T. W. Wilson called him “the most completely disciplined person I have ever known.” What Wilson calls discipline, others label compulsion, even venturing to suggest that Graham was a classic workaholic. Bob Terrell, a perceptive Asheville newspaperman who worked for BGEA for several years, observed that Graham “feels the urge to accomplish, and he doesn’t think he is accomplishing anything when he is sitting by a fire on top of the mountain. He uses compelled quite frequently—‘I feel compelled to preach the gospel to as many people as I can, for as long as I can’—and he is not satisfied if he is not busy. It’s hard for him to relax and rest. He has the busiest schedule of any person I have ever known, but I think he likes it that way. Whenever he is on the road, he is constantly busy, sometimes for months at a time. If he goes to the Caribbean, he is always working on a book. He will say he would like nothing better than to stay home and rock and relax, but he really can’t stand to be idle.”
Graham recognized that he took on more than he could handle with ease, but felt he sometimes had little choice. “One of the things we are blessed with,” he explained, “is that I get opportunities that no other Evangelical will ever get. For example, the realtors convention in Honolulu, or the bankers convention, or the National Chamber of Commerce. I’ve spoken to all of them. Or the American Bar Association; I’ve spoken to them two or three times. It takes so long to prepare those addresses, and I have to get help on them, because they’re specialized things. I don’t mind speaking. If they’d ask me to come and give an evangelistic address, that’s down my line. But these other kinds of speeches are so time-consuming.” Ruth obviously felt her husband could exercise a bit more discipline without harming the Evangelical cause. “It’s not necessary to speak at all,” she interjected; “I don’t think the Lord called you to give all those strange addresses.” Billy did not argue with her, but his response perhaps offered a clue as to why he kept accepting invitations. “At the last ABA meeting, I stood around and shook hands and shook hands until they finally told me that I had to go, that my plane was going to leave. So I just said, ‘I have to go,’ and left. I didn’t realize until about two days later that the next person in line was Justice [Lewis F.] Powell of the Supreme Court. But not long after that, he wrote me the most tremendous letter I have ever received about my ministry.”
Students of charismatic leaders have often noted that such men tend to stir a variety of emotions in the bosoms of their followers, a robust portion of which feelings are distinctly sexual. Leading a movement requires enormous energy, and the lines between political, spiritual, and sexual energy are not finely drawn on the map of the human psyche. That dynamic leaders, including religious leaders, experience and arouse strong sexual feeling should come as no particular surprise to anyone who pays attention. Thus, in light of his own quite obvious awareness of the imperious heights to which sexual temptation can mount, Billy Graham’s spotless record as a faithful husband is an accomplishment his followers regarded with due appreciation. Marshall Frady, in an overwrought but often insightful biography, likened Graham to Billy Budd, a man with “exactly that quality of raw childlike unblinking goodness,” possessing “a staggering passion for the pure, the sanitary, the wholesome, the upright.” The allusion to Melville’s classic American innocent is a natural one, and by no means completely off the mark, but it falls short at a crucial point, and that point is a theological one. Billy Budd was naturally good and unable to believe that others did not share his elemental guilelessness. Billy Graham suffered from no such fantasies. He did indeed seem to have “a passion for the pure,” but never for a minute did he imagine that he, or anyone else, was beyond corruption. And that is the secret of his ability to avoid public scandal. No one listening to Graham warn against succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh would imagine that he derived his information solely from survey research data. Just as he had the wisdom to put others in charge of the purse, he had long clearly understood that his best strategy for avoiding sexual temptation was to keep himself out of its path. “I’m sure I’ve been tempted,” he said, “especially in my younger years. But there has never been anything close to an incident.” How had he managed that record? “I took precautions. From the earliest days I’ve never had a meal alone with a woman other than Ruth, not even in a restaurant. I’ve never ridden in an automobile alone with a woman.” Even past seventy, on the rare occasions when only he and his secretary were in a room together, he kept the door opened wide so that none would suspect him of unseemly behavior. Before Graham entered a hotel room, T. W. Wilson checked it out to make sure no woman was hiding in the closet or the bathroom or lurking behind the drapes. Once he was in the room alone, he would not answer the door unless he knew for certain who had knocked. These are not measures taken by a man whose goodness is entirely childlike. At the same time, they are not hedges planted by a bloodless prude. He never suggested that he longed for the life of a monk, nor did he seem overly concerned simply with appearances. In 1983, shortly after actress Joan Collins appeared in a widely publicized nude spread in Playboy, Graham and Collins were booked onto The Merv Griffin Show on the same day. His staff was worried. Larry Ross pointed out that “everything she stood for was a complete about-face from what Mr. Graham stands for. For example, she talked about how to raise a thirteen-year-old daughter with a live-in boyfriend. Several times the audience booed some of her statements, just because of the values they represented. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, ‘This is good television, but it’s going to be a real shifting of gears.’ I thought Mr. Graham may not know everything she stands for. So I told him. He said, ‘Yes, I know.’ Well, when he went on, the first thing Merv said was, ‘Billy, were you aware that Joan Collins has appeared in Playboy?’ Mr. Graham said, “Yes, I’ve seen it. Someone showed it to me in the barbershop.’ Right on national television, he said that! And then he went right into sharing the gospel. I’m sure he was concerned about his position on that program, but he was so confident in his message and what he stood for that he wasn’t concerned about showing a side of Billy Graham people hadn’t seen.”
In 1989, with the fallout from the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals far from settled, he noted in a casual (but openly recorded) exchange about current movies that he had recently seen Dangerous Liaisons. “I was staying near Times Square,” he explained, “so I went to see it. It was based in the eighteenth century in France. It was very interesting. There were a couple of scenes that were pretty steamy. The people were about half nude. But you could see that anywhere.” That a universally recognizable evangelist would attend such a movie in Times Square would scandalize many Evangelicals. That he would talk about it freely to a writer with a tape recorder and give no indication that he preferred it not be mentioned would cause anxiety among some of his colleagues. But just as he had freely acknowledged that he sometimes looked at the pictures in Playboy, he seemed unworried that someone might discover he had seen a “pretty steamy” movie without launching a boycott of the Satanic film industry. In short, he seemed to know when he needed external controls, and when he did not.
Graham’s passion for sexual fidelity doubtless stemmed primarily from his unshakable conviction that fidelity is God’s will and infidelity a mortal sin. But he also enjoyed an uncommon bond with Ruth, an uncommon woman. “There would have been no Billy Graham as we know him today had it not been for Ruth,” T. W. Wilson contended. “They have been a great team. A model couple.” Cliff Barrows described her as “a tower. She has great insight, great sensitivity. She is a woman of the Bible, a scholar with the great capacities and gifts of her father, who was probably Bill’s greatest teacher.” Graham readily seconded these assessments. “She knows the Bible a lot better than I do,” he admitted. “A lot of my sermons, I read to her and she gives me little pointers and illustrations and Scriptures to go with them. My son Ned said to me on the phone just last night, ‘Dad, she’s the most remarkable woman in the world. She has stayed in the background, but I just don’t
know any other person like her.’ Of course, that’s a boy talking about his mother, but as I look at her as objectively as I can, I think he’s right. She really is remarkable.”
Ruth’s contributions to her husband’s success were not limited to Scripture verses and sermon illustrations. She also provided him with a measure of grit lacking in his own palliative style and a willingness to question and challenge him when his colleagues would not. “Ruth is a power,” one former associate noted. “She has a little tougher mind than Billy’s. She is not as afraid of offending. Billy is always auditioning.” Ruth had sometimes been critical of the women’s liberation movement—“I think we’re being taken for a ride. It’s men’s lib because it’s relieving them of the responsibility of supporting and caring for their families”—but she seemed never to have felt that the biblical injunction to wives to be in subjection to their husbands required her to hide her opinions or feelings under a bushel, nor did she seem the least bit awed to be married to one of the world’s most famous men. Honorary degrees, red-carpet treatment, and lavish compliments did not impress her. When Billy spoke glowingly of a reception given him by the president of Mexico—“He even embraced me”—-she quickly brought him down to earth: “Oh, Bill, don’t be flattered. He did that to Castro, too.” And unlike the wives of most of the prominent television evangelists, she never tried to insert herself into the limelight: “That’s not my wad of gum.” She did, however, quietly pursue her own forms of ministry. When she inherited a nice sum of money at her father’s death, she gave it all away, bestowing much of it on an orphanage in Mexico. She also maintained an interest in female prisoners. In a case that received minor public attention, she befriended Velma Barfield, a North Carolina woman convicted and eventually executed for murder. After making her commitment to Christ while in prison, Barfield would call out from her cell, “I’m guilty. I did what I shouldn’t have done. But please listen to me. Read your Bibles and pray; turn to Jesus.” From all appearances, her conversion did not appear to be a case of trying to impress the governor or the board of pardons and paroles in the hope of winning a stay of execution. T. W. Wilson told of going with Billy Graham to visit the prison a week or two after Barfield had been executed. “One person after another told Billy, ‘Velma Barfield was the finest person I ever met.’ The warden said, ‘She made an impact on our prison.’ Billy spoke, and when he gave the invitation, he said, ‘How many would like to adopt Velma’s Jesus.’ Without exaggeration, fully half of them stood up. Even the warden’s father stood. I’m telling you, it was impressive.”
However extensive or effective her work with felons and orphans, Ruth’s primary ministry, by all accounts, was with her children. “PKs” (preachers’ kids) who rebel against a strict and public upbringing are standard figures in the lore of religious communities, but the children of itinerant evangelists, who spend substantial portions of their lives away from home, may be at special risk. Billy Graham and his team knew that their own fame and personal dedication would not guarantee that their children would stay on the straight and narrow path. Grady Wilson recalled an evening early in Graham’s ministry when the inner circle went out for a snack in Atlanta and invited Ma Sunday to go with them. “Boys,” she said, “whatever you do, don’t neglect your family. I did. I traveled with Pa all over the country, and I sacrificed my children. I saw all four of them go straight to hell.” Grady remembered that “she sat there with tears running down her cheeks. I know one of her sons jumped out of a hotel window somewhere in California. He was on drugs or something. Another one came to me in Phoenix, Arizona, just a panhandler. I gave him twenty-five dollars. Ma said, ‘I wish you hadn’t done it. He’ll just take it out and buy more whiskey.’ We remembered that. I know Billy has prayed night and day by the hour, all around the world, for his children. All of them have been filled with plenty of adrenaline, from the oldest to the youngest, but Ruth stayed up on that mountain and took care of them and all of them have turned out to be just exceptional Christians.”
For a time, as had been true of Franklin, it appeared that Ned, the youngest son, might spoil the family record. After graduating from the Stony Brook School, Ned dabbled briefly with college, spent two years as a mountaineering instructor while living at home, then sampled the curriculum at three more schools before he finally graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. He admits to a rebellious impulse but insists it was aimed not at his parents: “I never had any reason to rebel against them.” Rather, he asserted, he was resisting “God’s call on my life to go into the ministry. It wasn’t that I had had bad examples. It was that I knew what entering the ministry would mean: turning everything over to God.” Ned manifested his rebellion by turning to more than a casual use of drugs, including cocaine. Once again, the Graham philosophy of child rearing prevailed. “While I was embroiled in all that,” he recalled, “my parents were just very patient. They expressed concern and displeasure over the behavior, but never once did they make me feel they rejected me as a person. Their love for me was always unconditional. Their home was always open, no matter what condition I was in. They gave themselves to me, and I never felt their love was conditioned on meeting some requirement. Eventually, their grace and love were just irresistible.” Also once again, the formula worked. In mid-1991, at age thirty-three, Ned lacked only one course before finishing a degree at Fuller Seminary and was serving as pastor of adult ministries in a Tacoma Baptist church. He also serves as president of East Gates Ministry, an American-based operation dedicated to assisting a wide range of mission and indigenous Christian efforts in the People’s Republic of China.
Though it obviously cannot explain the success that brought him fame, the very fact that he was extraordinarily famous unquestionably added to Billy Graham’s appeal, and the way he handled that fame further warmed those who were drawn to the glow of his celebrity. No person in the twentieth century received as much sustained popular attention and was as widely admired as Billy Graham. He placed high on public-opinion poll listings of the nation’s and the world’s most admired men virtually every year since 1951. In a survey conducted by Christian Century to discover which of eleven “living giants of the Christian faith” could be identified by American church-people, 67 percent of respondents correctly identified Billy Graham; the next most familiar “giant” was known to only five percent. Contestants in the 1976 Miss U.S.A. beauty pageant in Niagara Falls named him “Greatest Person in the World Today,” and in a 1978 Ladies’ Home Journal survey, only God outpointed him in the category “achievements in religion.” He was once named Time’s “Man of the Year,” and in 1990 Life listed him among “The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century.” The only other figure from the world of religion to make the list was his old adversary, Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1990 Graham was honored with a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
Graham’s celebrity gave him entrée to others of similar repute. When Mikhail Gorbachev visited the United States for a summit meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1988, for example, Graham was the only clergyman invited to be present at his arrival and attend the state dinner in his honor. The evangelist long defended his association with celebrities and the publicity machinery that kept his star well polished and ascendant by contending that though he personally abhorred the attention he received, he went along with it as essential to attracting an audience for his message. He admitted that might have paid more attention to public-opinion polls than he ought to—“I wonder sometimes if I’m pleasing God or man”—but his awareness of and concern over his need for approval served to keep what could easily be a colossal ego in admirable check. His standard opening offer—“Please call me ‘Billy’”—seemed utterly genuine and reflected his uneasiness with honorific treatment he felt he had not earned. “I don’t really like these honorary degrees at all,” he said. “They’ve given me so many that they’ve become meaningless, and I don’t ever list them. I couldn’t even name all the places I’ve received degrees from. Many times, if the
y invite you to speak at commencement, it’s just automatic that they give you a degree. In the beginning—I think the first degree I got was from Houghton College—I was quite pleased. And the first degree I got from a Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey, I was honored. I should be honored about the others, I suppose, but I don’t have the feeling of appreciation that maybe I ought to. It’s just something I sort of endure. Unless, of course, some major school like Harvard or Yale or Princeton were to give me one. . . .”
His oft-expressed desire to move about the world incognito was understandable. Johnny Lenning observed that “sometimes he must feel like a piece of meat, just being pushed into a room, told that the person in the gray coat is the most important man in the room, and the one he ought to pay most attention to, then twenty minutes later pushed into another room and told that the lady in the green dress is the prime minister, and then trying to talk to those people through an interpreter, knowing that everything he says is loaded with political implications—it must be so draining on him.” Even when no one expected anything in particular from him, the simple fact that every eye in the room was on him took an inevitable toll. Robert Ferm recalled a dinner he had shared with Graham in a nondescript restaurant in San Francisco. “All through the meal, people would walk by and just reach out and touch him lightly on the shoulder, or brush his sleeve. There must have been twenty people who did that. A few stopped and said, ‘Hello, Billy Graham.’ One or two teen-aged girls came over and got his autograph. Here in Asheville, he is pretty free to go out in restaurants. People recognize him and leave him alone. But no where else.” The wish for privacy, however, was mixed with a measure of gratification at being recognized. Graham’s sister, Jean Ford, noted that “he very much wants to be able to be in a restaurant or walk through a hotel lobby in privacy, and yet he would almost feel hurt if people didn’t recognize him. We were on an elevator with him a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Hilton, and people didn’t recognize him, and he initiated the ‘Good morning, how are you?’ He wouldn’t say, ‘I’m Billy Graham,’ but as soon as they looked at him they knew who he was immediately. I think there’s a paradox there in his personality. But also, I think he never wants to pass anybody up and have them think he is aloof or unapproachable, because he’s not. I think he very much wants to be warm. People around him sometimes try to make him out to be unapproachable, but that’s not the way he is. He is still very much a southern gentleman.”
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