Billy Graham and Lyndon Johnson met through Sid Richardson shortly after Johnson was elected to the Senate. They had not been close friends but liked one another and had maintained cordial contact, largely at Johnson’s initiative. Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Graham contacted the new President to let him know he would be praying for him and stood ready to help in any way he could during the difficult days that lay ahead. Whether for spiritual or political reasons, Johnson eagerly accepted the offer. “Your message met the need,” he wrote. “The knowledge that one of God’s greatest messengers was seeking Divine Counsel in my behalf provided me with the strong source of strength, courage, and comfort during the extremely trying days immediately after the tragic event in Dallas.” Within a week after he moved into the White House, Johnson summoned Graham to Washington. A visit scheduled for fifteen minutes stretched to five hours as two farm boys who had ridden their talent, ambition, and energy to the pinnacle of their respective professions found they had more to offer each other than either had ever imagined.
That first visit was not all solace and solicitude. Graham had brought Grady Wilson with him, and Johnson insisted they all take a swim in the White House pool. “I was somewhat startled,” Graham recalled, “because they didn’t have any bathing suits. You just went as you were.” Afterward, Grady regaled the group with stories so outrageously funny that Johnson called for an aide to make notes so that he could remember them and as an accomplished storyteller himself, perhaps put them to good use in another setting. Graham enjoyed Johnson’s affability but felt obliged to remind the new President of his need to rely on God’s guidance and power. Johnson’s great-grandfather had been an Evangelical preacher, and Graham had no qualms about stating just what the Reverend Mr. Baines would have said or done in this or that situation, since he assumed that the good cleric’s views would approximate his own. Graham conceded that Johnson probably recognized the value of associating himself with a major religious symbol at a time of national mourning and crisis but felt certain his interest in matters spiritual was genuine. A few days later, he told the press that Lyndon Johnson was “the best qualified man we’ve had in the White House,” a man who would doubtless “provide moral leadership for the country.” And he told the President that, as God had been with George Washington at Valley Forge and with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, he would now stand close to Lyndon Johnson, ready to strengthen him when the awesome burdens of his office threatened to overwhelm him.
Not long after reestablishing ties to the White House, Graham found himself at the center of a rumor that could have strained his friendship with Johnson. For several years, Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt had admired Graham and his team, particularly Grady Wilson, whom he wanted to support in a series of wildcat revivals along the entire Gulf coast. Grady turned him down, at least in part because Hunt thought BGEA’s policy of cooperating with local clergymen and organizing laypeople was foolishness: “You don’t need the preachers, Grady. They’ll just get in your way. Forget all that other stuff. Just go from town to town.” Hunt let Grady off the hook, but he apparently tried out an even bolder notion on Billy Graham: an offer of 6 million dollars if Graham would run for president against Lyndon Johnson. According to Grady Wilson and other close friends, the old tycoon reached Graham in the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, informing him that the money would be deposited in his personal bank account if he allowed his name to be put in nomination at the Republican convention that summer. Witnesses insist that Billy took no more than fifteen seconds to tell his would-be benefactor that he was flattered but had no interest in relinquishing a post he regarded as more important than the presidency. Given his notorious penchant for wasting huge sums of money on conservative pipe dreams, particularly those in which unfettered capitalist individualism and uncritical patriotism were served up in a stew of Scripture, Hunt either could not imagine that Graham would actually refuse such an offer or sought to force his hand. In any case, he leaked his plan to the media, which, along with the entire Scripps Howard newspaper chain, ran the story immediately. That evening, Walter Cronkite told viewers of CBS News that evangelist Billy Graham was considering a bid for the presidency.
Prior to the 1952 election, Graham speculated that he might be elected president if he were to run on a platform calling the nation “back to God, back to Christ, and back to the Bible,” but that seemed clearly to be a rhetorical ploy aimed at influencing the bona fide candidates to take a similar line. In the interim he had waved off several opportunities to run for public office in North Carolina, and his instant refusal of Hunt’s offer seemed genuine. Still, the Houston Press reported that a source close to Graham indicated that “he is deeply interested in the opportunity for service, and . . . is giving earnest and prayerful consideration to the idea,” adding that if he did accept a draft, “it would be as a Republican.” If Graham had such second thoughts, his friends and family quickly dispelled them. Ruth called from Montreat to tell him that she did not think the American people would vote for a divorced president, and if he left the ministry to enter politics, he would certainly have a divorce on his hands. Hunt’s call came on a Friday. Graham proposed to call a press conference for the following Monday to deny the rumors. Calvin Thielman, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Montreat and an old friend of Lyndon Johnson’s as well, told him that would be like waiting three days to deny that he was running around on his wife. “You deny that immediately,” Thielman insisted. “You are not going to run for President. No use to fool with that one.” Graham summoned the press, and by Sunday morning his short career as a putative candidate for national office had ended. H. L. Hunt was not the only party who felt the press conference was a mistake; the Christian Century, showing little sympathy for Graham’s unsought plight, hooted at the entire affair. “This denial of an intention nobody except perhaps a few of his entourage suspected he entertained was remarkable,” the Century observed. “That he should feel it necessary . . . to take himself out of a race few even dreamed he might enter indicates just how far out of touch with political reality a man who stands in front of crowds can get.”
If Lyndon Johnson considered Billy Graham a potential rival, he did not show it. Contact between the two men appears to have been limited during 1964. Graham invited the President to attend a crusade, and though he did not accept, Johnson reciprocated with an invitation for the Grahams to spend a night in the White House, which they did accept. That visit, Graham’s first overnight stay in the private quarters—in recalling it, he noted that Richard Nixon had never been invited to Eisenhower’s private quarters during his entire eight years as vice-president—sealed the friendship and led Graham to urge the President to “call on us any time we could ever be of the slightest service to you.” Graham also forged ties with such key members of the Johnson administration as Bill Moyers and Marvin Watson.
Not long after her father’s overnight visit to the White House, Anne Graham, then a freshman in college, attended a rally for Barry Goldwater and declared herself in favor of the Republican candidate. Johnson may have figured Anne was voicing sentiments uttered at the family dinner table, but he overlooked that possibility when he called Graham to say, “Billy, I know about those things. I have two daughters of my own, and I have trouble sometimes controlling what they say. When the election is over, you bring Anne up to the White House. I’d like to get acquainted with her.” Conservative political operatives, however, seized on what Johnson chose to ignore. In a well-organized last-ditch effort to stem the tide that seemed certain to carry the President to a crashing victory, Republican campaign offices around the country received telegrams indicating that Billy Graham would endorse Goldwater if enough people asked him to. In the few remaining days before the November election, Graham received over a million telegrams, some bearing lists of names stretching three feet in length. The Western Union office in Charlotte called in extra operators, used emergency circuits, and operated at full tilt around the clock. Circuits in Asheville were similarly jammed, and tens of thousands of additional messages poured into Montreat by airplane and motor courier. The manager of the telegraph office in Asheville declared that in thirty-five years of working for Western Union, he had never heard of such a campaign directed at one individual. On hearing of the avalanche in Asheville, Lyndon Johnson placed another call, delivering the simple, ostensibly avuncular message, “Now Billy, you stay out of politics.” He also took the precaution of inviting Graham to spend the weekend before the election at the White House, where he would not be tempted to read his mail. Whether from preference or prudence, Graham disappointed Goldwater backers by refraining from endorsing either candidate, but when the election turned out as all the polls predicted, he congratulated the victorious President on his “tremendous victory” and declared expansively that he was “convinced that you were not only the choice of the American people—but of God. You are as truly a servant of God as was your great-grandfather Baines when he preached the gospel.” As for being impressed with the telegram campaign, he observed dryly that the money “might have been better spent for evangelism.”
The election behind them, Graham and Johnson unleashed their enthusiasm on each other. Billy led the Protestant prayer at the inauguration and preached at a special dedication service Johnson arranged at the National City Christian Church. Using as his text the words from a letter that legendary Texas hero Sam Houston had written to Johnson’s grandfather, Graham exhorted the President, his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, and a delegation from Congress not to forget the spiritual dimensions of leadership. Over the next four years, White House files reveal a continuous exchange of letters, cards, and small gifts between the two men, as well as repeated reports of intercessory prayer aimed at everything from hastening Johnson’s recovery from the flu to supplying him with deep draughts of supernatural wisdom.
Johnson and Graham, of course, had much to give each other. For Billy, just to be welcome once again at the White House meant that he and his people—good, decent, God-fearing, Bible-believing, patriotic, middle-class, middle-American folk—were back in charge, or at least back in favor, as many felt they had not been during the Kennedy years. More specifically, the legitimation Evangelicals worked for and won in the years after World War II had not been lost. Now, their plans to rekindle a spirit the nation had not known since the days of the Benevolent Empire could proceed apace. Beyond that reclamation of stature and staging ground for himself and his constituency, Graham clearly savored the renewed opportunity to share in the experience and secrets of presidential power. Bill Moyers has recalled how the evangelist’s eyes lit up as he sat riveted with fascination while the man who wanted to be “President of All the People” talked of his hopes for the Utopian enterprise he called the War on Poverty, while the Commander in Chief explained how he personally selected bombing targets in a much darker war in Southeast Asia, and while the Great Manipulator shared stories of the peccadilloes and peculiarities of powerful men he intended to turn to his will.
Graham always seemed surprised that famous and important people sought him out as assiduously as he sought them, and for reasons not remarkably dissimilar. Neither did he seem to realize fully, though he was certainly not innocent of all understanding on this score, that he gave as good as he got in such associations. Without question, and apart from the genuine affection he appears to have felt for Graham and the intrinsic satisfactions he found in their friendship, Lyndon Johnson understood the advantages of being Billy’s buddy. If Billy Graham was the President’s friend, then millions of Americans would conclude that the President must be a good man, a decent man, a noble man, perhaps even a Christian man. And if he possessed those qualities, then his causes—his War on Poverty, his civil rights act, his effort to preserve freedom and democracy in Southeast Asia—must also be good, decent, noble, perhaps even Christian, and therefore precisely the causes Christian folk ought to support. “Johnson always had a high appreciation of men as symbols,” Moyers observed. “[If] a man comes clothed in symbols like Billy did, you never have to ask that man to do anything for you; he’s done everything just by being there. . . . So Billy didn’t have to do anything to help him, and Billy, in turn, never asked him for a thing. He was helped by being there as much as Johnson was helped by having him there.” Public-opinion polls regularly placed both men at or quite near the top of the list of the world’s most-admired men. Each clearly shared in that high view of the other, and each cherished the other’s appreciation. Johnson once acknowledged that he often contacted Graham to “get a new injection” of confidence and optimism, recalling that during one particularly difficult period “when I was being called a crook and a thug and all,” he invited Graham to spend a weekend with him, 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.”
Perhaps because his own political career and opinions owed little to his meager academic training at the tiny teacher’s college he attended in San Marcos, Texas, Johnson appeared to feel that Graham, another man whose success and appeal to millions of people owed more to intuition and personal qualities than to formal education, might be a resource fully as valuable as the Harvard brain trust inherited from John Kennedy. According to Graham and several associates, Johnson frequently sought his counsel on a variety of issues, ranging from general guidance about the War on Poverty to an offer to let him try to figure some way to cut 10 million dollars from a proposed budget. After Sargent Shriver flew to Montreat in a helicopter to enlist his aid, Graham did participate in a film supporting the poverty program but claims he generally limited his involvement to spiritual matters. Johnson did not always accept this reticence at face value. Shortly before the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the two families were having dinner at the White House, and the President asked Graham who he thought would be a good vice-president. Ruth immediately gave her husband a sharp kick under the table and interjected that “Bill really shouldn’t get into political matters.” Graham quickly agreed and Johnson let it drop for the moment, but when Lady Bird and Ruth walked into an adjoining room after the meal, the President grabbed Graham’s arm and said with the insistent intensity few men found easy to resist, “Now Billy, tell me what you really think about that.” Without taking credit for the eventual outcome, Graham has acknowledged that he recommended Hubert Humphrey.
In keeping with his long-standing tendency to interpret friendly behavior or polite attention as evidence of deep spiritual interest, Graham perceived Lyndon Johnson to be a somewhat more pious man than did many of his colleagues or various secular observers. It is of course possible to fake religiosity, and politicians in both ancient and recent memory have demonstrated notable talent for that particular artifice. Perhaps less well appreciated is the fact that it is also possible to hold deeply felt (if not always precisely articulated) religious beliefs, including belief in the worth of religion, right alongside and perhaps in conscious tension with patently secular and instrumental beliefs, values, and habits of mind and body. Billy Graham acknowledged this duality within Johnson. He understood that he served to legitimate Johnson to an Evangelical constituency, particularly in the South and Southwest. “I think he was attracted to me at least partially because I was well-known in Texas. . . . I think he was more afraid of what the editor of the Baptist Standard [a weekly Southern Baptist newspaper] was going to say about him than of the Washington Post or the New York Times.” But the memory of a mother who hoped he would be a preacher, to follow in the steps of her own grandfather, also burdened the President’s complex soul, and his friendship with Graham forced him to struggle under that weight. “He wanted to live up to his mother’s goals,” observed Graham, who knew something of what that could mean. “I think he had a conflict within himself about religion. He wanted to go all the way in his commitment to Christ. He knew what it meant to be ‘saved’ or ‘lost,’ using our terminology, and he knew what it was to be ‘born again.’ And yet he somehow felt that he never quite had that experience. I think he tried to make up for it by having many of the outward forms of religion, in the sense of going to church almost fanatically, even while he was President. Sometimes he’d go to church three times on a Sunday.”
In addition to his penchant for attending public worship, which might easily be dismissed as a political gambit, Johnson manifested a less-visible piety that, even if it reminded one more of a St. Bernard than a St. Francis, was probably genuine. Graham recalled that “a number of times I had prayer with him in his bedroom at the White House, usually early in the morning. He would get out of bed and get on his knees while I prayed. I never had very many people do that.” The President also liked to have people read the Bible to him—“He liked the plain-language versions”—and felt that others could benefit equally. On occasion, he would summon members of his staff a day or two after these devotional sessions, read the same passages to them that Graham or some other preacher had read to him, and admonish his minions to apply the truths they contained both to affairs of state and to their personal behavior. Johnson also believed that those who worked with him could benefit from some old-fashioned gospel preaching and sometimes invited Graham to conduct services and preach at Camp David or at his ranch on the Pedernales River in the Texas Hill Country. And if it seemed too much of an imposition to ask Graham to preach, Johnson always had a worthy backup he could call on: his own great-grandfather Baines. Trying hard but unsuccessfully to conceal his amusement at the memory of the scene, Graham recalled an impromptu service Johnson arranged at Camp David: “Ruth and I got up a little bit later than the others did. We walked over to the President’s cabin, and there out on the porch several people were standing around, including [Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach and several other Jewish people, and there was Jack Valenti, an Italian Catholic, reading a sermon that Johnson’s great grandfather had preached, on ‘How to Be Saved.’ The President thought they ought to hear it, and everybody had to listen.”
The White House was not the only venue where Graham drew lavish attention during this period. For two six-month periods spanning the summers of 1964 and 1965, the Billy Graham Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park, New York, gave five million visitors a slick high-tech overview of his worldwide ministry and an opportunity to hear a well-polished, wide-screen, soul-winning sermon. Most Protestant denominations and parachurch organizations presented their case to fairgoers in the sprawling Protestant Pavilion. Graham could easily have obtained a section of that exhibit hall, but he dreamed of something grander and more distinctive. Soon after plans for the fair were announced, Robert Ferm and George Wilson met with the fair’s director, Robert Moses, to discuss a separate BGEA-sponsored pavilion. Moses not only agreed to allow Graham to have his own building but promised to assign him a prime spot not far from the main gate. Typically, Billy embraced the idea with great enthusiasm at first, then suffered severe second thoughts. While recuperating from pneumonia, he decided the pavilion was too grandiose and was about to back out when one of his board members counseled him never to make a major decision when he was ill. When asked for his opinion on the matter, Wheaton president V. Raymond Edman reminded him of the huge response D. L. Moody had stirred at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The opportunity to repeat and perhaps surpass an accomplishment of one of his heroes appealed to Graham. After George Wilson, who did not customarily spend money with much relish, declared that BGEA could afford to build the pavilion, Graham’s enthusiasm returned. When the fair opened in the spring of 1964, one of its most prominent and recognizable landmarks was the Billy Graham Pavilion, designed by famed architect Edward Durrell Stone and crowned by a 117-foot tower covered with 4,000 gold-anodized disks.
Inside the pavilion, visitors found exhibits tracing Graham’s ministry from the first great crusade in the Canvas Cathedral to the triumphant tours of six continents and dozens of countries. The central focus of the structure was a 350-seat theater in which curious visitors—more than one million in all, from more than 125 countries—saw Billy Graham, twelve times a day for twelve months, larger than life on the sweeping Todd-AO screen, and using a translation system that enabled them to hear “each man in his own language,” as on the Day of Pentecost, listened to him deliver a comprehensive jeremiad that ended with the inevitable call to accept Jesus Christ as savior. Critics blasted the fair’s religious exhibits for sharing in the general atmosphere of “chaos and greed” they saw pervading the exposition. Graham offered a more upbeat assessment. The New York World’s Fair, at which nations from all over the world were sharing the brightest and most beautiful aspects of their respective cultures, was, he declared, “an indication that man is on the threshold of paradise.” As for the Billy Graham Pavilion in particular, an editorial in Decision magazine pronounced that “there is definitely a taste of heaven about the place.”
The World’s Fair film, entitled Man in the Fifth Dimension, reflected the evolution Graham’s film ministry had undergone since the days of Mr. Texas and Oiltown, U.S.A. Amateurish as they were, those first films proved so popular with church audiences that Graham used them to launch a reasonably successful series of films. The real breakthrough, however, came with the production of The Restless Ones in 1963. The full-length black-and-white picture told the story of the Wintons, an upper-middle-class family that had begun to lose its moorings in a sea of Southern California secularity but had found new meaning and the ability to withstand the temptations of sex and alcohol after attending Billy Graham’s great crusade in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The film is far from subtle, and its attempts to capture the flavor of youthful wildness and early-sixties argot are often amusing. Still, to the young people most likely to see it, it apparently served as a strong warning against giving in to raging hormones. During the first four years after its release, it was seen by 4.5 million people and stimulated 346,000 known decisions. It also paid for itself. “On this one,” film-ministry evangelist Dave Barr explained, “we decided to charge admission for the first time. This was a whole new concept, and we tried it in several cities to see if it would work. If the churches were too critical or if it looked like we were going to get crucified, then we would back away from it.” The films would be shown in public auditoriums or commercial theaters on a “four-walled” basis in which the sponsoring committee rented the facility and were then free to offer the invitation, counsel inquirers, or do anything else they felt was appropriate. The first big showing was at the 5,000-seat Aerie Crown Theater in Chicago. Barr recalled that “the Aerie Crown had a ninety-foot screen, and when you stood alongside the screen, you could see everybody’s face in the light reflected off the screen, even though they didn’t know you were looking at them. We’d have hundreds of young people in the audience, and as soon as the lights went out, you could see them start hugging and kissing and playing around with each other. But when Billy came on, his finger must have looked forty-five feet long. And when he started to preach, those kids would just sit there spellbound. The story is good, but not super. But his message was just so powerful; I think it’s one of the best ever put on film. By the time he gave the invitation, the Holy Spirit had taken over. It was every bit as effective as when Billy is there in person.”
Encouraged by the success of the Chicago showing, the Graham team decided to experiment further and met similar enthusiasm in other cities. At no cost to BGEA, dairies placed ads on the side of milk cartons and bottling companies run by Christians inserted fliers in six-packs of their soft drinks, so that by the time the film opened, a sellout had been guaranteed. In Albuquerque, a scheduled one-week run in a conventional movie theater stretched to three weeks. In San Antonio, the engagement lasted twelve weeks, and approximately one fourth of the audience responded to the invitation, a far higher percentage than Graham ever reaped in person.
Despite the adolescent awkwardness that accompanied rapid growth, the new approach was a walloping success. Dave Barr credited the intrinsic impact of the medium itself. “Films are so real,” he observed. “Several years after The Restless Ones came out, a lady who had seen it in New Mexico wrote Billy to tell him she had seen Kim Darby [who played an unmarried pregnant girl in The Restless Ones] in another show on television. She said, ‘I’ve often wondered what happened to April and her baby. Thank God, she’s happily married and the baby is OK.’ Later, we had another film about two guys that ran a gas station in Denver. A man wrote in to say that if he could find the station, he would give them his business for the rest of his life. Then he added a P.S.: ‘Do you know if they give S & H Green Stamps?’ That’s precious, but it’s also frightening to realize what a powerful tool film can be. I wouldn’t have stayed with [the film ministry] for more than two years after Mr. Texas, no matter how much they paid me, if it hadn’t been for the soul-winning aspects, but a tool that can make that kind of impact on people’s minds can be used to win people to Christ. That’s why God has given us this medium.”
While Graham’s celluloid self addressed millions of pilgrims from around the world, he gave his personal attention to a more modest aggregation situated at the Hub of the Universe. He had not been back to Boston for an extended campaign since his stunning victories in 1950, and many of the ministers and leading laymen who remembered that visit longed for his return and were primed to make the most of it. The 1964 crusade was typical in most respects. Instead of winding up in Boston Garden, Graham started there, filling it for each of ten nights, then addressing a throng of 75,000 at a closing rally on Boston Common. On the political and public relations front, the evangelist visited Ted Kennedy, hospitalized by severe injuries suffered in a plane crash, and drew praise from Governor Endicott Peabody, both for the contribution he was making to Boston’s spiritual and moral life and for the quality of his sound system, which Peabody wished the Garden would purchase for its own use. Graham also professed to see signs of a growing interest in matters spiritual, signs he had not seen fourteen years earlier, signs that made him suspect Boston might be on the verge of a great religious awakening.
Billy’s rosy vision was understandable. After a Saturday-evening service, he made an unscheduled but well-photographed visit to the Combat Zone, Boston’s raunchy red-light district, where he brought traffic to a standstill as squealing young girls flocked around him while patrons of the tattered melange of bars, cafes, and strip joints poured into the street to catch a glimpse of the man who condemned their way of life each night. One club owner approached him to say, “I’d be proud if you stepped inside.” When he entered the dark, smoky den of iniquity, the band stopped and the emcee, accustomed to welcoming “the very lovely and talented Miss Velva La-Voom,” invited him to say a few words to the assemblage. Perhaps remembering that awkward gathering at the air force base in Newfoundland, when he and Chuck Templeton found themselves facing a crowd of servicemen more interested in girls than the gospel, Graham observed that “this is a very unusual congregation.” But as on that occasion years before, he remembered his personal dictum, “This one thing I do,” and he did it. He told the boozy auditors that they needed to fill their souls with a spirit that did not come in bottles, and he urged them to attend church the next morning. Guilt is magic, and darkened rooms are full of it. Instead of tossing him out, as a Tampa barman had done twenty-five years earlier, they applauded heartily and banged their glasses on the bar, and as he picked his way past the crowded tables, shaking every hand he could reach and radiating compassionate goodwill for people whose pleasure he could scarcely comprehend, several hundred new sinful seekers greeted his reappearance on the street with a rousing cheer. Despite that gratifying response, not many of the Combat Zone’s denizens made it to the Garden. The crusade crowds, as usual, were heavily populated with sinners of a less spectacular sort. Reporters could not help noticing that on the whole, the legion of believers who packed the Garden each night were rather different from those who gathered to sip champagne while Arthur Fiedler conducted the Boston Pops or to bellow their outrage when Bruin tough guy Teddy Green went to the penalty box for high-sticking some fancy-skating Canadian. On the contrary, Graham’s crowds were sober, almost homespun, in appearance and demeanor. “You would think you were in Kansas or Indiana or some place else,” one journalist wrote. “It doesn’t seem quite like Boston.” But it was Boston, and those earnest people whose presence the journalist had previously failed to notice came in such numbers that in an echo of the 1950 campaign, Graham elected to go back to the Garden for an additional week after a few days off. The high point of the second stage, one that would have a lasting impact on Graham’s ministry, was a meeting with Boston’s fabled Roman Catholic prelate, Richard Cardinal Cushing.
Cardinal Cushing had long looked on Graham with favor. During the 1950 campaign, he had written an editorial entitled “Bravo, Billy!” for the diocesan newspaper. Just before the 1964 crusade got under way, he sounded another approving note by announcing that the crusade would “surely be of great importance for many Christians in the Greater Boston area,” and assuring Graham that he and other Catholics would be praying for God’s blessing on him in the expectation that he would “lead many to the knowledge of Our Lord.” Because Cushing flew off to attend the Second Vatican Council in Rome immediately after making that statement, the two men did not meet during the crusade’s first phase, but Graham made a point of stressing his own “tremendous admiration” for the cardinal. As soon as Graham announced he was staying on, America’s favorite cardinal and the man some called “the Protestant Pope” began an amusing game of Muhammad and the Mountain. A diocesan spokesman later claimed that Graham initiated the request for a meeting, but Robert Ferm insisted he was present in the crusade office when the cardinal’s secretary called to ask if Billy would come to the chancery. Sensitive to issues of relative prestige and still not convinced Catholicism was a benign force, Ferm vetoed that suggestion but indicated the cardinal would be welcome to drop by Graham’s hotel. After a few minutes of consultation, the secretary called back to say that the cardinal would be happy to meet Billy on neutral ground and was offering to have their meeting presented live on local television. Ferm was skeptical. “How can you just have the television people schedule something like that?” he asked. The answer was simple: “The cardinal owns the TV station.”
The forty-five-minute televised conversation surely rivaled any of Graham’s mutual-admiration sessions with Lyndon Johnson. The cardinal, dressed in street clothes rather than in the ornate robes of his office, generously declared that “I have never known of a religious crusade that was more effective” than Graham’s and assured the evangelist and his supporters that “although we Catholics do not join with them in body, yet in spirit and heart we unite with them in praying God’s blessing upon this Christian and Christlike experience in our community.” He urged Catholic young people to attend the crusade services with no fear of disloyalty to their church, assuring them that Graham’s message “is one of Christ crucified, and no Catholic can do anything but become a better Catholic from hearing him. . . . I’m one hundred percent for Dr. Graham. He is extraordinarily gifted. The hand of God must be upon him.” Then, in a mild rebuke to priests who might contrast Graham’s populist appeal with the majesty of the Roman liturgy, Cushing added that if the Catholic Church had half a dozen men of Graham’s caliber, he would stop worrying about its future in America. Never one to be outcomplimented, Graham professed to regard his new friend as “the leading ecumenist in America,” lavished further praise on Pope John XXIII and his successor, Paul VI, and heralded Vatican II as a major step in dissipating the clouds of resentment and mistrust that had separated Catholics and Protestants. As for himself, he announced that he felt “much closer to Roman Catholic traditions than to some of the more liberal Protestants.”
While most observers either praised or paid little attention to the conversation, some in both camps showed discomfort at its amicable spirit. On reading newspaper accounts of Cushing’s endorsement of Graham, a leading Catholic official in New Hampshire insisted that the cardinal had been misquoted. In the Graham camp, Robert Ferm assured a troubled supporter that the evangelist had not really meant to imply that Catholics might be closer to the truth than some Protestants. But both men had meant what they said, leading Graham to observe that in contrast to the rancor and suspicion that attended the 1960 election, “this is sort of a new day.” The encounter thus stands as a significant marker on the course that Graham steadfastly chose to follow, a course that led him from the narrow confines of the strictest sort of sectarianism to the open ground upon which one is reluctant to deny anyone the right to be called, if not brother, at least neighbor.
Graham opened 1965 with a quite modest crusade in Hawaii, where the average crowd was less than 6,600. He followed that with two weeks of preaching in Alabama, including a rally at the all-black Tuskegee Institute, an eight-day effort in Copenhagen, and ten-day campaigns in Denver and Houston. After more than fifteen years of independent ministry, Graham and his team could organize and execute a major crusade in their sleep, but a back-region episode at the Houston crusade revealed that Billy did not feel himself capable of flying on automatic pilot. That crusade, scheduled to be one of the first nonsporting events to be held in the brand-new Astrodome, had to be postponed several weeks when Graham underwent prostate surgery in late summer. During his recuperation period, he called several members of his board to Montreat and confided to them that he was considering backing out of the Houston meeting because he was not certain he would be able to preach. They assumed he was still feeling weak from the effects of his surgery and urged him to stick to the plan, to which he agreed. At a subsequent board meeting, however, he told Carloss Morris, a prominent Houston lawyer who had played a key role in organizing the crusade, that he was still not sure he could preach. Morris did not take him too seriously, assuming that the problem was physical and would clear up with a few more days of rest. But a night or two before the opening service, Graham addressed a precrusade gathering on the University of Houston campus. The next day, during a golf game at the River Oaks Country Club, he told Morris that he could preach after all. “I’d been speaking about five minutes last night,” he reported, “and I felt the Holy Spirit take over, and it’s back. I can preach. We are going to have a great meeting in Houston.” Shaking his head at the memory, Morris finally understood what Graham had been trying to tell him: “Billy just didn’t know whether or not the Lord was going to have his hand on him again so he’d be able to preach. I was astonished, but he had really been in doubt up to that point.”
The Houston crusade was notable not only for the late arrival of the Holy Spirit but also because it marked the first time that Graham was able to persuade a sitting President to attend one of his services. The President and First Lady flew over from their Texas Hill Country ranch to be present at the climactic Sunday-afternoon service, at which 61,000 packed the spectacular domed arena. Reporters noted that Mrs. Johnson paid attention, but the President, for all his putative piety, spent most of the afternoon chatting with the Astrodome’s visionary builder, Judge Roy Hofheinz, whose private box they shared. Johnson did, however, register his appreciation when Graham lambasted Vietnam protesters, comparing them unfavorably to the more religiously minded young people who had come to the dome that afternoon to show their loyalty to their Lord and their President.
Graham’s position on Vietnam, like that of most of his countrymen, was never as definite as his stand on World War II and the Korean conflict. On the other hand, as a loyal friend and staunch patriot accustomed to giving those in authority the benefit of the doubt, he tended to take the President’s side. And even though he had toned down his anti-Communist tirades of a decade earlier, he still warned against the encroachment of “Communist tyranny,” urged his fellow Americans not to listen “to the siren song which would have us believe that the tide has turned or that communism has changed its goal for world revolution,” and insisted that it was incumbent upon the United States to maintain “the strongest military establishment on earth.” Early in 1965, during the Hawaii crusade, he asked a crowd to pray that President Johnson might obtain wisdom to help him lead the United States out of the “mess in Southeast Asia.” The President, he reminded them, had inherited, not started, the war in Vietnam, but it was his painful responsibility to do something about it, and quickly. If the United States dallied, Graham speculated, “We either face an all-out war with Red China, or a retreat that will cause us to lose face throughout Asia. Make no mistake about it. We are in a mess.” In an address to the Denver Press Club in late summer, he said, “I have no sympathy for those clergymen who [urge] the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. Communism has to be stopped somewhere, whether it is in Hawaii or on the West Coast. The President believes it should be stopped in Vietnam.” Later in the year, he pointed out that “95 percent of the Congress is back of the President,” adding that “these people know the facts.” Such statements, infrequent as they were, led many war critics to conclude that Graham was a hawk. Even he recognized the charge was not entirely unfounded. In a letter to Bill Moyers in October of that year, he complained that he was “constantly taking a beating from some of these extremists because of my support of the President’s Vietnam policy.”
Graham had less problem with Johnson’s Great Society programs, since their aims generally coincided with his own generous impulses toward those in need. He continued to believe in the worth of industry and self-discipline, but he also felt that those more favored by ability and circumstance had an obligation to share with those of meaner estate. In a departure from the pietistic individualism that characterized much of Evangelicalism, he acknowledged that “there is a social aspect of the Gospel that many people ignore. Jesus was interested in the hungry, the diseased, and the illiterate. A great deal of his time and preaching was taken up with this aspect of the ministry. The church should be deeply concerned about the poor, the illiterate, the diseased, and those oppressed by tyranny or prejudice.” Graham understood that the problem extended beyond American shores and, more over, that America could not pretend that the poverty of Third World countries was unrelated to its own affluence. “Three-fifths of the world live in squalor, misery, and hunger,” he thundered. “Too long have the privileged few exploited and ignored the underprivileged millions of our world. Our selfishness is at long last catching up with us. Unless we begin to act, to share and to do something about this great army of starving humanity, God will judge us.”
Graham’s clearest stand on social issues continued to be in the realm of race relations. A few months after the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and in the face of acute misgivings on the part of city officials and dissension within both black and white ministerial associations, he held a fully integrated United Evangelistic Rally in that city’s 60,000-seat municipal stadium on the afternoon of Easter Sunday. Threats of violence from both black and white racists limited the crowd to no more than 35,000 people, but that number was divided almost evenly between blacks and whites, who appeared to go out of their way to be friendly to each other. In his sermon, “The Great Reconciliation,” Graham decried the hatred and prejudice that was tearing communities apart but offered no concrete recommendations for solving the problems of segregation. A week later, however, speaking before the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, he said, “We should have been leading the way to racial justice but we failed. Let’s confess it, let’s admit it, and let’s do something about it.” In recognition of these statements, moderate as they were, the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute gave Graham its Supreme Award of Merit, citing him “for outstanding contribution to the betterment of race relations and human understanding.”
Not all black clergy agreed with the Carver Institute’s assessment. Most accepted Graham’s desire for racial harmony and understanding at face value, but many felt that his tepid support of Martin Luther King, his disavowal of protest tactics, and his skepticism about legislative solutions to racial problems, including the monumental Johnson-engineered Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked him as something less than a champion of their cause. It did not help his or white Evangelicalism’s ratings in black circles that Christianity Today had not given its endorsement to the civil rights act. One of the magazine’s editors, Frank Gaebelein, wanted to offer strong editorial support for the bill when it was under discussion, but Nelson Bell demurred, sticking to his hard-line insistence that true social change could come only with genuine spiritual conversion. Graham declined to take a definite stand on the civil rights act when he addressed the NAE meeting, excusing himself by claiming he had not had time to study the bill’s provisions adequately. But he had said that “Evangelicals are going to have to give an account to God for our stand on the racial crisis,” and the normally cautious organization adopted a resolution favoring the legislation then before Congress.
Such perceived half measures did not persuade Graham’s black critics. A columnist for a black newspaper in Chicago called him “the most magnificent phony in America” and mocked his prescription of “‘kneeling at the cross,’ waiting for a miracle to transform our souls.” Graham would not walk with protesters or call for open housing or desegregated churches, the journalist jabbed, because “he’s too busy praying.” These charges stung, and Graham tapped his top troubleshooter, Robert Ferm, to investigate the possibility of organizing a crusade especially for blacks and other minorities on Chicago’s South Side. After a week of visiting church leaders in that troubled quarter, Ferm reported that it was “one of the most explosive situations I ever got into” and seemed ripe for an outbreak of serious violence. Many black churchmen, including some who participated in the 1962 crusade, now found Graham guilty of tokenism and other half measures, evincing little more commitment to racial justice than other representatives of the exploitative “white power structure”—a label, Ferm noted, that “they have borrowed from Communist ideology.” Graham’s deputy told of the tension he felt in one meeting as blacks shouted angrily at him and at each other and admitted that he had never appreciated just “how serious a situation we have confronting us in interracial relations” in large cities. Any crusade, he concluded, would have to originate from the black community itself, and that seemed an unlikely prospect. Apparently sobered by Ferm’s evaluation, Graham scuttled plans for a South Side crusade.
Blacks may have found Billy Graham ineffectual, but Lyndon Johnson did not. When violence broke out in Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South in the spring of 1965, Johnson dispatched 4,000 troops to protect freedom marchers, then encouraged Graham to visit the troubled state and use his influence to restore a measure of calm. Graham canceled meetings planned for Great Britain to comply with the President’s request, and for a brief moment it appeared he was coming to appreciate Martin Luther King’s advocacy of civil disobedience. “It’s true I haven’t been to jail yet,” he conceded to students in Honolulu, but added, “I underscore the word yet. Maybe I haven’t done all I could or should do.” Then, when he returned to the mainland, he told the New York Times that “I never felt that we should attain our rights by illegal means, yet I confess that the demonstrations have served to arouse the conscience of the world.” When he addressed the situation in Alabama, however, his observations were of the nonconfrontational, blame-diffusing sort that black and white civil rights activists so resented. Alabama had its problems, he conceded, but so did other parts of the country, and using Alabama as a whipping boy diverted attention “from other areas where the problem is just as acute.” Further, as he had been saying all along, only “a spiritual and moral awakening” could solve such problems. In the meantime, all parties should obey all laws, “no matter how much we may dislike them. If the law says that I cannot march or I cannot demonstrate, I ought not to march and I ought not to demonstrate. And if the law tells me that I should send my children to a school where there are both races, I should obey that law also. Only by maintaining law and order are we going to keep our democracy and our nation great.”
Unable to countenance any kind of unseemly behavior, and equally unable to denounce his fellow southerners as peculiarly wicked people, Graham nevertheless took a firm position on the side of civil rights and racial integration. Behind the scenes, he met with hundreds of pastors, laypeople, civic leaders, and even with Governor George Wallace, repeatedly calling for tolerance and understanding and confidently reporting signs of “great progress” on every hand. If blacks found this too tame, segregationists found it too radical, but Graham received an enthusiastic rating from the man who sent him to the troubled region. In a warm and effusive letter, President Johnson assured him that “you are doing a brave and fine thing for your country in your courageous effort to contribute to the understanding and brotherhood of the Americans in the South.” He stressed how much the evangelist’s support and prayers meant to him and urged him to visit in person whenever he could: “Please know that this door is always open—and your room is always waiting. I hope you will come often.”
With the coming of summer, Graham continued to assert that if the Klan would quiet down and civil rights extremists would give southerners a chance to get used to the new laws and court orders, and if politicians would quit trying to exploit the situation for their own selfish ends, Alabama and other southern states would not only make peace but would provide a model for the rest of the country to follow. In the meantime, those who pointed accusing fingers at the South should take care, because his own observations indicated that racial violence could easily break out in dozens of cities far from the Deep South. Before that long hot summer was over, Graham’s dire prophecy came true in a manner more terrifying than he had dreamt possible. When a routine police encounter in a black district of Los Angeles one stifling August evening erupted into a days-long conflagration that made it forever impossible to think of Watts without thinking of riot, Graham flew to Los Angeles. After donning a bulletproof vest and taking a reconnaissance helicopter flight over the swirling, smoking turmoil, the appalled evangelist declared what seemed to him obvious, even in the absence of concrete evidence. The rioters, he announced, were “being exploited by a small, hard core of leftists.” He felt sure that 97 percent of the rioters were not Communists, “but it cannot be overlooked that this kind of disturbance is being used by those whose ultimate end is to overthrow the American government.” It was, he believed, “a dress rehearsal for a revolution,” stimulated by the “hate literature of the right and the left.” Then, apparently feeling black rioters were not as susceptible to the reformation by evangelism he recommended for white racists, Graham called on Congress to devise “new tough laws . . . to curb this kind of thing.” He also urged Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been walking the streets of Watts in an effort to restore a semblance of peace, “to call for a moratorium on demonstrations for the time being.” The Christian Century blasted his “fervent generalities” as “a vague emotional outburst [by] a man who knows something is dreadfully wrong but who hadn’t the slightest idea what caused it,” but Graham’s hometown Charlotte News observed that “in the entire country, only one national figure of substance seems concerned enough to suggest corrective steps and to travel to the scene to offer his help.”
Graham appealed to President Johnson to identify publicly those “who are teaching and advocating violence, training in guerilla tactics and defying authority” in the apparent hope that once these troublemakers had been exposed and branded, black folk would settle down and wait patiently for converted white people to open the doors they had deliberately held shut so long. His views on campus antiwar protests and widespread relaxation of conventional norms regarding sex and drugs took similar form. In commenting on disruptions in American universities, he revealed an unmistakably conformist and anti-intellectual strain. “You see some guy on every campus,” he said disdainfully, “and he usually has a beard. I’d like to shave a few of them. And he has a cigarette dangling out of one side and he’s got a book by Jean-Paul Sartre under the other arm. And he’s called an intellectual. . . . Now, who are the intellectuals? Usually the intellectuals are somebody who is sort of an extreme left-winger and he’s considered an intellectual especially if he smokes a pipe and has horn-rimmed glasses and sits in an ivory tower in a university.” Graham’s suspicion of the nontraditional extended beyond the university campus to high art and popular culture. “We can judge our times by the paintings produced by some modern artists,” he asserted. “We see indiscriminate splashes of color with no recognizable pattern or design. The incomprehensible mixture of pigment merely denotes the confused minds and values of our day. Many of the playwrights, novelists, and scriptwriters for television and movies give us unadulterated doses of violence, sex, and murder. Ours indeed is a sick generation in need of salvation.” Young people, he warned, were particularly vulnerable to the loss of structure and authority. “Drinking fathers and drug-dancing mothers are breeding a generation of unstable youngsters,” with the result that “one out of twelve college students is under some kind of psychiatric care.”
The only dependable guideline for restoring order and sanity to a troubled nation was, of course, to be found in Scripture. “I have a deeper conviction than when I began,” Graham insisted, “that the Bible has the answer to every moral situation known to man.” He conceded that Scripture might not provide a foolproof formula for settling every dispute, and that honest Christians might disagree over some issues, but he insisted that race is a different matter: “When it comes to specific moral issues that we can really pinpoint, like the race question, let’s say, I think our duty is clear.” Even so, he sometimes despaired that human effort, even when informed by Holy Scripture, would be able to wrest order from the chaos of the midsixties, and speculated that the only conceivable denouement to the tragic drama being played out on the national stage was a deus ex machina. “On the dark horizon of the present moment,” he confessed, “I see no other hope. There is really no other possibility I see . . . for solving the problems of the world than the coming again of Jesus Christ.”