Billy Graham arrived at precisely the right moment. Some who jammed the interview room at the National Press Club looked as if they might be first-assignment reporters for their church’s weekly newsletter, but most had the countenance and equipment of men and women accustomed to confronting the familiar figures who provide grist for the evening news and the morning editions in the nation’s capital. Still, even those well-seasoned veterans seemed to acknowledge the sheer physical presence radiated by the world’s most famous preacher, a man who is by almost any measure the most successful evangelist in Christian history.
As Graham and his small retinue took their places at a table, it was hard not to be surprised that despite his six-foot-three-inch height, his shoulders are rather narrow, his chest thin, and his legs, outlined when he crosses them in a loose-jointed way, almost skinny; only the large expressive hands seem suited to a titan. But crowning this spindly frame is that most distinctive of heads, with the profile for which God created granite, the perpetual glowing tan, the flowing hair, the towering forehead, the square jaw, the eagle’s brow and eyes, and the warm smile that has melted hearts, tamed opposition, and subdued skeptics on six continents.
After a press-club welcome and warm praise from the cochairs of the 1986 Greater Washington Crusade, Billy Graham took center stage. With a manner that suggested he still marveled that a simple country preacher found favor with famous and powerful people, he recalled how legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn arranged for him to use the Capitol steps for the closing service of his 1952 crusade, mentioned that Ben Bradlee asked what the Washington Post could do to help the present effort (“I told him that all we want is the first headline every day for eight days”), revealed that he had discussed the crusade at private dinners with President and Mrs. Reagan, Vice-President and Mrs. Bush, and Secretary of State George Shultz and at meetings with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and other cabinet members. He told of an international conference his organization would host that summer at a cost of more than 20 million dollars and revealed an ambitious plan to use satellite technology to preach the gospel simultaneously to virtually the entire world. Then, after lamenting the return of the Elmer Gantry image among television preachers, Billy spoke of his anguish over continuing racism, his concern for the hungry and homeless, and his determination to do what he could to foster bilateral nuclear disarmament and world peace.
When he opened the floor for questioning, noting ahead of time that he would “sort of beat around the bush” on purely political issues, Graham displayed a well-honed skill at fielding and finessing what turned out to be a quite routine set of inquiries. Forty minutes later, as the reporters packed up their gear, Graham’s lifetime friend and primary gatekeeper T. W. Wilson, drew public relations specialist Larry Ross into a corridor for a quick assessment. They agreed the conference had been a bit of a letdown. Graham had prepared for a tough session and got nothing to hit but softballs. None of it would win much airtime or newspaper space. They also registered disappointment over a Washington Post article that appeared that morning. “That guy spent two hours with Billy, but it didn’t reflect it.” They had higher hopes for a New York Times story because the reporter was a Christian. “Give the Times, USA Today, and the other big papers all the time they need,” Wilson said. “Try to spare Billy from the others. We need to move out of here as soon as possible and get over to CNN.”
Two days before the crusade would begin, Graham met with his “team” for a serve-yourself continental breakfast in a conference room at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel in Alexandria. All but he and two or three of his closest aides stayed at the Marriott; to protect himself from a potentially endless parade of supplicants, Graham nearly always maintains separate quarters, taking most meals in his room. Typically, he stays in a comfortable suite in a good hotel, but lest the press find out and create an unfavorable impression, he seldom accepts the ultraluxurious suites pressed on him by admiring hoteliers. The precrusade team breakfast is one of the few occasions when most staff members will see him, except on the crusade platform. In public Graham wears well-tailored suits that give him the look of a statesman or an investment banker. Here, among his friends, some of whom have worked with him for forty years, he sported his favorite informal outfit: moccasin-style gum-soled shoes, nondescript gray trousers, and an off-the-rack bright blue blazer. His hair, as usual, needed trimming and would have benefited either from a new application of Grecian Formula 16 (a concession to television rather than vanity) or simple recognition that longevity is one of his greatest assets, of which a mane of gray would be a fitting symbol. Most of the men on his staff appeared to have chosen their clothes for utility rather than style. Several sported toupees; only one had bothered to try for a match with the texture and color of his own hair. They make up one of the most efficient and effective event-producing organizations in America; they remind one of the Lions Club in Dothan, Alabama. The women, mostly wives and secretaries, cut a similar figure: neat but unflashy, competent but ever friendly, well able to take care of themselves but accustomed by ethos and experience to attend to the needs of others. As a group, these pleasant, unassuming, thoroughly dedicated men and women represent the elite of Evangelical Christianity and the middle of the middle class.
Graham opened the meeting with a few words about the importance of the crusade, then relinquished the chair to Sterling Huston, director of North American Crusades for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). A trim, diplomatic man who favors precise speech and is ever at pains to shine the best possible light on the evangelist and the association, Huston urged the team to regard its interaction with the Marriott staff as a kind of ministry, taking care to display a consistently courteous and friendly attitude and inviting them to the crusade services. On a practical note, he reminded them that the hotel restaurant’s cold breakfast buffet would provide as much as they wanted to eat, with plenty of cereal and fresh fruit at about half the cost of the hot buffet.
There followed a series of brisk reports, most packed with statistics, in which various team members summed up the preparation and current status of the aspects of the crusade under their direction. Washington crusade director Elwyn Cutler, one of several BGEA staffers who move to cities a year or two in advance to oversee the development of committees and other crusade preparations, declared how amazing it had been “just to stand back and see how the Lord worked, in ways beyond human understanding, to bring to the front the leadership He wanted for this crusade.” To illustrate his point, various team members told how sixteen major committees, all carefully integrated and headed by black and white cochairs, had organized 8,000 volunteers into an elaborate network of prayer, Bible study, and work groups. Workers had issued over 500,000 personal invitations and distributed 400,000 packets of promotional material to homes in the Greater Washington area. Thousands of small prayer groups had met regularly for months, and thousands more who belonged to national “prayer chains” had implored God to smile on this effort. Nearly 4,000 people had been taught how to counsel those who would “come forward” at the crusade services, and another thousand would lead “nurture groups” for new converts after the crusade ended. The Billy Graham School of Evangelism, an intensive training program held in conjunction with every Graham crusade, would enroll 1,750 pastors from 79 denominations and all 50 states in a five-day program designed to help them become more effective evangelists in their home communities. In similar fashion, other team members reported on special efforts to minister to blacks, young people, college students, military personnel, political leaders, and prisoners, and on the Love-in-Action program that collects food for disbursement to the crusade city’s hungry and homeless.
As a capstone to this triumphalist litany, United States Senate chaplain Richard Halverson spoke almost worshipfully of Graham’s visits on Capitol Hill. “When Billy Graham comes to the Capitol,” he said, “suddenly, the Senate and Congress are unimportant. To me, it’s a miracle. Wherever Billy is, there is the gospel of Christ. Everybody knows what he stands for, so he says it without a word. Just yesterday, after he opened the Senate with prayer, it was almost impossible to get away. Pages wanted to get his autograph. Senators kept coming off the floor to talk with him. It was just absolutely exciting. Here is a man who personifies the gospel of Christ, the love of God in Christ. Wherever he goes, all over the world, it’s not like they are receiving just him; it’s like they are receiving Christ. I wish that were true of more of us.”
Such a potent witness apparently has its downside. Graham observed that “the Devil is also at work,” citing as proof the afflictions that had befallen three of the men who had stood at his side in virtually every crusade since the 1940s. His longtime song leader, Cliff Barrows, crusade pianist Tedd Smith, and Associate Evangelist Grady Wilson, a high school friend who had been present when Graham preached his first sermon in 1936, were all ailing. “I’m sure this is an attack of Satan,” Graham said. “We’ve had a number of things happen that have no other explanation to me, and we need to build a wall of prayer.” At his direction, the people at each table began to pray, softly lifting petitions for the matters that burdened their hearts. As the room filled with the earnest sounds of heaven-directed entreaties, Billy Graham prayed especially for “those who think they are not interested in religion but are, for those who laugh at cocktail hours but are not happy.” Others prayed for the hotel staff, for team members out visiting prisons, and for those trying to solve parking problems around the downtown convention center. When enough time had passed to ensure that most key needs had been covered, Chaplain Halverson brought the meeting to a close by asking everyone in the room to touch Billy Graham or someone who was touching him. Then, as they linked in an unbroken chain of support, Halverson offered a fervent prayer commending the evangelist to the Almighty as “Mr. Gospel, the incarnation of the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
An old black prophet shuffling along inside a word-jammed sandwich board tried to convince the thousands who streamed past him into the convention center that Billy Graham was an aide-de-camp to the Antichrist, but they did not buy it. To them, as to Chaplain Halverson, he was the living symbol of Evangelical Christianity, the man who had preached Christ to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and now brought his message to the capital of what many still regarded as the Redeemer Nation, the “nation with the soul of a church.”
Inside, some grabbed Cokes or hot dogs at concession stands. Others lingered at tables set up in the center’s cavernous lobbies, browsing over devotional guides, souvenir picture books, how-to manuals on personal evangelism, and rapidly shrinking stacks of volumes by and about Graham and sundry relatives and associates. For the most part, the assembling multitude was solidly middle- and working-class: clean, neat, and conforming to standards of dress and decorum they felt best reflected their self-image as the good, decent people who affirm and embody the core values of American society. A well-schooled usher corps funneled folks into the stands or to special areas for the deaf or for those who spoke one of the eight foreign languages into which the service was being translated.
In the cramped quarters of a TV-production truck parked at a loading dock off the main hall, a small crew checked monitors and controls as they prepared to transform a live service into a television program that would be seen by millions a few weeks later. Meanwhile, in one of the center’s many conference rooms, Elwyn Cutler gave instructions and seating assignments to the ministers and other professional churchmen whose contribution to the crusade would be honored by a spot on the platform, a tangible symbol of importance to massage their egos, impress their parishioners, and consequently boost attendance. In another room, comfortably furnished with sofas and chairs and stocked with an abundance of soft drinks and snacks, Billy Graham spent the last few minutes before the service visiting with former District of Columbia mayor Walter Washington, Mayor Marion S. Barry, Jr., and Vice-President George Bush.
When the appointed moment approached, T. W. Wilson unobtrusively indicated it was time for this inner circle to join Elwyn Cutler’s larger group in its procession to the platform. Inside the arena the choir fell silent and attention shifted to the stage, where the organ, piano, and synthesizer sounded the first notes of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Moments later, as Graham and his party mounted the rear steps and came into view, 25,000 people rose in sustained ovation.
Because it was the opening service, introductions ran somewhat longer than usual, but they provided a good view of the thin line between Church and State and of Billy Graham’s position as an icon not just of American Christianity but of America itself. Mayor Washington, noting that he had raised the first dollar to build the magnificent convention center, announced that Billy Graham came to Washington, like Queen Esther in the Bible, “for such a time as this.” Mayor Barry, observing that it was he who brought the ninety-eight-million-dollar facility to completion, praised Graham’s stand against apartheid in South Africa and racism in America, then assumed the evangelist’s support of the mayor’s own programs regarding drugs, unemployment, the rehabilitation of prisoners, and sex education for young people. To close, Barry wrapped his own career in the mantle of God’s providence, noting that his rise from a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi to the leadership of this great city and a spot on the platform with Billy Graham proved that “the Lord moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.” George Bush provided the final cachet. “We welcome to America’s city,” he said, “America’s pastor, Dr. Billy Graham.” He affirmed his own belief in the separation of Church and State but insisted the nation would be strong only so long as its faith is strong, and he thanked Graham for his role in reawakening the faith of citizens in “this one nation, under God, the last, best hope of man on earth.”
Other preliminaries included a stirring religiopatriotic song and a low-key collection. Then, just before Graham spoke, “America’s beloved singer of sacred songs,” George Beverly Shea, a gentle bear of a man who became the first member of Graham’s team in 1944, stepped to the microphone, anchored himself to the pulpit with both hands, and sang, “In times like these we need the Bible. . . . This rock is Jesus . . . Yes, He’s the one.” At seventy-seven, Shea sounded twenty years younger, his deep rich voice rolling out over the auditorium and settling on the audience like a down comforter.
With no further fanfare—at most services, Graham receives no introduction whatever—America’s Pastor began to speak. He commended local officials for giving “the greatest cooperation we have ever received in any crusade we have ever held,” announced that on Tuesday night he would talk about “The Richest and Sexiest Man Who Ever Lived,” and urged everyone to make a special attempt to fill RFK Stadium for the final service the following Sunday. Then, apparently because he feels a preacher ought to tell a few jokes to show he is a regular fellow, he related a couple of the small handful of stories he has been repeating for decades. Neither was a four-star anecdote, but the crowd laughed generously, as crowds often do when famous noncomedians tell jokes.
The sermon, when he finally got to it, was a classic piece of Graham homiletics. Its theme was Christ and its five subheadings were the Creative Christ, the Compassionate Christ, the Crucified Christ, the Conquering Christ, and the Coming Christ. As in virtually all his sermons, he recited a laundry list of problems: poverty, drugs, broken hearts, emptiness, guilt, loneliness, spiritual blindness, and fear. He knew these were problems and that secular remedies were bound to fail because one of the greatest biochemists in the world and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Harvard president Derek Bok had told him so. He had other evidence as well: “a Roman Catholic priest studying for a Ph.D. in Chicago . . . Simon LeBon of the rock group Duran Duran . . . a girl in Japan . . . the managing partner of one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms . . . a new movie out . . . a recent Gallup poll . . . a magazine cover story . . . a taxicab driver on Donahue . . . a letter that came to me last month. . . . “And most important of all, “the Bible says. . . .”
To no one’s surprise, Graham proclaimed, with monumental conviction and certainty, that the sole and sufficient answer to these problems is Jesus Christ. In the early years of his ministry, he spoke with such volume and driving rapidity that journalists dubbed him “God’s Machine Gun.” He can still generate considerable intensity when the topic and occasion demand it, but his style has become almost conversational, and the conversation has a tendency to ramble despite his increasing use of full manuscripts. Nonetheless, many of the familiar gestures—the clenched fist, the pointing finger, the ambidextrous slashes, the two-pistol punctuation, the hands drawn down to the Bible like twin lightning bolts—are still there and still riveting in their effect.
The sermon moved inexorably to its goal: the “invitation”—to accept Christ for the first time, to receive assurance that one’s prior acceptance and salvation are still under warranty, or to acknowledge a backslid condition and to rededicate oneself to walking a straighter and narrower path. “Life is uncertain,” he said. “God does not give us the date of our death.” And then, the words that bring virtually every sermon of his to an end: “I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seat and come and stand here in front of the platform, and say by your coming, ‘Tonight, I want Christ in my heart.’” As he suddenly fell silent, his head bowed in prayer, chin resting on right fist, elbow cradled in left hand, the convention center swelled with the simple melody and words of the quintessential invitation hymn:
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
And from every section of the auditorium, they came, they came. Serious of mien but devoid of tears or other overt signs of emotion, more than a thousand souls answered Billy Graham’s call to be washed in the blood of the Lamb.
The response pleased the crew in the television truck:
“Pan around and pull, [Camera] Three. Let them walk through. We want movement. Stand by, One. . . . Give me the shot with the aisles. A little further right. That’s nice.”
“Would you look at that! They’re still coming.”
The program would not air for several weeks, but Graham stepped back into the pulpit to say, “To you watching on television, at home, in a hotel room, in a college dormitory, wherever you are, call that telephone number you see on the screen.” Then, to the “inquirers” who had streamed into a large open space immediately in front of the platform, he said:
You have not come to Billy Graham. I have no special powers. I’m just another human being like you. I’m just the messenger. The message comes from God. You have asked for his forgiveness. I want to tell you on the authority of Scripture that he will give you that forgiveness. Not because you deserve it, but because Christ died for you. And he rose again, and he’s alive, and he’s willing to come into your heart now by the Holy Spirit and give you a new power, a new strength, a new joy, and a new peace.
He then led them through the “sinner’s prayer”:
O God, . . . I am a sinner. . . . I’m sorry for my sins. . . . I’m willing to turn from my sins. . . . I receive Christ as my savior. . . . I confess him as Lord. . . . From this moment on. . . . I want to follow him . . . and serve him . . . in the fellowship of his church. . . . In Christ’s name, Amen.
This ostensibly life-changing transaction so simply accomplished, he urged them to read the Bible every day, to pray regularly, and to witness for Christ by inviting others to become Christians and by manifesting a loving and helpful spirit, particularly across racial lines. Finally, he encouraged them to affiliate with a church and worship regularly, not just stay home and watch TV preachers: “Many are far better than I’ll ever be, but Christians need to worship together.” With that, Graham left the platform and his associates took control, making sure all inquirers were matched with counselors who would help them clarify and confirm their decisions. As the last remaining strays found shepherds, the area began to hum with quiet conversation and prayer. Counselors helped their charges fill out decision cards and gave them a booklet entitled The Living Christ, a copy of the Gospel according to John, a brief Bible correspondence course, and suggestions for further study. The cards would reveal that few inquirers were confirmed pagans. Most already had some connection to a church or had come to the crusade as the guest of a church member.
Within minutes, runners rushed the decision cards to rooms where a Co-Labor Corps of over two hundred volunteers waited to feed them into an elaborate follow-up procedure designed to link them to cooperating pastors and channel them into local congregations. The head of this operation, Dr. Robert L. Maddox, who had served as Jimmy Carter’s liaison to the religious community before becoming executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, admitted that the crusade could not be expected to reshape Greater Washington. “Billy will go home next week and the city will swallow him up and the effects will be gone. But as a matter of fact, in the lives of individuals, it may be absolutely pivotal. I have seen that happen. It won’t rock Washington, D.C., for the Lord, but it might make some congressman struggling with key legislation think a little bit differently. Last night, I watched two or three guys that I know who grew up out here in Virginia and were as segregationist as they could be. They were working right alongside black people without any regard to color at all. When this is over, white churches will still do their thing and black churches will do theirs, and there is not going to be any great crossing of that line. But there will be greater understanding. It could have some impact.”
Back on the sidewalk outside the convention center, the old prophet had retired for the night, but a squad of grim-faced young men in slacks and white shirts and severe long-haired women in ankle-length homemade dresses passed out cheaply printed pamphlets that condemned Graham for his apostate theology, coming down especially hard on his faulty understanding of the purpose and proper mode of baptism. Most people declined their publications and tried to ignore them, but one Graham supporter vociferously responded to their challenge. While they argued, a policeman who had asked a departing counselor for an inquirer’s packet and had, after a brief conversation, “trusted Christ,” held up his hand to stop traffic for one of the last groups to leave the building. He was singing a gospel song.