Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  Floyd Roberts eventually quit his job with the Grahams when Ruth repeatedly told him that she needed him to work inside the house as well as in the yard. “But indoor chores,” he often reminded her, “are woman’s work.” It was an amiable parting.

  He was succeeded by John Rickman, a gentle, kindly man who also lived on Rainbow Mountain. A recovering alcoholic, Rickman had been converted to Christ after Nelson Bell found him unconscious in the woods. Dr. Bell carried him into his own home, sobered him up, and hired him to do odd jobs around the house. Later he sent Rickman up the mountain to work for the Grahams. They took him on, provided he wouldn’t drink. After a few slips, which they pretended not to notice, he kept his promise. An uncle of sorts to Franklin and Ned, he taught them how to handle guns. He taught all of the children how to drive.

  In the late seventies, Ruth began noticing that Rickman was pale and listless. She caught him leaning on his rake, panting and wiping his brow when he thought no one was looking. Finally, she persuaded him to see a doctor, and it was discovered that his years of chain smoking had finally exacted their toll. He had cancer of the throat. She visited him in the hospital the day before his death.

  “Let not your heart be troubled,” she read to him. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions …”

  A rough hand covered hers and she looked up to see Rickman, whose larynx had been removed, carefully mouthing, “many, many mansions.” They prayed, his face crinkled into a smile, a finger pointing heavenward.

  The next day, his daughter Shirley watched him struggle in his hospital bed as he tried to hold on.

  “Papa,” she said gently, “don’t fight it. Go on to heaven.”

  His face smoothed as he passed on.

  In the early sixties Ruth noticed that Gregg Sawyer’s skin was yellowish and it was discovered that he had a fatal pancreatic disorder. One afternoon as they worked on a gate, he began thinking out loud.

  “I figure I’m not good enough for Heaven,” he told his boss.

  Ruth smiled and her hands never stopped as she worked on the rocks. She told him a true story.

  “Well, you know, Mr. Sawyer, when Mr. [Dwight L.] Moody was in Scotland holding meetings, a little boy wanted to get into the building. He was a little urchin. Now when I say a little urchin, I mean his face was dirty, his clothes were ragged. And every door he went to was closed because the place was jammed. He was turned away. Maybe if he’d come in top hat and tails they would have been a little more respectful to him.

  “But anyway, the little guy got turned away and turned away until finally he wound up at the back door with tears running down his little face. And just about that time a carriage pulled up. People went to help the gentleman out of the carriage and a big, tall man stepped down. And he noticed this little guy with the dirty face and tears running down and he put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Sonny, what’s wrong?’

  “The boy said, ‘I want to hear Mr. Moody and it’s full up and nobody will let me in.’

  “And the big man took his hand and said, ‘Come with me.’

  “When they got to the door it was thrown wide and people bowed him in. The big man found the little boy a seat in the front row. Then he mounted the platform. It was Mr. Moody.

  “When we get to Heaven, Mr. Sawyer,” she concluded, “that’s the only way any of us are going to get in, if Jesus takes us by the hand. None of us are good enough. We’re too dirty.”

  Cocking his head to one side, he studied her over his glasses for a moment. “Well, now,” he said, “that makes sense. A man can understand that.”

  1. “The Greatest Meet: Graham, Ali Discuss Problems,” Asheville Citizen Times, September 17,1979.

  12

  CHAPTER

  Her Jungle

  THE NEW YORK CRUSADE, 1957

  Having always longed to do pioneer missionary work, I must keep reminding myself as I look out over the New York skyline this is our jungle.

  —Ruth Bell Graham, 1957

  On Saturday, May 11, 1957, Ruth leaned against pillows in her Pullman car as soft lamplight shone on the blanket tousled over her legs and her open, battered King James Bible. Two and a half hours had passed in hypnotic beats since she had awakened at 2:00 A.M.

  The train lurched to a halt in Washington, where the day before Billy had met with President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Billy boarded the train and greeted Ruth with a hug in their two-bunk stateroom. As the train lumbered to New York, they talked and then slept until the porter brought them coffee and toast at 9:00 A.M.

  Two years earlier, John Sutherland Bonnell, pastor of New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, had approached Billy with an interesting question.

  “Billy,” Bonnell asked, “when will you begin a crusade in New York?”

  “I am not ready for that,” Billy replied. “I want more time for study and prayer before tackling that project.”1

  That same year, the Protestant Council of the City of New York, representing seventeen hundred churches and thirty-one denominations, invited him to hold a crusade in Madison Square Garden. He accepted and his organization began setting it up. As the train sped that way, the city was plastered with six hundred fifty billboards, forty thousand telephone dials reading “Pray for Billy Graham,” thirty-five thousand window posters, and forty thousand bumper stickers. The BGEA’s marketing arsenal included one million letterheads, two and a half million envelope stuffers, two hundred fifty thousand crusade song-books, and one hundred thousand Gospels of John.2

  Vice President Nixon would attend the crusade on behalf of the president and speak to one hundred thousand people in Yankee Stadium for ten minutes on July 21. Many of the country’s top entertainers and jet setters would come. It would be the longest, most expensive, and exhausting crusade Billy had yet held, as the scheduled six weeks of services stretched into sixteen. By the time it was over, more than two and a quarter million people would have attended, with one hundred sixty thousand jamming Times Square for the first meeting September 1. But the phenomenon that would change the course of history for Billy, and for the Graham family, was that on June 1 Billy’s ministry would be televised, launching him as one of the nation’s pioneer “televangelists.”

  As the Grahams sat in their Pullman car, journalists from virtually every major magazine and newspaper in the United States and Europe were trickling into Manhattan. Billy was restless, unnerved by the task ahead. To him, his mission was not necessarily one of choice, but of obedience. He knew it was God propelling him along a ribbon of steel to the central nervous system of the nation, the hub of sophistication, art, and fashion.

  Politically, it was a volatile time in the United States. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Violence and controversy erupted in the already stormy South. In September of 1957 President Eisenhower would send a thousand federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to quell Governor Orval E. Faubus’s attempt to block the integration of a local school. Reporters wanted to know why Billy Graham didn’t stay home and help his people solve the racial problem instead of traveling north to “save” New York City.

  Over the past four years he had gained increasing respect in the country for his stance on racial segregation. During the 1953 Chattanooga, Tennessee, crusade he had instructed his ushers that blacks were to sit wherever they pleased. There was no segregation at the foot of the Cross, he maintained repeatedly. Many people fancied that he was moving in rhythm with a twenty-eight-year-old black Baptist named Martin Luther King Jr., who had mounted his own platform in 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black woman, had been arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man. While Billy Graham rebelled against the ungodliness of racial discrimination, King set in motion the first mass civil rights movement in American history.

  At the 1957 New York crusade King would sit on Billy’s platform. Three years lat
er the two men would fly together to Brazil to attend a banquet for Baptist leaders. There King said, “If it had not been for the ministry of Billy Graham, my civil rights work in the United States would have been much harder.”

  Shortly before Billy left Montreat for Washington, and then New York, he and Ruth had hiked to the small mountainside field near their house, a quiet spot where he often wandered alone to pray. They stretched out on the grass, sleepily watching their four sheep graze. As they talked and prayed about New York, he confessed to her that though he was challenged, he was frightened. She shared his feelings, she told him. “But at the same time,” she simply added, “self-confidence would be worse.”

  Now, as they ate breakfast on the train, they were talking and praying again. She gently peeled back the fragile pages of her Bible, smoothing them when she found each verse. “If Thy Presence go not with me carry us not up hence…. My Presence shall go with Thee Lo, I am with you always,” she read. This opportunity came from God, she told him. And He would be with them.

  In a steady, dreary rain, the train stopped briefly in Newark, New Jersey, an hour late. The press, much to Ruth’s relief, had tired of waiting and had left. But in Manhattan they were greeted by a mob of reporters, friends, and, for the first time, police. A burly sergeant and a detective stood sentry on the station platform while the Grahams left the train. Ruth was surprised, for it had not occurred to her that there was any possibility of violence. The presence of guards was the beginning of what was soon to become commonplace.

  Moments after they arrived at the New Yorker Hotel, one of Billy’s associates began ushering Ruth to her quarters, away from the hundreds of journalists who had been waiting more than an hour for her husband.

  “Oh, no,” Billy said, grinning as he scotched Ruth’s getaway. “She goes to the press conference with me.”

  She sat beside him, feeling “like a fool,” as she recalled, while he answered the reporters’ ten pages of questions:

  “How sinful do you think New York is?”

  “Is it a criticism of the church today that people respond to you as an evangelist and not to the churches themselves?”

  “Why is a revival needed when the membership in churches is zooming?”

  Drained, he remarked to a reporter as he walked toward the elevator, “My wife and I have lost our privacy. And I don’t think anyone who has lost their privacy doesn’t long to have it back. You don’t realize what a priceless possession it is to be a private individual. To be looked at, to be stared at everywhere one goes, never to go into a restaurant without being looked at…”3

  During this crusade many of the wealthy and famous showed interest in Billy as never before. Jackie Gleason invited him to lunch. Tallulah Bankhead invited the Grahams to tea. Billy was a frequent guest on talk shows. On Sunday, May 12, Ruth sat on a balcony and watched him on the set of the Steve Allen Show, along with Dean Jones, Milton Berle, Tallulah Bankhead, and Pearl Bailey. Amid the dancing, fanfares, and one-liners, he emerged in a simple gabardine suit.

  “And the presence of God was there,” Ruth observed. “Right in the midst of all that fun & foolishness Bill sat and God was with him Oh, the consuming… ambition of the stage and even when you reach the top, what do you have? Full lives and empty hearts.”

  She couldn’t wait to escape the crowds, the flashbulbs. Whenever possible she would sequester herself in her hotel suite and read and meditate. Along with her Bible, she read Frank W. Boreham’s essays and the recently published Through Gates of Splendor, written by Elisabeth Elliot, whose husband Jim was one of five missionaries murdered by the Auca Indians in Ecuador. “I have never been more deeply moved or challenged,” she wrote at the time.

  Her life had radically changed over the past fourteen years, evolving in a way she could never have imagined in those early days in Illinois. Her priorities, nonetheless, had not wavered. They burned like a quiet inner flame, making her who she was. She had redefined her notion of her mission field. It was not Tibet; it was everywhere.

  The moment the Grahams would emerge from their room, they were hounded by journalists and television crews. Everywhere they turned, it seemed, someone was snapping their picture.

  “After so much publicity you begin to feel exposed,” Ruth wrote on May 13. “Every paper you pick up has a picture or a story or both. And you feel a bit like a beetle under a stone when the stones have just been removed. Well, I was feeling very uncovered when I picked up my Bible and read, ‘He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.’ I can’t say what a comfortable thought that was. All I needed.”

  Journalists crowded into the BGEA team prayer meetings. They wandered through the crowds at night, hunting for celebrities to photograph. Ruth’s annoyance with the press mounted when the “czar of the Los Angeles underworld,” as Mickey Cohen was called, appeared in Manhattan. She had recently seen the tough-talking ex-convict on television, where he referred to gangsters and racketeers as “fine men,” and law enforcement officers as “degenerates.” She feared that he was attempting to reestablish himself in the underworld. She also suspected that his interest in the crusade was only a publicity stunt. She hoped he would come to know Christ during the services, but she didn’t see how that was possible when the press was between him and the pulpit.

  She watched the assault the night of May 21 and her indignation peaked. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, at the service with her father, later recalled it was the “angriest” she ever saw Ruth. Sitting in the lower tier, just in front of Cohen, Ruth noticed an Associated Press photographer stalking the front row like a cat. Oblivious of the woman inches away from him, he squatted and focused his camera on Cohen. Smiling, Ruth blocked the lens with her songbook just as the shutter clicked. She shook her head at him like a mother reprimanding a naughty child.

  “It’s my job,” the photographer explained when Ruth bumped into him after the service. “And I will do all I can to get the pictures.”

  “And it’s our job to do all we can to stop you from getting them,” she replied, again with a smile.

  “So at least we understand one another,” he said as he walked away.

  Moments later she met Cohen in Billy’s stadium office. She had been praying for him since the 1949 Los Angeles crusade when his wiretapper Jim Vaus had accepted Christ and Billy had unsuccessfully urged Cohen to do likewise.

  “We’re praying for you,” she said.

  He smiled nervously, kissed her on the cheek, and left.

  “He has not given in to God, he would not that night,” she recorded. “As he said good-bye, I felt like that verse in the Scriptures, ‘He went out. And it was night.’”

  While Billy Graham, “the fair-haired evangelist with that clean collared look,” was “fighting the roughest battle in his phenomenal career,”4 as columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, he was chosen Father of the Year in Religion. On May 23, he took time off from his usual fourteen-hour workday to escort Ruth to the awards dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Guests included Ronald Reagan, who with his wife Nancy would one day invite the Grahams to the White House, and the parents of Grace Kelly, as well as Ed Sullivan, Charles and Mark Van Doren, and Mickey Mantle, who was wearily signing autographs. When Billy rose to accept his award, he told the guests that it was his wife who deserved it, not he, because she had been both mother and father to their children.

  After the dinner, Ruth returned to the hotel and discovered that the AP photographer she had confronted days earlier had left her a message. He wanted her to sit in the front row that night so he could take her picture. She sent him a message back.

  “Yes, I will, if you promise not to photograph any celebrities.”

  He never showed up.

  Saturday, June 1, marked the beginning of Billy’s television career. The month before, American Broadcasting Company executives had approached him with their idea of televising the services. Soon, seventeen broadcasts had been scheduled for the crusade, a modern miracle made
possible by a one-hundred-thousand-dollar donation. The Grahams rode the train back home and gathered with the Bells before the television set, switching the channels past Jackie Gleason and Perry Como until Billy floated onto the grayish screen before them. He preached on John 3:16, his face pale, his gestures too energetic for the small box.

  Yet his words carried power, and as Ruth watched hundreds of people come forward, she was overwhelmed. “Thank God for the incomparable opportunities of preaching Christ these days,” she wrote. “For men’s willingness to listen. It may not be but for a time. But thank God for it! And may we all take advantage of every opportunity while the time lasts.”

  Six million people tuned in for the first broadcast, three times as many as had attended the sum of all Graham crusades the year before. Ruth knew then that if television was to become his new pulpit, their lives would be laid bare before the world as never before. It was, however, but a small exchange for transformed lives, she believed. A Presbyterian minister, a Roman Catholic priest, a bartender, a calypso dancer, a prostitute, and one of her customers all had made that walk through the Garden as a gesture of their desire to make peace with God. “One watches, lost in wonder, love and praise,” Ruth wrote.

  Joy and pain, blessings and bitterness, are usually yoked together. The New York crusade was not exempt. By 1957 Billy had reached a point in his career where he was rapidly polarizing his fellow Americans. He was evolving into the most powerful religious figure of the century. That alone made him controversial, and a target for criticism.

  In a Life magazine article published during the crusade, Reinhold Niebuhr, prominent theologian and vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, took the evangelist to task.