A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  When Bychkov introduced Graham to the congregation, he asked how many had read his book, Peace with God. Though most could have had access only to hand-copied or other duplicated versions, nearly half the people in the audience raised their hands. Graham preached a rousing hour-long sermon on the healing of the paralytic man described in the fifth chapter of John, likening the man’s change to religious conversion. Ticking off the marks of a convert’s life, he mentioned that believers should be diligent workers and loyal citizens, “because in the thirteenth [chapter] of Romans, we’re told to obey the authorities.” A wire-service reporter erroneously converted that sentence into Graham’s text, and newspaper accounts all over America subsequently indicated that Graham had preached a sermon on the thirteenth chapter of Romans urging Christians to be submissive to authorities.

  Bychkov called Graham’s visit “a great event in the history of our church,” but not all Baptists agreed. At least three people brandished signs or banners protesting the persecution and imprisonment of religious workers in the Soviet Union. A plainclothesman ripped a sign away from one woman, and another was detained briefly by authorities after the service. When told of this, Graham once again showed his attachment to decency and order by responding blandly, “We detain people in the United States if we catch them doing something wrong. I have had people coming to my services in the United States and causing disturbances and they have been taken out by the police.” He could not be prodded into a more provocative comment. “In a host country like this,” he said, “it’s been my practice through the years never to take political sides and get involved in local problems.” In a subsequent discussion of the same incident, he explained that, if he were to follow any other policy, “then it means that my own ministry is limited.” One disappointed Baptist commented, “I don’t see any difference between Dr. Billy Graham and our own timid churchmen, who are scared to death to offend the authorities. We hoped for better things from him. He could be very helpful if he wanted to be.” And a disillusioned woman said, “I’m sure our authorities are very reassured by what they heard today. If they could trust him to be so uncontroversial every time, they’d probably let him have his crusade and then use it to prove that there is freedom of religion in our country.”

  Graham’s behavior was not a bold public stand for freedom, to be sure, but neither was it the sycophant self-aggrandizement some thought. The detained woman, for example, had held up a banner reading, “We have more than 150 prisoners for the work of the gospel,” apparently referring to a well-known aggregation of imprisoned pastors. Because he felt a public statement would be less effective than private diplomacy, Graham did not reveal that he had the names, addresses, pictures, and other relevant information on 147 of these prisoners and that he was in serious conversation with Soviet authorities about them.

  As soon as he ended his sermon at the Baptist church, Graham was whisked back into a car for a dash to the patriarchal cathedral. There Father Borovoy introduced him to a crowd of approximately 5,000 and allowed him to speak for a few minutes to worshipers who had stood throughout the three-hour liturgy. He attempted a condensed version of the same sermon he had just given, but whatever effect it might have had was diminished by the lack of a microphone and his interpreter’s soft voice, a combination that led a sizable segment at the rear of the church to shout repeatedly, “We can’t hear! Louder! Louder!” Graham was able to declare, however, that he had experienced three conversions in his lifetime: his first acknowledgment of Christ as his Lord and Savior, his determination to work for a racially just society, and more recently, his commitment to work for world peace for the rest of his life. After a quick lunch with the patriarch in a private room on the third floor, he was treated to a four-hour tour of the publishing facility. “Who wanted ever to see the publishing department of the Orthodox Church?” Haraszti later fumed, barely able to control his frustration at the still-fresh memory. “It was a made-up meeting. It had no real meaning or significance. All the good time was taken up, just to be sure there would be no opportunity for anything.” Some blamed the Russians for the fiasco. Haraszti saw it otherwise. “We blew it! It is we who blew our chances. Moscow could have been a world affair—all splendor, Billy Graham with the patriarch in the cathedral, with the patriarch of Alexandria, the patriarch of Romania, the metropolitan of Poland, the metropolitan of Finland all present, and the great evangelist talking to the people.” Failure to understand the Soviet situation and an unbridled penchant for publicity that led to announcement of the visit had tarnished a golden opportunity. “I will control my expressions,” Haraszti said, but “this is the lack of wisdom of American Evangelical people to the capital of the atheistic world. You see? A lack of wisdom. . . . We misused, abused, and breached the verbal contract. I actually am unhappy.”

  The early sessions of the peace conference, held at the International Trade Center rather than at a religious site, immediately confirmed the suspicion of critics. Patriarch Pimen opened the proceedings with an assault on the West for “blackening the honest and openly peace-loving policy of our fatherland.” That theme continued as speakers from Soviet-influenced nations praised President Brezhnev and Soviet policies and laid the blame for the arms race squarely at the feet of Western warmongers. Graham had said beforehand that he would walk out if the proceedings grew too one sided. That threshold was apparently not crossed, but when a Syrian delegate scheduled to give a three-minute greeting launched into a slashing half-hour diatribe against the United States, Graham, who was sitting on the platform and visible to all, removed his headphones to signal his unwillingness to listen further to attacks on his country. In response to these broadsides, Arie Brouwer, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, and David Preus, presiding bishop of the American Lutheran Church, warned that if such unproductive harangues continued, the American contingent would walk out. Either by coincidence or, more likely, at explicit instructions from Soviet authorities—-shortly after Graham removed his headphones, Metropolitan Filaret and other Orthodox leaders began passing slips of paper back and forth—the attacks on the United States abruptly ceased.

  When Graham’s turn came to speak late Tuesday morning, he acquitted himself admirably. Other speakers had run over their allotted time so much that speakers were being urged to cut nonessential remarks in the interest of time. Always unusually conscious of time, Graham fretted and tried to decide on what he might omit until Filaret came to him privately and said, “Regardless of everything else, don’t curtail your message. Say everything that is on your heart.” Whether or not he said everything, he said a great deal. After making the expected statements of appreciation to Pimen and Filaret, he summoned an image Billy Sunday or Mordecai Ham would have appreciated. The United States and Russia, he said, reminded him of two boys, their hands filled with lighted matches, standing in a room knee-deep with gasoline. Though they might argue immaturely over who had the most matches and how they could arrive at an equal distribution, both knew full well that if either dropped just one match, mutual destruction was certain. While disclaiming technical expertise that would enable him to set forth a comprehensive plan for disarmament, and reasserting his conviction that no lasting peace could come until the advent of Christ, Graham insisted nonetheless that Christian leaders had a solemn obligation to call the nations to repentance—all nations. “No nation, large or small,” he stressed, “is exempt from blame for the present state of international affairs.” The “unchecked production of weapons of mass destruction,” he charged, “is a mindless fever which threatens to consume much of our world and destroy the sacred gift of life,” but even if nuclear war never comes, “the nuclear arms race has already indirectly caused a hidden holocaust of unimaginable proportions in our world. Every day, millions upon millions of people live on the knife-edge of survival because of starvation, poverty, and disease. At the same time, we are told the nations of the world are spending an estimated $600 billion per year on weapons. If even one-ten
th of that amount were diverted to long-range development programs that would help the world’s poor and starving, millions of lives could be saved each year. The standard of living in underdeveloped countries would be raised significantly. If we do not see our moral and spiritual responsibility concerning this life-and-death matter, I firmly believe the living God will judge us for our blindness and lack of compassion.”

  In his specific recommendations, Graham called on world leaders to turn down the volume on hostile rhetoric and listen carefully and emphatically to what those on the other side were saying. Reflecting his own convictions regarding the importance of personal relationships, he recommended an increase in every sort of cultural interchange between Eastern and Western nations. Then, in the only mention of the topic by any speaker, he called on all nations to respect “the rights of religious believers as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and agreed to by those who signed the Final Act at Helsinki, to “recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.” After renewing his call for a SALT 10 elimination of weapons, Graham closed by recalling that thirty-seven years earlier, almost to the day, the Nazi forces had surrendered in Berlin, bringing to an end a devastating war in which the United States and the Soviet Union had fought side by side against a common enemy. Today, he said, these two, and all other nations on earth, again faced a common enemy: the threat of impending nuclear destruction. “May all of us,” he pleaded, “whether we are from large nations or small nations, do all we can to remove this deadly blight from our midst and save the sacred gift of life from nuclear catastrophe.”

  Graham’s address met with three minutes of sustained applause and Cossack-style foot stamping, but he was not permitted to savor that moment long. Violating a trust, however unwittingly, by publicizing his schedule had caused him one set of problems. Keeping a trust created another set of at least equal magnitude. Metropolitan Filaret’s hope that the Pentecostal problem would be resolved before Graham arrived in Moscow had not been realized. The dissidents were still in the embassy basement and the United States was still trying to embarrass the Soviet government into guaranteeing them the right to emigrate if they emerged. Ambassador Hartman, irked that Graham had agreed to participate in the peace conference, refused to meet him at the airport or to hear him preach at the patriarchal cathedral lest he seem to be approving his visit, but he did invite the evangelist to dinner at the ambassadorial residence and seemed determined to use him as a weapon in the struggle over the Pentecostals.

  In deference to the strong anxieties of both the Soviet government and the Orthodox Church, Graham had given his assurance that any visit with the dissidents would be private and pastoral, not public and political, and that he would make every effort to keep the visit low-key and confidential, with no reporters, photographers, or television cameras present. That assurance, accepted by the Russians “with grinding teeth,” proved hard to uphold. As Graham headed for his car after a brief press conference on his arrival at the airport, a reporter from a Charlotte television station, with cameras whirring behind him, pushed toward him with a thick packet, calling out, “Dr. Graham! Dr. Graham! These are letters from the Pentecostals.” Graham was taken aback and instructed Haraszti to take the letters, in which the Pentecostals urged Graham either not to visit them at all, or if he did visit, to demand first that the Soviet government agree to their emigration. Neither option seemed viable, but Graham and his colleagues saw immediately that press determination to give full publicity to any contact with the Pentecostals put him in an extremely delicate position.

  Alerted that the press planned to be present for Graham’s scheduled visit to the embassy, Akers complained to Ambassador Hartman, then said that Graham would not visit the Pentecostals if the media were involved. Hartman reluctantly agreed to keep the press away from the evangelist during his visit and provided aides who helped Graham and his party push through a swarm of at least fifty reporters who met them when they arrived at the embassy on Tuesday evening. After keeping Graham’s party waiting for a long period in a bare room outside his ninth-floor office—Haraszti felt it was a deliberate “royal waiting time” designed to establish rank—Hartman informed Graham that the Pentecostals insisted on television and photographic coverage of the visit. While Akers and Smyth went downstairs to talk with the Pentecostals, Hartman pressed Graham to accept their demand. In an adjoining room, the deputy chief of mission, Warren Zimmerman, urged Haraszti to convince Graham that he had a responsibility to take a bold stand for religious freedom. Hartman’s pressure weighed heavily on Graham’s shoulders. When the ambassador and his deputy left the two men alone, Graham said, “Alex, I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m letting the Pentecostals down.”

  Haraszti called on his experience as a physician to give an answer. Medical disaster plans, he explained, include a system known as triage. Of three categories of casualties, those who will survive without attention and those who will perish no matter how much attention they receive are ignored. The responsible physician makes his decision, then gives his attention to those who truly need his help to survive. “You are in a similar situation,” he said. The Soviet Union and its satellite nations contained 400 million people; the U.S. embassy contained six Pentecostals. Based on his extensive negotiations over this matter, Haraszti felt certain the Soviet government was willing to allow the dissidents to leave the country but had made it a matter of honor not to give in to U.S. pressure and would let them go only when it could be accomplished in a nonsensational way that would preserve Soviet dignity. Even if Graham were somehow to create a stir sufficient to embarrass the government into releasing the Pentecostals, he would immediately and forever end any chance of a further ministry in Eastern Europe. “Which is more important,” Haraszti asked, “six or four hundred million? To do what the Pentecostals want or to come back to Russia on a greater scale?” Haraszti enjoyed telling the story. “I will never forget,” he said. “He stuck out his chin—you know, he has a strong chin—and he said, ‘I have made my decision. If they insist on cameras, I will not visit them.’”

  At that point, Akers and Smyth returned to confirm that the Pentecostals were insisting on photographic coverage. Graham stood firm, and after two more visits by Akers and Smyth the dissidents agreed to an unrecorded visit. A consul took them downstairs, through an inner courtyard where photographers had been allowed to congregate, and into the basement rooms where the Pentecostals were living. Once inside, Haraszti and Akers both immediately noticed that a curtain over the basement window had been pulled open to permit photographers standing outside to take pictures of the gathering. While Akers waved his hands to spoil the cameramen’s view, Haraszti pulled the curtain to close the gap. “I looked around,” he recalled. “If they could have killed me by looks, they would have. I would not be here.”

  The Pentecostals seemed obviously dejected and resentful, but Graham greeted each one warmly, “with a hug and a kiss. All of them. Very nice.” But as soon as he sat down at a table to talk with them, Lyubov Vaschenko, a girl of seventeen or eighteen, opened a spiral notebook and began to read questions from it. Haraszti could not believe it. “There was no Thank you for coming. . . . We have heard of you. . . . No appreciation. Nothing.” The questions, which he felt certain had been prepared by American reporters, were sharp and accusing. Why had Graham refused to have their meeting photographed? Why had he come? What would we tell the American President? Why was he not interested in helping them gain release? Graham explained that his visit was pastoral and that he never televised a pastoral visit. He did not yet know what he would tell the President. He was working to help them, but privately, and felt that a public furor would not be in their interest.

  After further sparring, the highlight of which was an unsuccessful attempt to get Graham to identify the red horse in the book of Revelation
as communism, Graham interrupted Lyubov Vaschenko’s questions by reading from Psalm 37: “Wait for the Lord and be patient, and He will bring up your sun.” He counseled the Pentecostals to be patient, expressing his sympathy for their situation and his hope that it would soon be resolved. Then, using a classic Evangelical technique for escaping from a tense encounter, he suggested they pray together. When Graham finished his own prayer, in which he asked God to give the Pentecostals wisdom to understand and accept the present situation, he fell silent, expecting other members of the group to offer their own prayers. When a long period of utter silence made it clear no one else would speak, Graham and his colleagues, and then the Pentecostals, stood up. The visit was over.

  “They were just full of rage,” Haraszti recalled. “Two thirds of the questions had not been read. Billy would not say the red horse was the Communist government. They were just outraged.” In a last attempt to snatch some victory, Vaschenko asked Graham “in a very nice way” if she might take a picture of him, “just for our family album. We would like to have a memory that we were with you.” Graham, congenitally unable to say no easily, looked at his associates for help, murmuring that he had no objection as long as they promised not to use it to publicize his visit. Akers stepped in quickly and reminded him that they had agreed no photographs would be taken and that agreement must be kept. Relieved to let someone else don the black hat, Graham agreed, and after awkwardly stiff good-byes, he and his party adjourned to the ambassador’s residence for dinner. The next morning, the American press reported that the Pentecostals had been not at all impressed with Billy Graham—“He was like all the other religious figures who have visited us, nothing special”—and had been disappointed with the visit and with his failure to offer any help other than prayer.