Dramatic and pathbreaking as they were, Graham’s visits to the Soviet bloc nations and the Amsterdam conferences did not long divert him from the well-worn crusade trail. During the early 1980s, he held crusades in Canada, Japan, Mexico, Baltimore, Boston, Boise, San Jose, Houston, Spokane, Chapel Hill, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Tacoma, Sacramento, Anchorage, Oklahoma City, Hartford, and Anaheim. In 1984–85 he conducted a highly successful two-stage Mission England that included seven full-scale campaigns in major cities other than London and live-link satellite video meetings in fifty additional cities. In 1986 he followed up the Washington, D.C., crusade with a meeting in Tallahassee and with Mission France, an effective effort that originated in Paris in the midst of terrorist bomb scares and sent the gospel flying by satellite to thirty-one cities throughout that nation. In 1987 he opened the season in Columbia, South Carolina, in the same stadium where Henry Luce had first heard him thirty-seven years earlier, then checked off all the remaining parts of the country in which he had never held crusades in a five-state Peaks to Plains barnstorming tour that wound up in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. He closed that year with an encouraging campaign in Helsinki. Then, as the decade ended, the premier evangelist of the second half of the twentieth century consciously sought to associate himself with his counterpart from the first half of the nineteenth by beginning a series of crusades that would take him to the same cities in upstate New York where Charles Grandison Finney had stamped his indelible mark on American revivalism.
With forty years of experience in the vault, Graham’s crusade team unquestionably had its act together, so that when an invitation to hold a crusade was received, pondered, and accepted, it could roll into a city and roll out a crusade along well-established lines, pursuing what Charles Finney called “the right use of the constituted means.” Most of the time its accomplishments were quite predictable, within a modest range of variance, although the results were often not exactly what the sponsoring churches expected or what the Graham team implied, and the process was not quite the automatic, self-contained, flawless operation it may have appeared to be from the outside. Still, a Billy Graham Greater Anywhere Crusade, however much it may have depended on the Spirit of God for its success, was a remarkable exercise in rational organization and action.
Team members did not want to appear as manipulators of ostensibly spiritual phenomena and were invariably careful not to relegate Deity to the sidelines, but Sterling Huston, director of North American crusades, freely acknowledged that “yes, we have a plan. We know one way, and it will work for local congregations if they will follow it. We try to be flexible and adapt the plan to a local situation, but when they invite Mr. Graham to come, this is the only plan we know that really works. We want it contextualized, but the skeleton, the principles, the goals don’t change.” The degree to which the plan was followed varied somewhat with the personality of the particular crusade director assigned to a given campaign, but David Bruce, a Denver pastor who worked with the follow-up program on numerous crusades, noted that “there is a sense in which, because you have a short time line, you almost have to come in and say, ‘Look, we’ve done this for forty years. This is the game plan. Get on board with us.’” This approach often worked better at home than abroad. In the 1986 Mission France, resistance to what French churchmen dubbed an entreprise parachutée—a complete system dropped from an American gospel transport plane—made it necessary to give more control to local leaders. The resulting blend of local custom and imported practice was both successful and amusing. In Strasbourg, the lovely old Alsatian city near France’s northeastern border with Germany, satellite-service organizers saw nothing incongruous in having concessionaires sell beer and sausage or in allowing worshipers to smoke during the services, and the Graham people apparently felt no need to complain about these breaches of American pietistic practice, as long as the soccer-stadium scoreboard proclaimed that “Jésus dit, ‘Je suis Le Chemin, La Vérité, et La Vie,’” and the book tables had plenty of copies of La Paix avec Dieu and Un Monde en Flamme. But some American Evangelicals felt the Graham method was too inflexible. One pastor who had worked in several Graham crusades over the years charged the team with putting on “a dog-and-pony show with little evidence of struggle or growth or ambiguity. The concern for people is great, no question about that. But there is some going through the motions. It would seem that there is such a dramatic difference between Spokane, Boise, Houston, and Boston that there’s got to be some reflection of that, and that a great organization like BGEA ought not to be just transplanting the same thing in every community.” Instead he felt the team and “the plan” had “developed a kind of rigidity that does not listen. Most of the crusade directors have done this so often that they are weary of [it].” John Bisagno, pastor of Houston’s 21,000-member First Baptist Church, agreed that greater flexibility was needed but conceded that “when you have a thirty-year track record of the most successful evangelism in the world, why should they [let] local committees come in and get them to change their plans?”
Graham’s remarkable record did indeed enable him to overcome obstacles that would surely thwart a lesser figure. Seldom was this more clearly in evidence than in Mission France. To help the evangelist gain permission to use the sparkling new 15,000-seat Palais Omnisport de Paris-Bercy, U.S. ambassador Joe M. Rodgers, a former Tennessee contractor who had attended Graham’s crusades in both Knoxville and Nashville, successfully interceded with Paris mayor Jacques Chirac. Rodgers, it happens, was not acting entirely on his own. With some bemusement, he observed that two years into his term as his country’s ambassador to France, President Reagan had given him only two assignments, one of which was to help Billy Graham get the use of Bercy. The other was to arrange a meeting between Graham and President François Mitterrand. Similar cooperation obtained at other levels. When terrorists initiated a frightening series of bombings in public places a few days before the crusade opened, the city responded by providing Graham and his team with bullet-proof automobiles and deploying 2,500 heavily armed policemen and soldiers to stand guard at the arena and search everyone who entered each night of the crusade.
Security was seldom the obvious problem that it was during the Paris campaign, but great care was always taken both to protect Graham and his team from injury or harassment and to preclude or short-circuit any attempts to disrupt the services. In most cities the team worked closely with local police or, in some places, national police, military, and intelligence forces for months before a crusade to map out detailed security and crowd-control plans. When circumstances seemed to justify it, the association hired former Secret Servicemen to oversee security operations. “People try to get to him,” Tex Reardon said simply. “You don’t always know for what purpose. We try to protect him from strangers walking off the street.” The team’s own security personnel downplayed physical threats to avoid setting up challenges for addled publicity seekers and also to protect Graham from anxiety. For the most part, their efforts were limited to greater attentiveness to possible problems. “If someone comes in with a package,” Reardon explained, “we don’t deliberately search it or anything, but we note it. We log where it is.” In addition, they altered a long-standing practice of storing programs and counseling materials under the speaker’s platform: “If you were going to do anything, what better place than a cardboard box under a platform? So we eliminate boxes. We also have guards watching the facilities all night.” Graham knew of such measures, but if they bothered him, he managed not to show it. He told Ruth and his colleagues not to pay ransom if he were ever kidnapped and he appeared to believe, in good Presbyterian fashion, that nothing would happen to him unless God willed it. Ruth shared his view, contending that “nothing can touch a child of God without his permission.” Still, Graham and his staff took precautions against the twisted fantasies and misplaced hatreds demented souls sometimes direct toward public figures. According to T. W. Wilson, the evangelist received more threats of violence during the mid-1980s than during the thirty years prior to that. Pulling out a four-inch folder filled with vile imprecations that documented his point, he said, “We turn all threats over to the FBI, and they look into it. Some of the language is so filthy, and the hatred so bitter, you wouldn’t believe it.” One warned, “I’m going to get you. I’m going to cut up your wife’s body in small pieces, feed her innards to wild animals, and bury the rest in a shallow grave. I have never been arrested and have no police record.” It was signed with a swastika. Because the letter bore a California postmark and had been addressed to a BGEA post-office box, it seemed likely the writer was on the ministry’s mailing list. The FBI narrowed the field to 4,000 neo-Nazis in the San Diego area, cut that number to a dozen most-likely candidates, and assigned agents to stake out each one of them. When the would-be assailant, a young woman, sent the fifth such letter, agents arrested her, went to her home and found the typewriter on which she had punched out her malevolent missives, and confronted her shocked parents with what their daughter had been doing. Apparently feeling little real danger existed, Graham decided not to press charges. “If they really want you,” Wilson conceded, “they can usually get you, but we take all the threats seriously. We have more trouble with religious nuts than anything else.”
One part of the crusade plan that seldom worked perfectly, even after forty years, was the effort to increase black participation in crusade preparations and black attendance at services. Team members admit that despite their efforts to integrate the crusades, blacks still regarded them as predominantly a white enterprise and did not usually participate as fully as had been hoped. Charges that BGEA was not sensitive to black issues and sensibilities stung Graham, and he directed his associates to make every conceivable effort to involve blacks in the 1986 Greater Washington Crusade. John Akers acknowledged that “we made our best shot with regard to blacks in Washington. We have tended to do what whites tend to do: make plans and invite blacks to join in. This time we made a deliberate effort to involve black churches and black leadership from the beginning. Every committee had a black cochair. But we did not do this in Tallahassee a few months later.” Ralph Bell agreed that “the association really went out of its way in Washington. If that same effort were made in other crusades, I think it would be much better. But we have not made as much effort since then. We forget really quickly. I think it is in Billy’s mind, but I don’t think it is in the minds of the guys who carry it out to really involve themselves in the black community. At times in a team meeting, we have talked about developing a strategy to reach black America. We’ve said we were going to talk about it, and cry over it, and pray about it, and get ideas, and call in resource people, and explore opportunities, and so forth. It’s a good idea, but it never happens. It’s a matter of commitment. If it were a matter of technology, they would explore the avenues, figure out how to do it, and go ahead and do it. But I don’t think that, apart from Billy himself, that we have been committed to that goal with respect to the black community.”
Some blacks have noted that the decorous style of Graham’s crusades lacked the spirit and demonstrative character of the worship services to which they are accustomed. Some white supporters felt the same way. John Bisagno, whose church in Houston is a model of Baptist respectability, ventured that “Cliff and the team have overreacted a little bit too much over the years to criticism. They’re trying a little too hard not to be specifically emotional in the services. I’m hearing people say they are surprised that the services seem kind of structured and flat. They’re not experiencing the kind of life and excitement that they anticipate. We shouldn’t program the joy of the Lord and natural excitement out of the services.” Barrows’s intention was not simply to be innocuous but to try to create a service that would be familiar and reassuring to people who do not go to church regularly. While it is true that the music in many Evangelical churches is far livelier than that in Graham’s crusades, he felt that the limits are set not by what Christians would enjoy but by what non-Christians will find comfortable and reassuring. For that reason, crusade hymns were usually those likely to be recognized by nonregular attenders—“Bless the Lord, O My Soul,” “Amazing Grace,” and “When We All Get to Heaven.” This ruled out most newer songs and choruses. Barrows also avoided choosing hymns that contain such words or phrases as “I worship,” “I adore,” or “I praise your name,” which might embarrass outsiders or make them feel they don’t belong. These sentiments were left to the choir or soloists, who presumably could sing them with a clearer conscience. Barrows was not adamant in resisting change and adjusted to some more recent developments in Christian music, but organist John Innes acknowledged that “Cliff keeps a pretty tight rein. He talks to the special artists carefully, but his more nervous moments are likely to come with the people who give testimony than with the singers, because you don’t know how long they are going to take or, really, what they are going to say when they get up there.”
Crusade guests did generate a bit of anxiety for the platform team, particularly when they were appearing for the first time. Some, like Grammywinning vocalists Sandi Patti and Larnell Harris, country-music performer George Hamilton IV, and British singer Cliff Richard were known and dependable entities. Johnny Cash, another regular, caused little worry about his performance, but his occasional relapse into drug use caused some problems for Graham, who doggedly stuck by his longtime friend and put him back on the platform, penitent and presumably forgiven, as soon as he was physically and emotionally able to get there. In addition to musicians, crusades typically featured several Christians from the sports world, such as former Dallas Cowboy coach Tom Landry, former baseball standout Pat Kelly (who was director of Christian Fan Outreach and husband of Howard Jones’s daughter, Phyllis), and various local sports figures who affirmed that their greatest accomplishment in life came when they became a member of the Greatest Team, under Coach Jesus, who will never cut them from the squad. Former NBA basketball star Pete Maravich had just begun to give testimony at Graham’s crusades a few months before he died of a heart attack in 1987, and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan may have been auditioning for a spot in Evangelicalism’s main event when he made a point of visiting Graham during the Denver crusade, talking with the evangelist about his own roots in the Baptist church, his personal faith in God, and “the privilege of leading his father to Christ shortly before his death.”
Guest artists, celebrity testifiers, announcement makers, and prayer givers were all urged to keep their remarks short and succinct to make sure they “leave plenty of time for Mr. Graham.” Though he was pleased to use celebrities to draw crowds and to demonstrate that Christianity need not be a drab and lifeless affair, Graham unquestionably felt that the main event of his meetings was the sermon itself, and he expected Cliff Barrows to see to it that people didn’t have to wait too long to hear him and that he had plenty of time to say what he wanted to say. When a singer threw in a gratuitous testimony, or a testimony giver took an extra two minutes to reveal an unexpected defeat or triumph in the struggle with Satan, Graham began to cast impatient glances at Cliff and to nibble anxiously at his fingernails.
The team’s largely successful efforts to knock off rough edges, polish away the bumps, and remove any burrs that might make a visitor uncomfortable produced a service that for whatever it may have lacked in the thrills produced at revivals featuring dramatic healings, outbursts of tongue speaking, and rows of ecstatic believers strewn around the pulpit after having been “slain in the Spirit,” nevertheless provided an important and impressive kind of ritual reassurance and reaffirmation. In America, at least, most people who attended the crusades either belonged to or grew up in churches where such middle-of-the-road styles and sentiments were the norm. For them, a Billy Graham crusade was like a gigantic homecoming reunion, an upbeat, friendly, nonthreatening festival that assured them that the old verities are still to be believed, the old songs and prayers still sung and prayed, the old threats and dangers still out there huffing and puffing, but still equally easy to keep at bay if one will “only believe.”
Crucial to the success of this ritual and to Billy Graham’s remarkable longevity as a crusader was his ability to enlist representatives of the mass media as key soldiers in his campaigns. On occasion, of course, the press was anything but friendly toward him, but anyone who spends several days in the BGEA headquarters browsing through the oversize scrapbooks that fill an entire room cannot help but be impressed with the overwhelmingly positive treatment the media lavished upon him for four decades. That response was neither unsought nor uncultivated. Larry Ross, a Walter Bennett Communications employee assigned almost exclusively to the Graham organization (which was the agency’s only major continuing account), speculated that the favorable treatment Graham typically received from reporters is an example of the benefits of following the Golden Rule. The press generally treated him well “because of how well he treats the press. He is so gracious even when he is dealing with reporters who have written stories that are not in his best interest. He gives them more time than they request or expect. Many times, I have seen him bless those who curse him. I think the Lord has honored that. Even those who don’t agree with his message respect the man and his transparent goodness.” Veteran AP religion writer George Cornell agreed that Graham seemed able to parry even the most pointed thrusts from hostile reporters: “He has the plain, ingenuous directness of a genuinely free human being.” A further reason Graham was able to maintain good relations with the press was his habit of paying them public praise during his crusade services. In 1950 he asked his Boston audiences to write to the editors or publishers of the local newspapers to thank them for the marvelous coverage the crusade had received. Forty years later, he was still making the same request, some times even singling out one or two reporters—typically, the key religion writers from the crusade city’s major papers—for special praise.
The Bennett agency counted on the local press to provide an abundance of free publicity for Graham’s crusades and sometimes kept careful score of the results. After the 1984 phase of Mission England, for example, Gavin Reid reported that “the national press had published 157 items and eleven editorials covering nearly 3,000 column inches. The regional press (and we were deliberately working to capitalize on regional awareness) published 1,262 items plus eighteen editorials taking up no less than 37,116 column inches! Radio time amounted to nearly eight and a half hours and television time amounted to five hours seven minutes.” Reid and his assistants had made these tallies at the specific request of the Graham organization. Predictably, however, the agency did not rely solely on cooperative journalists. Every crusade involved a saturation advertising campaign, and though Graham sometimes professed to wish he never had to see his name on another billboard or banner, even his closest friends and staunchest backers admit that he handled whatever embarrassment he felt with considerable equanimity. Bob Evans recalled that shortly before the 1986 crusade, “when he came to Paris, he said, ‘Get some more pictures up. I don’t see my picture up enough.’ He got special permission to put posters in the Metro stations. He felt like he needed more publicity.” And Fred Dienert, who was personally responsible for puffing Graham for forty years, said, in unambiguous admiration, “Bill understands the value of publicity. At night, when he can’t sleep, God evidently gives him thoughts—about the ministry, about promotion, about what to do here and there. It’s uncanny, and they work out well. And it’s because the Lord’s got his hand on him. It’s not us. We do the newspapers. We do the billboards, we buy the spots, and everything else. I believe all that helps, but I think the real answer is God.”
Of course, the bottom-line goal of every crusade was the number of people who responded to Graham’s call. Though from his early days he had an uncanny gift for the invitation, his colleagues acknowledged that especially since he achieved world renown, several quite unmiraculous factors entered into Graham’s unprecedented success at “drawing in the net.” Gavin Reid admitted that “Billy gets good results because more uncommitted people come to his meetings than is true with other evangelists. He is a ‘name.’” And all gave much credit to the planting and cultivation that went on before the harvester hit town with his evangelistic combine. In giving the invitation, Graham often described the decision to come forward as a difficult one. That can be the case, of course, particularly in foreign countries where Christianity is a minority religion and becoming a Christian may involve painful breaks with one’s family and friends. But for most inquirers, the decision to walk down the aisle is relatively easy; indeed, in some cases, it is easier than staying put. Everyone who has been to a crusade service or watched one on television, which almost certainly includes most of those in attendance, knows that hundreds of others would be streaming to the front and that no embarrassing emotional demonstrations would be expected (or even tolerated). Further, those who came with a friend as part of the Operation Andrew program surely understood that failure to respond would be a bit of a disappointment to the friendly folk who got them a ticket and saved them a place on the bus, and would make the trip home less enjoyable than if they had behaved as hoped—as some of the other invitees were almost certainly likely to have done. Such pressures were not enormous, but they were real, and they helped swell inquirer ranks.
The inevitable success of the invitation could not help but have an exhilarating effect on the counselors who assisted inquirers in clarifying and confirming their decision. Evangelical Christians feel they should be leading others to Christ, but many find it difficult to talk to their friends and relatives about salvation out of fear they will be thought intrusive or odd. But at the crusade, they talked with people who, by their complete willingness to buy what is being sold, furnished them with the opportunity to do precisely what they thought they should be doing, with an almost perfect guarantee of success. This happy experience almost surely bolstered their confidence and willingness to approach others once the crusade ended.
In a diffuse and invisible way, this process was repeated a few weeks later, when the crusade was aired on television and viewers were given opportunity to respond to his preaching by calling a number on their screens. More than a fourth of the 12,000 or so people who called one of BGEA’s eight regional telephone centers during the week of Graham’s quarterly television specials made some kind of decision for Christ. And, as at the live crusades, some of the greatest benefits accrued to the counselors themselves. Terry Wilken, a team member who worked with the telephone ministry from its inception, observed that “nothing increases faith like trying to give it away. Every night counselors go out of here several feet off the ground talking about the blessings they have received from participating. When you look at it from their perspective, its probably the easiest kind of witnessing you could do.”
As one who long compared himself to the harvester who reaps what others have sown and cultivated, Billy Graham recognized that the harvest, to be of significant use to any but scavengers, must be gathered into barns and protected against hostile elements. By his own criterion, then, it is disciple making rather than decision counting that must serve as the ultimate measure of an evangelist’s accomplishments. Neither he nor his associates pretended that every person who comes forward or calls a counseling center is making a meaningful response. When one watches a father shrug his shoulders and shuffle down the aisle after his grown daughter tells him she is disgusted with him for holding back—“That was the whole point in coming, for God’s sake!”—or sees two prepubescent boys poke one another and toss their caps in the air as they skip across the stadium infield toward the counseling area, or listen to a teenage girl tell her friend, “Well, if I can, you can. There’s nothing to it,” one comes to understand that not every decision flows from the deepest wellsprings of heart or mind. Graham long admitted that people come for different reasons and that some of the reasons are quite superficial. “We never call them ‘converts,’” he said early in his career. “We much prefer to call them ‘inquirers.’ Only God knows when or if a man is truly converted. Many come forward in our meetings who are seekers but not finders.”
As Graham and his team always graciously admitted, the trip down the aisle is just one segment of a journey on a path that many others have helped prepare and on which the seeker had already started to walk. “I am not sure I have ever led a soul to Christ,” he has said. “There are so many factors—a mother, a Sunday school teacher, a preacher who has been slugging it out for years. I simply come along as a way-shower. I say, ‘Do you see that door? That’s the way in.’” Of those who made first-time decisions in Graham’s crusades, a small minority—but still a substantial number—were doubtless truly won to Christ from a stance of antagonism, indifference, or apathy, as a sampling of the mail received in Minneapolis clearly reveals. For the majority, however, particularly in America, the decision they made is one they would have made at some point in their lives even if Billy Graham had not come to town—when they reached a certain age, when peers in their Sunday-school class responded, when pressure from their spouses reached a sufficient level, or at a revival held by a lesser evangelist. Similarly, some “rededicators” were genuine reprobates, dragooned into the stadium against their will or perhaps come to scoff and moved instead by terror or love to repent and turn from their evil ways. Far more were people of tender conscience who feared they had not done all they might to win souls, or who were more concerned with their own affairs than about their Father’s business, or who felt guilty because they sometimes daydreamed during the pastor’s sermon. But, like the decision to attend college or to marry, a decision to say “I am now ready to assume the responsibility of living as a Christian” was not less momentous simply because it was an expected part of one’s life agenda. Similarly, if a substantial number of church folk whose light had begun to dim were plugged back into their systems on a high-voltage line, the crusade performed an important function for both the individual and the systems in question.
While the great stadium crusades remained the hallmark of his ministry, and while he drew crowds to them for a far longer period than any other evangelist has ever managed to do, it is indisputably the case that Billy Graham magnified his voice and multiplied his words tremendously by his ability and willingness to use modern mass media. To the end, he made use of the two media that served him longest: print and radio. In 1990 his “My Answer” column ran in over a hundred newspapers, but that was far below its peak during the 1950s and 1960s. Aides insist he tried to check them to approve of their content, but conceded, as the column itself noted once each year, that staff members did the actual writing. No one seemed to think the column was living up to its potential. Even Fred Dienert, who was usually relentless in his determination to put a positive spin on anything connected with the ministry, admitted that “something should be done. There’s an opportunity to handle it in a way that meets the needs of people today. For example, if you talk about divorce, you’re talking about the whole country. It’s in every church in America. Families breaking up, loneliness, singles, people who are hurting and crying. You can’t just give them a verse about casting all of your cares on Jesus because he’ll take care of you. It would probably take a full-time crew to do a better column, but it could grow again, because nobody has the audience Billy has.”
Rather than wait for a newspaper squib to hit upon their particular problem, those who wanted a fuller and more satisfying answer to a specific question could write directly to Graham at his Minneapolis headquarters. Correct spelling and a precise address were unnecessary. The letter collection contains missives sent to “Belly Grayem, Menihapuls, Menisoldiem”; “Rev. Billy Graham, Many Applause, Many Sorrow, Los Angeles”; “Mr. Belly Graham, Baptist Church’s Preacher, will you find him out, please, NY”; “Billy Graham (World Citizen), care of American Government”; and “The Rev. Billy Graham—Dear Mr. Postman, I don’t know the address of Rev. Graham, but please try and get this letter to him. It really is important. Love, Linda.” In marked contrast to other well-known media ministers who not only claim to read every letter they receive but authorize responses in which a computer has slugged in the correspondent’s name in a display of ersatz intimacy, Graham freely admitted he did not and could not read more than a tiny fraction of his mail. Moreover, the responses were signed by the people who actually prepared them.
Prepare is often more accurate than write. Ralph Williams, director of BGEA’s Christian Guidance Department, explained how his staff of approximately twenty-five men and women handled most of the more than 200,000 inquiries people addressed to Billy Graham each year. Large notebooks contained standardized responses on a host of subjects; each sentence and verse of Scripture were numbered, so that a mail counselor could construct an appropriate response simply by typing the proper codes on a computer. Most of the topics were routine, of the sort a secular therapist might face: Anxiety, Bereavement, Birth Control, Drugs, Jealousy, Marriage, Smoking, and War. Others made it clear that this was a religious enterprise: Age of Accountability, Bible Translations, Daughter Wants to Marry Non-Christian, Frequent Writers (“We keep a file of people who just write to us again and again, so we can refer back to previous letters”), Heaven (Description of), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ministry (Call to), Non-Christian Friends for Children, Parents (How to Deal with Child’s Waywardness), Perilous Times, Poem Acknowledgment (“We get a lot of poems”), Purgatory, Sabbath, and Witnessing. The responses were not quotations from Billy Graham, but Williams felt they were “pretty much abreast of how Billy feels. We’ve built them up over the years and feel we’re in tune with him and his thoughts and position on these topics, whether it’s in the area of theology or social action or whatever.” When a topic loomed large in the public consciousness—for example, abortion, AIDS, cults, herpes, or as in 1987, television evangelism—the counseling department typically prepared a few paragraphs, a special letter, or even a complete pamphlet on the subject. Sometimes such letters called for a delicate balancing act. “We are inclined to be a bit ambiguous on AIDS,” Williams noted. “We feel it’s important to give a sense of hope. While some are saying AIDS is a judgment from God, we just say that our sin as a nation brings its own harvest.”
When an inquiry was too complex or sensitive for a prepackaged response, it was forwarded to an “advanced counseling reader,” typically a minister or counselor with more experience than the first tier of readers. Advanced counselors also had notebooks to draw on but could adapt the responses to fit a particular situation; regular counselors were not permitted to deviate from the printed responses. When it appeared that correspondents needed something more than a one- or two-page letter, the counselors could refer them to specialists near their homes. “We have a list of ‘helping people’ around the country,” Williams explained. “We know something about their background, their specialty, and their staff, so that we are sure they have a Christian perspective. It may be a church or a pastoral counselor or a Christian who specializes in crisis intervention. There are so many people who are without purpose, who don’t know why they should live and think they don’t want to live, who are just awash in life, and can’t find help from pastors who believe the answer is simply to tell them to have more faith.” In August 1987 BGEA’s operations chief John Corts noted that 27 women in the mail division had answered 17,000 letters during the previous 60 days. “The people who wrote don’t know those ladies,” he admitted. “The only name they know is Billy Graham. They write because they want him to tell them whether they should buy a house or move into a rest home down the street, or whatever. We can’t answer all those questions, but at least we can go back to them with some kind of love, care, and concern.”
Decision still rolls along as the world’s most widely distributed religious magazine, with two million copies mailed to subscribers in 163 countries, and Graham continues to reach millions through his many books. In 1972 the Saturday Evening Post quoted him as saying, “I do all of my own writing.” The quote may have been accurate, but the reality was not, and Graham was said to be quite sensitive about his extensive reliance on researchers and ghostwriters. That sensitivity ebbed noticeably, so that he became quite open about the help he received from others, maintaining only that he participated actively in his writing projects and, at the least, carefully examined anything that went out under his name to make certain it accurately represented his beliefs and opinions. John Akers, who helped with several books, explained that Graham provided the essence of his books and others helped fill in the outlines, “including Ruth, who has a great gift for illustration.”
The Hour of Decision was still being aired weekly over 690 stations in 1990 (including 151 international stations broadcasting six foreign-language versions of the program), but the Graham team had come to view it less as a prime evangelistic tool than as a vehicle for keeping the ministry’s “prayer partners” informed as to what the evangelist is doing. In addition to its radio program, BGEA also owns and operates two radio stations, one near Montreat and one in Honolulu. “We didn’t want to be in that business,” Graham said, “but we are in it. It’s never really been an interest of mine, and I don’t give it top priority.” T. W. Wilson, who monitored the stations, agreed with that assessment. “When a station’s going real good,” he said with a chuckle, “it’s our station. When there are problems, it’s T’s station.” Graham apparently had a similar lack of passion for making films. According to John Akers, “The film ministry has always driven him crazy. Basically, it’s an exercise in deficit financing.” World Wide Pictures became the largest producer and distributor of Christian films in the world: An estimated 150 million people have seen at least one of the films and at least 1.5 million have made decisions for Christ at film showings. (Expense and concern over diminished effectiveness led to a 1988 decision to close the Burbank studios and relocate production facilities in Minneapolis.) Caught, a 1986 film about drugs and a boy’s search for his natural father, did not draw well in the United States, but worldwide more than 600,000 people saw it during the first two months after it was released—far less than had been expected, but not an insignificant number—and Dave Barr, World Wide’s international representative, ventured that “this one may do for the international program what The Restless Ones did for the United States. We think it is going to be a great blessing.”
Radio gave Billy Graham his first truly national exposure, and films legitimated the use of that medium by people who regarded cinema as the devil’s tool, but it was television that kept him in the public eye. Other preachers appear on television more often, but none used the medium more efficiently and effectively than Graham. One key to his success was the decision not to attempt a weekly Sunday-morning program. As years of Nielsen and Arbitron ratings have demonstrated, the audiences for his programs, usually aired in groups of three on a quarterly basis, were far larger than those for the syndicated Sunday programs of other religious broadcasters. This larger audience also appeared to contain far more unchurched people than did the Sunday shows. The 1978 Gallup study, The Unchurched American, for example, discovered that 11 percent of the 61 million unchurched in this country said they had watched Billy Graham on television. The only other preacher to attract more than 4 percent was Oral Roberts, then also using prime-time specials in addition to his Sunday-morning program. The audience of the Sunday programs produced by Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and their colleagues appeared to be composed primarily of faithful church members, which is why most of the programs aired before ten o’clock; if they came on later, their audience would be in church. If a program was geared to teach, nurture, and encourage believers, early Sunday morning would be the best time for it. If it aimed to reach the lost and the lukewarm, it would be hard to think of a less promising time slot. Since Graham’s compelling mission was to present his message to people who are not already hearing it several times a week, he chose to run his programs during prime-time early evening hours.
Despite the success Graham’s quarterly specials enjoyed and the near-automatic ease with which they could be produced, there had been in creasing pressure to modernize the format in the later years. TV director Roger Flessing put the matter bluntly: “We have a Good News show with an hour on the anchor man. I’d like to see more graphics, file footage, other things that would illustrate points Mr. Graham is making. Jesus was a visual teacher—- ‘Look at the lilies,’ ‘Look at the fisherman,’ ‘Look at the farmer,’ ‘Look at the . . . Look at the. . . .’ With television, we have the capacity to look but we’re not doing it. We’re right here just looking at the preacher. And we can’t even be as visual as we’d like with what we’ve got.” Pointing to a shot of the choir on one of the monitors arrayed before him on the control panel in the television truck, he said, “Most church choirs look better than this. We don’t really try to shoot ‘tights,’ because when you zoom in, these people don’t know what they’re singing, or they’re three beats off, or one person is just gung ho and the person next to her doesn’t even know what’s going on. A church choir is more disciplined.”
Ted Dienert—Fred’s son, Graham’s son-in-law, and TV producer beginning in 1982—agreed with Flessing. Sitting in a hotel restaurant one morning during the 1987 Columbia crusade, he said, “There’s a constant effort to try to figure out what will hook the secular audience. The crusades haven’t changed for twenty years, and the TV format has been virtually the same. We are integrating new elements into that format because the viewer’s taste and sophistication has changed, and we need to keep up with that. At times maybe I get a little avant-garde for the ministry, but my job is to see if we can get the job done more effectively. I don’t care whether I like it, or Cliff likes it, or even whether Billy Graham likes it. We want to be sensitive, of course, but my goal is that audience out there.”
To create a more appealing product, Dienert and Flessing altered the old practice of filming only three crusade services and hoping for the best, with editing limited to cutting a few dead spots here and there to squeeze the program into a one-hour time frame. They began to film all the services and used only those segments they felt would make the most effective package. A few weeks after the Denver crusade, for example, the two men and other members of their crew, armed with stacks of film and thick notebooks, met at Third Coast Studios in Austin, Texas, to piece together the master videotape they would send to a duplicator, who would make 350 copies to be distributed to television stations in the United States and Canada.
With seven or eight nights of entertainers and testifiers, it was relatively simple to come up with a good mix that fit the time constraints for a particular program and to edit out anything that might be jarring to the viewing audience. On this occasion someone noted that the sky was dark while Bev Shea sang but light when Graham got up to preach afterward. “We try to keep the songs with the night of the sermon,” Dienert explained, “but Bev blew the words that night,” and his segment was taken from another service.
When it came time to plug in Graham’s sermon, Dienert and his technicians referred to notebooks that contained transcripts of every word spoken on the videotape, with a precise indication of the time each sentence took. The evangelist’s “misspeaks” were always excised. “Either we or someone else points out mistakes, and we clip them,” an assistant producer explained. “If he misquotes Time magazine or says the King of Spain died last week, that comes out. Or anything controversial—that comes out.” Jokes and stories Graham had repeated for years also came out, as did meandering trips down what the TV crew called “rabbit trails.” The editors might also cover up such minor irregularities as reference to “my fourth point” when no third point was ever made. After the sermon’s obvious errors and weak spots were eliminated and its length set, it was strengthened even further by skillful use of reaction shots of the crowd that could be matched with various parts of the sermon. By the time the program aired a few weeks later, Billy Graham had become a better preacher than he actually was on the night he delivered the sermon in person, and those who watched the program could see that he held the crowd in the palm of his hand.
Graham’s policy of appearing quarterly instead of weekly may have won him a larger audience, but it also saddled the Dienerts with a tougher task than that faced by the media representatives for other television ministers. Instead of negotiating long-term contracts for a regular weekly time slot, the Dienerts and other Bennett company agents had to wrangle anew with station representatives every time they wanted to put Graham on the air. Partly as a measure to save money, the Bennett company moved Graham’s programs onto UHF stations in many cities and in some markets dropped local stations entirely, relying on the Turner cable network to provide a sufficient audience. Economic pressures also led to a dropping of the foreign-language programs that were once a standard component of Graham’s television outreach. Despite these cutbacks, there was no sign that Graham or his colleagues had serious misgivings about television’s efficacy as an evangelistic tool.
A major advantage of television, of course, is that it enabled Billy Graham to do what he could not possibly do in person. Larry Ross elaborated on that obvious but important fact. “Television,” he said, “enables Mr. Graham to reach more people with less demands on his time and energy as he gets older. We try to maximize a limited resource that has been blessed by God over the years and try to maximize his effectiveness in his remaining years.” Ross was not implying that Billy Graham had gone into semiretirement and planned to sit at home in Montreat, talking to television cameras and playing out the string. At that time, early in 1988, the team was actively engaged in setting up Mission World, a project that would carry crusades originating in London, Hong Kong, and Buenos Aires to satellite centers in hundreds of cities throughout the world. In underdeveloped nations or away from major cities, the satellite signal would be picked up by low-cost portable receiving dishes that could be transported in a case the size of a golf bag, then unfolded like a fan and made operational in eighteen minutes. In more remote spots, the program would be videotaped and shown in small villages a day or two later on portable VCR equipment. “Mr. Graham is not afraid of the technology at all,” Ted Dienert insisted. “He welcomes it. He wants God to use him until it is all over, and he is willing to take the necessary risks. It would be easy for him to stay in the same pattern, but he is a visionary man, and I feel that God has really honored that.”
Dienert had good reason to appreciate his father-in-law. BGEA was unusual among large independent ministries in having continued to use an outside agency rather than creating an in-house agency that would perform the same roles without receiving the 15 percent to 17 percent commissions typically paid to agencies for their work. The savings were substantial; for example, if an agency receiving a 15 percent commission bought $20 million in television air time, its share was $3 million. Fred Dienert, who prospered handsomely from the arrangement, saw it as a mark of Graham’s character that he remained with Bennett. “Bill remembers his friends,” he said. “He’s very faithful to his friends, and he’s been faithful to us. He could have gone in-house a long time ago, but he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be bothered with it. He has enough problems as it is, and he’s happy with what we’ve been doing, and he appreciates it.”
Not everyone within BGEA was completely at ease with the arrangement. Overt criticism was muted or ventured on a not-for-attribution basis, in part because Fred Dienert had been connected with the ministry for longer than all but the inner circle; in part because Millie Dienert, who received no pay for her extensive work in building the prayer program, was held in unfailingly high regard; in part because Bennett company personnel unquestionably did a first-rate job and appeared genuinely committed to the ministry’s primary goals; and in part because Ted Dienert was married to the Graham’s youngest daughter, Bunny. Still, an undercurrent of uneasiness occasionally bubbled to the surface. Asked where Fred Dienert could be found, a plainly dressed Graham lieutenant might name a location, then add, “You’ll be able to spot him,” a mild dig at Dienert’s preference for somewhat flashier clothes than were common in BGEA. Another would commend Franklin Graham for living in “just an ordinary house with a tin roof” and driving “a car just like yours or mine—not a Porsche, like some people drive.” Again, the reference was clear: BGEA salaries would not support a lifestyle that includes Porsches, airplanes, and Arabian horses; Ted and Bunny Dienert somehow managed to have them all.
When the only issue was standard payment for work well done, few people seem to have objected, though when Walter Bennett died in 1982, some board members reportedly suggested it might be time to form an inhouse agency, under the direction of Cliff Barrows. Those vague feelings of discontent were reinforced when Ted Dienert, who had worked on the Graham account since 1967, took charge of producing the TV programs that same year, giving rise to inevitable murmurs of nepotism. In 1987, however, the Dienerts found themselves at the center of a small stir that illustrated both the constant need to monitor the ministry’s financial affairs and a willingness to take swift and decisive action when the situation demanded it. For several years, postproduction work (final editing and preparation for duplication) on the television programs had been done at CVS, a video facility in Dallas, where the Bennett company’s main headquarters are located. In 1986, however, the contract was shifted to Third Coast Studios, a small operation in Austin. Some board members questioned the shift and wondered why Third Coast had been selected without competitive bidding. When the answer came to light, it was not inspiring.
Early in October 1987, when asked about ties between Third Coast and the Bennett company, Fred Dienert acknowledged that “we are related. We have a small portion.” CVS, he explained, had not always been able to get the postproduction work done as rapidly as was needed. Owning a small portion of Third Coast provided enough leverage to make certain the turnaround time for production was minimal. What Dienert characterized as a small portion turned out to be 45 percent, with an additional 5 percent belonging to a Bennett employee. When Cliff Barrows learned the extent of Bennett’s ownership, he is said, in suitably Evangelical language, to have “hit the ceiling.” In a year when the biggest story in American religion was the fall of Jim Bakker’s PTL empire, the one major ministry that had managed to emerge as a model of probity did not need a revelation that Billy Graham’s son-in-law and one of his oldest friends not only benefited handsomely from handling his media account but had also hired their own company to help produce his programs. It was neither illegal nor more expensive than the arrangement with CVS, and it may have been efficient, but it could easily cast Graham and his ministry in an unfavorable light if zealous reporters got hold of the information. Almost immediately, while Ted Dienert was in Austin supervising work on programs drawn from Graham’s Denver crusade, Barrows flew in for a brief but intense set of discussions. No one would speak freely about the details of their conversations, and it is not clear Barrows knew precisely what he was looking for when he arrived, but the upshot was unambiguous. Within days the postproduction contract was shifted back to CVS. Not long afterward, Graham’s board appointed one of its members to serve as a special liaison between BGEA and the Bennett agency to make certain their financial relationships remained well within ethically defensible limits.