A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The decade following John Kennedy’s death hardly delivered the revival Billy Graham dared hope for in the aftermath of the assassination, but it did produce a notable resuscitation of his own involvement in affairs of state. His well-known friendship with Richard Nixon, coupled with his awkward involvement in the 1960 campaign, made it seem likely that his return to favor at the White House would probably have to await the return to power of the GOP. Insofar as Graham imagined that to be the case, he underestimated Lyndon Johnson.

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  Billy and Lyndon

  Billy Graham and Lyndon Johnson met through Sid Richardson shortly after Johnson was elected to the Senate. They had not been close friends but liked one another and had maintained cordial contact, largely at Johnson’s initiative. Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Graham contacted the new President to let him know he would be praying for him and stood ready to help in any way he could during the difficult days that lay ahead. Whether for spiritual or political reasons, Johnson eagerly accepted the offer. “Your message met the need,” he wrote. “The knowledge that one of God’s greatest messengers was seeking Divine Counsel in my behalf provided me with the strong source of strength, courage, and comfort during the extremely trying days immediately after the tragic event in Dallas.” Within a week after he moved into the White House, Johnson summoned Graham to Washington. A visit scheduled for fifteen minutes stretched to five hours as two farm boys who had ridden their talent, ambition, and energy to the pinnacle of their respective professions found they had more to offer each other than either had ever imagined.

  That first visit was not all solace and solicitude. Graham had brought Grady Wilson with him, and Johnson insisted they all take a swim in the White House pool. “I was somewhat startled,” Graham recalled, “because they didn’t have any bathing suits. You just went as you were.” Afterward, Grady regaled the group with stories so outrageously funny that Johnson called for an aide to make notes so that he could remember them and as an accomplished storyteller himself, perhaps put them to good use in another setting. Graham enjoyed Johnson’s affability but felt obliged to remind the new President of his need to rely on God’s guidance and power. Johnson’s great-grandfather had been an Evangelical preacher, and Graham had no qualms about stating just what the Reverend Mr. Baines would have said or done in this or that situation, since he assumed that the good cleric’s views would approximate his own. Graham conceded that Johnson probably recognized the value of associating himself with a major religious symbol at a time of national mourning and crisis but felt certain his interest in matters spiritual was genuine. A few days later, he told the press that Lyndon Johnson was “the best qualified man we’ve had in the White House,” a man who would doubtless “provide moral leadership for the country.” And he told the President that, as God had been with George Washington at Valley Forge and with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, he would now stand close to Lyndon Johnson, ready to strengthen him when the awesome burdens of his office threatened to overwhelm him.

  Not long after reestablishing ties to the White House, Graham found himself at the center of a rumor that could have strained his friendship with Johnson. For several years, Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt had admired Graham and his team, particularly Grady Wilson, whom he wanted to support in a series of wildcat revivals along the entire Gulf coast. Grady turned him down, at least in part because Hunt thought BGEA’s policy of cooperating with local clergymen and organizing laypeople was foolishness: “You don’t need the preachers, Grady. They’ll just get in your way. Forget all that other stuff. Just go from town to town.” Hunt let Grady off the hook, but he apparently tried out an even bolder notion on Billy Graham: an offer of 6 million dollars if Graham would run for president against Lyndon Johnson. According to Grady Wilson and other close friends, the old tycoon reached Graham in the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, informing him that the money would be deposited in his personal bank account if he allowed his name to be put in nomination at the Republican convention that summer. Witnesses insist that Billy took no more than fifteen seconds to tell his would-be benefactor that he was flattered but had no interest in relinquishing a post he regarded as more important than the presidency. Given his notorious penchant for wasting huge sums of money on conservative pipe dreams, particularly those in which unfettered capitalist individualism and uncritical patriotism were served up in a stew of Scripture, Hunt either could not imagine that Graham would actually refuse such an offer or sought to force his hand. In any case, he leaked his plan to the media, which, along with the entire Scripps Howard newspaper chain, ran the story immediately. That evening, Walter Cronkite told viewers of CBS News that evangelist Billy Graham was considering a bid for the presidency.

  Prior to the 1952 election, Graham speculated that he might be elected president if he were to run on a platform calling the nation “back to God, back to Christ, and back to the Bible,” but that seemed clearly to be a rhetorical ploy aimed at influencing the bona fide candidates to take a similar line. In the interim he had waved off several opportunities to run for public office in North Carolina, and his instant refusal of Hunt’s offer seemed genuine. Still, the Houston Press reported that a source close to Graham indicated that “he is deeply interested in the opportunity for service, and . . . is giving earnest and prayerful consideration to the idea,” adding that if he did accept a draft, “it would be as a Republican.” If Graham had such second thoughts, his friends and family quickly dispelled them. Ruth called from Montreat to tell him that she did not think the American people would vote for a divorced president, and if he left the ministry to enter politics, he would certainly have a divorce on his hands. Hunt’s call came on a Friday. Graham proposed to call a press conference for the following Monday to deny the rumors. Calvin Thielman, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Montreat and an old friend of Lyndon Johnson’s as well, told him that would be like waiting three days to deny that he was running around on his wife. “You deny that immediately,” Thielman insisted. “You are not going to run for President. No use to fool with that one.” Graham summoned the press, and by Sunday morning his short career as a putative candidate for national office had ended. H. L. Hunt was not the only party who felt the press conference was a mistake; the Christian Century, showing little sympathy for Graham’s unsought plight, hooted at the entire affair. “This denial of an intention nobody except perhaps a few of his entourage suspected he entertained was remarkable,” the Century observed. “That he should feel it necessary . . . to take himself out of a race few even dreamed he might enter indicates just how far out of touch with political reality a man who stands in front of crowds can get.”

  If Lyndon Johnson considered Billy Graham a potential rival, he did not show it. Contact between the two men appears to have been limited during 1964. Graham invited the President to attend a crusade, and though he did not accept, Johnson reciprocated with an invitation for the Grahams to spend a night in the White House, which they did accept. That visit, Graham’s first overnight stay in the private quarters—in recalling it, he noted that Richard Nixon had never been invited to Eisenhower’s private quarters during his entire eight years as vice-president—sealed the friendship and led Graham to urge the President to “call on us any time we could ever be of the slightest service to you.” Graham also forged ties with such key members of the Johnson administration as Bill Moyers and Marvin Watson.

  Not long after her father’s overnight visit to the White House, Anne Graham, then a freshman in college, attended a rally for Barry Goldwater and declared herself in favor of the Republican candidate. Johnson may have figured Anne was voicing sentiments uttered at the family dinner table, but he overlooked that possibility when he called Graham to say, “Billy, I know about those things. I have two daughters of my own, and I have trouble sometimes controlling what they say. When the election is over, you bring Anne up to the White House. I’d like to get acquainted with her.” Conservative political operatives, howe
ver, seized on what Johnson chose to ignore. In a well-organized last-ditch effort to stem the tide that seemed certain to carry the President to a crashing victory, Republican campaign offices around the country received telegrams indicating that Billy Graham would endorse Goldwater if enough people asked him to. In the few remaining days before the November election, Graham received over a million telegrams, some bearing lists of names stretching three feet in length. The Western Union office in Charlotte called in extra operators, used emergency circuits, and operated at full tilt around the clock. Circuits in Asheville were similarly jammed, and tens of thousands of additional messages poured into Montreat by airplane and motor courier. The manager of the telegraph office in Asheville declared that in thirty-five years of working for Western Union, he had never heard of such a campaign directed at one individual. On hearing of the avalanche in Asheville, Lyndon Johnson placed another call, delivering the simple, ostensibly avuncular message, “Now Billy, you stay out of politics.” He also took the precaution of inviting Graham to spend the weekend before the election at the White House, where he would not be tempted to read his mail. Whether from preference or prudence, Graham disappointed Goldwater backers by refraining from endorsing either candidate, but when the election turned out as all the polls predicted, he congratulated the victorious President on his “tremendous victory” and declared expansively that he was “convinced that you were not only the choice of the American people—but of God. You are as truly a servant of God as was your great-grandfather Baines when he preached the gospel.” As for being impressed with the telegram campaign, he observed dryly that the money “might have been better spent for evangelism.”

  The election behind them, Graham and Johnson unleashed their enthusiasm on each other. Billy led the Protestant prayer at the inauguration and preached at a special dedication service Johnson arranged at the National City Christian Church. Using as his text the words from a letter that legendary Texas hero Sam Houston had written to Johnson’s grandfather, Graham exhorted the President, his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, and a delegation from Congress not to forget the spiritual dimensions of leadership. Over the next four years, White House files reveal a continuous exchange of letters, cards, and small gifts between the two men, as well as repeated reports of intercessory prayer aimed at everything from hastening Johnson’s recovery from the flu to supplying him with deep draughts of supernatural wisdom.

  Johnson and Graham, of course, had much to give each other. For Billy, just to be welcome once again at the White House meant that he and his people—good, decent, God-fearing, Bible-believing, patriotic, middle-class, middle-American folk—were back in charge, or at least back in favor, as many felt they had not been during the Kennedy years. More specifically, the legitimation Evangelicals worked for and won in the years after World War II had not been lost. Now, their plans to rekindle a spirit the nation had not known since the days of the Benevolent Empire could proceed apace. Beyond that reclamation of stature and staging ground for himself and his constituency, Graham clearly savored the renewed opportunity to share in the experience and secrets of presidential power. Bill Moyers has recalled how the evangelist’s eyes lit up as he sat riveted with fascination while the man who wanted to be “President of All the People” talked of his hopes for the Utopian enterprise he called the War on Poverty, while the Commander in Chief explained how he personally selected bombing targets in a much darker war in Southeast Asia, and while the Great Manipulator shared stories of the peccadilloes and peculiarities of powerful men he intended to turn to his will.

  Graham always seemed surprised that famous and important people sought him out as assiduously as he sought them, and for reasons not remarkably dissimilar. Neither did he seem to realize fully, though he was certainly not innocent of all understanding on this score, that he gave as good as he got in such associations. Without question, and apart from the genuine affection he appears to have felt for Graham and the intrinsic satisfactions he found in their friendship, Lyndon Johnson understood the advantages of being Billy’s buddy. If Billy Graham was the President’s friend, then millions of Americans would conclude that the President must be a good man, a decent man, a noble man, perhaps even a Christian man. And if he possessed those qualities, then his causes—his War on Poverty, his civil rights act, his effort to preserve freedom and democracy in Southeast Asia—must also be good, decent, noble, perhaps even Christian, and therefore precisely the causes Christian folk ought to support. “Johnson always had a high appreciation of men as symbols,” Moyers observed. “[If] a man comes clothed in symbols like Billy did, you never have to ask that man to do anything for you; he’s done everything just by being there. . . . So Billy didn’t have to do anything to help him, and Billy, in turn, never asked him for a thing. He was helped by being there as much as Johnson was helped by having him there.” Public-opinion polls regularly placed both men at or quite near the top of the list of the world’s most-admired men. Each clearly shared in that high view of the other, and each cherished the other’s appreciation. Johnson once acknowledged that he often contacted Graham to “get a new injection” of confidence and optimism, recalling that during one particularly difficult period “when I was being called a crook and a thug and all,” he invited Graham to spend a weekend with him, and “we bragged on each other. I told him he was the greatest religious leader in the world and he said I was the greatest political leader.”

  Perhaps because his own political career and opinions owed little to his meager academic training at the tiny teacher’s college he attended in San Marcos, Texas, Johnson appeared to feel that Graham, another man whose success and appeal to millions of people owed more to intuition and personal qualities than to formal education, might be a resource fully as valuable as the Harvard brain trust inherited from John Kennedy. According to Graham and several associates, Johnson frequently sought his counsel on a variety of issues, ranging from general guidance about the War on Poverty to an offer to let him try to figure some way to cut 10 million dollars from a proposed budget. After Sargent Shriver flew to Montreat in a helicopter to enlist his aid, Graham did participate in a film supporting the poverty program but claims he generally limited his involvement to spiritual matters. Johnson did not always accept this reticence at face value. Shortly before the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the two families were having dinner at the White House, and the President asked Graham who he thought would be a good vice-president. Ruth immediately gave her husband a sharp kick under the table and interjected that “Bill really shouldn’t get into political matters.” Graham quickly agreed and Johnson let it drop for the moment, but when Lady Bird and Ruth walked into an adjoining room after the meal, the President grabbed Graham’s arm and said with the insistent intensity few men found easy to resist, “Now Billy, tell me what you really think about that.” Without taking credit for the eventual outcome, Graham has acknowledged that he recommended Hubert Humphrey.

  In keeping with his long-standing tendency to interpret friendly behavior or polite attention as evidence of deep spiritual interest, Graham perceived Lyndon Johnson to be a somewhat more pious man than did many of his colleagues or various secular observers. It is of course possible to fake religiosity, and politicians in both ancient and recent memory have demonstrated notable talent for that particular artifice. Perhaps less well appreciated is the fact that it is also possible to hold deeply felt (if not always precisely articulated) religious beliefs, including belief in the worth of religion, right alongside and perhaps in conscious tension with patently secular and instrumental beliefs, values, and habits of mind and body. Billy Graham acknowledged this duality within Johnson. He understood that he served to legitimate Johnson to an Evangelical constituency, particularly in the South and Southwest. “I think he was attracted to me at least partially because I was well-known in Texas. . . . I think he was more afraid of what the editor of the Baptist Standard [a weekly Southern Baptist newspaper] was going to say about him
than of the Washington Post or the New York Times.” But the memory of a mother who hoped he would be a preacher, to follow in the steps of her own grandfather, also burdened the President’s complex soul, and his friendship with Graham forced him to struggle under that weight. “He wanted to live up to his mother’s goals,” observed Graham, who knew something of what that could mean. “I think he had a conflict within himself about religion. He wanted to go all the way in his commitment to Christ. He knew what it meant to be ‘saved’ or ‘lost,’ using our terminology, and he knew what it was to be ‘born again.’ And yet he somehow felt that he never quite had that experience. I think he tried to make up for it by having many of the outward forms of religion, in the sense of going to church almost fanatically, even while he was President. Sometimes he’d go to church three times on a Sunday.”

  In addition to his penchant for attending public worship, which might easily be dismissed as a political gambit, Johnson manifested a less-visible piety that, even if it reminded one more of a St. Bernard than a St. Francis, was probably genuine. Graham recalled that “a number of times I had prayer with him in his bedroom at the White House, usually early in the morning. He would get out of bed and get on his knees while I prayed. I never had very many people do that.” The President also liked to have people read the Bible to him—“He liked the plain-language versions”—and felt that others could benefit equally. On occasion, he would summon members of his staff a day or two after these devotional sessions, read the same passages to them that Graham or some other preacher had read to him, and admonish his minions to apply the truths they contained both to affairs of state and to their personal behavior. Johnson also believed that those who worked with him could benefit from some old-fashioned gospel preaching and sometimes invited Graham to conduct services and preach at Camp David or at his ranch on the Pedernales River in the Texas Hill Country. And if it seemed too much of an imposition to ask Graham to preach, Johnson always had a worthy backup he could call on: his own great-grandfather Baines. Trying hard but unsuccessfully to conceal his amusement at the memory of the scene, Graham recalled an impromptu service Johnson arranged at Camp David: “Ruth and I got up a little bit later than the others did. We walked over to the President’s cabin, and there out on the porch several people were standing around, including [Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach and several other Jewish people, and there was Jack Valenti, an Italian Catholic, reading a sermon that Johnson’s great grandfather had preached, on ‘How to Be Saved.’ The President thought they ought to hear it, and everybody had to listen.”