Four days after Graham released this statement, Nixon called from Camp David for a fourteen-minute conversation, the longest the two men had had in ten months and apparently their last while Nixon was President. The content of that conversation is unknown, at least until the Watergate tapes themselves are eventually made public, but it did not restore the relationship to its former level of closeness. Graham spent most of July in Switzerland in connection with an international conference that would prove to be one of the most significant enterprises of his entire ministry. (In his major address to the assembly, he drew sustained applause when he warned that evangelists must be careful not “to identify the Gospel with any one political program or culture,” adding that “this has been my own danger.”) When he returned to the United States, Nixon was all but finished. “I tried to get to him,” he remembered, “to go have prayer with him, but I couldn’t. The night before he resigned, I went to Washington at the urging of Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan, who asked me to come. He said, ‘Billy, you are the only one who can talk to Nixon, and he needs you. I just talked to Ed Cox, his son-in-law, and he said to tell you to come just as quick as you can.’ And I went, but I couldn’t even get the operator to answer. I couldn’t get anything.”
The day following Nixon’s retreat to San Clemente, Graham observed that he felt sorry for the President and his family, adding that “I shall always consider him a personal friend. His personal suffering must be almost unbearable. He deserves the prayers even of those who feel betrayed and let down. . . . We should let President Nixon and his family have some privacy now.” When the new President, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon on September 8, Graham gave his blessing, stating that prosecuting the fallen leaders “would have torn the country apart more than Watergate itself.” By acting mercifully, Ford “saved the country from the emotional division and agony that could have further weakened America at home and abroad.” Ten days later, while he was in Los Angeles celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the great crusade in the Canvas Cathedral, he talked briefly with the former President on the telephone; he asked if he might drop in for a visit, but Nixon, who “seemed depressed,” indicated it would not be a good time, both because he had a great deal of work to do and because phlebitis was causing terrible pain in his leg. Not long afterward, the phlebitis produced a blood clot that sent Nixon to the hospital, where Graham did manage to pay him a visit. “He came pretty close to dying,” Graham recalled. “He was much sicker than people realized.” After his return to San Clemente to recuperate, “Ruth hired an airplane and had a big sign following the plane, saying Nixon, God Loves You and So Do We. She did that because we couldn’t get to him. The picture was in Time magazine, but nobody knew it was Ruth.”
Graham and Nixon finally reconciled the following spring over a two-and-a-half-hour candlelight dinner at San Clemente. According to Graham, they never specifically mentioned Watergate—“I’d say there was a studious avoidance of the subject by both of us. I certainly didn’t want to bring it up!”—but Nixon did express some regret that he had let his friends down. Most of their conversation, he said, had been about the Bible and a book about the life of Christ that Nixon was reading. After dinner, the two of them had repaired to the study for a session of prayer. The former President, Graham said, had obviously suffered a great deal, but he voiced no recrimination and harbored no rancor toward those responsible for his downfall. Most important, it seemed obvious to Billy that Nixon had become deeply religious since his resignation.
And that, it seemed, put the matter to rest. The Evangelical doctrine of human depravity provided a useful clue to understanding what had happened, and Graham was quick to remind those with stones in their hands that “there’s a little bit of Watergate in all of us. Let’s don’t go around so self-righteous, talking about all those bad people.” But that same theological system made it possible for him to shift the primary blame to external forces. As his official biography puts it, he eventually decided that “Satan was somehow involved in the downfall of Nixon.” He speculated that the Enemy’s weapons of choice had been sleeping pills and demons. As he explained to another chronicler, Nixon “took all those sleeping pills that would give him a low in the morning and a high in the evening, you know. And all through history, drugs and demons have gone together—demons have always worked through drugs. Even the Greek word for them both is the same. My conclusion is that it was just all those sleeping pills, they just let a demon-power come in and play over him. . . .”
As time passed, Graham seemed to have decided that what Satan had wrought may not have been so dreadful after all. When allegations concerning John Kennedy’s amorous adventures surfaced late in 1975, he noted that at least Nixon “didn’t have nude women running around in the private quarters of the White House.” And a decade later, he had come to regard Watergate as little more than standard operating procedure for presidents. “They’ve all done that sort of thing,” he pointed out—correctly, it appears. “I could tell you about Johnson, about what he did, what he was doing to Goldwater, but I won’t get into that—at this point. I also read where Kennedy had certain conferences taped. And even back in Roosevelt’s day they had things on wire recordings. I don’t guess they were private conversations, but they were things that he wanted to record. Nixon wasn’t much different, but the difficulty is that he had it on tape. Sid Richardson told me years ago, ‘Don’t put anything in writing. If you use the telephone, they can never use it against you.’ I follow that pretty well. I don’t have much in writing. All my business is on telephones. You know, if Nixon hadn’t kept those tapes, he never would have been in all that trouble. To keep a tape of his private conversations was his greatest mistake. But he made other mistakes.”
Though he indicated he and Nixon remained in touch—“I see him very often, in fact, almost every time I go to New York”—he acknowledged that their friendship was probably asymmetrical. “For years, I considered him among my very closest friends. I never thought of him for who he was. I just thought a great deal of him as a friend. He is one of the great people I have ever known personally who was a real gentleman. He’s always courteous, always thoughtful. He would always ask about our meetings and the television programs, and he would comment on it. He was always very receptive when I would talk to him about spiritual things and his own relationship to the Lord and his family’s relationship. He was always very respectful and very quiet. He didn’t respond that much, but I could sense that he was responding inside. I think he considered me a close friend, but not one of his closest. I guess everybody has different levels of friendship.” Reflecting on the possibility that the friendship between Graham and Nixon may have been asymmetrical, Charles Colson said, “That’s true about Nixon with everyone. Nixon had a penchant for knowing how to use and manipulate people. He was the consummate politician. He would demand great loyalty, but as Watergate proved, he never quite gave it back.”
Although Graham acknowledged that “maybe I was naive at that time; maybe I was used,” he continued to insist that if any politician ever exploited a relationship with him, Richard Nixon was “certainly not one of them.” Still, the episode sobered him mightily and made him far more wary of patrolling the corridors of power. Early in 1989 he observed that “inside the Beltway is a different world. That’s the reason I don’t go there anymore if I can help it. I’m glad I live down here on these mountains. I don’t go to Washington much and I don’t go to the Hill much. I used to have lots of friends that I’d go back and see—congressmen and senators—but for years I haven’t done that. I just don’t want to go. I feel God has called me to a much higher calling.”
Friends and close co-workers confirm that the revelations of Watergate had a profound and chastening impact on the evangelist. Colson reported that “Billy told me he would never make the mistake again of getting that close to someone in office. And I think he has been more careful with Reagan and Bush than he was with Nixon.” Leighton Ford conceded that “it wa
s a great mystery to him. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it.” All seem to agree, however, that Graham’s insistence that Nixon’s friendship was entirely nonpolitical is sincere. Without tipping his own hand on the matter, Ford volunteered, “I have never heard him say one thing that made me believe he thought he was being used.” Another close associate framed his assessment a bit more directly. “For the life of me,” he said, “I honestly believe that after all these years, Billy still has no idea of how badly Nixon snookered him.”
Part 5
Keeping the Faith (1974–1990)
27
Lausanne
In the gospel accounts of Jesus’ final meeting with his eleven faithful apostles a few moments before he ascended into heaven, he gave them what came to be known as the Great Commission: “Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the Good News to the whole creation. Those who believe it and receive baptism will find salvation; those who do not believe it will be condemned.” In August 1974 Time magazine noted that “millions of Christians still take that commission of Christ literally, still believe that one of their foremost tasks is to preach the Gospel to the unbaptized.” Taken alone, that was a commonplace observation, but Time saw something uncommon afoot in the Christian world. “Last week,” it announced, “in the lakeshore resort of Lausanne, Switzerland, that belief found a formidable forum, possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held. Brought together largely through the efforts of the Rev. Billy Graham, some 2,400 Protestant Evangelical leaders from 150 countries ended a ten-day International Congress on World Evangelization that served notice of the vigor of conservative, resolutely biblical, fervently mission-minded Christianity.” That notice and the congress that had served it, Time suggested, “constituted a considerable challenge to the prevailing philosophy in the World Council of Churches, headquartered some 30 miles down Lake Leman in Geneva.” The WCC, the magazine noted, had all but abandoned any attempt “to disturb the honest faith” of adherents to non-Christian religions and had redefined its mission as “more of a campaign to achieve a sort of secular salvation, a human liberation in the political and social sense.” The Lausanne Congress had arisen, at least in part, as a direct response to that departure from the evangelistic motive that had impelled John Mott to convene the meetings and form the organizations that eventually led to the founding of the WCC in 1948. Now, Time ventured, “the Evangelicals at Lausanne [had] laid the groundwork for a post-congress ‘fellowship’ that could eventually develop into a rival international body.” Seventeen years later, no Evangelical world council had been formed, but the spirit of Lausanne was still vibrantly alive and the WCC’s good ship Oikumene has unquestionably felt the waves generated when Billy Graham’s band of Evangelicals dropped the Rock of Ages in their ocean.
Evangelism had steadily lost ground throughout the century in WCC-affiliated churches, but the turmoil of the 1960s had accelerated that process. In the West, liberal theologians and seminaries had flirted with and, in some cases, openly embraced views so unorthodox that it became fashionable to contend that one was being most “honest to God” when proclaiming God’s death, a stance that obviously undermined any plausible theological rationale for preaching a gospel of otherworldly salvation. In America this progressive diminution of confidence in the basic historic claims of Christianity combined with increased attention to civil rights, poverty, and Vietnam to detract even further from interest in evangelism and traditional missions. In the United Presbyterian Church, for example, the number of missionaries declined from 1,300 in 1958 to only 580 in 1973. In the Third World, anti-colonialist movements often encouraged or viewed with favor by the World Council also served to discourage the sending of missionaries, who were seen to represent not only the Christian religion but Western culture as well. In addition, a tendency in liberal circles toward cultural relativity made it seem impolite and presumptuous to try to impose the Christian religion on sincere practitioners of another faith. Reacting to these several forces, the WCC and its member denominations began to speak more and more of a “moratorium on missions,” a shutting down of traditional attempts to win people to Christ through proclamation or other forms of explicit evangelism.
All this, of course, was anathema to Evangelicals, including those whose denominations belonged to the World Council. For thirty years, they had seen tremendous response to unabashed proclamation of the old-fashioned gospel, not least in Billy Graham’s crusades on six continents. Conservative Christians, including Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and charismatics, had founded scores of new evangelistic and mission agencies, and their several versions of Christianity were booming, particularly in the Third World. In 1974, for example, Protestant churches (largely Pentecostal) in Brazil were growing at a rate three times faster than the population as a whole. In Korea the figure was four to one. In sub-Saharan Africa Christians constituted almost 30 percent of the population and were expected to be a majority by the year 2000. The number of Christians in Taiwan—650,000—was twenty times larger than in 1946. As one important consequence, Third World churches were coming to see themselves not only as receivers but as senders of missionaries. And in America, as National Council of Churches executive Dean Kelley documented in his 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, liberal churches were losing members, ministers, and money, while Evangelical bodies such as Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God were experiencing vigorous growth. Furthermore, the prospect for at least the near term seemed equally rosy, as Fundamentalist and Evangelical seminaries overflowed with students at a time when liberal schools were suffering steady attrition in the number and quality of applicants.
Still missing, however, was a firm sense among Evangelicals that they were part of a coherent worldwide movement. The 1966 Berlin Congress had helped, but it had been predominantly Western in composition, and its participants had been chosen with an eye for the role they could play in hammering out a viable Evangelical theology to undergird their triple themes of “One Race, One Gospel, One Task.” In succeeding years BGEA financed and helped organize regional conferences in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the United States, and Europe, taking care in Third World meetings to encourage men from those areas to assume as much of the leadership and direction as possible to facilitate the development of a sense of independent fellowship and vision. In some cases, Graham did not even attend the meetings. “I felt I should not go,” he explained, “for fear that they would think I was in a dominant role.” The success of the post-Berlin regional conferences led naturally to consideration of another world congress, this time to move beyond theology to specific strategies for reviving and implementing John R. Mott’s dream of “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” Billy Graham was interested but understandably cautious, since it was clear that only he had the prestige to summon such a gathering and raise the money to pay for it. After consulting and receiving strong encouragement from approximately 150 Evangelical leaders around the world, Graham convened several small gatherings of what Carl Henry described as “international champions of evangelism,” all of whom had worked with him closely in the past. Finally, in December 1971, he had the team he wanted. Leighton Ford would chair the program committee. Japan missionary Donald Hoke would serve as executive director, assisted by Stan Mooneyham, who would oversee the actual management of the meeting. Victor Nelson, a wise and profoundly respected pillar of BGEA’s Minneapolis office, would mediate between various factions and use his remarkable organizational skills to keep the project afloat while the more visible public figures drummed up interest and support. Jack Dain’s wide international experience and superb diplomatic skills made him an ideal choice for chairman, though he accepted only on the explicit condition that Billy Graham accept the designation of honorary chairman and that all concerned clearly understand that he, Dain, was acting as Graham’s surrogate and was carrying out the evangelist’s personal instructions. As he explained to the reluctant evangelist, since
“I cannot see anyone but yourself being raised up by God to take an initiative at this time in this direction,” it made no sense to pretend that Graham was not ultimately in charge. With the approval of his board, Graham agreed that BGEA would assume financial responsibility for the congress, slated for the summer of 1974.
A Prophet with Honor Page 66
