Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  Mr. Truman nodded as though he remembered the incident.

  Then I reaffirmed my support for his swift reaction to Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea, even though the recent news from the battlefields had not been all that encouraging.

  Our allotted time was quickly running out, and what I really wanted to talk to him about was faith. I did not know how to begin.

  “Mr. President,” I blurted out, “tell me about your religious background and leanings.”

  “Well,” he replied in his Missouri accent, “I try to live by the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule.”

  “It takes more than that, Mr. President. It’s faith in Christ and His death on the Cross that you need.”

  The President stood up. Apparently, our twenty minutes were up. We stood up too.

  “Mr. President, could we have prayer?”

  “It can’t do any harm,” he said—or something similar.

  I put my arm around the shoulders of the President of the United States of America and prayed.

  “Amen,” Cliff exclaimed during the prayer. “Do it, Lord!”

  When we left the Oval Office, I looked at the clock; my prayer had taken another five minutes.

  When we stepped outside the White House, reporters and photographers from the press corps pounced on us.

  “What did the President say?”

  I told them everything I could remember.

  “What did you say?”

  Again I told them everything I could remember.

  “Did you pray with the President?”

  “Yes, we prayed with the President.”

  “What did he think about that?” someone called out.

  Before I could respond, an enterprising photographer asked us to kneel on the lawn and reenact the prayer. The press corps roared its approval.

  I declined to repeat the words we had prayed in the Oval Office, but I said that we had been planning to thank God for our visit anyway, and now was as good a time as any. The four of us bent one knee of our pastel summer suits, and I led the prayer of thanksgiving as sincerely as I could, impervious to the popping flashbulbs and scribbling pencils.

  It began to dawn on me a few days later how we had abused the privilege of seeing the President. National coverage of our visit was definitely not to our advantage. The President was offended that I had quoted him without authorization, Drew Pearson observed in his syndicated column, and now I was persona non grata at the White House. And Pearson was right. Mr. Truman never asked me to come back.

  A White House staff memorandum in late 1951 stated it bluntly: “At Key West the President said very decisively that he did not wish to endorse Billy Graham’s Washington revival meeting and particularly he said he did not want to receive him at the White House. You remember what a show of himself Billy Graham made the last time he was here. The President does not want it repeated.”

  I did visit Mr. Truman many years later at his home in Inde-pendence, Missouri. I recalled the incident and apologized profusely for our ignorance and naiveté.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replied graciously. “I realized you hadn’t been properly briefed.”

  After our gaffe, I vowed to myself it would never happen again if I ever was given access to a person of rank or influence.

  Forty-two years later—April 2, 1992—I was, in the minds of some, about to make a fool of myself again, this time in another capital, Pyongyang.

  North Korea was a place few people from the West had ever visited. Politically and diplomatically, it was considered one of the most isolated nations on earth. Technically, the United States and North Korea were still at war, and there was almost no contact between them. The Korean War had ended some four decades before, but only with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Now it was rumored that North Korea was developing its own nuclear arms program.

  Before leaving the United States, I had asked President Bush if he thought it was wise for me to go. He and others cautioned me about the risks we might be taking, including the danger of being used for propaganda purposes. Yet he encouraged me to go anyway. He even asked me to deliver a brief message of greeting if I was received by President Kim.

  On the other hand, some felt it was foolish for me to journey to a country so openly hostile to my own. And it would be especially foolish to meet with President Kim, others contended, given that millions of people—especially in South Korea, where we had many friends—would draw the conclusion that just by meeting with him, I would be giving support to his political and social policies.

  Furthermore, under President Kim—the same Communist leader who had been President Truman’s adversary during the Ko-rean War (and whom I had urged President Truman to resist with all his power)—North Korea had become the most nonreligious nation on earth. President Kim had even proclaimed North Korea the first completely atheistic state in the world, although recently two churches—where I would preach—had been opened in Pyongyang.

  As I recount in more detail later in these pages, we were driven through the countryside to the President’s residence about twenty miles outside the city. In the reception room, President Kim greeted me with a warm embrace as cameras clicked. Though just turning eighty, he had only a few streaks of gray in his black hair. He wore spectacles, but his intelligent eyes flashed behind them. In a dark business suit, white shirt, and deep maroon tie, he looked like an international business executive. He could not have been more cordial.

  Among my token gifts to him were a copy of my first book, Peace with God, and a copy of the Bible, both of which I had inscribed to him personally.

  In return, President Kim gave me the first volumes of his autobiography, the conclusion of which he was still working on. In those volumes, I later learned about his boyhood, including the fact that his mother was a Christian.

  Before our private meeting began, President Kim commented to the media that the warmth of early spring stirred his hope that a new spring was coming in relations between our two countries. Subsequent developments would cast a temporary chill over our hopes for that, but I am sure his kind reception of our little group was meant as a friendly gesture politically as well as personally.

  In our private meeting, I conveyed President Bush’s greeting to him, and he in turn gave me a message to convey back to the President. Subsequent events indicated that our visit might have been a first step toward better relations. When we went to Hong Kong, en route back to America, reporters and cameramen—in-cluding a large number from South Korea—jammed the press conference. They clamored repeatedly for details about our private conversation, demanding to know the message President Kim had asked me to deliver to President Bush. I could not help but recall the fiasco on the White House lawn four decades before. I politely but firmly refused.

  No two heads of state—President Harry Truman and President Kim Il Sung—could have been further apart ideologically and politically. Yet those two Presidents are like bookends on my shelf of memories. Between them stand volumes of varied contacts and conversations with my fellow human beings—a few leaders like them, but mostly very ordinary people like myself.

  Part One

  1918–1943

  Foundations

  1

  Down on the Farm

  Roaring Twenties and Depression Thirties

  Day after day, the tall, spare farmer leaned on the board fence and searched the sky for clouds. In front of him, rows of corn were stunted, brown for lack of rain. He shoved his hat back on his head, exposing a strip of white forehead above a sun-browned face. No rain meant no crops. His shoulders slumped. His feet shuffled up the hot, dusty path back to the farmhouse, where I watched from the open door. My heart sank as I read the concern in his weary face. That man was my dad. . . .

  When I was a boy growing up, Park Road outside Charlotte, North Carolina, was little more than a rutted dirt lane cutting across acres of farmland. Our white frame house with green trim sat back from the road and overlooked sprawli
ng pastures dotted with our family’s dairy herd, set against the tranquil backdrop of trees and low hills. There I was born on November 7, 1918, four days before the armistice that ended World War I and one year to the day after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

  This was not the first house built on the site. A log cabin on acreage bought after the Civil War in Sharon Township, between the villages of Pineville and Matthews, was built by my grandfather William Crook Graham, a hard-drinking, hard-cursing veteran whose service with the Sixth South Carolina Volunteers left him with a Yankee bullet in his leg for the rest of his life.

  My Aunt Eunice said the extent of her father’s religion was to be an honest man. Fortunately, his wife, a God-fearing Scotswoman named Maggie McCall, influenced the character formation of their eight daughters and three sons by teaching them precepts and principles from the Scriptures. They all grew up to be deeply religious, and a number of their grandchildren became preachers—I being the first.

  The first death in our immediate family was that of my maternal grandmother, Lucinda Coffey. Grandmother talked often about her husband, Ben Coffey, who had been badly wounded while serving with the Eleventh North Carolina Regiment, Pettigrew’s Bri-gade, which led the advance on Gettysburg from the west on July 1, 1863. Shrapnel almost severed his left leg. While he was lying on the battlefield, a bullet grazed his right eye, blinding it forever. Doctors were forced to amputate his wounded leg some time later. On August 1, the company commander wrote a letter of commendation: “Benny was such a good boy; . . . a better soldier never lived.” His comrades testified to his concern for spiritual values. I never knew him; he died in 1916 at the ripe old age of seventy-four.

  When Grandmother Coffey died, I was in elementary school, and my sister Catherine and I were called out of school. The manner of her dying became a legacy of faith for our family. She sat up in bed and almost laughingly said, “I see Jesus. He has His arms outstretched toward me. And there’s Ben! He has both of his eyes and both of his legs.” She was buried among many other members of our family in the large Steele Creek Presbyterian churchyard.

  For a child of the Roaring Twenties who reached adolescence in the Depression of the early thirties, rural life probably offered the best of all worlds. As Scottish Presbyterians believing in strict observance of moral values, we stayed relatively uncontaminated by the Great Gatsby lifestyle of the flapper era, with its fast dancing and illegal drinking. And being farmers, we could manage to live off the land when the economy nose-dived in the 1929 stock market crash, even though my father lost his savings—$4,000—in the failed Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in Charlotte.

  Not that those were not anxious times. Yet it never occurred to me or my parents to think of the rigors of dairy farming as hardships. We all simply believed in hard work. The fact was that the South had never fully recovered economically from the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is strange to realize now, in light of Charlotte’s present prosperity, that the region of my boyhood only sixty years ago was unbelievably poor.

  In the Depression, our dairy farm barely survived when milk got down to 5¢ a quart. After the stock market crash of 1929, and the bank holiday that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered in 1933 under his National Industrial Recovery Act, my father nearly went broke. At first he was confident that his bank in Charlotte would reopen, but it did not. He couldn’t even write a check to pay his bills. He had to start over from scratch. It took him months to recover from the blow.

  Yet business reverses never stifled my father’s sense of humor. While he had cause to be melancholy or depressed, he was anything but that. There were down moments, of course, when the rains did not come and the crops did not grow, or when a prize cow died. But in spite of the hardships, he found much to laugh about. People loved to come to our place from all around the neighborhood just to hear him tell his jokes. His dry sense of humor kept us laughing by the hour.

  Growing up in those years taught us the value of nickels and dimes. My father early on illustrated for me the merits of free enterprise. Once in a while when a calf was born on the farm, he turned it over to my friend Albert McMakin and me to raise. When it got to the veal stage, we marketed it ourselves and split the proceeds.

  We were not out of touch with what was going on elsewhere, but our newspaper carried mostly local stories. Radio was still in its infancy. Once my father made his first crystal set, he tuned in pioneer station KDKA from Pittsburgh. We gathered around the squawking receiver, holding our breath. When, after Daddy had done a lot of fiddling with the three tuning dials, something intelligible broke through the static, we all shouted, “That’s it! We have it!”

  Later we were among the first in our neighborhood to have a radio in our car. When my folks went into a store to shop, I stretched out on the backseat and listened to those mysterious sounds—distorted broadcasts marvelously relayed by wireless from Europe. They had a hollow echo as if coming to us through a magic seashell. I was particularly fascinated by the oratorical style of speeches shouted in an almost hypnotic voice by a man in Germany named Adolf Hitler. He frightened me in some way, even though I did not understand his language.

  However, there were more important things to think about in my boyhood North Carolina universe. It centered on the three hundred acres inherited from my grandfather by my father and his brother Clyde, where they ran Graham Brothers Dairy. Father handled the business affairs and the farm itself, with Mother doing the bookkeeping at our kitchen table. Uncle Clyde looked after the milk-processing house.

  My father’s younger brother and dedicated business partner, Uncle Clyde seemed to depend on Daddy for nearly all the decisions having to do with the farm. The first few years of my life, he lived with us. He always liked a good laugh. He once placed an order with a traveling salesman for a whole case of wonder tonic that was supposed to restore his lost hair. He was only moderately disappointed when it failed to live up to its promise.

  Even though a bachelor, he never had any women friends that we knew about. Yet when he decided to build a house across the road from us, my mother jokingly said, “Maybe he’s planning to get married!”

  Little did we know! I’d had a teacher in the second grade by the name of Jennie Patrick. She came from a prominent family in South Carolina. I would never have dreamed that Uncle Clyde was secretly courting her! One day when he was pulling out of the driveway, all dressed up for a change, my father stopped him.

  “Where are you going, Clyde?” Daddy asked in astonishment.

  “I’m going to get married,” he stammered with a blush and a smile.

  That was the only announcement we had—and the only preparation my mother had—that Uncle Clyde’s bride would be arriving soon.

  Aunt Jennie proved to be a marvelous cook, and of course she had a special affection for me because I had been one of her pupils. She and Uncle Clyde eventually had two sons who grew up sharing the devout convictions of their parents. One of them, Ed, became one of the finest pastors I have ever known, with the largest Presbyterian congregation in the western part of North Carolina. His older brother, Clyde, worked at Ivey’s department store in Charlotte, where he was promoted a number of times through the years.

  In the “Wild West” years, the eldest Graham brother, my Uncle Tom, went off to Oklahoma, where he married a full-blooded Cherokee woman. He did well for himself in cotton gins. Each summer when they came back to North Carolina for a two-week visit, driving the biggest car I had ever seen (with every kind of gadget on it), they stayed at our house. He was tall and heavyset, and how he and the equally ample Aunt Belle could sleep in that three-quarter-size bed in our guest room remained one of the unsolved mysteries of my childhood.

  Our barns had tin roofs. On rainy days, I liked to sneak away into the hay barn and lie on a sweet-smelling and slippery pile of straw, listening to the raindrops hit that tin roof and dreaming. It was a sanctuary that helped shape my character. Whenever I visit a bustling city anywhere in the world now,
I like to retreat from noisy boulevards into an open church building and just meditate in the cool, dim quietness. At our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my favorite spot is a little path above the house where I walk alone and talk with God.

  We always had a collie—at least one—and what would any farm be without plenty of cats? Not knowing any better, I once took a cat and shut it in the doghouse with the dog. They hated each other with some ancient instinct when they went in, but after spending the night inside they came out as friends forever. Maybe that is where the seeds of some of my ecumenical convictions got planted, wanting to help people at odds with each other find ways to get along together.

  When I was quite little, I kept pet goats. I had them pull me and my sister Catherine (who was a couple of years younger than I) around in my cart while we played dairy farm and pretended to be helping Daddy haul hay. One long-horned, red-haired goat named Billy Junior was a favorite of mine, but he attacked Catherine several times. She was quieter than the rest of us; maybe she seemed more vulnerable to the goat.

  We were fortunate to have Catherine with us. As an infant, she swallowed an open safety pin. The unusual and complicated surgical procedure that had to be performed to close the pin inside her and remove it made medical news in our part of the country. Since my parents were at the hospital a lot of the time, I had to stay at my Aunt Lill’s house in town. We just had to wait to see whether Catherine would survive.

  I had one narrow brush with death myself as a child. Once when I was sick, Mother thought she was giving me cough medicine, but she gave me iodine instead. If it had not been for a quick phone call to Aunt Jennie, who suggested some thick cream from the dairy to counteract the iodine, I might have died.

  When I got too big for the goat cart, I rode my bike down the road, followed by a procession of goats and dogs (but never the proud cats), to the amusement of our few neighbors and the people who passed by in buggies and cars. My father kept a riding horse, Mamie, for us children. And as we got older, we rode the mules—Mag, Emma, and Bessie—bareback, sometimes standing up on the backs of the gentler mules.