A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham preached to large crowds in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and encountered little organized opposition. Overall, the trip was less than a smashing success. BGEA crusade statistics, which typically list every city in which Graham has held a major public meeting, write off nine weeks of preaching in South America under two brief entries, both consisting of “Tour—South America.” Similarly, authorized histories of Graham’s ministry devote only two or three sentences to the campaign without naming a single country visited. Still, the tour gave Protestant Christianity valuable exposure in newspapers and on television, and veteran Latin American missionary Kenneth Strachan called it a watershed event in South American Evangelicalism, claiming it provided an important impetus for a broad movement of aggressive evangelistic efforts that led to a well-documented surge of Protestantism in many sectors of South America.

  As Graham faced his other major challenge of 1962, he must have wondered if the cooperative spirit he had worked so hard to forge was being eroded. Despite his many contacts in the area, he had not held a crusade, or even an outstanding rally, in Chicago since his YFC days in the 1940s. An effort to wangle an invitation in 1958 had come to naught after Mayor Richard Daley, allegedly under pressure from Catholic leaders, openly opposed a Graham crusade, and the Protestant Church Federation of Greater Chicago expressed strong reservations about the high-powered bureaucratic approach Graham’s team imposed on churches in a crusade city. Despite this rebuff, Graham’s Evangelical supporters in the Chicago area continued to aim for a full-scale crusade, often working through enthusiastic laymen who brought pressure on their more reticent pastors. Two years later, at a breakfast meeting with nearly seven hundred Chicago-area ministers, many of whom had been negative about a crusade, the evangelist patiently addressed their concerns and doubts. When he finished, the chair of the meeting, an old friend of Graham’s who had supported him since the YFC days, asked the men to indicate by standing if they wished to invite Billy to hold a crusade in Chicago. All seven hundred stood. After the meeting, Graham acknowledged that the procedure had “looked to some as if it were a bit high-pressure,” but the chairman insisted there was no way such a procedure could be viewed as an attempt to pressure the clergymen, pointing out, apparently as proof, that Graham himself had proposed the rising vote.

  While the ostensibly unanimous vote of the clergymen did not quell all doubts, it clearly shifted the balance of power to those favoring a crusade, and in the summer of 1962, Graham preached for three weeks to a packed house at the new McCormick Place arena. Then, at the closing service in Soldier Field, he addressed 116,000 souls, his largest American audience yet. That service was notable in other respects as well. Chicago was suffering from a sweltering heat wave that caused a plague of vapor lock to descend on the long lines of approaching cars, creating a cacophonous tangle outside the stadium. Inside, the sun’s rays seemed to concentrate on the unshaded platform, and the television lights made the pulpit area even hotter, so that Graham risked a heatstroke just by preaching a sermon of normal length. At one point, sweat-soaked and sagging, his head throbbing with pain, he apparently came close to blacking out; though he never stopped talking, one observer later recalled that he suspected an uncut film would reveal several moments of incoherence. Waving his aides away, however, Graham cut the sermon short and managed to offer the invitation. The response was substantial, and the service drew to a close with no further problems, but Graham went immediately to his hotel to sleep off his affliction and weariness.

  The evening, however, was not over. After years of practice, Graham had learned to time his sermon so that his television crew could wind up with a film that required only minimal editing to produce an hour-long program. Because of his problems with the heat, however, the service had ended seven minutes early. Since the crew would depart the next day, something had to be done immediately. Aware that Graham was exhausted and asleep, some felt it would be best to have him tape a short concluding message the next morning, but Cliff Barrows had a more dramatic idea. He rousted Graham out of bed and trundled him back to Soldier Field. When viewers saw the program weeks later, the usual closing shots of inquirers streaming toward the platform were suddenly replaced by a slow, sweeping panoramic shot of a littered and empty stadium, deserted except for Billy Graham, who sat alone on the platform, obviously weary, his eyes circled in darkness. “I have come back here to Soldier Field to talk to you,” he said. “I talked on Agrippa almost being persuaded to follow Christ. Some of you during this meeting have almost been persuaded to give your life to Jesus Christ, but you haven’t done it. . . . And as this stadium is empty now, your heart is empty.” For most of seven minutes, he told them that no matter what they had done, no matter where they were, no matter how many times they had previously rejected Christ, it was not too late. And then he said, in what had become one of Evangelical Christianity’s most famous phrases, “I’m going to ask you right now. . . .” Within a few days, the mail and telephone response generated by that dramatic scene outstripped that for any previous appeal in Graham’s ministry.

  Two aspects of the Chicago crusade drew little public attention but proved to be of considerable long-term significance for the Graham organization. After the 1957 New York crusade, during which he organized the recruitment of show-business people, Lane Adams found that the hands-on experience gained while working with prospective and new converts translated easily into a more effective ministry in a local pastorate. He felt every pastor ought also to be an evangelist but realized that most seminaries did not provide the skills he had learned while working with the Graham team. At Adams’s instigation, seven students from Columbia Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which he had attended, received internships (paid for by an affluent student at the seminary) to work with the team during a month-long crusade in Philadelphia in the fall of 1961. About the same time, a wealthy California layman, Lowell Berry, was thinking along similar lines. Berry, whose theological leanings had been somewhat liberal before his participation in Graham’s highly successful 1958 San Francisco crusade, had been convinced of both the plausibility of a more Evangelical theology and the effectiveness of high-powered evangelism of the sort Graham practiced. George Wilson recalled that Berry approached BGEA representatives several times, indicating his interest in underwriting a program to enable seminary students and young ministers to obtain intensive instruction in evangelistic theory and methods during Graham crusades. Wilson was not particularly open to the idea, responding that such a program would require a great deal of money. Berry’s simple response—“Well, I have a great deal of money”—-cast a different light on the matter, and at the Chicago crusade, twenty-seven seminarians from seven schools received seminar training and practical field experience in evangelism. The Chicago experience proved so successful that Berry continued his support. Robert Ferm developed a more structured program for an El Paso crusade later in the year, and the Billy Graham School of Evangelism was under way. A year later, a hundred men, including young clergy as well as seminarians, attended a School of Evangelism attached to a Graham crusade in Los Angeles, spending their days in classes taught by members of the team and invited guests, and their evenings watching the master evangelist at work. In subsequent years, the program catered less to seminarians than to pastors, but each major crusade eventually came to include evangelistic training for several hundred ministers. Long after Berry’s death, most of the expense, including travel and lodging for less affluent ministers, was picked up by the Berry Foundation.

  A second little-noticed development of the Chicago crusade involved a shift in T. W. Wilson’s role. After Graham persuaded him to come to work for BGEA in 1956, Wilson served as an associate evangelist, using team-developed techniques and personnel to hold crusades on his own, quite independent of Graham’s schedule, or conducting “satellite crusades” in locations not far from cities where Graham was coming or had just been. In the latter case, Graham often preached at the last service or two to give thos
e unable to attend the larger crusade a chance to hear him in person. For Graham’s major crusades, the associate evangelists typically join the larger team, filling in for Billy at various speaking engagements and simply enjoying the chance to visit with other members of the association. During the Chicago crusade, Graham needed a nap one afternoon and asked T.W. to handle a handful of small tasks—returning a few telephone calls, conveying a message to an aide, answering a question for the public relations staff, and the like. A well-organized man, Wilson finished the entire list before Graham awoke. When Billy expressed amazement, T.W. said, “You wanted them done, didn’t you? Well, I did them.”

  About two o’clock the next morning, Graham went to Wilson’s room and woke him. “I want you to come with me and help me,” he said. The sleepy Wilson groaned. “Billy,” he said, “we’ve been over this before and the answer is the same. I appreciate you more than I can tell you, but I know what I am supposed to do, and that is preach.”

  Graham quickly trotted out the reasoning he had used so effectively so many times before: “I want to ask you a question. Are you more concerned about the number of times you can speak or the most good you can do for Almighty God?”

  “Man, that’s beside the point,” Wilson objected.

  “Is it? Think about it. First of all, I need somebody who knows me, knows my family, knows my friends, and who is an evangelist himself.”

  “Billy, I just can’t do this. I know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Will you pray about it?”

  “I don’t need to pray about it.”

  “Oh? There’s something in your life you don’t need to pray about?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Anyway,” Wilson recalled with a chuckle, “he was a super salesman. I tried to go back to sleep and couldn’t. I tossed and turned all night. I called my wife back in Dothan, Alabama, but she didn’t help me at all with a decision. She said, ‘Just promise me one thing. Make sure you are in God’s will, because if you are not, you will be miserable, and if you are miserable, we will all be miserable. Just make sure you are in God’s will.’ Well, I didn’t sleep any that night, and I couldn’t sleep the next night either. Finally, I said, ‘Lord, I’ve got to get some sleep. Please help me.’ Then it just seemed like he was impressing on me that this was what I ought to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

  After that afternoon in 1962, T. W. Wilson spent most days of the rest of his life at the side or within easy reach of Billy Graham, serving as his gatekeeper, travel agent, valet, nurse, adviser, buffer, booster, defender, listener, jollier, minesweeper, and constant chaperon. Some team members occasionally referred to mild feelings of resentment toward T.W. because of his unique relationship with their leader—inevitably, they perceived such feelings in others rather than in themselves—but colleagues and knowledgeable observers of the Graham organization alike almost invariably described him as “an amazing man,” “one of the strong backbones of the entire association,” “a man who is able to subordinate himself without ever worrying about it a minute,” and “a man who knows how to take care of Billy without making everyone mad.”

  T.W.’s chaperonage efforts did not always work out perfectly. Not long after he assumed his new post, Graham fell ill with pneumonia on his way to a meeting in the Philippines and had to be hospitalized in Honolulu. Checking himself out of the hospital against his doctors’ advice, he and Wilson headed back to Montreat. The doctors had been right. By the time the two men reached Los Angeles, Graham’s fever had soared, and he was miserable with a severe bronchial infection, but he insisted on returning home, where Nelson Bell could look after him. When their plane landed in Atlanta, tornadoes and pouring rain made it impossible for airplanes to leave for Asheville, so Graham insisted that T.W. rent a car and head out for home. When they got to Jefferson, Georgia, well after dark, Wilson stopped at a service station to ask for directions. Graham, who had gone to sleep in the back seat, groggily appraised the situation and staggered through the heavy rain to the restroom at the side of the building. When Wilson returned to the car, he never thought to check the back seat but simply jumped in and drove off—leaving Graham in the restroom. The interstate highway had not yet been built, and winding through the hills in a driving rain fully occupied his attention until he finally stopped for gas about midnight in Oteen, North Carolina, less than twenty miles from Montreat. When he turned around to wake Billy up and tell him they were almost home, he was astonished to find an empty back seat. He called Ruth to see if she had heard from her husband. “No,” she said, “I thought he was with you.” Wilson had recalled that, as he pushed along those last few miles wondering what on earth had happened, he could not help considering the possibility that the rapture had occurred and that he and Ruth had not been invited to make the trip.

  Graham, of course, knew exactly what had happened, but that did not provide a simple solution. He had heard Wilson preparing to drive off but had not been in a position to pursue him. Sick, rumpled, and unshaven, he went into a cafe attached to the station and tried to call home. Unfortunately, he had just gotten a new unlisted number and could not remember it. With his famous voice rendered unrecognizable by laryngitis, neither could he convince the operator that he was in fact the registered owner of that number. Eventually, he persuaded the driver of the town’s lone taxicab to take him to nearby Greenville, South Carolina, where he knew he could get a ride on to Montreat. The old man insisted Graham put down twenty dollars in advance and refused to believe his claim to be Billy Graham (“I think you are on the lam,” he said) until they reached Greenville’s Holiday Inn, where the manager recognized the evangelist and helped him arrange to rent a car to drive the rest of the way to Montreat.

  Back at home, Ruth continued to care for her maturing brood of children and their ever-changing menagerie of dogs, goats, rabbits, ponies, and assorted wildlife. Anne continued to be a kind and tenderhearted girl who gave little trouble to anyone, and youngest daughter Bunny displayed much the same pleasant and pliable spirit. Franklin was cut from different cloth. An independent spirit from the start, he had started experimenting with cigarettes at age three, picking up butts from carpenters working on his mother’s dream home. A few years later, Ruth decided to end the allure of smoking by offering him a pack and inviting him to smoke right in front of her. To her uncomfortable surprise, he quickly drew it down to a stub, then immediately lit up another. Other efforts to break his spirit were no more successful. Once, on the way to a drive-in restaurant in Asheville, his pestering the other children became so aggravating that Ruth stopped the car, pulled him out, and after checking to make sure he could get enough air, locked him in the trunk. When she let him out at the restaurant, he popped out and chirruped to the carhop, “I’ll have a cheeseburger without the meat.”

  Ned, six years younger, was an easy target for Franklin’s aggression. Ruth told of an overheard conversation in which Franklin, polishing his shoes by the fireplace, asked his younger brother, “Ned, do you love me?”

  Ned, always described as having a gentle spirit, answered, “Yes, my love you.”

  Then Franklin sprang the trap: “Well, I don’t love you.”

  Reflecting his father’s ability to handle rebuff, Ned leaned back against the hearth and said after a few moments’ thought, “Well, my love you.”

  Franklin shot back, “Well, I don’t love you.”

  Ned knew where to go for help: “The Bible says . . .”

  Franklin cut him off. “The Bible doesn’t say I have to love you, does it?”

  “Well . . . ,” Ned ventured, “the Bible says some nice things.”

  The soft answer apparently had its effect. Not long afterward, while Ruth was tucking Franklin into bed, she noticed Ned standing at the doorway of Franklin’s bedroom—Franklin had trained him not to enter without permission. The tiny figure shyly asked his brother, “Can I come in and kiss you go
od night?” This time, Franklin accepted Ned’s affection, and mission accomplished, little brother padded happily off to bed. “You know,” Franklin admitted to his mother, “he’s a pretty good little boy.”

  Seventeen-year-old GiGi had lost none of her spunk, but boarding school had removed her from Montreat for most of the year, and a new development was about to remove her forever. During the summer of 1960, while Graham was touring in Europe, his family stayed in Montreux, Switzerland, as the guest of Ara Tchividjian, a wealthy Swiss Armenian who became a Christian after reading Peace with God, flew to New York in 1957 to hear Graham preach, and had been an enthusiastic backer ever since. Over the course of the summer, GiGi, then fourteen, met Tchividjian’s eldest son, Stephan, who was twenty-one. “I thought he was an old man,” she recalled, but Stephan’s grandmother told him, “That is the girl you are going to marry.” Stephan, who was already engaged to a woman his age, thought it absurd, but his grandmother confidently informed him, “God has told me.” The Grahams also admired Stephan. Late one afternoon, looking across a bejeweled mountain lake from the terrace of their home, Billy mused, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if GiGi and Stephan grew up and fell in love?” Ruth conceded his point, but noting the years and geography that separated them, added, “It’s not going to happen. Let’s pray that she finds someone like Stephan.”