Barely one month after Nixon’s resignation left Graham filled with feelings of profound sorrow, confusion, and perhaps betrayal, he returned to Los Angeles for a three-night reprise of the 1949 crusade that had hurled him into the nation’s consciousness twenty-five years earlier. This exercise in nostalgia, however, was no harbinger of a ministry in decline. Two weeks later, Graham headed for Rio de Janeiro to make another run on the continent that had largely resisted his incursions twelve years earlier. Of all the South American countries he visited in 1962, Brazil had been among the friendliest. In the intervening years, the country had experienced impressive growth in its Protestant ranks, particularly among Pentecostals, and the stage seemed set for a satisfying visit. After a shaky start marked by audio problems that contributed to plummeting attendance after the opening service, the crusade gained momentum and wound up with close to 250,000 people jammed into the huge Maracana soccer stadium. The president of Brazil, himself an Evangelical, authorized the largest television station in Rio to carry the service, making it available to over 100 million people; according to Crusade Director Henry Holley, station officials believed perhaps 50 million saw at least part of the unprecedented broadcast. Evangelicals were not the only ones impressed with the crowd. Graham asked the archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who was in Brazil at the time, to bring a brief greeting to the assembly. The British prelate rankled a few feelings when he arrived at the stadium in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce (“There was some insensitivity—-the people are awfully poor”) and violated Graham’s request that he limit his remarks by speaking for nearly twenty minutes. Bemused at the memory, Holley provided a simple explanation for the archbishop’s failure to observe the protocol: Unlike Billy Graham, “the Archbishop had never seen that many people gathered in one place before.”
The Brazilian campaign burned itself into Graham’s memory not only for triumphs registered at a time when he needed triumph but also because it coincided with one of the most frightening and unsettling events of his life. While visiting daughter GiGi and her family in Milwaukee, where GiGi’s husband, Stephan Tchividjian, was doing graduate work in clinical psychology, Ruth decided to rig up a pipe slide for her grandchildren. The simple device consisted of a strong wire strung at a sharp angle between two trees with a section of pipe threaded onto it. The plan was for the children to climb one tree, grab hold of the pipe, and sail across the yard to the ground. To make sure it was safe, Ruth (age fifty-four but giving that fact no more respect than she felt it deserved) acted as test pilot. She had no trouble scaling the taller tree, but when she grabbed the pipe and launched herself, the wire snapped as she picked up speed and she crashed into the ground from a height of fifteen feet—and did not move. For a split second, GiGi considered the possibility that her mother was faking injury, trying to salvage a laugh from an embarrassing situation, but when the family dog licked Ruth’s face and she did not react, it was clear this was no joke. At the hospital, GiGi learned her mother had shattered her left heel, broken a rib, and crushed a vertebra. More frightening, she had suffered a concussion that left her unconscious for a week, causing her family and physicians to wonder if she would live, and if she lived, whether she had suffered irreparable brain damage.
Shortly after arriving in Brazil, Billy got a confused and incomplete message that Ruth had been in a serious accident. It was one o’clock in the morning, but he immediately began preparing to return home, directing Grady Wilson to preach in his stead. Grady told his friend, “Buddy, we never know why God allows these things to happen, but Ruth’s unconscious. She’d rather you stay here and preach, and do what God called you to do.” At that moment, Graham’s call to be an evangelist gave way to his covenant to be a husband; he looked at Grady and, feeling utterly helpless, said, “I can’t.” After several abortive efforts with an eccentric telephone system, they made contact with GiGi, who unexpectedly subscribed to Grady’s theology. Her mother was in good hands, she assured her father, and was doing just fine—a diagnosis for which she had no good evidence. He should by all means finish the crusade as scheduled and not worry for a moment.
Billy did as family and friends urged, but with a fearful aching in his heart. He had always demonstrated a remarkable ability to shut out all distractions when he stepped into the pulpit, but his offstage tendency to anticipate the worst now tormented him terribly, as he suspected—correctly—that his family was protecting him from the full truth. When he returned to America, he learned just how serious Ruth’s injury had been. And then Ruth herself learned. On regaining consciousness, she discovered to her horror that her memory was seriously impaired; among the missing items were hundreds of Bible verses memorized throughout her life. As her faculties returned with vexing slowness, she prayed, “Lord, take anything from me, but please give me back my Bible verses.” Gradually, the precious memories straggled back into her mind, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes bringing with them companions she did not remember ever having seen before, much less having committed to memory. Visible signs of the accident eventually passed, but it left its mark, including mild impairment to her short-term memory and physical problems that necessitated replacement of her hip, part of a wrist joint, and, possibly related, reconstruction of her esophagus. She also began to suffer from a nerve disorder whose effects she likened to being attacked by swarms of ants, and from a chronic wracking cough that disturbs her sleep and sometimes threatens to expel the life from her small body. She emphatically did not suffer from a delight in talking about her misfortunes. One morning in 1987, while her obviously worried husband talked about her problems, noting that she had been awake most of the night, she came into the room to stir the coals in the giant walk-in fireplace. “Did you ever hear the definition of a bore?” she asked, looking back over one shoulder. “A bore is someone who, when you ask them how they feel, will tell you the truth. Change the subject!” With that, she walked out brightly and began rounding up some lunch. That same afternoon, Graham went into another room to take a call from their daughter, Bunny Dienert. When he came back, he announced that Ted and Bunny would cancel their vacation and go with her to the Mayo Clinic the following Monday. She listened tensely and did not respond directly, but she was clearly irritated that he had taken this action without consulting her. The subject, one sensed, would be discussed in further detail when they were alone. When she left the room, Billy broke the tension by recalling an occasion when she had gone into a severe coughing fit in the midst of receiving an honorary degree. “The papers said she had been greatly moved,” he said with a smile. “She didn’t even want the degree.”
In the mid-1970s, Graham adopted a conscious policy of holding more crusades in medium-sized cities such as Albuquerque, Lubbock, Jackson, Asheville, and South Bend. This saved money and focused on the television broadcasts as much as on immediate results in the crusade cities themselves. On foreign outings, however, the team still pulled out all the stops, trying always for the largest possible crowds and the greatest possible penetration of the gospel in lands where it was less familiar. Not every foray onto foreign soil met with great success—a ten-day crusade in Brussels produced only 2,557 inquirers—but stronger showings in Taiwan and Hong Kong indicated Graham was in no danger of losing his prowess. The Taiwan crusade had strong official and popular support. Earlier in the year, Graham had presided at a memorial service for Chiang Kai-shek at the National Cathedral in Washington, and Madame Chiang returned the favor by serving as honorary chair of the crusade, which drew more than 250,000 over five days, despite heavy rainfall during each service. Strong anti-American sentiment in Hong Kong made crusade organizers so anxious that they considered taking Graham’s name off the publicity materials, but crowds were large—nearly twice as many as the pope had drawn, team members noted—and the inquirer rate was a whopping 9.4 percent, about twice the standard response.
In 1977 a five-day crusade in Manila marked another politician’s effort to use Graham to polish a public image. Under heavy fire for what CT called “allegedly repressive politics,” Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos went out of their way to associate themselves with Graham and his mission. They received him in private audience, had him spend the night in the presidential palace when the water system at his hotel broke down, and hosted a state dinner in his honor, the first time a head of state had ever so honored him, despite his many visits with presidents, queens, and chancellors. At a National Prayer Breakfast, which both Marcoses attended, the president declared he had come “to demonstrate to our people and to the whole world my personal belief in prayer. . . . The time has come again to pray.” At the School of Evangelism, where she gave the opening address, Mrs. Marcos proclaimed that “it is only those who are Christ-informed and Christ-conscious who are strong.” Apparently, she counted herself and her husband among those so empowered. “The president and I,” she said, “are fully conscious that our temporal powers are bestowed by God, and we clearly realize that this gift of love can only be used in the purest of motives.”
On the other side of the world, Graham held two crusades in Scandinavia during 1977 and 1978. The first installment, in Goteburg, Sweden, was modest in the numbers it generated but encouraging in spirit. The second tour, which included visits to Norway and Sweden, was marred by some of the most bitter and concentrated opposition the evangelist had ever faced. In Oslo, a coalition of scientists, psychologists, actors, writers, and miscellaneous humanists opposed the crusade. Voicing some of the same complaints, but with greater vituperation, a group calling itself the Heathen Society loudly vowed to disrupt the services and made good on their pledge. At a meeting for pastors, a young woman barely missed dousing Graham with a mixture of red paint and chemicals. As security men trundled her out of the room, Billy benignly declared, “I love that young woman because Christ loves her,” a statement that contained the requisite cheek turning while making it clear he did not find her intrinsically winsome. At a stadium rally, the same woman slashed the ropes holding a huge crusade banner, then climbed a tall light tower where she unfurled a sign reading WHEN CHRISTIANS GET POWER, THEEY WILL KILL. A female companion on another light tower loosed a long blast from a powerful air horn and showered the crowd with anti-Graham leaflets, while other heathens chanted, “Billy, go home!” Police hustled the demonstrators away, allowing Graham to finish the service, but as he left, still more hecklers hurled rotten fruit, cream-filled cakes, and small bags of garbage at him, none of which scored a direct hit. In Stockholm protesters pelted Billy with tomatoes, this time hitting their mark, and criticized him for terrorizing children with the fear of hell. Faculty and students at a Lutheran seminary in Uppsala so opposed his coming to Sweden that they released a paperback book subjecting his theology and approach to severe criticism, leveling charges of unreasonable expense and psychological manipulation of crowds (his use of the invitation, they said, was “spiritual rape”) and criticizing the evangelist for his association with Nixon, his support of the war in Vietnam, and his strong opposition to communism. The attacks had their effect. The inquirer rate for all services was less than 1 percent, the lowest ever recorded in forty years of crusades.
Most of Graham’s foreign crusades during this period met with far better results. Repeatedly—in Singapore 1978, Australia 1979, Japan 1980, and Mexico City 1981—participants and team members reported larger-than-expected crowds, high percentages of first-timer responses to the invitation, and occasional doubling and tripling of church membership. Repeatedly, they delighted in generous and even-handed treatment by the media and government officials and at ecumenical cooperation that crossed virtually all barriers, except those protecting McIntire-type Fundamentalists from contamination by compromise and those insulating liberals from people who believed more fervently than they deemed appropriate.
Back in America, Graham continued to demonstrate increasing openness to Roman Catholics, and they returned the favor. In a crusade in Asheville early in 1977, a Catholic church opened its doors to allow overflow crowds to view the crusade on closed-circuit television. And in May Graham held a five-day crusade on the campus of Notre Dame University. Though he altered his sermons mainly by adding references to Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mother Teresa, Christianity Today aptly observed that this remarkable event showed that Graham “is not afraid to go deep into Roman Catholic territory. It also showed that many elements in the once-hostile Catholic community are now receptive to Graham’s type of ministry.” CT reported that one priest had taken off his collar as he came forward, telling a counselor he was accepting Christ for the first time, but Graham required no such renunciation of past allegiance. On the contrary, he assured Catholics that he was not asking them either to break or to form a relationship with a particular denomination. And as one measure of the impact of his ecumenism on his own team, Robert Ferm, who had often assured anxious supporters that Mr. Graham would never compromise the gospel by consorting with Catholics, addressed the faculty and students at the Notre Dame seminary prior to the crusade. It was, Ferm admitted ten years later, in a bit of charming understatement, “significant.”
Graham acknowledged continuing differences between Catholic and Evangelical theology. “From my point of view,” he noted, “the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes Mary too much, but I think Protestants have gone the other direction in denying the greatness of Mary. The Scripture says she was the most blessed of women. Also, the infallibility of the pope is something Protestants can never accept, but I have a great deal of admiration for the pope, even though I don’t accept all of his theology. I don’t think the differences are important as far as personal salvation is concerned.” In a similar vein, T. W. Wilson observed that television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart was “absolutely wrong” in his insistence that Catholics are not Christians in the eyes of God. “A number of doctrines they teach,” Wilson said, “we don’t subscribe to, nor would we ever. But to say that they are not Christians—-man alive! Anybody that receives Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is converted! They’re born again! I believe the pope is a converted man. I believe a lot of these wonderful Catholics are Christians. I’d like to shake them and turn them around and tell them, ‘You don’t need all this. You don’t need to go to the confession booth and confess all your sins to that priest. He’s just a man.’ So there are differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not converted.”
Immersion in his crusades provided Graham with a convenient reason to retreat from the national spotlight after the Watergate debacle, but the 1976 election campaign forced him to clarify his political stance. Though clearly scorched by his association with Nixon, he had not deemed it necessary to break all ties with the White House. He had played golf with Gerald Ford while Ford was still a congressman and, shortly after he became President, had called to offer congratulations and assurances of goodwill. He followed that with a long visit during which he and the new President prayed and read the Bible and a few weeks later allowed the Ladies’ Home Journal to publish a prayer affirming that “we acknowledge thy sovereignty in the selection of our leaders.” Still, early in 1976 he told a reporter he planned to “stay a million miles away from politics this year,” and he came close to a public breach with Campus Crusade leader Bill Bright over the latter’s efforts to launch a conservative Christian political bloc. Graham charged that Bright had contacted prayer and Bible-study groups spawned by his crusades in an effort to enlist them in his movement. He did not resign from Campus Crusade’s board, but he refused to serve as chairman of the Christian Embassy, a Washington mansion Bright purchased for use as a staging ground for evangelizing legislators and other government officials; and when the embassy opened, he chose not to participate in the dedication ceremonies. “Bright has been using me and my name for twenty years,” he complained. “But now I’m concerned about the political direction he seems to be taking.” Graham and Bright subsequently patched up their differences, but Graham never became a supporter of the Christian Embassy.
Perhaps ignoring signs of Graham’s increased skittishness at political partisanship, Gerald Ford made no effort to distance himself from his predecessor’s favorite preacher. The new President declined an offer to attend a crusade in Norfolk, Virginia, but asked to be kept informed about future crusades, and he maintained occasional contact with the evangelist, assuring him that “Betty and I think of you and Ruth often, and we are deeply grateful for your wonderful friendship.” As he began gearing up for reelection, he clearly hoped to count on Graham for more than prayer. When Ruth’s health prevented Billy from attending the National Prayer Breakfast, an event at which an incumbent President typically displays all the piety he can muster, White House memos indicate that Ford’s staff was disturbed at his absence, and the President invited him to be in touch as soon as he felt free to travel, “so that arrangements may be made for us to get together for a visit.” Ford was known to share the Evangelical sentiments common to his Grand Rapids, Michigan, congressional district, but his interest in Billy Graham was not exclusively spiritual. As it began to look more likely that the Democratic candidate would be a southern Evangelical Christian, it seemed especially important for Ford to cultivate whatever ties he had within the Evangelical community. In late April a White House staffer directed colleagues to “keep your eye open for possible events that we could help hook Billy Graham into with the President.” Two days later, Ford sent a note to the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, congratulating it on its fiftieth anniversary and sending warm greetings to its pastor—Ruth Graham’s brother, Clayton Bell. That summer, when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the United States, Billy and Ruth Graham were one of only 150 couples invited to attend a state dinner in their honor. “All America wanted to come,” he recalled, “but they couldn’t invite but about 150 to 175 couples. Ruth and I were quite surprised to be invited. The invitation could have come from the Palace.”
Graham thought well of Ford, but he thought better of maintaining a stance of political neutrality. At some point during late summer, after Carter’s nomination, the President decided to exercise his option to attend a crusade service. Graham was preaching in Pontiac, Michigan, in Ford’s home state, and it would have been easy to justify inviting the President to sit on the platform and offer a few words of greeting to the crowd. But in a letter that showed how far Billy Graham had come since the days when he fairly begged Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to grace his ministry with a visit, he told the President, apparently in response to a telephone inquiry, that he felt it would be impossible to ask him to address a crusade audience. “I think the backlash would not only hurt our ministry,” he wrote, “but would hurt you as people would think you were ‘using’ me.” He did, however, offer a fair-sized crumb: “If you came and sat in whatever area the Secret Service would decide is best, and were recognized from the platform, I am sure you would get a rousing reception.” Lest Ford envision that such an invitation might be interpreted as an endorsement, Graham added, “Of course, since I am maintaining a neutral position, as I always try to do in politics, I will also extend a similar invitation to Governor Carter. In the meantime, I am praying that God’s will will be done on November 2, and that the man of God’s choice will be elected.”
Though Graham’s general political stance was closer to Ford’s than to Jimmy Carter’s, he faced a stronger-than-usual dilemma. In 1966 Carter chaired a film crusade in Americus, Georgia. He had not been particularly impressed with The Restless Ones, the crusade’s centerpiece film, but he was a devout, born-again Southern Baptist (truly converted, it was said, not long after hearing his pastor preach a sermon borrowed from Billy Graham) and he affirmed the main points of Evangelical belief. He was also one of the few church leaders willing to oversee an integrated public program, which Graham insisted upon. At the conclusion of the film each evening, Carter himself explained the gospel briefly and gave the invitation. Seven years later, while governor of Georgia, Carter chaired Graham’s Atlanta crusade and hosted the evangelist for an overnight stay in the Governor’s mansion. Still, the man who so fervently longed for piety in his presidents that he sometimes perceived it where others could not carefully avoided indicating a preference for his fellow Southern Baptist. To the contrary, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “I would rather have a man in office who is highly qualified to be President who didn’t make much of a religious profession than to have a man who had no qualifications but who made a religious profession.” In an ostensible and perhaps sincere show of the promised neutrality, he added that Ford and Carter held similar religious views, but some in the Carter camp, apparently including the candidate himself, felt Graham had been giving Evangelicals permission not to vote for the governor. Carter snapped, “I think what people should look out for is people like Billy Graham, who go around telling people how to live their lives.” In a similar display of pique, Carter’s son Jeff also criticized Graham’s statement, gratuitously (and erroneously) adding that Graham’s doctorate was a mail-order degree.
Graham sought to defuse the building tension by dropping a note to Rosalyn Carter, telling her “to give Jeff a big hug. I have two sons and I understand.” Carter’s resentment was eased by winning the election. Graham immediately told the press that although he was not one of Carter’s advisers, they had been friends for years. The president-elect was, he asserted, “a leader we can trust and follow,” and he would personally be praying and “rootin’ and tootin’ for him.” Graham skipped the inauguration, the first he had missed since 1949, but he did attend a special presidential Prayer Breakfast a few days later, and he and Ruth spent yet another night in the White House. “Rosalyn asked if we wanted to sleep in the Lincoln Room,” Graham recalled, “and I told her, ‘No, I don’t. That bed has a hump right in the middle.’ I’d been there with both the Johnsons and the Nixons, so I knew how the beds slept. She said, ‘Really?’ She went back and felt it and said, ‘You’re right.’ So we slept in the Queen’s Room, across the hall. The same thing happened with the Reagans, but I think Mrs. Reagan got a new mattress for the Lincoln Room.” The two men had occasional contact after that, and Graham later characterized Carter as “the hardest-working President we’ve ever had.” He noted that “he doesn’t inspire love or loyalty in the way that Reagan does,” but added, “At the same time, you know he would struggle with you and do anything in the world you asked him to, if he felt like he could.”
It was understandable that the relationship between Carter and Graham never became particularly close. Graham was wary of the political spotlight, and given the evangelist’s ties to Nixon, Carter had little reason to believe Billy would ever become a major ally. Further, within months after Carter’s inauguration, BGEA was plunged into a crisis that made association with Graham seem more a liability than an asset. To the chagrin of his admirers and the snide smiles of cynics, it appeared for a time that Billy Graham and his righteous band, like so many of their predecessors, had been caught trying to serve both God and mammon.
That Graham might be guilty of financial malfeasance came as a shock even to those who had excoriated him for his theology and his politics. After he made the decision in 1952 to stop taking love offerings and to place BGEA’s finances under the direction of a board of respected business- people, the association enjoyed a mostly unblemished record for financial integrity. No one receiving mail from several of the leading independent ministries can fail to be struck by the contrast between Graham’s fund-raising techniques and those of most of his colleagues. As frequently as every two weeks, others send letters bordered in red or black or Western Union yellow and labeled “Crisis-gram” or “Disaster-gram,” and claiming their ostensible author had been in prayer in the middle of the night (“My doctor says I have to get more rest, but how can I sleep with a heart so burdened for lost souls?”) when he realized the only hope for his financially strapped ministry lay in writing “you, Sister Chapman, one of the most faithful supporters I have had in twenty-seven years of serving God.” Graham’s letters, arriving once a month in a simple window envelope, report on what the ministry has recently accomplished and what lies just ahead, request continued prayer and, usually in no more than four or five sentences, apologetically asks supporters to send “as generous and sacrificial a gift as the Lord lays it on your heart to give.” And that’s it. No cries of desperation. No threats. No promises of a tenfold or hundredfold miraculous return on whatever they contribute. No requests for seventy dollars to celebrate his seventieth birthday, or forty dollars to commemorate forty years of crusade evangelism, or twelve dollars in honor of the twelve apostles or the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve white Edsels he had seen on the way to his prayer tower. Just “Here’s what we are doing. We think it’s the Lord’s will. If you’ll pray for us and send us a little money, we surely would appreciate it.” Ed Plowman, a veteran Graham associate, observed that the monthly letter “is one of the few things Billy does entirely himself. George Wilson applies his editorial touches and there’s very little besides that. It’s no professional fund-raising agency. It’s Billy. And it’s refreshing.”
The radio and TV pitches follow a similar pattern. Unlike colleagues whose programs are often little more than hour-long begging bouts, Graham’s prime-time specials seldom devote more than two or three minutes to finances, and those appeals are carefully couched to avoid any hint of charlatanry. The refusal to employ half-truths, heart-tugging petitions, and misleading promises has saved Graham from a load of opprobrium. “Let’s face it,” Plowman said, “you don’t identify the Graham organization as being one of the sob sisters out with a tin cup, or with its hat in its hand all the time. Whatever problems the organization has had, they aren’t problems of exploiting the masses or shaking down little old ladies. Billy has so soft-pedaled the appeal for funds that this has contributed to the aura of integrity. People say, ‘I believe this man. I can trust him. I believe he is telling the truth.’” As a result of that approach, Plowman estimated that BGEA “is probably realizing only one fourth or one fifth of its potential income.” Plowman was not calling for a shift in tactics: “What I’m saying is that respectability and the impression of respectability comes at a high price to the Graham organization.”
In addition to paying its own formidable bills, BGEA regularly makes substantial contributions to numerous other ministries and charities, a practice extremely unusual among parachurch ministries. Graham’s conviction that BGEA should spend all the money it receives, except for a prudent short-term reserve, made it difficult for his board to convince him he needed to establish a pension fund for himself and other members of the association. “We don’t worry about anything like that,” he told Carloss Morris during the mid-1950s. “It’s not the way we operate. We use whatever we get to put our radio program on new stations.” Morris countered with an example he could not ignore. “Old Mordecai Ham would come into Houston after he was way up in years,” Morris recalled, “and he would try to conduct a revival and not draw enough people to pay his expenses. I’d call some friends and we’d bail him out of the Rice Hotel and give him enough money to get to the next town. I told Billy, ‘No one takes care of old evangelists. If you don’t need anything for yourself, you need to make plans for Cliff and Bev and the others.’ Well, we finally got Roger Hull on the board. He was chairman of Mutual of New York—that’s a big one—and he pushed it and we finally got a pension plan put in.” Once convinced of the need, Graham not only accepted it graciously but insisted it be retroactive. Willis Haymaker, for example, was too old to qualify for benefits, but Graham saw to it that his old crusade mentor received what amounted to a full pension until the day he died.
In a similar spirit of “taking no thought for the morrow,” Graham also resisted setting up a program of trusts, annuities, and life-estate agreements by means of which supporters could donate money, stocks, real estate, and other types of property to the association, gaining an immediate tax deduction and drawing regular interest income from the annuity until their death or some other designated point, at which time the property would belong fully to BGEA, to do with as it wished. “Billy didn’t want to become an institution,” George Wilson recalled, “but every day we lived we became more and more an institution, and people kept writing in, wanting to set up annuities. He didn’t understand it and I didn’t push it.” Finally, under continued prodding from the board and patient explanation by Wilson, Graham agreed to an annuity program, but only with the stipulation that donors would be completely protected against loss. Most ministries and other nonprofit organizations using this popular fund-raising strategy feel free to put a hefty portion of the gift—40 percent to 50 percent or, in some cases, substantially more—-directly into working funds in the actuarially reasonable expectation that the remainder will provide enough to cover the promised interest payments. In an unusually conservative policy, Graham and Wilson both insisted that none of the principal be touched as long as the donor was alive, so that if, for whatever reason, the ministry went bankrupt, no donor would be hurt financially. “We don’t need it and we don’t want to touch it,” Wilson explained. “There’s been too much religious skulduggery at that point.”
To cultivate possible donors to this program, BGEA representatives call on people who make sizable donations to the ministry or who specifically express interest in some kind of annuity program. On a typical first visit, the field reps offer to take the prospect to dinner, always letting them pick the place, “so they won’t think we’re being too cheap or too expensive,” and if asked, explain how the annuity program works. They are instructed not to ask for money and are forbidden to accept any gifts themselves. They are also admonished not to use their contacts to set up their own organizations. But as one admitted, “It happens—as Billy Graham started by using his YFC contacts.”
In 1977 approximately $147,000 worth of annuities were sold to a handful of supporters in Minnesota, where the association had not yet met all the requirements of an amended registration procedure and were not properly licensed to offer such investment instruments. The sticking point was BGEA’s reluctance to provide extensive financial information about its operations. When pressed by reporters, Graham claimed the Minnesota Securities Commission’s letter asking for fuller data had been lost and that as soon as he had learned the association was not in compliance, he had directed George Wilson to furnish whatever information was needed. Wilson also described BGEA’s failure to provide the information as an “oversight caused by a clerical error.” That defense had flaws. The commission agreed that a letter had been lost, but the loss had occurred two years earlier. For the past nine months, a commission spokesman said, he had been negotiating with BGEA attorneys over whether the annuities were a security and needed to be registered, whether BGEA had to file a report at all, and if it did, how much information it must provide. “I would hardly call nine months of negotiations an ‘oversight,’” the agent tersely observed. While covering the story, reporters learned that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) had been trying unsuccessfully for five years to get Wilson to provide a copy of BGEA’s annual audit; because he had refused, the bureau would not put BGEA on its list of trustworthy charities. Such pressures quickly moved the association to meet the Securities Commission requests, and the annuity sales were approved as expected. The BBB would probably have been left hanging, however, had it not been for a nearly simultaneous revelation that threatened for a while to leave a sizable stain on Graham’s reputation for fiscal rectitude.
During the spring of 1977, the Charlotte Observer published a four-part series on Graham and BGEA by investigative reporters Mary Bishop and Robert Hodierne. After a year of scrutinizing the ministry’s operations and receiving what they believed had been a full disclosure of all its facets, Bishop and Hodierne gave Graham and his organization a clean bill of health. The ministry, they said, was financially upright and refreshingly free of scandal. In their report they quoted Graham as saying the association spent nearly everything it raised each year and was seldom more than a million or so long or short. He also volunteered that he thought it would be wrong for BGEA to own stock, since ownership could be construed as an endorsement of a corporation. Just a few weeks later, however, the Observer broke a story that delighted doubters and caused millions of true believers to wonder if even Billy Graham had succumbed to the lure of lucre. The paper revealed the existence of the World Evangelism and Christian Education Fund (WECEF), incorporated in Dallas and worth $22.9 million. Most of the holdings of the seven-year-old fund, which the paper said had been “carefully shielded from public view,” were in blue-chip stocks and bonds, but assets also included $3.9 million worth of prime undeveloped land in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, purchased by Dallas attorney Jerry John Crawford in 1973 and held in his name until 1975. Though he used WECEF money, the Observer reported, Crawford did not mention Graham or any of his organizations while making the purchase. Further, when owners of land next to the tract asked if Graham or any of his people owned the land, they had been told no as recently as the spring of 1977. That WECEF was a Graham organization was beyond question. Almost all of its funds had been funneled into it from BGEA. Nine of its eleven board members were also directors of BGEA; the other two were Ruth Graham and her brother, Clayton Bell.
The explicit and implied charges in the article stung Graham, and in contrast to his standard policy of turning the other cheek to his critics, he characterized the Observer article as “grossly misleading” and used an Hour of Decision broadcast to offer a detailed statement, which was then released to the press and sent to his supporters. WECEF, he explained, had been established for three purposes: to provide support for such student-oriented programs as Campus Crusade, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Young Life; to establish an evangelism institute on the campus of Wheaton College; and to develop a layman’s training center in Asheville. The fund’s extraordinarily low profile, he said, had been seen as desirable to avoid giving the impression that the ministry was so rich that it did not need small contributions and also to avoid a flood of requests from needy projects. In a more scriptural but less persuasive defense, he quoted Matthew 6:3–4:
“But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” As for his previous statements about holding stock, well, this was different, since WECEF did not bear his name.
Neither the legality of the fund nor the way its monies were spent was ever questioned. It was fully registered as a nonprofit corporation in Texas, it filed yearly 990 forms with the IRS, it was overseen by unpaid board members and had virtually no overhead expenses, and the money was being disbursed exactly as Graham said. Between 1971 and 1975, for example, WECEF had donated more than $1 million to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton, a center for the study of evangelism and the repository of Graham’s extensive archives; $260,000 to Montreat-Anderson College; $120,000 to Gordon-Conwell Seminary; $72,000 to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes; and smaller amounts to more than a dozen other Evangelical groups. (It also channeled $240,000 into the coffers of Christianity Today, a detail that magazine omitted in a listing of major recipients of WECEF funds. When asked why he had not included CT, editor Harold Lindsell said he “saw no need to do so.”) Despite the legitimacy of the fund and its beneficiaries, Bishop and Hodierne understandably felt they had been deceived. When Graham and his associates sketched the ministry’s various financial components, the reporters asked if that covered everything and were assured that it did. Now, that seemed plainly not to be true. The claim that they had not even thought about WECEF, since it was a legally separate entity, persuaded no one. The claim that the fund was not a secret, since 990 forms are available to any wishing to see them, was equally unconvincing, since even the most diligent sleuths are unlikely to ask for information about an organization they do not know exists.
Feeling burned, Hodierne took a closer look at the real estate owned by the fund, and for awhile it appeared he had uncovered the real dirt. Not only had Jerry John Crawford purchased land without revealing his use of WECEF money, but it seemed possible that several of Graham’s relatives and associates in the ministry might have benefited financially from the transactions. Hodierne’s investigation centered on a payment of $2.75 million for Porter’s Cove, a 1,050-acre piece of stunning mountain property on the edge of Asheville where Graham planned to build the proposed training center. The owners of the property received $2.1 million; the remaining $650,000 went to the North Carolina firm of Pharr Yarns, which had purchased an option to buy the property for $2.1 million just three months earlier. The option had cost Pharr $25,000. Real estate experts told Hodierne that no one would assess the property as worth more than $2 million, that the highest offer prior to Pharr’s had been $1.5 million, and that it was simply unheard of for a $25,000 option to produce a $625,000 profit in so short a time. The plot got even thicker when William Pharr revealed that he had shared the profit with McLain Hall, a Greenville, South Carolina, real estate broker. Hall and Melvin Graham, who speculates in land, were involved in several land deals at this time, some of which involved not only Pharr Yarns but Morrow Graham, Catherine Graham McElroy, and Leighton Ford as well. Further, Grady Wilson and Cliff Barrows had also made real estate investments with Hall. Because William Pharr indicated that he and Hall had shared $465,000 of the profit for the option but would not account for the remaining $160,000, it seemed possible that Melvin, and perhaps some of his relatives and close friends, might have pocketed some of that money. Since Melvin was a member of the WECEF board, such action would be not only unethical but illegal. Asked about that possibility, an IRS official replied, “If these are the facts, then they have a problem with us.”
Neither Hodierne nor the IRS nor anyone else was able to establish that Pharr or Hall knew the foundation was looking for property when they bought the option. Melvin Graham emphatically denied that he or any relative or board member or ministry employee received any profit whatsoever on the transaction, and no evidence to the contrary ever surfaced. Billy Graham declined to say whether he was aware of prior ties between his relatives and the owners of the option, but T. W. Wilson said he felt sure Billy knew nothing about these dealings. When pressed as to why the foundation had paid such an inflated price for both the property and the option, without so much as getting an appraisal or haggling over the premium, WECEF and BGEA board member Bill Mead, CEO of Campbell-Taggart Industries, said, “We didn’t consider it necessary. If [a piece of land] fits the purpose and you can make [the deal], you do it. . . . That’s the one we felt we had to have to accomplish our purpose, so we bought it at the best price we could.” Melvin Graham snorted, “You pay what a man’s asking . . . or you don’t get the property. If you’ve got any common sense, you know that.” Those with more than rudimentary common sense, of course, felt that anyone who paid the initial asking price on such a piece of property had not had much experience with real estate, a description that did not fit Melvin Graham.
It was not a happy time for the Graham organization. Even the most charitable reading of the evidence made it appear that BGEA had not been completely straightforward with either the press or their supporters, and that key leaders in the association had exercised poor business judgment and displayed uncalled-for generosity in allowing some of their friends to make an unreasonable profit on the deal. Letters and calls to the Observer and to BGEA, even from people sympathetic to the ministry, urged Graham to come clean and clear the air, admitting mistakes if there were any, and then get on with his ministry. Others, of course, condemned the newspaper for attacking a trustworthy man of God. Ironically, some letters defended both Graham and another homegrown ministry to which the paper was beginning to give a hard time: Jim Bakker’s PTL Ministries.
Though Graham acknowledged the fund had not been widely publicized, he denied it had been a complete secret. Its creation in 1970 had been announced at a news conference in Minneapolis, and the Religious News Service, whose subscribers include the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and CBS, had carried stories about it during the first year or two of its existence. More pointedly, Graham noted that he had talked about it freely in 1972 with Peter Geiger, a respected religion reporter with the Akron Beacon Journal, a newspaper in the Knight-Ridder chain, which also owned the Observer. The Observer’s response to that particular bit of intelligence seems to have been less than exemplary. According to Geiger, whose memory of the incident remained fresh in 1989, he had gone to North Carolina in 1972 to gather information for an extended piece about Graham prior to an upcoming crusade in Cleveland. While visiting his boyhood home, by then surrounded by a new industrial park, Graham volunteered that when his family sold the land, he had put his share of the money into a foundation headquartered in Dallas and headed by one of his board members. Monies from this fund, which had grown to $2.5 million at the time, would be used to further world evangelism. Geiger mentioned the fund in his story but thought little more about it until he read the 1977 Observer series and listened to Graham’s defense on the Hour of Decision.
As a kind of memento of the visit, Geiger had kept the tapes of the interview. On checking them, he confirmed his memory that Graham had indeed talked freely about the fund and that he had written about the fund in his story. He immediately sent a copy of his story and a transcript of the interview to David Lawrence, editor of the Observer. Lawrence did not respond, but Geiger’s own editor advised him not to make a fuss about the matter. A few days later, Graham called to ask Geiger if he remembered their conversation. Not sure just what force his editor’s cautionary statement carried, Geiger answered carefully: “Mr. Graham, if you had told me about the fund, I would have had it in a tape recording and would have written about it. If that were true, I would have sent it to the Observer. Do you hear me?” Graham exulted, “I hear you loud and clear. Thanks a lot!” Several weeks later, Charlotte television executive and longtime Graham friend Charles Crutchfield called to ask Geiger if he had indeed sent a transcript and a clipping to David Lawrence. Geiger gave Crutchfield the same answer. Shortly afterward, Geiger’s editor asked him, “What have you done?” Geiger explained, “I tried to set the story straight.” He then learned that Lawrence had said he was going to Montreat to check with Graham. Geiger asked how long that would take and was told it was none of his business. About six weeks later, Graham called Geiger to say, “I’m hurting. What can you do for me?” Lawrence had indeed visited with him, but had written nothing as yet. “Shall I call in [AP religion writer] George Cornell?” the evangelist asked. Geiger told him that was a brilliant idea. By contract, the Associated Press was free to use everything he published, and he would be happy to send Cornell the tape and his article. Shortly afterward, Cornell called, got the information he needed, and wrote a column explaining Graham’s side of the story and chiding the Observer for its own failure to come clean. The story went out on the wire on Wednesday, for Saturday publication. On Friday Lawrence called the managing editor of the AP, demanding it be withdrawn. The editor refused. “The Beacon Journal never carried the column,” Geiger said. “I don’t think the Observer did.”
The following week, Graham called again. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” he asked. Geiger admitted he was. He had been called into his editor’s office and told, “We will hear no more of this. You have done your good deed. Now keep your mouth shut.” Graham told him not to worry—“I’ll hire you.” Geiger pointed out that no matter what happened, he could never come to work for BGEA without destroying his own credibility. Graham conceded that point but assured him, “I know ten editors who would hire you tomorrow.”
In a rare occurrence, BGEA and its affiliate organizations ran a deficit of $3.2 million in 1977, and CT speculated that the hubbub over the WECEF may have contributed to a drop in contributions, but most of the deficit was due to a $2.7 million rise in expenditures. The association was back in the black the following year, and the ministry seemed to suffer no lasting negative effects. More significant, BGEA began making an audited financial statement available to anyone who requested it, for whatever reason. The memory of that incident still rankled people within the Graham organization ten years later, but Billy himself has long since made peace with his antagonists. “David Lawrence and I became friends, eventually,” he said. “When he got a big award in Detroit from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, they wanted me to be their speaker. He did, too. I went up there and gave the address, praising him. I didn’t want to hold a grudge against him. There was no way we could quite explain it to their satisfaction, but it didn’t cause us too much trouble. I spoke to the National Press Club around that time also, and Bob Hodierne was in the audience. They asked me some questions about the incident and I said, ‘Bob Hodierne has taught us some good lessons. We have learned some things from him.’”
Ruth Graham, cleaning up after lunch while her husband recounted this episode, interjected sarcastically, “That was very gracious of you.”
“No, it wasn’t gracious,” Billy gently responded. “It was the truth.”
Ruth snapped back: “He came up here and we told him everything, right out there on the porch, and he went back and what he wrote didn’t have one word of fact in it.”
“Well, darling, I wouldn’t say ‘not one word.’ There were a few misstatements, but it had a lot of truth in it.”
“My husband is more gracious than I am,” she said, banging pots as she spoke.
“We didn’t mention the fund,” Graham continued, “because it was a separate corporation. And they didn’t ask about it. That was a little bit on the fence line, I think. We should have said, ‘We’ve got another fund down in Texas that we are going to do thus and such with.’ We told the government about it, but we didn’t think the newspapers necessarily had a legitimate right to know about everything. I’ve changed my mind on that. I think they do. Because I think we should be publicly accountable for everything.”
Having proved to himself anew the value of setting up external mechanisms to ensure one’s virtue, Graham became a zealous advocate of full disclosure by parachurch organizations. In 1979 he played a key role in founding the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), and George Wilson served as the first chairman of its board. The organization’s stated purpose is “to enunciate, maintain and manifest a code of financial accountability and reporting which is consistent with enlightened and responsible Christian faith and practice.” Membership in ECFA is voluntary, and almost none of the well-known television preachers opted to join, but Graham soon began to call on his colleagues to come aboard and to warn Christians against being too trusting. “It is common for most religious leaders to be very secretive about the finances of their organization,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, when legitimate Christian organizations and churches refuse to be completely open about finances, they are conditioning people to accept unquestioningly the contention of the cult leader that he is not accountable to anyone for his financial dealings. If you give to any Christian charity (including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) and you don’t insist on an understandable financial accounting of your gift, you are in danger of falling prey to [dishonesty].”
During the closing years of the 1970s, Graham was nudged out of his traditional spot as the nation’s most newsworthy Christian leader by Jerry Falwell, who was soon joined by Pat Robertson, James Robison, and a gaggle of other religious broadcasters and parachurch leaders who were forming what came to be called the Christian New Right. Graham was not tempted to throw in with the new movement. Instead, he began to try on the role of elder statesman. In Christianity Today’s first issue of 1980, he drew on personal experience to warn his newly politicized brethren to “be wary of exercising political influence” lest they lose their spiritual impact. A few days later, in a press conference prior to a preaching mission at Oxford University, he noted that, “in my earlier days and [crusades], I tended to identify the Kingdom of the God with the American way of life. I don’t think like that now.” Though he still favored free-enterprise capitalism, he believed Christians could live under various economic systems. A few days later, in a dialogue at Cambridge with the archbishop of Canterbury, he sounded a similar note, observing that he no longer associated a Christian understanding of society with American nationalism. These were not just throwaway lines designed to please a British audience. In various press conferences and interviews in the United States, he warned against “the mingling of spiritual and political goals,” observing, in notable contrast to his earlier willingness to offer prescriptions for national policy, that “we as clergy know so very little to speak out with such authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. I do not intend to use what little influence I may have on [such] secular, non-moral, non-religious issues.”
As he had in 1976, Graham kept a low profile during the 1980 election, but his sympathies lay with Ronald Reagan, whom he had known since 1953. “I met him through his mother-in-law,” he recalled. “I was playing golf with Henry Luce at the Biltmore Country Club in Phoenix, and Mrs. Davis came out on the course. She said, ‘I want you to meet my new son-in-law. You two have many things in common.” And indeed they did. Both reached the pinnacle of their professions by dint of a gift for articulating, in terms easily grasped by masses of people, a large but essentially simple vision. Neither demonstrated any notable talent for critical analysis or practical detail. They understood intuitively how to inspire and how to lead, and how to assemble teams to implement their visions. They trusted fully in a small number of firmly held principles, and as long their friends and associates pledged allegiance to those principles, they assumed they had no reason to be wary of anything else those friends or associates might believe or do. And when that assumption proved faulty and expectations went awry, they possessed a remarkable ability to dismiss the troublesome evidence as a blip, a momentary aberration—certainly not a fundamental weakness in their own vision or judgment. The friendship flourished, and Billy and Ruth often visited the Reagans when they were in California. Graham recalled that on one occasion, while Reagan was governor, “I spoke to a group of Democratic leaders, and they had a big battle as to whether to invite him, because they knew I was a big friend of his.” Reagan did not attend the speech but invited Graham to visit with him and his cabinet in his office, which was in the same building. As soon as they sat down, Reagan said, “Billy, tell us what the Bible teaches about things that are happening today, and where you think we stand in the prophetic scriptures.” Graham observed, “I knew he had an interest in prophecy, but I don’t know where it came from. I understand his mother was interested in all that.”
Despite this background, Graham declined to jump on board Reagan’s campaign train, but he did manage to give it a well-publicized friendly wave. Fortuitously for the candidate, Graham was holding a crusade in Indianapolis at the time of the Indiana primary, and he gave Reagan a nice boost by joining him for breakfast, during which he congratulated him warmly on his strong showing in the Texas primary the day before. Reagan was duly appreciative, and all three major television networks suggested that the meeting had given him a remarkably well-timed boost. Graham professed to see it as no more than a courtesy visit, noting that “I refused to endorse him. He never asked me, but one of his aides did. I never had Nixon or any of his aides ask [for an endorsement]. Nixon told me to stay out of politics. Always. Of course, everybody knew pretty well how I stood with Nixon.”
After Reagan’s election, Graham enjoyed many other breakfasts with him—at the White House. By his reckoning, he spent more nights in the presidential quarters during Reagan’s time in office than during either Johnson’s or Nixon’s presidency, though little was made of most of the visits. After the first of these overnight stays, which included a five-hour conversation, he characterized Reagan as “laughing, kidding, a lot of fun, yet a brilliant man” who “thinks positively and is optimistic about the country.” The country, Graham volunteered, was in capable hands: “Ronald Reagan runs it but, like Ike, he lets others handle the details, which gives him time to think of bigger things.” The friendship was sufficiently close that when the President was shot on March 30, 1981, the White House sent out an emergency call for Graham, and the evangelist came immediately to the capital to comfort and pray with Mrs. Reagan. He also contacted the father of John Hinckley, the President’s assailant, and prayed with him over the telephone.
Graham once noted that Reagan liked to talk about “the old days in Hollywood” more than about politics and indicated that he probably had less influence over him than over some past Presidents. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that in the fall of 1981 Graham successfully lobbied several key senators on behalf of the President’s plan to sell AWAC airplanes to Saudi Arabia, a measure actively opposed by Jerry Falwell and his avidly pro-Israel troops in the Moral Majority. Graham minimized his role, but did not deny that at the President’s request he had indicated to several legislators that putting AWACs in Saudi hands posed no military threat to Israel. Still, it appears that his relationship with Reagan had far less political implications than those with Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon. This is not to say that Billy Graham had lost interest in affecting the secular order, particularly as it impinged on the sacred realm. Quite to the contrary, he was at that moment, and had been for several years, involved in a slow, quiet, occasionally awkward but nonetheless remarkable campaign aimed at nothing less than inducing the leadership of the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc satellites to grant full religious freedom to the citizens of their respective nations.