and was aiming for diamond greatness before entering the ministry. Reporters pressed for his opinion on such topics as the death penalty and received the cautious responses that would come to characterize his public style: “I don’t say [the defendant in a controversial mercy-killing case] deserves death, but if we let this pass, who is to say who is to die and who is to live?” Occasionally, he ventured further, then stepped back quickly to avoid giving offense. Asked his views on foreign aid, he asserted that revival would do more than the Marshall Plan to combat evil and warned that “we are going to spend ourselves into a depression. We can’t keep on taking care of the whole world.” Then, when he noticed that every reporter present was writing down what he had said, he became flustered and added with a sheepish grin, “But don’t anybody tell Mr. Truman I said so.” As a measure of his growing stature, he was invited to offer prayer at a session of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where a rising young legislator, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, introduced him to the assembly.

  Graham had not expected all this success and attention, and when the overflow turnout at the Boston Garden indicated the revival still had plenty of fire left in it, he was, like the Apostle Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, reluctant to come down. Prior commitments and increasing difficulty in hiring suitable auditoriums led him to leave the field temporarily, but not before announcing he would return as soon as possible in the spring. On the train west, he seriously considered turning back but did not. Among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of opportunities chosen or waived during his long career, Graham always looked back on the decision to end the Boston campaign as one of two or three times when he “possibly disobeyed the voice of God” by allowing the demands of his schedule to overpower the inclination of his heart.

  The next major campaign, a three-week stint in Columbia, South Carolina, marked a further stage in the growth and maturation of Graham’s revival machine. At his suggestion, the sponsoring Layman’s Evangelistic Club hired Willis Haymaker, who had done advance work for Gipsy Smith and Bob Jones senior and junior to organize prayer groups, encourage cooperation across denominational lines, and arrange for scores of small gatherings at which Billy and his associates could appear before and during the crusade. Haymaker also installed Billy Sunday’s delegation system, in which cooperating churches reserve large blocks of tickets for specific nights, a technique that assured good attendance at every service. The veteran advance man proved so effective that Graham persuaded him to join the team as his chief crusade organizer, a position he held until his retirement in 1979. It was Haymaker who suggested using crusade, instead of the more modest campaign, a change first implemented at the Columbia meeting. Graham also added Tedd Smith, a young classical pianist just out of the Royal Conservatory of Music at Toronto. The basic “platform team” formed at this 1951 crusade—Graham, Barrows, Shea, Grady Wilson, and Smith—was still intact thirty-six years later when the evangelist returned for his second Columbia crusade in the spring of 1987. More significant than the size and enthusiasm of its crowds—more than 40,000 attended the closing service at the University of South Carolina stadium—the Columbia crusade enabled Graham to forge stronger bonds with the political and cultural establishment. Governor Strom Thurmond underscored his personal endorsement of the crusade with a notable disdain for the ostensible barrier between Church and State. He brought prominent guests to services and insisted that Billy and Grady stay in the governor’s mansion. He invited the evangelist to address the state’s general assembly, arranged for him to speak at school assemblies, and declared the closing day of the crusade South Carolina Revival Rally Day. Then, when the crusade ended, he provided Graham and his team with a police escort for a quickly arranged two-week preaching tour of the state that included a triumphant return to Bob Jones University, where Bob Jones, Jr., introduced him to a packed house and those who could not get in heard his sermon about Belshazzar broadcast live over the campus radio station, WMUU (an acronym for World’s Most Unusual University).

  The most celebrated of Governor Thurmond’s “pew packers” was Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time and Life. Both magazines had already run stories about Graham, but Luce himself had not paid much attention until financier and statesman Bernard Baruch, who had a home in South Carolina, showed him a Columbia newspaper’s account of the young evangelist’s speech to the general assembly. Luce, himself the son of missionaries, was interested in the possibility of religious revival and was also impressed by Graham’s emphasis on Russia’s possession of the atomic bomb. Since he and his wife, Clare, were vacationing in Charleston, he went to Columbia to attend the crusade and spent long hours with Billy at the executive mansion, also as Governor Thurmond’s guest. The following week Time carried a substantial article that if not entirely complimentary—it pointed out that the 7,000 decisions registered in Graham’s crusade seemed meager compared to the 25,000 souls harvested in Columbia by Billy Sunday in 1923 and noted that 80 percent of the inquirers were already church members—still enhanced Graham’s position as a man worth watching.

  Immediately after the South Carolina tour, Graham made good on his promise to return to New England. After a brief stand in the Boston Garden, he launched a sixteen-city tour, accompanied this time by a press corps shepherded by Gerald Beavan, who had taken leave from Northwestern to help with media relations and publicity. On the first trip, Grady Wilson had pecked out press releases in his hotel room, and Robert Van Kampen, who had come from Illinois to help out, had done his best to answer the mail and filter requests for interviews. As executive secretary and public relations director, Beavan now took on both of these men’s roles, controlling access to Graham and serving as an almost constant companion. When Graham fell ill in Hartford for several days (Jack Wyrtzen drove up from New York to fill in for him), Beavan stayed at his bedside and read to him from Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul and Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind. From that experience, Graham began to consider writing a book on the same theme. Published in 1953, it bore the title Peace with God.

  If Strom Thurmond’s political patronage boosted Graham’s career, his next brush with secular power nearly undid him. Billy had an uncommon determination to stand out from the herd. In part, this impulse involved nothing more complicated than a desire to be admired, a need sufficiently well distributed as to require little explication. Without question, Billy Graham wanted to be somebody—somebody important, somebody famous, somebody who stood in the circle of other somebodies. In part he fastened himself to the Fundamentalist luminaries who visited Florida Bible Institute, curried the favor of rich Evangelicals like R. G. LeTourneau and British weapons manufacturer Alfred Owen, delighted in winning the souls of pop stars and athletes and gangsters, and reveled in the attention paid him by William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce because they gratified that portion of his ego that conversion and baptism and agonizing prayers of surrender would never fully regenerate or subdue. But to dismiss his fascination with celebrity, influence, and power as nothing more than garden-variety social climbing is to misunderstand Billy Graham quite seriously, for even more consuming than his desire to find favor with his fellows was his passion to be approved by the Ultimate Somebody: Almighty God. Nothing impelled Graham more powerfully than the hope he expressed while cont
emplating the northern lights at Maranatha: “to do something great for the Lord.” From the earliest stages of his ministry, he understood intuitively that his message would reach more people, appear more legitimate, and have a greater impact if he were viewed as an important man whose friendship and opinion and counsel mattered to people of property, power, and prestige. He also understood that his lower-order ambitions could easily overwhelm and corrupt his higher desires. Awareness of this vulnerability would haunt him throughout his career as he wrestled to conquer his humanity.