A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Despite this background, Graham declined to jump on board Reagan’s campaign train, but he did manage to give it a well-publicized friendly wave. Fortuitously for the candidate, Graham was holding a crusade in Indianapolis at the time of the Indiana primary, and he gave Reagan a nice boost by joining him for breakfast, during which he congratulated him warmly on his strong showing in the Texas primary the day before. Reagan was duly appreciative, and all three major television networks suggested that the meeting had given him a remarkably well-timed boost. Graham professed to see it as no more than a courtesy visit, noting that “I refused to endorse him. He never asked me, but one of his aides did. I never had Nixon or any of his aides ask [for an endorsement]. Nixon told me to stay out of politics. Always. Of course, everybody knew pretty well how I stood with Nixon.”

  After Reagan’s election, Graham enjoyed many other breakfasts with him—at the White House. By his reckoning, he spent more nights in the presidential quarters during Reagan’s time in office than during either Johnson’s or Nixon’s presidency, though little was made of most of the visits. After the first of these overnight stays, which included a five-hour conversation, he characterized Reagan as “laughing, kidding, a lot of fun, yet a brilliant man” who “thinks positively and is optimistic about the country.” The country, Graham volunteered, was in capable hands: “Ronald Reagan runs it but, like Ike, he lets others handle the details, which gives him time to think of bigger things.” The friendship was sufficiently close that when the President was shot on March 30, 1981, the White House sent out an emergency call for Graham, and the evangelist came immediately to the capital to comfort and pray with Mrs. Reagan. He also contacted the father of John Hinckley, the President’s assailant, and prayed with him over the telephone.

  Graham once noted that Reagan liked to talk about “the old days in Hollywood” more than about politics and indicated that he probably had less influence over him than over some past Presidents. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that in the fall of 1981 Graham successfully lobbied several key senators on behalf of the President’s plan to sell AWAC airplanes to Saudi Arabia, a measure actively opposed by Jerry Falwell and his avidly pro-Israel troops in the Moral Majority. Graham minimized his role, but did not deny that at the President’s request he had indicated to several legislators that putting AWACs in Saudi hands posed no military threat to Israel. Still, it appears that his relationship with Reagan had far less political implications than those with Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon. This is not to say that Billy Graham had lost interest in affecting the secular order, particularly as it impinged on the sacred realm. Quite to the contrary, he was at that moment, and had been for several years, involved in a slow, quiet, occasionally awkward but nonetheless remarkable campaign aimed at nothing less than inducing the leadership of the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc satellites to grant full religious freedom to the citizens of their respective nations.

  29

  A Crack in the Curtain

  Few, if any, developments in Billy Graham’s ministry were more surprising or controversial than his success in penetrating the iron curtain. It was not surprising that he would want to preach in Communist-dominated lands. He wanted to preach everywhere, and he had at least a modicum of confidence that, aided by the Holy Spirit, his preaching could achieve wondrous results in even the most unpromising of environments. It was, however, a notable turn of events when first one and then another and another Warsaw Pact country not only allowed him to visit, but progressively extended privileges to him that no other churchman, including the most prominent and politically docile native leaders, had ever received. Graham had, after all, been described in America as “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One” and touted as an effective force for warning neutral and left-leaning nations against the perils of collaborating with the Russians. The Communist press had also depicted him as a threat, calling him a charlatan and a warmonger and claiming he was an active and not-so-covert agent of American foreign policy. But as early as the mid-1950s, Graham began to express interest in preaching behind the iron curtain, as long as no restrictions were placed on what he could say. During his tourist trip in 1959, he knelt in Red Square and prayed that he might one day preach the gospel on that very site and also at Moscow’s great public stadium. The Polish government’s cancellation of its 1966 invitation disappointed him, and his brief trip to Yugoslavia did not have the same cachet, since that country had cut its ties with Moscow and was regarded as a Communist renegade. Graham was stymied. He wanted to add Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to his life list of preaching venues, but he could not just barge in and set up a tent or hire a hall. Lyndon Johnson had approved of the proposed visit to Poland but made no effort to push it, and neither the Nixon nor Ford administrations volunteered to intercede on his behalf with any Communist government. It seemed unlikely that the tiny Evangelical minorities in any of the Soviet bloc countries would have sufficient influence to persuade their governments to permit an American evangelist to propagate a message explicitly challenging the official atheism of the Communist system. In short, it appeared that a ministry behind the iron curtain, if it ever came at all, might have to wait for a political upheaval of the magnitude of what eventually occurred in 1989. And then came Alexander Haraszti.

  In a milieu peopled mainly with good old southern boys, sobersided midwestern Evangelicals, a phalanx of brisk young sales-executive types, and a sprinkling of witty British clergymen, Alexander Haraszti, M.D., Ph.D., stands out. Rumpled and gruff-looking in a setting where neatness and smiling are the rule, cannily calculating in the midst of men whose stock-intrade is disingenuousness, authentically well educated (a master’s degree in Latin and Hungarian literature, a seminary degree, a doctorate in linguistics, and a medical degree with specialties in gynecology and general surgery) in an environment abounding in honorary doctorates conferred by friends, and equipped with apparently inexhaustible energy, monomaniacal tenacity, and virtually total recall, he has left an indelible mark on a ministry that would scarcely acknowledge he existed for the first five years he labored on its behalf.

  Born and reared a Baptist in Hungary and married to the daughter of a Baptist minister, Haraszti supported himself as a pastor and theological professor from 1944 to 1956 while he and his wife completed medical degrees. In the mid-1950s, he began to learn of Billy Graham’s ministry from typewritten pages passed from hand to hand in Hungarian Baptist circles. In 1955 he obtained an English copy of Peace with God and, with the help of a German edition, translated Graham’s best-seller into Hungarian. Since he saw little chance of obtaining government permission to publish the book through regular channels, he distributed mimeographed copies to his students at the Baptist theological seminary in Budapest on the pretense that its chapters were examples of sermons and suitable for homiletic instruction. Soon afterward, this pirated edition of Peace with God, which he subtitled Lessons in Homiletics for Students of Theology, made its way into the Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic seminaries in Hungary.

  Haraszti’s talent for accomplishing his goals without running afoul of the authorities had already shown itself a few years earlier. The Communist government had long and correctly viewed the Catholic Church as a formidable opponent, but Catholics were not the only perceived enemy. Because the Ministry of the Interior, which oversaw all religious affairs, knew the United States was a stronghold of Baptist religion, it regarded the Baptist Church in Hungary as little more than a front for an American-inspired, antigovernment political association. By chance, during a preaching tour that took him through the little village of Korosszakall in eastern Hungary, Haraszti met an elderly Baptist couple who told him that their son, now the minister of the interior, had grown up in the Baptist church in the village. A few months later, at the request of his fellow churchmen, Haraszti met with the minister in an effort to persuade him that Baptists were politically harmless and should not be persecuted. When the bureaucrat raised the familiar ch
arge that “Baptists are American agents,” Haraszti was ready. First, with great politeness, he asked if the minister had grown up in Korosszakall and if his parents still lived there. When the minister acknowledged this to be the case, Haraszti told of having met them and of knowing he had attended the Baptist church before moving to the capital. “I cannot imagine,” Haraszti said, “that you would ever go to a place that has any American contacts. You would not go to people who are American agents or who have in any way some secret contacts with American agencies.” His apparent gruffness dissolving into gleeful delight at the memory, Haraszti recalled that “the man became red up to the top of his head. He was most embarrassed—most embarrassed—and the entire collection of data [about Baptists] was stopped immediately. If they continued presenting Baptists as American agents, what happens to His Excellency?”

  From that point forward, the Ministry of the Interior began to give Baptists and other Evangelicals greater license to carry out normal church activities. Though it granted these rights rather grudgingly, Haraszti noted that “this was the price they had to pay for peaceful people who otherwise were not dangerous, who were reliable, and actually, who were very good workers. In the government’s view, they were a little odd. They believed in their Jesus Christ. They liked to read the Bible and sing their hymns and so on—a little strange, but otherwise good people.” Gradually, the government softened its resistance to all religion as part of a larger effort by János Kádár’s Communist regime to polish its image and gain most-favored-nation trade status with the United States. Regular church meetings and some special events could be held, though not advertised, as long as the Ministry of the Interior was informed about them. Ministers could preach and teach Christian doctrines, but could not preach against the government. The churches, in turn, were expected to encourage workers to work hard and refrain from stealing from their factories, and to support the government’s position on such key issues as peace. The established religious bodies—Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Jewish—received financial support from the state in return for their acknowledgment of the state’s authority in world matters and their pledge of political allegiance to it. Free churches neither sought nor received such assistance, but they did receive equal standing at the Ministry of the Interior, and they were protected from harassment at the hands of the numerically dominant Catholic Church so that in many ways their situation was better than it had been prior to the Communist takeover.

  In 1956, shortly after the beginning of the Hungarian uprising, the Harasztis emigrated to America with the intention of becoming medical missionaries to Africa for the Southern Baptist Convention (it was this lifelong ambition, he insists, not political dissent, that led them to leave their homeland). However, by the time they completed their training and received citizenship status, both were over forty and too old to be accepted as new missionaries. Learning of the situation, Albert Schweitzer sent Haraszti a seven-page letter inviting the family to join him at his hospital at Lambarene. Haraszti was flattered, but wrote back to ask the famed humanitarian, “Do you do a soul-winning service?” When he received no answer, he resigned himself to working with Hungarian Baptists in America and to opening channels to facilitate Evangelical preaching in his homeland. After he and his wife established their medical practice in Atlanta, they met several members of Billy Graham’s team who had begun to use that city as the central staging base for both domestic and foreign crusades, but he made no effort to contact Graham himself, not even to tell him of his use of Peace with God. (He had reason to lie low on that score. Shortly after coming to America, he had notified Doubleday of the warm reception his translation received in Hungary, naively believing Graham’s publisher would be pleased. Doubleday was not amused and instructed him sternly in the ways of American publishing.) He did not meet Graham until sixteen years after he arrived in the United States.

  In 1972, Haraszti, now an American citizen, used contacts with fellow Atlantans Walter Smyth and BGEA public relations director Don Bailey to arrange a meeting between Graham and two prominent Hungarian Evangelical leaders, Dr. János Laczkovszki, president of an organization of 20,000 Baptists in Hungary, and Seventh-day Adventist clergyman Sandor Palotay, president of Hungary’s Council of Free Churches, an association representing eight Evangelical denominations. Both men were well known to Haraszti from earlier days. Both were shrewdly skilled at dealing with Hungarian authorities. And largely because of this skill, both were widely regarded as Communist agents by American Baptists who knew anything about them.

  In the midst of a crusade in Cleveland, Graham received Haraszti and his two friends warmly, and Palotay invited the evangelist to come to Hungary under the auspices of the Council of Free Churches. Graham announced and accepted the invitation from the platform that same evening but found himself in a bind when Palotay later admitted he had no authority to issue the invitation without government approval and when critics, including some of the evangelist’s most trusted confidants, warned against dealing with suspected Communist agents. When Smyth informed Haraszti that a news release confirming the meeting and the invitation might be canceled to avoid embarrassment and criticism, Haraszti leveled with him. Aware that Palotay’s considerable ego had been bruised by his perception that Graham and Smyth doubted he could make good on his invitation, Haraszti said, “All right. Since he is an agent, we do not accept an invitation from him. Therefore, we shall not go to Hungary. Period. Because we cannot get an invitation from anybody else.” The only plausible strategy for a Graham visit, he insisted, was to go “above ground,” with the full knowledge and approval of the Communist government. If they rejected the assistance of Laczkovszki and Palotay, the only possible source of an invitation would be “some not-respected, not-acknowledged, little bitty underground Baptist leader, who will be happy to give us an invitation,” but whose lack of clout would result in Graham’s having to dig an underground tunnel, emerge secretly in some forest, “and there [he] will preach to the birds.” Even to get a visa, he pointed out, it would be necessary to contact the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. The ambassador would contact his government, the government would contact the churches, and the churches he contacted would be those cooperating with the government. If the leaders of those churches were not involved, Haraszti said, “we will continue where we have been so far: nowhere.” The two Hungarians, he insisted, were not Communists, but pragmatists. When he had preached and taught in Hungary, he had done so with government approval. That did not make him a Communist agent. Laczkovszki and Palotay, he assured Smyth, were no more Communist than he.

  Somewhat calmed by this discussion and by additional material Haraszti produced in Palotay’s defense, Smyth authorized the physician to travel to Hungary to finalize the plans. Haraszti smiled at such naïveté. “They thought it was just like in India or Japan or Australia. If it is agreed upon between church leaders and Dr. Graham, then the rest is just a matter of letter writing. Little did they know.” In Hungary he met not only with leaders of the Council of Free Churches but with the presiding bishops of both the Lutheran and Reformed churches—Graham had expressed a strong hope that all Protestant groups would support a visit—and, most importantly, with Imre Miklos, the secretary of the Ministry for Church Affairs and the government official who would give final approval to any visit by the evangelist.

  Miklos made it clear the Hungarian state had deep misgivings about Graham’s coming, alleging that he was “a burning anti-Communist”; that his evangelistic techniques were alien to Hungary; that he did not understand Eastern European political, religious, or social life; and that he was a war monger. Haraszti took exception only to the last of these charges. On a subsequent visit with the secretary, he produced photographs and other documentation of Graham’s visits to the troops in Korea and Vietnam. He pointed out that while the evangelist had indeed been critical of communism, he urged American soldiers not to exploit or behave arrogantly toward native people in the lands where they
were fighting, and he had prayed not only for America and the nations they were defending but for North Korea and North Vietnam as well. “Your excellency,” he said to Miklos, “if this is warmongering, please teach me how to do peace mongering.” Miklos made no promises, but he smiled broadly and told Haraszti, “I see Dr. Graham in a different light now than I did before. I am very grateful to you for bringing this information.” Then he added, “We, as the State, could order the churches to accept [Dr. Graham], and smile at his coming, and be happy. We could order it, but we don’t want to. We have to discuss this matter with the churches. And we must get their consent. If the leading churches agree, and if the Hungarian government agrees, and if the governments of other Socialist countries agree—there are no independent actions—then we can speak about Dr. Graham’s coming.”