A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  With regard to the third objection his critics raised, Graham always acknowledged that he saw no lasting solution to most of the world’s problems short of the Second Coming. Without question, this conviction seriously weakened his and other Evangelicals’ commitment to movements dedicated to major social change. But he did not invoke this belief as a means of escaping responsibility; he invoked it because he believed it was true, because he believed the Bible taught it. Even so, his views on the two great social issues of the decade—race and Vietnam—were neither as individualistic nor as patently acquiescent to governmental authority as his critics charged.

  On the question of race, Graham stuck to his long-standing policy of insisting on integrated crusades, urging brotherhood and understanding, and warning that demonstrations and protests were likely to prove futile and counterproductive. In the summer of 1969, when Graham returned to Madison Square Garden for a ten-day crusade, civil rights activist James Forman was presenting his Black Manifesto to white churches and synagogues, demanding they pay $500 million in reparations to black Americans. When asked at a precrusade news conference if he expected Forman to present his demands at the Garden, Graham replied drily that “I don’t think we’re going to have any outside speakers. I’m going to do the preaching. If he were to come, we would welcome him with a big smile and hope he enjoyed the service.” Perhaps sensing he would never get past the Garden’s security force, or if he did, that he would not be able to work the guilt of Graham’s congregation as successfully as that of, say, New York’s liberal Riverside Church, Forman made no attempt to interrupt the crusade’s services, and Graham never mentioned the Black Manifesto in his sermons. He did, however, attract more blacks to the Garden than he had in 1957. Time magazine estimated that at least a quarter of his audience on most nights was nonwhite.

  For all his distance from the main arenas of conflict, Graham’s frequent references to racial injustice and his principled adherence to what he did believe made it easier for other Evangelicals to take stronger stands. An important manifestation of that phenomenon came in September 1969, at the U.S. Congress on Evangelism. Though BGEA had no official role in this gathering, its leaders consciously saw themselves as extending the work of the 1966 Berlin Congress; Graham served as honorary chairman and gave a major address, the meeting was held in Minneapolis, and a book containing the speeches delivered at the gathering was edited by George Wilson and produced by BGEA’s World Wide Publications. This congress, which attracted 5,000 delegates from 93 denominations and most states, served as a kind of springboard, enabling Evangelicals to identify more boldly with social action. Many of the old familiar notes were struck by the old familiar people, but the meeting also offered bolder fare. Leighton Ford, who had begun to appear on the Hour of Decision broadcasts almost as often as Graham and was unofficially being groomed to succeed him, declared it a shame the church had been “so slow to face the demands of the Gospel in the racial revolution of our time,” and Stephen Olford warned of what could happen when church people clung to segregation. When he arrived at New York’s Calvary Baptist Church, he reported, he found it staunchly segregationist. After he preached and taught a series of lessons on the evils of such an arrangement, all but eleven members voted to integrate the church. Of those eleven, four soon confessed their sin and repented; of the stonyhearted remainder, all seven died shortly thereafter. In the dramatic, riveting manner that had arrested a young Billy Graham’s attention more than twenty years earlier, Olford thundered the explanation of their deaths: “God’s judgment fell!”

  Black delegates to the congress moved well beyond their white brethren. Tom Skinner, a former Harlem gang leader who admitted stabbing at least twenty-two people before being converted by a gospel radio broadcast, acknowledged that “Mr. Graham has been an outstanding spokesman in terms of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in healing the relationship between Black and White in this country,” but he noted that religion had not always improved the lot of the oppressed and suffering. He reminded the delegates that religion had also undergirded slavery and that the church had been guilty of gross negligence of minorities and the poor. And then he got specific. “When I move to your community and buy a home and I’m being given a rough time,” he asked, “will you take a stand? If my daughter falls in love with your son and they decide to get married, will you allow them to marry in peace? Will you reciprocate by accepting me as a brother? This is what black Christian brethren are crying out for, a genuine relationship.” Skinner challenged his white brethren to open the doors to their institutions, to provide black faculty and recruit black students for their colleges, to grant black writers and ministers access to their magazines and radio stations, and to let them talk about race, not just about communism and sex and movies and nightclubs. To do less than this, to mouth platitudes about equality and then to censure blacks who participated in protests and riots, or to relocate their congregations when blacks moved into the neighborhood was to cry “Give us Barabbas” and to crucify Christ anew. In another uncomfortable historical allusion, Ralph Abernathy, the black Baptist minister who succeeded Martin Luther King as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, compared the law-and-order campaigns mounted by many politicians in 1968 to the campaign that elevated Hitler to chancellor of Germany in 1933. Finally, a group of nearly fifty black ministers presented the congress with a list of complaints, calling on white Christians to “confess in word and action to the sins committed against black people,” urging representatives of church agencies to foster equal-employment practices and asking church leaders to help blacks obtain improved urban housing.

  The Minneapolis congress neither took nor recommended any specific direct action on racial issues, but Evangelicals concerned for social action regard it as an important moment, and Graham himself took seriously the need to move beyond rhetoric and personal example. Though skeptical about the efficacy of forced busing, he made a series of five spot announcements urging southern parents to “obey the law” on school integration. Then, during a crusade in Anaheim, California, a few days later, he met E. V. Hill, a successful and influential Baptist pastor and close friend of Martin Luther King’s. A conversation scheduled for forty minutes stretched into six hours as Hill detailed with considerable emotion the impatience many black churchmen felt toward their white brethren. Shortly afterward, Graham arranged a meeting between a group of key black ministers and the President of the United States. He acknowledged that “they would never have gotten to him in a hundred years if I had not opened the door,” but Nixon treated it as more than a courtesy visit. Though internal memos reveal that the President thought the meeting had run on much too long (over three and a half hours), Graham recalled that “they let him have it with both barrels and he sat there and took it.” And at least on the short run and not without an eye for political advantage, Nixon responded to their complaints. The clergymen were quite specific, discussing such matters as their difficulty in getting funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for housing projects for senior citizens and bonding restrictions that seemed to favor contractors. These appeals touched Nixon’s compassionate as well as his calculating side. A Haldeman memo prior to the meeting indicated that “the President is extremely interested in following up with Billy Graham in the work he is doing with Negro ministers across the country. He feels, as does Graham, that this may be our best chance to make inroads into the Negro community.” But more than unvarnished political tactic was at work. Immediately after the April 1970 meeting, Haldeman informed Ehrlichman that Nixon wanted “one of the projects cleared and done tomorrow. He points out that you can always find a way to do the things for the people on the other side and that just for once he’d like to see us find a way to do something right for the people on our side. . . . [He] wants to see at least one of their projects approved and under way if it means the staff at OEO have to take up a collection from their own pockets to raise the mone
y to do it.” Another staff memo indicated that “we are exploring additional ways in which we can involve these men and assist in their efforts to solve the problems of their communities.” Whatever the controlling motive, help fulaction did occur, and at least some black ministers moved closer to the Republican camp. In May 1970, E. V. Hill wrote to Nixon to say that “upon your instructions, your staff intervened and within a few days caused the program to commence and also enabled the program to have as its contractors two very able Negroes. . . . I have not been quiet in proclaiming what you have personally done in this matter. I shall continue to tell my community . . . of the interest of the President in a ‘local matter.’”

  When Graham looked at Vietnam, his stance continued to be less clear than his views on civil rights. Just weeks after Nixon took office, the evangelist told reporters that “we must have peace in Vietnam. I’m not only going to say I’m for peace, but I’m going to try to do something. In my particular area it must be done in rather a quiet way.” What he did immediately was to gather a group of missionary leaders from various parts of Southeast Asia for a three-day meeting in Bangkok, where they shared their perceptions on the war and offered specific recommendations for ending it. The men were not tyros who had spent a few months in the area and were now calling for a worldwide day of prayer. Most had been in Vietnam from five to twenty years, and some enjoyed regular access to President Thieu and other members of the South Vietnamese government. Prior to the meeting, they interviewed hundreds of Vietnamese officials and other key people. In a thirteen-page confidential report to Nixon, Graham characterized them as a “hawkish” group, making their criticisms of the war all the more telling.

  According to the missionaries, the South Vietnamese people were overwhelmingly pro-American and pro-Nixon, but the Paris peace talks had generated a fear that “a coalition government will be imposed on them that in the long run may lead to a Communist takeover.” The group also manifested a growing sense of disillusionment with Americans in Vietnam, citing reports that “more than 40 percent of American troops are now on some form of dope or narcotics.” They also charged that South Vietnamese officials and other citizens were enmeshed in a massive web of corruption largely traceable to the actions of Americans, particularly contractors and other businessmen, whom one missionary described as “the ‘crud’ of American society.” As a result, at least a third of all the goods shipped to Vietnam from America eventually found their way onto the black market, and multiplied millions were being spent on programs that were colossal failures, creating disillusionment at the “glaring corruption, incompetence and waste of American civilians working for companies doing business in Vietnam.” The missionaries believed that American policy was hopelessly misguided. Americanizing the war by providing extensive manpower and taking over the decision making not only robbed the South Vietnamese of their dignity but enabled the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese to appear like a “little boy” being beaten by an American giant, which gave them a tremendous propaganda weapon, even though their own giant—the Communist world—stood directly behind them. To make matters worse, the American giant often appeared clumsy and ineffective, “using methods of warfare learned at West Point and more appropriate in the battle theaters of World War II than in the jungles of Vietnam.” Equally damaging, the missionaries felt, was “the overwhelming cultural intrusion,” particularly the flood of American consumer goods readily available through post exchanges and on the black market. If this kept up, they warned, “we will have destroyed what we came to save, and that is the Vietnamese, their culture, and their freedom.”

  The missionaries felt it was still possible to win the war if the Paris peace talks produced no honorable settlement. The first step would be to return the war to the Vietnamese, letting them fight it in “the Oriental way.” Guerilla warfare, encouraged by Eisenhower and Kennedy but deemphasized by Johnson, should be resumed, “using Oriental methods which seem brutal and cruel in sophisticated Western eyes, but which are being used every day by the Viet Cong to spread terror and fear to the people.” The North Vietnamese, they believed, feared a well-equipped and well-trained South Vietnamese army using guerilla tactics far more than they feared American soldiers. Especially valuable in a renewed emphasis on guerilla warfare would be the mountain people, whom the missionaries felt they could control for another year or two, despite intense efforts by the Chinese to win their allegiance. America should also encourage and equip North Vietnamese defectors to return to the north to engage in guerilla warfare and ultimately to attempt a coup. “Why,” Graham asked, “should all the fighting be in the south?” By missionary estimates, perhaps no more than 10,000 of the 27 million North Vietnamese were hard-core Communists. The rest, they suspected, would welcome liberation by anti-Communist forces.

  Because ineffective and insensitive American policy provided the Vietcong with important psychological advantages, Graham and his colleagues recommended major attention to propaganda. “Instead of showing 10 hours of American movies a day,” he said, “use our vast television investment for propaganda purposes,” with concentrated attention to boosting Vietnamese morale, helping them feel a kinship with free nations throughout the world, and exposing Communist tyranny by such methods as interviewing Vietcong defectors and showing “the terrorism by the Communists right on television.” This last tactic alone, he felt, “would do more than anything we can think of.” Used properly, Graham believed, the multimillion-dollar radio and television system devoted almost entirely to entertainment purposes would produce 5,000 or more defectors from the Vietcong every month. Finally, he recommended that the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization be reorganized—“It is totally out of date”—and that Nixon convene an Asian summit conference.

  When Graham’s report, which varied somewhat from his repeated public insistence that he limited his counsel with political leaders to spiritual matters, became available for public inspection in February 1989, he noted characteristically that the views contained in it were largely those of the missionaries and that he had merely conveyed those views to the President. It is clear, however, that he agreed with them, not only from his own statements in the report but also from the fact that six months after he had sent it to Nixon, he sent a copy to Henry Kissinger, assistant to the President for national security affairs, noting that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had been impressed with it and expressing his hope that Kissinger would also pay heed to it. Kissinger, too, had “found it quite useful” and was “looking into the points which they raised.” Less concretely, Graham also began to voice an ambivalence about the war, reflecting the missionaries’ influence. In an interview with Dotson Rader (grandson of evangelist Paul Rader, under whose preaching Nixon made his boyhood commitment to Christ) Graham revealed that he understood the feelings of “the people of Southeast Asia who are frightened that we might pull out” but added that America “can’t be the world’s policeman. We have far too many problems at home, growing too dangerous. And, also, I am not at all sure that the war is supportable, morally supportable. I am simply not sure at all.”

  Despite his misgivings, Graham could not bring himself to disagree openly with government policy, and he was at pains to show himself in sympathy with the views of Richard Nixon. When the Christian Herald, one of his early boosters, published an editorial opposing U.S. policy in Vietnam on both moral and legal grounds, Nixon asked Graham to find out who, specifically, had been responsible. Graham reported that the culprit was David Poling, who “openly professes his liberal thinking on practically all matters” and had led the magazine “increasingly to the left” during his tenure as president of the Christian Herald Association. Graham suggested, however, that Nixon need not be too concerned about the editorial. The circulation and influence of the magazine had been declining steadily in recent years and he believed it “definitely could not have any kind of impact on American Protestant thinking at the present time.” Besides, he added, “Christianity Today . . . is well-kno
wn as the most influential Protestant news journal, and it consistently takes stands opposite to those of the Christian Herald.”

  In addition to his efforts to help find some solution to the war in Vietnam, Graham stood ready to serve his President at any other promising juncture where he might be needed. Before a meeting with Israeli primeminister Golda Meir, he told Nixon, “If you have any suggestions as to how I may contribute in this delicate Middle East situation, please let me know.” The White House evidently did not feel the evangelist was overreaching. One staffer suggested to Kissinger that Graham should convey to Mrs. Meir a sense of American unease over Israeli military strategy—specifically, a series of aggressive air strikes against its neighbors during the summer of 1969. Nixon also relayed Graham’s offer to Kissinger and asked for a report on the meeting between Graham and Meir. There seems to be no record of the meeting itself, but Graham was clearly perceived during this period as one of Israel’s valued friends. The World Wide Pictures film His Land, released in 1969, outlined Graham’s theological understanding of the role of Israel in God’s grand historical plan and was well received by Jewish leaders both in Israel and America. The film moved prominent Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum to declare that “for acts of friendship toward the Jewish people at a time of turmoil which has not been altogether congenial to Jewish security, Billy Graham deserves better than a stereotyped skeptical response from thoughtful Jews and many others, while not ignoring basic differences.”