A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Dienert had good reason to appreciate his father-in-law. BGEA was unusual among large independent ministries in having continued to use an outside agency rather than creating an in-house agency that would perform the same roles without receiving the 15 percent to 17 percent commissions typically paid to agencies for their work. The savings were substantial; for example, if an agency receiving a 15 percent commission bought $20 million in television air time, its share was $3 million. Fred Dienert, who prospered handsomely from the arrangement, saw it as a mark of Graham’s character that he remained with Bennett. “Bill remembers his friends,” he said. “He’s very faithful to his friends, and he’s been faithful to us. He could have gone in-house a long time ago, but he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be bothered with it. He has enough problems as it is, and he’s happy with what we’ve been doing, and he appreciates it.”

  Not everyone within BGEA was completely at ease with the arrangement. Overt criticism was muted or ventured on a not-for-attribution basis, in part because Fred Dienert had been connected with the ministry for longer than all but the inner circle; in part because Millie Dienert, who received no pay for her extensive work in building the prayer program, was held in unfailingly high regard; in part because Bennett company personnel unquestionably did a first-rate job and appeared genuinely committed to the ministry’s primary goals; and in part because Ted Dienert was married to the Graham’s youngest daughter, Bunny. Still, an undercurrent of uneasiness occasionally bubbled to the surface. Asked where Fred Dienert could be found, a plainly dressed Graham lieutenant might name a location, then add, “You’ll be able to spot him,” a mild dig at Dienert’s preference for somewhat flashier clothes than were common in BGEA. Another would commend Franklin Graham for living in “just an ordinary house with a tin roof” and driving “a car just like yours or mine—not a Porsche, like some people drive.” Again, the reference was clear: BGEA salaries would not support a lifestyle that includes Porsches, airplanes, and Arabian horses; Ted and Bunny Dienert somehow managed to have them all.

  When the only issue was standard payment for work well done, few people seem to have objected, though when Walter Bennett died in 1982, some board members reportedly suggested it might be time to form an inhouse agency, under the direction of Cliff Barrows. Those vague feelings of discontent were reinforced when Ted Dienert, who had worked on the Graham account since 1967, took charge of producing the TV programs that same year, giving rise to inevitable murmurs of nepotism. In 1987, however, the Dienerts found themselves at the center of a small stir that illustrated both the constant need to monitor the ministry’s financial affairs and a willingness to take swift and decisive action when the situation demanded it. For several years, postproduction work (final editing and preparation for duplication) on the television programs had been done at CVS, a video facility in Dallas, where the Bennett company’s main headquarters are located. In 1986, however, the contract was shifted to Third Coast Studios, a small operation in Austin. Some board members questioned the shift and wondered why Third Coast had been selected without competitive bidding. When the answer came to light, it was not inspiring.

  Early in October 1987, when asked about ties between Third Coast and the Bennett company, Fred Dienert acknowledged that “we are related. We have a small portion.” CVS, he explained, had not always been able to get the postproduction work done as rapidly as was needed. Owning a small portion of Third Coast provided enough leverage to make certain the turnaround time for production was minimal. What Dienert characterized as a small portion turned out to be 45 percent, with an additional 5 percent belonging to a Bennett employee. When Cliff Barrows learned the extent of Bennett’s ownership, he is said, in suitably Evangelical language, to have “hit the ceiling.” In a year when the biggest story in American religion was the fall of Jim Bakker’s PTL empire, the one major ministry that had managed to emerge as a model of probity did not need a revelation that Billy Graham’s son-in-law and one of his oldest friends not only benefited handsomely from handling his media account but had also hired their own company to help produce his programs. It was neither illegal nor more expensive than the arrangement with CVS, and it may have been efficient, but it could easily cast Graham and his ministry in an unfavorable light if zealous reporters got hold of the information. Almost immediately, while Ted Dienert was in Austin supervising work on programs drawn from Graham’s Denver crusade, Barrows flew in for a brief but intense set of discussions. No one would speak freely about the details of their conversations, and it is not clear Barrows knew precisely what he was looking for when he arrived, but the upshot was unambiguous. Within days the postproduction contract was shifted back to CVS. Not long afterward, Graham’s board appointed one of its members to serve as a special liaison between BGEA and the Bennett agency to make certain their financial relationships remained well within ethically defensible limits.

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  Decently and in Order

  The swift end to which Cliff Barrows brought the ambiguous operation in Austin was not simply the product of one man’s determination to follow the scriptural injunction to “abstain from all appearance of evil” (I Thessalonians 5:22). Rather, it reflected the conscious and remarkably well-observed philosophy that permeated another key foundation stone in Billy Graham’s enduring success, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association itself. Graham was quick to admit that his ability to travel the world, to stand before great throngs, to send his words to the farthest reaches of the planet, to visit and befriend the famous and powerful, to influence the policies of great nations, and to raise up legions to take his place were enormously enhanced by the tireless and dedicated efforts of several hundred men and women who labored in quiet anonymity in downtown Minneapolis.

  For nearly forty years, from 1950 until he reluctantly went into semiretirement in 1987, George Wilson ran BGEA’s headquarters with an iron hand. A stout, squarish man with a bulldog face and a taste for iridescent suits and sport coats that clash with the kindly-pastor image of most BGEA staffmembers, Wilson enjoyed the respect, if not always the affection, of those who labored in his vineyard. One team member characterized Wilson as having “a unique gift for giving directions.” From a position of greater occupational security, Billy Graham put it more pointedly: “George is a dictator. Maybe I shouldn’t use that word, but he’s a strong man. He doesn’t mind telling somebody off if they need telling off. He’s not the most popular man in the world, but he does use Sunday-school language, and he’s a real Christian. He’s part preacher, part lawyer, part financial wizard.” A former staffer cited frustration with Wilson as a major reason he had left the organization. “He’s hard to deal with,” he explained. “He deals carefully, particularly when he doesn’t know how close someone is to Billy, because he doesn’t want direct competition. He deals by instinct, and little more, and he can throw cold water on any idea.” But even he acknowledged Wilson’s effectiveness: “George knows how everything is wired. He’s like an indispensable engineer.”

  To a considerable extent what aggravated Wilson’s detractors was his zealous concern for the bottom line. That near obsession with saving money, however, helped shield Graham from the kind of criticism heaped on evangelists who live in opulent mansions, drive fleets of luxury automobiles, and air-condition their doghouses. BGEA’s Minneapolis complex, comprising an old and unremarkable three-story office building purchased from Standard Oil and a newer structure that was once a parking garage for the Willys Overland automobile company, had a Spartan quality that made it easy to believe the association obtained it for only $2.25 per square foot. In contrast to the elaborate and sometimes garish personal monuments erected by other media ministers, it could easily pass for the regional headquarters of a medium-size insurance company, and were it not associated with Billy Graham, it would surely not have been a stop on the Chamber of Commerce tour of the city. But as he walked through it, George Wilson’s pride in what he had built and in the money he had saved in build
ing it was unmistakable.

  The lifeline of every major independent ministry is its direct-mail operation. Howard Pew, Maxey Jarman, and other members of BGEA’s board provided major funding for several large projects, but the bulk of the ministry’s support comes in small bills and modest checks tucked into the millions of letters that pour into the headquarters—140,000 to 150,000 during a normal week, twice that per day during the quarterly television broadcasts. With multiplied millions of letters involved, minuscule savings per unit quickly become substantial amounts. No one understood that better than George Wilson, and he loved to show off procedural shortcuts or mechanical gimmicks he had devised to save money for the association. Pausing to give some whirring apparatus an affectionate pat, like a coach commending a running back, he observed, “This saves about half a penny a letter. When you’re talking about millions of checks a year, it’s worthwhile,” then cocked his head as if to say, “What do you think of that?”

  Officially, Wilson stepped down from his post as BGEA’s chief of operations in 1987, but he continued to work full-time as a consultant on various projects. Fortunately for the organization, any reluctance he felt about moving out of the top spot was eased by his having a major role in picking his successor, John Corts. Like Graham, Corts attended Florida Bible Institute, and he worked with YFC for years before signing on to help with the 1964 Boston crusade. Intending to stay with the association only six months, he wound up staying sixteen years, until he resigned to take a pastorate in 1980. Following a successful run in a local church, he moved into the presidency of his alma mater, now known as Trinity College and located in Dunedin, Florida, but Graham was reluctant to let him go. After obtaining leaves of absence to take key roles in both Amsterdam conferences, where he showed unusual administrative competence, Corts finally agreed to take over the reins at BGEA. It appears to have been a happy choice. He was sufficiently tough but less prickly and protective than Wilson, and he clearly had the boss’s confidence. “George picked him,” Graham reported, “and that helps. Whoever sits in that office is sort of the main center of the thing. The executive committee and the board call the ultimate shots, but it’s that day-by-day running of it that sets the tone. John’s a man of the Scriptures. He loves the Lord, and he will keep the organization on a firm biblical keel, and that’s what I want.”

  It is difficult to imagine that any visitor to BGEA headquarters in Minneapolis would have failed to notice a distinctive atmosphere. It was simple enough to dismiss almost universal participation in ten-minute daily devotionals and twice-weekly chapel services as prudent conformity, but casual conversation and consistent behavior quickly dispelled suspicions that this was just another job for these folk. At lunch the cafeteria resembled a fellowship dinner at a middle-size midwestern church, with little attention to distinctions of rank. Corts sat and talked easily with a minor official’s secretary and a man from the art department, and nearby, a printer and the head of the estate-planning division speculated about why even the most vigorous churches seemed to be having trouble drawing a good crowd for Wednesday-night prayer meetings. It was no surprise to hear several people observe that “we’re really more like a family than a business,” but the easy analogy was not far off the mark.

  Watching Billy Graham interact with BGEA personnel made it clear that though he depended heavily on men like George Wilson and John Corts, he was no figurehead who simply showed up at press conferences or popped into the pulpit to do whatever his “handlers” told him to do. No one doubted he was the undisputed leader of his team and that both the strengths and short comings of his leadership style left indelible marks on the association. Those who worked with him for years uniformly praised his vision, his intuition, his sense of strategy, and his ability to choose people he could trust and to motivate them to put his dreams into operation. “He is much brighter than most people, including himself, give him credit for being,” John Akers insisted. “He may not quote Aquinas in Latin, but he sees the essence of a problem quicker than most people. He has an ability to intuit the heart of a problem that is sometimes little short of brilliant.” George Wilson, who prefered performance to pedigree, made a similar assessment: “He has innate common sense. That’s something you don’t get with a Ph.D. When he gets the facts, he can usually come up with the right decision.” Sometimes, the decision-making process was more calculating than it might appear on the surface. “He plays it down,” T. W. Wilson said, “but he’s a real administrator. Many times he has shared with me in private what he thinks ought to be done. Then, in a meeting with the board, he will ask someone, ‘What do you think?’ Then he’ll look at another one and ask, ‘What do you think?’ When he gathers all their comments, he will say, ‘Well, I think most of us would agree that this is what we ought to do,’ and it will be exactly what he had been planning to do all along. His timing is almost as good as his strategy.”

  One of Graham’s greatest gifts was his ability to gather and hold on to a collection of men and women who proved to be far more able than any objective analysis of their portfolio would have predicted. As Sterling Huston diplomatically phrased it, “Mr. Graham has a remarkable ability to respond to intuitive promptings.” Further, once he had chosen someone, Graham accorded a remarkable amount of trust. “Billy is a great delegator,” T. W. Wilson observed. “He gives you a job and he trusts you to get it done. He doesn’t stand over your shoulder and monitor what you are doing, but he expects you to do the job and do it right. He doesn’t want you to tell him, ‘I can’t.’ He’ll say, ‘You keep working at it. If you want to, you can tell me how you accomplished it when you get it done.’ At the same time, he’s a good forgiver. He forgives all of us our mistakes.” Graham was also extraordinarily generous with praise toward those who worked with him. Allan Emery, who took early retirement in 1978 to devote full time to serving as BGEA’s unpaid president, observed that “[he has] one of those rare qualities that the greatest of leaders have—being able to share the glory. He always shares the reward publicly. He never stints in the praise he gives anyone. It has to be earned, to a degree, but he’s very generous with it. Sometimes I think he goes a little overboard.”

  The obverse side of Graham’s willingness to let his underlings work without specific direction was his own resistance to being pinned down on the details of whatever it was he wanted to do. One former associate described BGEA operations, particularly those directly involving Graham, as “more process than structure. Plans are made and unmade all the time. The inside circle tries to anticipate his movements, and there is some manipulation—-they know what he responds to. But he tries to keep all his options open. It is hard to tie him down on anything. You can never get him to say yes or no. If you ask him to do something, he is apt to say yes, but that doesn’t mean he will do it. He doesn’t want to commit, because something else might come up—an important meeting or a TV show or something like that. He is the inspiration and the mover, but he is also the bottleneck.”

  T. W. Wilson, who laughingly admitted to having to buy several sets of plane tickets for any trip Graham made, put a more positive face on Graham’s resistance to being pinned down. “How can you be in God’s will and pray for His leadership if you’ve already got a fixed idea about what you are going to do? The very fact that he’s willing to change, that he’s flexible—that’s because he always seeks God’s guidance. And he does that with his schedule. If there’s a part of the world where he feels God is impressing him to go, he’ll postpone something and go.” Wilson’s theological gloss on Graham’s notorious flexibility would not have displeased the boss. Recalling that “a lot of times I would go into a city [to help prepare for a crusade] and he wouldn’t even know where I was for a year,” Robert Ferm once faced Graham with the frustrations his open-ended way of operating generated in his staff. “It would help all of us,” Ferm told him, “if you would be more specific as to what you want us to do.” Graham hesitated not a moment. “When God called me to the work of evangel
ism,” he shot back, “I had to realize that it’s only the Holy Spirit that can give the answer to questions. And if that same Holy Spirit can’t guide you, you’ll know it yourself and you’ll probably drop off the team. But don’t expect me to tell you what to do.” Ferm smiled at the memory. “That was a definite point of view of his,” he said. “I only brought it up that one time.”

  Graham relied heavily on his board of directors. An all-too-familiar pattern in independent evangelistic ministries has been for the ministry’s board (which is required for the ministry to qualify as a nonprofit, tax-free organization) to consist of the evangelist, his wife, son, son-in-law, brother-in-law, closest assistant, lawyer, and one or two ciphers. In such an arrangement, the chances for financial and ethical laxity are enormous. Perhaps no single organizational measure Billy Graham took did more to keep him out of hot water and to undergird his reputation for fiscal integrity than his recruitment of and submission to an impressively strong board. Graham, Cliff Barrows, T. W. Wilson, George Wilson, and Franklin Graham were all on the board, as were E. V. Hill and another minister or two, but they were surrounded by such successful Christian business and professional men as CEOs Robert Van Kampen, William Walton (Holiday Inns), Bill Mead (Campbell-Taggart Industries), Bill Pollard (ServiceMaster); Carloss Morris (Stewart Title Company), Frank Coy (Day Company department stores in Cleveland); Montgomery Advertiser editor and publisher Harold Martin; former Minnesota governor Harold LeVander; financial manager and former Harvard University Corporation treasurer George Bennett; Dallas banking executives Bill Seay and Dewey Presley; and former postmaster general Marvin Watson. The larger board, which stood at twenty-seven in 1990, had final jurisdiction, but much of the real work of oversight was performed by a nine-member executive committee, chaired by Allan Emery. This committee met approximately ten times a year in person and convened on the telephone as needed. Neither Graham nor any other person paid by the association or in a position to benefit financially from any of its operations served on the executive committee. “That board has people on it,” Ed Plowman observed, “who are not accustomed to having someone walk in [as some well-known evangelists do] and say, ‘Here is the way we are going to go.’ They took what Billy said seriously, but not as a blank check they would sign without examination. And they took a much stronger stand in later years than they used to. The board would definitely call his hand on certain things—‘Who gave you authority to do that? We have a budget here and we have to stick with it.’ That happens.” George Bennett, the former Harvard treasurer, agreed. “I have served on many boards,” he noted, “but I have never been associated with an organization that has such high standards of business procedure and financial controls as BGEA.”