As expected, the New York crusade made the breach with the Fundamentalists permanent. Early in 1958, John R. Rice, the Bob Joneses (an equally fractious Bob junior had joined his father’s battle with Billy) and a number of lesser evangelists signed a pledge never to accept meetings sponsored by non-orthodox groups. Graham not only ignored this show of purity but offended his critics even more deeply by courting and receiving new levels of approval for his May 1958 crusade in the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The crusade received the endorsement of both the Oakland and San Francisco Council of Churches, the Episcopal Diocese of California, and the Presbytery of San Francisco, and enjoyed the participation of numerous other non-Evangelical churches as well. Some extreme liberals took the usual potshots, with the usual lack of effect. Several dozen Fundamentalist pastors, mostly Baptists, opposed and attacked the crusade, but their efforts attracted such meager support that in the words of one observer, they “became quiescent.” Clearly, Graham’s decision to occupy the middle ground had been a successful one. Christianity Today said of the San Francisco crusade, “The great central segment of Protestantism was committed to a mass evangelistic effort as never before. . . . There was a polarization of extremes; many of those opposed at the beginning were more so at the ending. Yet in the center, there seems to have taken place a wonderful warming and softening of hearts. . . . A real secret of Billy Graham’s power was manifest—his ability to bring believers into touch with each other by omitting the things which divide them.”
For a brief period, Graham attempted to repair, or at least to justify, the breach with the Fundamentalists. In a twelve-page open letter released during the San Francisco crusade, he urged his critics to realize that “many men are mistakenly called ‘liberal’ or ‘modernist’ by uninformed Evangelicals. I have found in my contacts that hundreds of men are warm, Godly men who hold to the essentials of the Christian faith but who for various reasons do not want to be identified with modern-day Evangelicalism, its organizations and institutions. . . . We should be extremely careful that we do not become as the Pharisees of old, thinking we have a ‘corner’ on the gospel.” The spiritual defects of extreme liberalism, he warned, are no more odious than those that cause the “bitterness, jealousy, rancor, division, strife, hardness, a seeking after revenge, and vindictiveness that characterizes a few fundamentalists.” Apart from this one effort, Graham restrained himself and responded to the long vitriolic letters he received from McIntire and Jones with no more than brief notes. “I soon learned there was no way I could answer them,” he recalled. “But I’d always write back and say, ‘Thank you for your letter. I’ve noted its contents and God bless you,’ or something to that effect.” He could not recall ever meeting Carl McIntire, but he did make one attempt to effect a reconciliation with Dr. Bob. While meeting informally in Birmingham, Alabama, with a group of twenty or so men who had fallen out of favor with Jones, Graham learned that Jones, who had been to nearby Dothan to inspect a statue of himself that he had recently commissioned, was staying in the same hotel. Graham asked his old adversary if he could call on him in his room: “I wanted to tell him that I still loved him and would answer any question he had about my ministry. It wasn’t an organized meeting; some of us just came in to visit. I remember Dr. Bob was in bed, and he was as nervous as a cat.” One participant recalled that Graham greeted Jones warmly and told him he was “looking great.” Instead of returning the compliment, Jones harrumphed, “You’re on your way down, Billy.” Graham said, “If that’s the way God wants it, then it’s settled.” The reason, Jones said, was because “your converts don’t last.” Graham turned the other cheek: “I don’t have any converts. I have never led anybody to Christ. Missionaries can say they have done that; I can’t. There are so many factors—prayer, Bible classes, pastors, hard work by lots of people. I come along and point to the door. I can’t claim any as mine.” Graham’s self-effacing responses fell on stony ground. “We’re taking over evangelism in America, Billy,” Jones announced, “Jack Shuler is going to be the man now. I know, because I trained him.” Eventually, the men in the room shook hands and prayed together, but the hoped-for reconciliation did not occur. When Jones died a few years later, Bob Junior took the trouble to send T. W. Wilson a telegram informing him that neither he nor, by clear implication, any of Graham’s colleagues would be welcome at the funeral. “Dr. Bob had a terrific philosophy,” Graham observed years later, “but he didn’t live up to it. He said, if a hound dog barks for Jesus, then I’ll be for him,’ but when I came along and was the hound dog, he wasn’t for me. . . . I suspect it was a little like Saul and David. Saul had slain his thousands and David his ten thousands. But I don’t want to be judgmental. I believe Dr. Bob loved the Lord.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It shows me how to act as an older man.”
The loss of Fundamentalist support disappointed Graham, but he and his New Evangelical colleagues had clearly won the war, and he had emerged as the most prominent figure in a revitalized national social movement. Harold Ockenga, who could legitimately claim to be the father of this movement, explicitly identified Graham as “the spokesman of the convictions and ideals of the New Evangelicalism.” Some Evangelicals remained wary, fearful that worldly success in the form of larger numbers and popular recognition might corrupt their purity. The Moody Monthly, for example, which had regularly extolled Graham’s triumphs, omitted all mention of the San Francisco crusade and maintained a cautious attitude toward the evangelist for another four or five years. This reticence, however, was more than offset by Charles Fuller’s naming Graham to the board of Fuller Seminary in 1958, thus forging a visible bond between the leading evangelists of two generations. In retaliation, Bob Jones took Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour program off WMUU.
If some Evangelicals worried that success might spoil their young champion, others delighted in his triumphs and basked in the respectability he had won for their movement. When newspaper and television reporters asked his opinions, he articulated Evangelical beliefs and values in a manner that made them plausible, perhaps even convincing, to mainstream America. When talk-show hosts interviewed him, Evangelicals appreciated that one of their own was accorded the same respect enjoyed by movie stars and sports heroes and famous authors and prominent politicians. When the Gallup poll repeatedly listed him among the “most admired men” in the nation, as it had every year since 1955, they felt their own judgments about him had been confirmed by the populace as a whole. And when Ralph Edwards retold his story on This Is Your Life, with Richard Nixon as a participant, they felt their own lives—-which were, after all, not radically different from his—had been declared legitimate and worthy of honor.
Graham took his celebrity seriously. Not only did he persist in his determination to keep his life free of recognizable stain, but he also showed remarkable grace and apparently indefatigable patience toward those who encountered him in more private circumstances. To protect himself against being nibbled into fragments by well-wishers and autograph seekers and desperate souls who sought his ministrations, he seldom ate in well-known restaurants or took the long walks that had been a lifelong habit. During crusades he spent most of his unscheduled time in his hotel room, at the homes of friends, or on the golf course, which offered him a chance to relax, socialize, and get some exercise without constant interruptions. Beavan and other associates served as gatekeepers, winnowing those who sought an audience to a manageable few and politely attempting to discourage strangers from accosting him unannounced. Graham wanted and needed these hedges against constant intrusion, but whenever an admirer or supplicant breached the thin protective barrier, his long habit of wanting to please overpowered any impulse toward resentment. Lane Adams recalled an airplane flight during which “the copilot, the engineer, all the stewardesses, and at least half the passengers at some time got up and came forward into the section where we were and said, ‘I don’t want to bother you, Mr. Graham, but I just have to shake your hand.’ Billy was exhausted and was sitting by the window, hoping to get a little rest, but he always stood up and shook their hand. He bumped his head on the overhead compartment nearly every time, but each time he acted just thrilled to meet them and to listen to their inane comments. Finally, the captain came back and said, ‘We’d like to show you what the cockpit of a DC-7 looks like.’ He said, ‘I’d love that.’ Later, I said, ‘Be honest with me. How many cockpits of DC-7’s have you seen?’ He said, ‘I’ve lost count. But I didn’t want to disappoint him.’ He had probably been in planes the pilot had never seen, but that’s just the way Billy is.”
Celebrity impinged on the Grahams’ family life as well. Their mountainside manse was hard to find, and thoughtful neighbors learned not to give directions to curious pilgrims, but some inevitably made their way up the narrow, steep road to the house, where they knocked to ask for directions, pretending to be lost, or just wandered around in the front yard, hoping to get a glimpse of the famous evangelist or some member of his family. Ruth tended to ignore them. If Billy happened to be home, she seldom informed him they had visitors; if he spotted them, he often went outside to greet them and chat for a few minutes. Eventually, however, he agreed to the installation of a security fence with electronic gates and acquired two German shepherd guard dogs, Belshazzar and Samson, whose alleged viciousness seems never to have been put to a definitive test. Ruth understood that she could do little to protect her husband from his own gregariousness, but she steadfastly refused to expose her children to public gaze. They were not available to make comments—charming, revealing, or merely childlike—to inquiring reporters. They were not trotted out on crusade platforms to give their personal testimony or to tell adoring crowds what a wonderful man their father was. And they were subjected to a rather stern and consistent discipline at home. GiGi observed that “because she had full-time help, Mother didn’t get upset about dirty clothes or little things like that. But she was strict, and she did spank us. I got spanked nearly every day. Franklin, too. Anne didn’t seem to need it. She had those great big blue eyes that filled up with tears, and Mother’s heart would melt. Also, I was usually the instigator of the trouble anyway. Mother was fair. She was particularly strict on moral issues, and respect for adults was a moral issue for her. My son calls me ‘Dude.’ My mother would not have allowed that. But she had a great sense of humor, and we had a lot of fun. I have no memories of a screaming mother.” Ruth would be pleased at that memory, since she sometimes worried that she was becoming shrewish. In one diary entry, she reflected, “The children misbehave. I reprimand them more sharply—more probably, peevishly. The very tone of the voice irritates them. (I know because if it were used on me it would irritate me.) They answer back, probably in the same tone. I turn on them savagely. (I hate to think how often. And how savage a loving mother can be at times.) And I snap, ‘Don’t you speak to your mother like that. It isn’t respectful.’ Nothing about me—actions, tone of voice, etc.—commanded respect. It doesn’t mean I am to tolerate sass or back talk. But then I must be very careful not to inspire it either.”
When Billy was home, which was less than half the time, much of Ruth’s disciplinary regimen went out the window. “Mother would have us in a routine,” GiGi recalled. “She monitored our TV watching, made us do our homework, and put us to bed at a set time. Then, when Daddy was home, he’d say, ‘Oh, let them stay up and watch this TV show with me,’ or he’d give us extra spending money for candy and gum. Mother always handled it with grace. She never said, ‘Well, here comes Bill. Everything I’m trying to do is going to be all messed up.’ She just said, ‘Whatever your Daddy says is fine with me.’ We just slipped in and out of two different routines. As a mother, I look at it with wonder now, but it wasn’t an issue. It was just two routines.” It was also a different routine for Ruth. “They were always very affectionate,” GiGi noted. “Whenever he was at home, they were always hugging or holding hands, or he’d have her sitting in his lap. They mutually adored one another, and it was very evident. They still do.”
GiGi offered a possible explanation of her father’s more relaxed approach. “Once, he disciplined me for something I did. I don’t even remember what it was about, but we had some disagreement in the kitchen. I ran up the stairs, and when I thought I was out of range, I stomped my feet. Then I ran into my room and locked my door. He came up the stairs, two at a time it sounded like, and he was angry. When I finally opened the door, he pulled me across the room, sat me on the bed, and gave me a real tongue-lashing. I said, ‘Some dad you are! You go away and leave us all the time!’ Immediately, his eyes filled with tears. It just broke my heart. That whole scene was always a part of my memory bank after that. I realized he was making a sacrifice too. But it does seem like he didn’t discipline us much after that.”
Over time, Ruth also became more flexible, reducing the number of her demands on the children to those she felt were essential. She claimed to have obtained some of her most effective child-rearing techniques from a dog-training manual whose directives included keeping commandments simple and at a minimum, seeing to it that all commands were obeyed, rewarding obedience with praise, and being consistent. Even then, GiGi found it difficult to stay in line. According to Ruth, her eldest daughter “tried harder to be good than anyone—but couldn’t.” Once, after a day in which she had been a particular trial, she asked at bedtime, “Mommy, have I been good enough today to go to heaven?” Ruth wrote in her diary, “Now how much should I impress on her Salvation by Grace when really for a child of her disposition one could be tempted to think salvation by works would be more effective on her behavior?” Whatever her faults, GiGi did display a talent for practical theology. Ruth once caught her slapping docile Anne on the cheek, insisting that she had a duty to turn the other for equal assault. On another occasion, to resolve an argument among the three girls over ownership of pictures cut from the TV Guide, Anne and Bunny prayed and decided they should burn all the pictures rather than let them become a source of conflict. GiGi countered by announcing that Jesus would not mind if they kept the better pictures. In 1958, when a fifth child, Ned (a contraction of Nelson Edman, after Nelson Bell and former Wheaton president V. Raymond Edman), was born, GiGi, just shy of her thirteenth birthday, was shipped off to Hampden-Dubose boarding school in Florida. T.W. and Grady Wilson had both sent their children to the school, and GiGi’s best friend was going, which made the decision seem attractive, but GiGi admitted she never adjusted well and “cried for four years,” adding that “when Anne went away and cried for a few days, they let her come back home, but I had to stay all four years. I didn’t like it, I was scared, and I missed my family, but the Lord led them, and I can’t thank him enough now. I married young, and it was great preparation time for me. The Lord knew.”
Whatever Billy Graham’s private feelings about fame, and even his most loyal and admiring friends acknowledge he does not find it entirely onerous, he instinctively understood its value to his ministry. He also understood that his ties to the Eisenhower-Nixon administration were his optimum public credential, and he worked assiduously to maintain them. In public he continued to insist that “I don’t think politics is part of my work. My work is winning persons for Christ. I follow [politics] as closely as I do religion, but I never take sides.” In private he continued to act like a Republican strategist. In December 1957 he told Nixon, “I think your political stock is extremely high, although I fear there are many factors working against any Republican being elected in 1960. Senator Kennedy is getting a fantastic buildup in certain elements of the press. He would indeed be a formidable foe. Contrary to popular opinion, when the chips are down, I think the religious issue would be very strong and might conceivably work in your behalf.” A few months later, he observed that “there is a growing possibility of a split deep within Democratic ranks on the race issue. Therefore, I think there is every reason for at least mild optimism.”
Graham’s critics not only scoffed at his claims to neutrality but explicitly charged him with cozying up to the White House as a way of boosting his own image and stature. Billy wrestled inwardly with both critiques, probably recognizing the elements of truth in each and attempting to convince himself as well as others that they were not valid. In a letter asking Nixon to address a Presbyterian meeting, he noted that he turned down most requests to intercede with the President or Vice-President lest he be accused of exploiting their friendship but justified this exception on the grounds that “it would give you an excellent platform to say some of the things you would like to say along moral and spiritual lines.” In similar fashion, just as he had importuned Truman to show up at a service during the 1952 Washington crusade, he had asked Eisenhower on several occasions to make an appearance at Madison Square Garden, venturing that “I am convinced that if you visited Madison Square Garden some evening in August, it would become one of the most historic events of your administration and would leave an indelible impression on the minds and hearts of millions, not only in this country but abroad.” To his disappointment, the President passed up the chance to make history.
Inevitably, standing close to the center of power involved Graham in the struggles that occupy power’s attention. In September, just as the New York crusade was drawing to a close, schools were about to open and dozens of southern cities and towns were in turmoil as citizens tried to deal with a series of federal court orders designed to end school desegregation. In Graham’s hometown of Charlotte, fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts, a black minister’s daughter, was driven away by a barrage of sticks and rocks when she tried to enter previously all-white Harding High School. Her plight moved Billy to write her a stiffly awkward letter of encouragement. “Dear Miss Counts,” he wrote, “Democracy demands that you hold fast and carry on. The world of tomorrow is looking for leaders and you have been chosen. Those cowardly whites against you will never prosper because they are un-American and unfit to lead. Be of good faith. God is not dead. He will see you through. This is your one great chance to prove to Russia that democracy still prevails. Billy Graham, D.D.” It was not Charlotte, however, that drew Graham’s primary attention. In what some regarded as a self-conscious strategic test of resistance to federal demands, the focus of the civil rights crisis shifted from the Deep South to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus (who had attended a crusade service in the Garden earlier in the summer) provoked a showdown in the confrontation created by the federal government’s determination to enforce the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation order and the stubborn refusal of southern states to obey it. The mayor, the school board, and a substantial proportion of Little Rock’s ministers declared themselves in favor of obeying a federal judge’s explicit directive to delay integration of the city’s schools no longer, but on the pretext that he feared an outbreak of violence if blacks sought to enter the all-white Central High School, Faubus deployed 270 members of the Arkansas National Guard to stop them. On the first day of school, no blacks appeared, but a white crowd raucously shouted its defiance of the court order. On the second day, when nine black students tried to enter, the troops turned them away, to the delight of a jeering crowd. President Eisenhower counseled restraint on all sides and informed Faubus that the federal government would not pay the Guard’s expenses and salary, since it was acting on behalf of the state of Arkansas, not the United States. In an obvious grandstanding effort, Faubus sent the President a wire accusing the FBI of tapping the phone lines to the executive mansion (a charge FBI director J. Edgar Hoover emphatically denied) and urging Ike to stop “unwarranted interference by Federal agents.” Eisenhower countered with his own wire, putting Faubus on notice that he intended to “uphold the Federal Constitution by every legal means.” The President’s press secretary, James Hagerty, told reporters that Eisenhower was firmly against the use of federal troops but left a bit of maneuvering room by acknowledging that the Commander in Chief had not anticipated a situation in which state troops would be used to bar children from attending school. To that, Faubus boasted, ambiguously but ominously, that Arkansas could defend itself, adding that at least half the southern states had vowed to help. In an attempt to break the impasse, Faubus flew to Newport, Rhode Island, where Eisenhower was vacationing, for a highly publicized meeting. The governor asked for a one-year cooling-off period; the President gave him until the following Monday to pull the troops out and allow the black students, who had already missed two weeks of classes, to enter Central High. Faubus withdrew the Guard as ordered and dispatched fifty Arkansas state troopers to help protect any black students who tried to enter the school. Hate groups flooded Little Rock with racist literature, the segregationist White Citizens’ Council announced it planned to hold anti-integration rallies, and pulpits rang with calls for calm and patience. When the nine students approached the school on Monday morning, September 23, a violent mob forced them to withdraw. Black and white newsmen, often lumped with Communists and the NAACP as outside agitators determined to stir up trouble, were attacked and twenty-four demonstrators were arrested.
Pressed for a comment, Billy Graham recommended that the white citizens of Little Rock submit to the court order: “It is the duty of every Christian, when it does not violate his relationship to God, to obey the law. I would urge them to do so in this case.” These words differed little from his earlier justification for having accepted segregated seating in his southern crusades and hardly constituted a ringing denunciation of discrimination. Graham also followed his practice of absolving most southerners of blame for the worst of the problems. The turmoil in Little Rock, he theorized, had been instigated by outsiders and was “giving the Communists one of their greatest [propaganda] weapons in years.” (In fact, Communist newspapers were paying close attention. Pravda clucked that Little Rock was showing the true face of “free America,” and a headline in the Italian Communist paper Unita, trumpeted, “SHAME OF ARKANSAS ENVELOPS AMERICA.”). Newspapers were not alone in their interest in Graham’s views on the Little Rock situation. With George Champion as intermediary, former Health, Education, and Welfare secretary Oveta Culp Hobby suggested that Graham consider a special nationwide broadcast on the need for peaceful integration. Billy also discussed the problem during a half-hour visit with Richard Nixon but would not reveal the substance of their conversation. Undoubtedly, Graham would have preferred to be out of the eye of this particular storm. If he said nothing or made excuses for southern racists, he risked losing the support of black Evangelicals and drawing the fire of white Christians committed to racial justice. If he spoke or acted in opposition to those resisting integration, he risked alienating a wide segment of his audience and support. But when the President, who had used him as a sounding board on racial questions for some time, called to tell him he was thinking of sending troops into Little Rock, Graham told him, “Mr. President, I think that is the only thing you can do. It is out of hand, and the time has come to stop it.” About an hour later, Nixon called to get a second reading on Graham’s inclination. Graham gave him the same answer he had given Eisenhower. That afternoon, a thousand troops of the 101st Airborne Division, together with additional members of the National Guard, rolled into Little Rock.
Graham revealed that he had been in touch with several Little Rock ministers and offered to visit the city if it appeared he could make some useful contribution. Some clergymen urged him to come to Little Rock, but Fundamentalists, who tended to be unsympathetic to both his racial views and his alleged doctrinal laxity, opposed any such visit on the grounds that it would just stir up more trouble. He chose to stay away, noting that he had “no intention of going there without an invitation.” This response may have been a model of thoughtful courtesy, and it surely reflected Graham’s distaste for conflict, but it hardly exemplified the stance of the biblical prophets, whose passion for justice sometimes took them into settings where their presence was not entirely welcome. Graham’s quite genuine but restrained support of the movement toward integration inevitably left many dissatisfied. Racists saw him as the critic and opponent that indeed he was. Those pushing hardest against the barriers to equality labeled him an equivocator and compromiser, always ready to step back from risking his popularity on a bold and courageous stand. And southern governors and other politicians, whatever their deepest feelings about integration, found it difficult to accept his siding with the federal government in the most notable challenge to the autonomy of the southern states since the Civil War. The disaffection of such a large segment of his constituency troubled him deeply, but he seems not to have doubted that the President had made the right decision, and for the right reasons. In a letter to Eisenhower a few weeks later, he gushed, “Just a note to say that you are about the most remarkable man in history. I think your going to church [Thanksgiving] morning sent a sigh of relief throughout the entire world. It also indicated to millions that your faith was in God.”
During the following two years, Graham’s growing reputation as an integrationist created both conflict and opportunity to set a positive example. He met each in the cautious, measured fashion that irritated his critics but kept him out of trouble. In the fall of 1958, he planned a rally on the lawn of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia, where he had held his first major southern crusade. Governor George Bell Timmerman, a hard-shell segregationist, opposed the rally on the grounds that allowing Graham to speak on state property would be tantamount to an official endorsement of racial mixing, the very sort of thing that had caused all the trouble in Little Rock. “While most Columbians were enjoying their sleep,” Timmerman solemnly reported, “I took this problem to my God in prayer and concluded that I should speak out in protest.” Despite this claim of divine warrant, some churchmen, including the pastor of the city’s largest Southern Baptist congregation, felt Graham should come to show the rest of the country that not all southerners shared the governor’s racist views. Rather than challenge Timmerman’s stand on segregation, however, Graham asserted that the purpose of his proposed visit to Columbia was to proclaim the gospel, not to promote integration. “I am certain,” he ventured, that “no citizen would object to people being won to Christ on the Capitol grounds.” This did not mollify the governor, who observed that having an evangelist speak on the statehouse lawn would violate the historic principle of the separation of Church and State—a principle South Carolinians had apparently not thought violated when in 1950 Governor Strom Thurmond, who had arranged for Graham to address the state legislature and public-school gatherings, proclaimed a “South Carolina Revival Rally Day” and dispatched a police escort to accompany him on a whirlwind preaching tour of the state. To Graham’s great relief, the impasse was broken and further conflict avoided when the commanding officer of Fort Jackson offered to host the rally on the army base. Billy told the press, “I certainly would not want to be a party to breaking any state laws” but refused further comment on the controversy surrounding the rally or the racial situation itself. Sixty thousand people attended the rally, described as “the first nonsegregated mass meeting in South Carolina’s history” and “the largest religious gathering ever held in the southeast.” Graham struck a gentle blow for integration when he introduced W. O. Vaught, Jr., a Baptist pastor who played a major role in restoring peace to Little Rock during the previous year’s racial turmoil, and commended him for having “stayed by his stuff.” But he also gave a prominent seat on the platform to former governor James Byrnes, an ardent foe of integration. During his sermon he commended Columbians for what he perceived to be a “warm friendship between the races,” an assessment that though perhaps accurate in some respects, ignored the clear fact that the conflict his visit had generated revealed some rather telling imperfections in that friendship. As usual, this moderate approach drew fire from both sides. John Sutherland Bonnell comforted him by writing, “The stand you took was very courageous and I believe truly Christian. Even the Christian Century had to take off its hat to you! I know that such a stand cost you a great deal in the matter of relations with some of the brethren in the South, but God will be able to use you even more effectively as the result.” Less sympathetic critics fastened on Governor Byrnes’s presence on the platform and contended that Graham should have stuck to his plan of meeting on the capitol steps, even though it might have provoked a riot.
About the same time, racists bombed the newly integrated high school in Clinton, Tennessee. Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson took the lead in raising money to rebuild the school and challenged Graham to join him. Graham not only accepted but agreed to serve on the executive committee of the Americans Against Bombs of Bigotry. He also pointedly observed that bombings of schools and churches were “symptomatic of the type of thing that brought Hitler to power. It could eventually lead to a union between forces of crime and hate groups which would lead to anarchy. . . . Every Christian should take his stand against these outrages.” In mid-December, he went to Clinton to speak at a fund-raising rally. Addressing an integrated audience of approximately 5,000 in the badly damaged school’s still-standing gymnasium, Graham called for “tolerance, forgiveness, cool heads and warm hearts,” noting that “hot heads and cool hearts never solved anything,” and declaring that “we must not even hate the depraved minds who commit acts of hatred and violence, but we must have the grace to forgive them.” He further urged that southern Christians allow neither integration nor segregation “to become our Gospel. Our Gospel must be Jesus Christ and the Cross.” When he offered the invitation at the close of his address, which Pearson described as “a fine and inspiring sermon,” no one moved for a full two minutes. Then, the dam broke and scores of people streamed forward, including, according to one account, “a white racist who had vowed to wreck the meeting.”
Graham had avoided Little Rock at the height of its troubles, but he came to the city for two large rallies in September 1959. While some still found him overly cautious in his efforts to boost integration, none doubted where his sentiments lay, as evidenced by the criticisms leveled against him by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council, which distributed thousands of leaflets attacking him for his antisegregation views and criticizing him for inviting Martin Luther King to participate in the New York crusade. More positively, Governor Faubus called on citizens not to oppose Graham, whom he commended as “a great gospel speaker,” and indicated his intention to attend at least one of the rally services. In his own show of conciliation, Graham went to the city jail to visit several men who had set off dynamite in the school-board office, the mayor’s office, and the fire chief’s car. He reported that “these men received me very cordially. We had quite a talk and I said a prayer with each of them privately. They were very humble and, I would say, repentant.” In his sermons and public statements, Graham lamented the conflict Little Rock had experienced and hinted that much of the blame for the troubles should be laid at the feet of those trying to force integration. Such intimations predictably displeased those who painted Little Rock’s preriot tranquillity in a less rosy light, but Billy’s moderate approach surely succeeded in softening some racist hearts. In a letter to Graham a week after he left Little Rock, integrationist pastor W. O. Vaught told the evangelist that “there has been universal agreement in all the churches and out across the city that your visit here was one of the finest things that ever happened in the history of Little Rock. So very many people have changed their attitude, so many people have washed their hearts of hatred and bitterness, and many made decisions who had never expected to make such decisions.” Several years later, Vaught reaffirmed his original assessment when he wrote, “The influence of this good man was a real factor in the solution of our racial problems here in Little Rock.”
As Graham’s reputation and influence continued to grow, he began to seek other ways of using them to enhance his ministry and Evangelicalism in general. Christianity Today had won a secure place in religious publishing, but it still addressed itself primarily to ministers. He sensed a need for a more popular magazine aimed at the lay Christian, a magazine that would be “thought-provoking, devotional and evangelistic, with a breezy, easy-to-read style.” It would also be, in a way Christianity Today could never be, an official organ of his ministry, reporting on his crusades and other activities, as well as those of his associate evangelists, and gently reminding subscribers of the ministry’s continuing financial needs. Some of his colleagues and supporters, aware of the financial and personnel problems that typically attend the launching of a new magazine, tried to dissuade him, but he was determined. During the 1958 San Francisco crusade, he developed a friendship with Sherwood Wirt, a Congregational minister who was so impressed by Graham that he jettisoned the liberal theology he had been preaching and began to proclaim a more Evangelical message. At Graham’s urging, Wirt wrote glowing accounts of the crusade for several Evangelical publications, including Christianity Today, and later expanded them into a book, Crusade at the Golden Gate. As a younger man, he had worked as a newspaper editor in Alaska and had earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, a combination of practical experience and academic credential that Graham found irresistible. Two years later, in November 1960, with former pastor Wirt at the helm, the first issue of Decision magazine reached a remarkable 253,000 charter subscribers generated by radio, television, crusade, and direct-mail appeals. Circulation increased with every issue until five years later, Decision went into 5,000,000 homes, making it by far the most widely received religious publication in the country.
At times it must have seemed, even to Graham, that virtually any enterprise he conceived would automatically come to successful, perhaps glorious, fruition, but that was not quite the case. During the preparation for the New York crusade, the evangelist became convinced that the northeastern portion of the nation desperately needed a Christian university, “a university that would be what Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth started out to be, with a Christian philosophy of education,” a university to which soon-to-be lesser schools like Wheaton and Houghton could turn when they needed professors for their own institutions. The positive response by young people at Madison Square Garden intensified that conviction. With encouragement from Reader’s Digest owner DeWitt Wallace, former New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, Vice-President Nixon, and the active participation of southern department-store magnate Henderson Belk (who pledged major support), radio commentator Paul Harvey (who agreed to serve as chairman of the finance committee), veteran Wheaton professor and administrator Enock Dyrness, and the usual cast of Evangelical entrepreneurs—J. Howard Pew, Roger Hull, Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Nelson Bell—Graham convened several meetings to explore the feasibility of establishing such an institution, preferably in New Jersey, as close to New York City as possible. A brochure entitled A Time for Decision in Higher Education: Billy Graham Presents Crusade University depicted a fifteen-building campus (complete with a football stadium) on five hundred to one thousand acres, projected a seventy-member faculty that would receive salaries above the national median, and described in general terms a liberal arts curriculum that would match its commitment to the highest possible academic standards with equal faithfulness to the Bible, “with emphasis on its absolute validity.” Keeping a customary eye for maximum public impact, the target date for opening the first phase of the institution, the undergraduate college, was set for the fall of 1963 “so as to capitalize on the World’s Fair to be held in New York in 1964.” Impressive as it was, the brochure probably contained the seeds of its failure in an open letter from Graham in which, despite his endorsement of the project, he said, “I am not an educator and have no intention of entering that field.” Graham’s decision not to play even a ceremonial role, however, seems to have doomed the project before it got off the ground, and the complete history of Crusade University is contained in a thin manila folder in the Billy Graham Archives at Wheaton College, the institution it was expected to supersede.
Graham repeatedly justified both his break with the Fundamentalists and his decision not to take a more prophetic stance on race and other social issues by pointing out that God had not called him to theological disputation or headline-grabbing social action. His call, he insisted, was to “do the work of an evangelist,” and he ended the decade as he had begun it, with an intense flurry of preaching. During 1959 and 1960, he held rallies and crusades in 40 cities on four continents, speaking in person to more than 5 million people and adding 227,000 more inquirers to his carefully kept box score. The most memorable of these campaigns were a 1959 tour of Australia and New Zealand, which still ranks as one of the most successful of his entire ministry, and a less triumphant but still notable 1960 safari for souls in nine nations of Africa.