Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  She would learn to soak labels off jars or prescription bottles that were nobody’s business. She would buy a trash compactor and burn personal bills, notes, itineraries, and other paperwork in a barrel behind the house. It was simply wise, she would say with a smile that did not belie her indignation. Such precautions, in her mind, were one more irritating and unwanted invoice from fame, and a violation of what should have been an individual’s reasonable right to privacy.

  As far as celebrities, royalty, and world leaders were concerned, Ruth simply treated them as she wished to be treated, and exploitation was rude, if not immoral. Her retelling of celebrity encounters, for the most part, would always be restricted to harmless and often humorous anecdotes. On the Grahams’ first visit to Clarence House in 1955, for example, a butler reached for Billy’s hat and Billy shook his hand with a “Pleased to meet you.” When the Queen Mother appeared, Ruth didn’t know which to do first, curtsy or bow. “Her indecision,” Billy remarked afterward, “made it seem she had tripped over the rug.”

  Though the Grahams were quiet about these visits, the British press was not. Reporters usually found out about what had gone on and printed detailed, often fictitious reports in the newspapers. After the 1955 lunch in Windsor Castle, reporters demanded a statement from Billy. When he refused, they printed that as the Grahams left the castle, the evangelist patted Prince Charles on the head and remarked, “God bless you, sonny. I have a little boy just like you at home.” Neither Billy nor Ruth had even seen Prince Charles.

  Billy’s associations with world leaders began generating criticism from other ministers and theologians, many of whom had never agreed with the evangelist or his message. One critic was theologian Karl Barth, whom the Grahams became acquainted with in the summer of 1960 while Billy was preaching in Switzerland and Germany and his family was staying near Montreux on Lake Geneva. One afternoon the Grahams met Barth and his son Markus for a chat at a provincial inn. On August 26, Ruth wrote her parents:

  Dr. Karl Barth came down from the little inn porch big, kindly, rumpled man. Like most great men, he doesn’t look the part…. We had a very interesting two-hour visit…. Really, his graciousness, his geniality, his kindliness, make one feel he is a near and dear relative like an uncle or a grandfather. There is nothing of the austere or unapproachable scholar one might expect.

  They are all deeply disturbed by and concerned over Bill’s giving an invitation. As far as I could see Dr. Karl Barth felt the “convert” would confuse the act of coming forward with conversion itself. Dr. Markus Barth felt it was “separating” the believer from the unbeliever and he feels there is a great danger in Christians “separating.” I felt the language barrier accounted for some misunderstandings and the fact that none of them had ever attended a meeting.

  They talked around the table, and Billy asked Karl Barth what he would say to a sinner if one came to him for help.

  “I would say to him,” Barth replied, raising his shoulders and upturned palms in an eloquent shrug, “friend, you are in great danger … but then, so am I.”

  Ruth observed, “One could not help but feel that was a rather dreary outlook with nothing of hope and certainty in it. I could hardly believe he meant it as he said it, and perhaps he didn’t. His English is very broken. But none of the others offered to contradict or supplement what he said. Trying to follow their profound reasoning I felt myself getting thoroughly confused.”

  Toward the end of the conversation Karl Barth suggested to Billy, “You should come to Basel and teach theology for six months. And I will go out and hold your meetings for six months.” A smile tugged at the corner of Barth’s lips as he concluded, “And anyway, I should love to have lunch with the Queen and meet President Eisenhower and people like that.”

  Ruth was not awed by glamour and fame. In truth, she was most comfortable sitting before the fire in her rustic house, chatting with a friend from her past or, perhaps, a neighbor. To her, greatness was measured by service, not office.

  Shortly after a tea with the royal family in 1961, she was in Belfast for a crusade at Saint Andrew’s Hall. There, on June 27, she visited a former missionary to China whom she remembered from her childhood. The woman lived in a nearby rest home. Her small apartment was washed with sunlight, and warm with symbols from her past. The quilt covering her bed was made of Chinese silk scraps. Favorite books filled the bookshelves, and yellowed photographs of family were neatly pasted on the walls. The packing crates used to carry her belongings home from China had been turned into furniture, and her desk was a card table. She was packing boxes with empty plastic bottles, notepads made from greeting cards and paper, a crib sheet made from bits of damask, and cans and trinkets she would soon ship to missionaries in Africa to distribute to needy children.

  “You certainly manage to keep busy and get a lot done!” Ruth marveled.

  The missionary straightened proudly, meeting her eyes. “I don’t belong to myself,” she said.

  “I couldn’t help remembering another room just five days before,” Ruth wrote in her diary that night, referring to her earlier visit to Buckingham Palace. “It also had family pictures all around the wall, books, and a desk. And boxes piled on boxes. Red dispatch boxes. They were a world apart. But for all the royal elegance of one and simple poverty of the other, there was a similarity. And I couldn’t help but feel I had tea with royalty twice in one week.”

  By the late fifties Billy was receiving invitations to White House prayer breakfasts, beginning a tradition that would continue through the Clinton presidency. It was at such a breakfast that he and Ruth became acquainted with Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnson became president, and soon Billy Graham became known as the White House chaplain and counselor to presidents.

  Forthcoming were telephone calls from President Johnson and invitations to the White House and to the ranch on the north bank of the Pedernales River, fifty miles west of Austin. Ruth was adamantly opposed to her husband’s becoming involved in politics. She reminded him of this whenever she could. In 1964, they dined with the Johnsons the weekend of the Democratic convention.

  “Who should I take as my running mate?” Johnson asked Billy.

  Before Billy could reply he got a swift kick under the table. “Why did you kick me?” he blurted to Ruth.

  Johnson looked at her quizzically, his eyes amused as he waited for her response.

  “Because,” she said firmly to her husband, “you are supposed to limit your advice to moral and spiritual issues and stay out of politics.”

  “I agree with you,” Johnson said to her.

  As they left the dining room, preceded by the women, Johnson whispered to Billy, “Now, what do you really think?”

  Johnson had no hesitation in letting the world know that he and Billy were friends. On May 20, 1965, the Associated Press reported that when the president was tired or worried he often called Billy to get a new injection. When he “was being called a crook and a thug and all,” he said, he spent a weekend with Billy and “we bragged on each other. I told him he was the greatest religious leader in the world and he said I was the greatest political leader.”

  Ideally, it was not the Grahams’ place to judge the president, they believed. Nor were they to endorse him. Of course, being frequently seen with a president might have been perceived by some as endorsement enough. But the friendships between Johnson and clergymen were more than political, claimed those who had reason to know. Calvin Thielman was of such an opinion. By a strange twist of fate, he had been Johnson’s campaign manager in his race against Coke Stevenson for a seat in the Senate in 1948.

  Calvin was seventeen, a respected orator in his high school, when the Lamar County attorney, Royce Whitten, summoned him to his spacious courthouse office and asked him to be Johnson’s campaign manager. Calvin accepted and with this gangly, jug-eared Texan, forever known as LBJ, buzzed the Lone Star State in a newfangled contraption called
a helicopter. It was just the two of them and a pilot, their bubble with flying blades agitating skies above rural towns, a Texas drawl booming such messages from the P.A. system: “THIS IS LYNDON JOHNSON, YOUR NEXT U.S. SENATOR. MEET ME AT THE MARKET SQUARE AT THREE O’CLOCK.”

  One afternoon they landed in Calvin’s hometown of Paris. Knowing that Calvin dreamed of one day being a politician, Johnson, amid a square thick with people, wrapped an arm around him and announced, “If Wright Patman ever dies, this boy will be the next congressman from this district.” Ironically, thirty-five years later, Calvin and Patman would stand side by side at Johnson’s funeral. Johnson campaigned for five months in thirty-six precincts, and won the runoff by eighty-seven votes out of nine hundred thousand cast. “Landslide Lyndon” was accused of stuffing the ballot boxes.

  Many years later, when Johnson was in the White House, he called upon Calvin as many as half a dozen times to sit by his bed and pray or read the Bible to him. The president had a vulnerability that caused him to crave approval and have “a soft spot for preachers,” Calvin observed. Billy’s affection seemed especially important to Johnson. In 1971, Johnson told Walter Cronkite, “Not many people in this country love me, but that preacher there loves me.”

  CBS anchorman Dan Rather, a native Texan who covered the Johnson presidency, believed that Johnson’s interest in Billy was not entirely opportunistic. “Johnson had a strong strain of religion in him,” he mused, staring over black reading glasses in his New York CBS studio. “I think Johnson, in a way, was a believer in what Graham was doing and what Graham was trying to do. … In street language, he put a move on Graham. But it would be a mistake to see it as entirely cynical.”

  To Lady Bird Johnson, it was all very simple. “I know, at least my feeling is, that Lyndon sought counsel of an awful lot of folks from our cook on up to Dean Rusk, and the wealthy or most academic to the lowest. Lyndon had a very strong sense of need, certainly he did in the presidency—a need for being sure he was on the right path, a need for comfort, a need for an anchor. Billy was a comfort. And Lyndon believed in him and respected him And if there ever is a position in the world where you feel you need all the help you can get it’s the presidency.”

  It was during the Johnson friendship that Ruth became familiar with the White House. Of those who observed her, Lady Bird Johnson, the press, and later Barbara Bush commented that it was not her modus operandi to elbow her way to the forefront and introduce herself to the important people. Rather, she would drift to the edge of the crowd, blending into the background like one of the dark oil portraits, unobtrusive amid heavy draperies and chandeliers. The Ruth who lost herself in the masses at crusades, the Ruth who disliked sitting on the platform, remained in character in places of power. Indeed, she would remain an enigmatic paradox of withdrawn whimsy and fire that seemed the wrong combination for such an overwhelming role in life.

  She was “quiet, gentle, observant,” recalled Rather, who occasionally saw her at the White House and later at events involving Nixon. “As a professional observer myself, maybe I recognize that. She was watching people, watching events. Listening very carefully. She was not one of these people whose minds are elsewhere.”

  Ruth Bell Graham was not a politician and never would come close. Her discomfort in front of the camera, if one watched carefully, sometimes broached anger, which manifested itself as mischief, acceptably harmless, but with a steely edge. Why this might have been the case for one so physically lovely and charming can only be guessed, but Billy himself would say many years later that Ruth had always been uncomfortable with her beauty.

  “She always has been as long as I’ve known her,” he said on a Saturday in the spring of 1996, while browsing through old family photographs and holding up one of her that took him back to Wheaton.

  It could simply be that, like other women who have so much more to offer than their looks, Ruth wanted to be taken seriously and demanded it in her own quirky way. For sure, she always dismissed compliments with a laugh and immediately changed the subject. She had a flair for style and could look stunning upon easy command. Or when it came time to cast her likeness on the Congressional Gold Medal, she might pin back her hair severely and look like the old maid missionary she never became. Newt Gingrich and Senator Strom Thurmond presented the medal, which truly did not bear a likeness to Billy either, and Ruth slipped to one side of her husband, where no one could see her. Then she sat down, slipping farther out of view as the accolades and honors went on.

  What she did not do was slip out on individuals, and one might argue that this was what mattered, for Ruth believed that if she touched a single life, she had accomplished something too important to measure with a medal. She was most present when alone with another human being who needed her help or attention.

  In the spring of 1994 when televangelist Jim Bakker was about to be released from prison, Ruth invited him to sit with her in church his first Sunday after he was freed. She called the Asheville paper and admonished the publisher about harassing Bakker any further and warned that she had better not see any reporters in church. She didn’t. Two years later, a celebrity friend whose alleged sexual behavior was worldwide news hid out at Ruth’s house one weekend and spent hours talking.

  It really did not matter whether Ruth agreed with a person’s behavior or convictions. What was vital was that she listened and offered kindness and understanding. Unlike many people brought up in strict environments, Ruth would spend her later years trying to be open-minded about matters that in earlier times may have been beyond her ken.

  “If she’s talking to you, she’s talking to you, she’s not looking past you,” recalled Dan Rather. “You may only have her for a few seconds, but you’ve got her attention and she’s listening to what you’re saying.”

  In 1968 Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. He asked the Grahams to stay with him on his last night in the White House in January of 1969. The friendship did not end with his term of office. On Sunday, October 18, 1970, the Grahams flew to Austin, and Secret Service agents drove them within two miles of the LBJ ranch. Johnson escorted them the rest of the way. He was thinner since leaving the White House, his silver hair untrimmed and curling down the back of his neck.

  Ruth found the former president more relaxed and playful. He yowled cheek to cheek singing duets with his white mongrel, Yuki, reducing guests to teary laughter. He told long stories, ambling through the colorful turns of his imagination, savoring every detail like the raconteur he was, and he read aloud long sections from his new book, The Vantage Point. When he tired of talking, he would ride around the ranch, checking on the guinea hens, hawks, deer, tractor blades, and his airport runway.

  During the October 18 visit Ruth met Madame Shoumatoff, the Russian artist who was painting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s portrait when he died at Warm Springs on April 12, 1945. She was now in the midst of painting Mrs. Johnson’s portrait, and on this Sunday she rode with the Secret Service man who picked up the Grahams in Austin. En route to the ranch, Ruth and Madame Shoumatoff discussed her leaving Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and Grigori Efimovich Rasputin.

  “It is quite an experience to find oneself in a new country with nothing,” she told Ruth. “Suddenly one realizes one has absolutely nothing. It is a strange sensation, a sort of lightness. It’s a great privilege to be deprived of all one’s possessions when one is twenty and in good health.”

  Madame Shoumatoff’s father, the artist went on, had once ridden a train with Rasputin and conversed with him for two hours. He was a compelling personality, repulsively dirty but with strange, piercing eyes. Very light with small, dark pupils, she said. During this train ride, Rasputin claimed that as a young man he had committed every sin and was consummately evil. One day in a field, he had seen the glory of God and he repented. When Madame Shoumatoff’s father asked him bluntly about the stories of his immorality, his debauchery, Rasputin replied as the train lumbered on, “I repen
ted once. I can sin and repent again.”

  As their car carried them farther away from Austin, Ruth wondered aloud if Rasputin could have been possessed by demons.

  “But of course,” Madame Shoumatoff replied. “One knows, but one cannot speak of certain things in polite society.”

  In contrast with some of the more prominent people Ruth had met, she found Madame Shoumatoff interested in others, and therefore interesting. Perhaps for this same reason Ruth held Mrs. Johnson in high esteem. In the former first lady, Ruth found a kindred spirit, and the two would remain close for the rest of their lives. Mrs. Johnson was a kind, gracious woman, lacking the veneer of self-importance one might expect of a president’s wife. She was humble, almost self-effacing, aggressive in her interest in others and quick to steer the interest away from herself. Beneath a soft exterior was a fortitude and intelligence, a keen perception, that was all the more powerful because it usually went unnoticed.

  “Sometimes beautiful women develop from adjusting to difficult men,” Ruth noted in her journal.

  The two women became friends. Both knew the pressure of having the world view them with expectation and curiosity. “I don’t want to be anybody’s role model, don’t think I’m that good,” explained Mrs. Johnson. “And Ruth wouldn’t want to be a role model, but you are forced into it willy-nilly.”

  It was a winter morning in Richmond, Virginia, and the former first lady was seated on an indigo couch on the second floor of the governor’s mansion, where she was visiting her son-in-law Governor Chuck Robb, her daughter Lynda, and the grandchildren. Mrs. Johnson’s hair was a bit grayer; she was erect, yet unassuming, dressed in a navy skirt and creamy satin blouse, and weary from greeting various groups touring the mansion.

  She was a troublesome interview, especially for someone twenty-four years old and writing a first book. More interested in asking questions about Ruth than in answering them, she was masterful at shifting the focus from herself to others, including this interviewer. Mrs. Johnson said she had unsuccessfully tried for years to learn more about her friend Ruth. The problem was that because of their husbands, the two women could rarely get a word in edgewise. It may also be that they were so much alike, neither would focus on herself.