The swift end to which Cliff Barrows brought the ambiguous operation in Austin was not simply the product of one man’s determination to follow the scriptural injunction to “abstain from all appearance of evil” (I Thessalonians 5:22). Rather, it reflected the conscious and remarkably well-observed philosophy that permeated another key foundation stone in Billy Graham’s enduring success, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association itself. Graham was quick to admit that his ability to travel the world, to stand before great throngs, to send his words to the farthest reaches of the planet, to visit and befriend the famous and powerful, to influence the policies of great nations, and to raise up legions to take his place were enormously enhanced by the tireless and dedicated efforts of several hundred men and women who labored in quiet anonymity in downtown Minneapolis.
For nearly forty years, from 1950 until he reluctantly went into semiretirement in 1987, George Wilson ran BGEA’s headquarters with an iron hand. A stout, squarish man with a bulldog face and a taste for iridescent suits and sport coats that clash with the kindly-pastor image of most BGEA staffmembers, Wilson enjoyed the respect, if not always the affection, of those who labored in his vineyard. One team member characterized Wilson as having “a unique gift for giving directions.” From a position of greater occupational security, Billy Graham put it more pointedly: “George is a dictator. Maybe I shouldn’t use that word, but he’s a strong man. He doesn’t mind telling somebody off if they need telling off. He’s not the most popular man in the world, but he does use Sunday-school language, and he’s a real Christian. He’s part preacher, part lawyer, part financial wizard.” A former staffer cited frustration with Wilson as a major reason he had left the organization. “He’s hard to deal with,” he explained. “He deals carefully, particularly when he doesn’t know how close someone is to Billy, because he doesn’t want direct competition. He deals by instinct, and little more, and he can throw cold water on any idea.” But even he acknowledged Wilson’s effectiveness: “George knows how everything is wired. He’s like an indispensable engineer.”
To a considerable extent what aggravated Wilson’s detractors was his zealous concern for the bottom line. That near obsession with saving money, however, helped shield Graham from the kind of criticism heaped on evangelists who live in opulent mansions, drive fleets of luxury automobiles, and air-condition their doghouses. BGEA’s Minneapolis complex, comprising an old and unremarkable three-story office building purchased from Standard Oil and a newer structure that was once a parking garage for the Willys Overland automobile company, had a Spartan quality that made it easy to believe the association obtained it for only $2.25 per square foot. In contrast to the elaborate and sometimes garish personal monuments erected by other media ministers, it could easily pass for the regional headquarters of a medium-size insurance company, and were it not associated with Billy Graham, it would surely not have been a stop on the Chamber of Commerce tour of the city. But as he walked through it, George Wilson’s pride in what he had built and in the money he had saved in building it was unmistakable.
The lifeline of every major independent ministry is its direct-mail operation. Howard Pew, Maxey Jarman, and other members of BGEA’s board provided major funding for several large projects, but the bulk of the ministry’s support comes in small bills and modest checks tucked into the millions of letters that pour into the headquarters—140,000 to 150,000 during a normal week, twice that per day during the quarterly television broadcasts. With multiplied millions of letters involved, minuscule savings per unit quickly become substantial amounts. No one understood that better than George Wilson, and he loved to show off procedural shortcuts or mechanical gimmicks he had devised to save money for the association. Pausing to give some whirring apparatus an affectionate pat, like a coach commending a running back, he observed, “This saves about half a penny a letter. When you’re talking about millions of checks a year, it’s worthwhile,” then cocked his head as if to say, “What do you think of that?”
Officially, Wilson stepped down from his post as BGEA’s chief of operations in 1987, but he continued to work full-time as a consultant on various projects. Fortunately for the organization, any reluctance he felt about moving out of the top spot was eased by his having a major role in picking his successor, John Corts. Like Graham, Corts attended Florida Bible Institute, and he worked with YFC for years before signing on to help with the 1964 Boston crusade. Intending to stay with the association only six months, he wound up staying sixteen years, until he resigned to take a pastorate in 1980. Following a successful run in a local church, he moved into the presidency of his alma mater, now known as Trinity College and located in Dunedin, Florida, but Graham was reluctant to let him go. After obtaining leaves of absence to take key roles in both Amsterdam conferences, where he showed unusual administrative competence, Corts finally agreed to take over the reins at BGEA. It appears to have been a happy choice. He was sufficiently tough but less prickly and protective than Wilson, and he clearly had the boss’s confidence. “George picked him,” Graham reported, “and that helps. Whoever sits in that office is sort of the main center of the thing. The executive committee and the board call the ultimate shots, but it’s that day-by-day running of it that sets the tone. John’s a man of the Scriptures. He loves the Lord, and he will keep the organization on a firm biblical keel, and that’s what I want.”
It is difficult to imagine that any visitor to BGEA headquarters in Minneapolis would have failed to notice a distinctive atmosphere. It was simple enough to dismiss almost universal participation in ten-minute daily devotionals and twice-weekly chapel services as prudent conformity, but casual conversation and consistent behavior quickly dispelled suspicions that this was just another job for these folk. At lunch the cafeteria resembled a fellowship dinner at a middle-size midwestern church, with little attention to distinctions of rank. Corts sat and talked easily with a minor official’s secretary and a man from the art department, and nearby, a printer and the head of the estate-planning division speculated about why even the most vigorous churches seemed to be having trouble drawing a good crowd for Wednesday-night prayer meetings. It was no surprise to hear several people observe that “we’re really more like a family than a business,” but the easy analogy was not far off the mark.
Watching Billy Graham interact with BGEA personnel made it clear that though he depended heavily on men like George Wilson and John Corts, he was no figurehead who simply showed up at press conferences or popped into the pulpit to do whatever his “handlers” told him to do. No one doubted he was the undisputed leader of his team and that both the strengths and short comings of his leadership style left indelible marks on the association. Those who worked with him for years uniformly praised his vision, his intuition, his sense of strategy, and his ability to choose people he could trust and to motivate them to put his dreams into operation. “He is much brighter than most people, including himself, give him credit for being,” John Akers insisted. “He may not quote Aquinas in Latin, but he sees the essence of a problem quicker than most people. He has an ability to intuit the heart of a problem that is sometimes little short of brilliant.” George Wilson, who prefered performance to pedigree, made a similar assessment: “He has innate common sense. That’s something you don’t get with a Ph.D. When he gets the facts, he can usually come up with the right decision.” Sometimes, the decision-making process was more calculating than it might appear on the surface. “He plays it down,” T. W. Wilson said, “but he’s a real administrator. Many times he has shared with me in private what he thinks ought to be done. Then, in a meeting with the board, he will ask someone, ‘What do you think?’ Then he’ll look at another one and ask, ‘What do you think?’ When he gathers all their comments, he will say, ‘Well, I think most of us would agree that this is what we ought to do,’ and it will be exactly what he had been planning to do all along. His timing is almost as good as his strategy.”
One of Graham’s greatest gifts was his ability to gather and hold on to a collection of men and women who proved to be far more able than any objective analysis of their portfolio would have predicted. As Sterling Huston diplomatically phrased it, “Mr. Graham has a remarkable ability to respond to intuitive promptings.” Further, once he had chosen someone, Graham accorded a remarkable amount of trust. “Billy is a great delegator,” T. W. Wilson observed. “He gives you a job and he trusts you to get it done. He doesn’t stand over your shoulder and monitor what you are doing, but he expects you to do the job and do it right. He doesn’t want you to tell him, ‘I can’t.’ He’ll say, ‘You keep working at it. If you want to, you can tell me how you accomplished it when you get it done.’ At the same time, he’s a good forgiver. He forgives all of us our mistakes.” Graham was also extraordinarily generous with praise toward those who worked with him. Allan Emery, who took early retirement in 1978 to devote full time to serving as BGEA’s unpaid president, observed that “[he has] one of those rare qualities that the greatest of leaders have—being able to share the glory. He always shares the reward publicly. He never stints in the praise he gives anyone. It has to be earned, to a degree, but he’s very generous with it. Sometimes I think he goes a little overboard.”
The obverse side of Graham’s willingness to let his underlings work without specific direction was his own resistance to being pinned down on the details of whatever it was he wanted to do. One former associate described BGEA operations, particularly those directly involving Graham, as “more process than structure. Plans are made and unmade all the time. The inside circle tries to anticipate his movements, and there is some manipulation—-they know what he responds to. But he tries to keep all his options open. It is hard to tie him down on anything. You can never get him to say yes or no. If you ask him to do something, he is apt to say yes, but that doesn’t mean he will do it. He doesn’t want to commit, because something else might come up—an important meeting or a TV show or something like that. He is the inspiration and the mover, but he is also the bottleneck.”
T. W. Wilson, who laughingly admitted to having to buy several sets of plane tickets for any trip Graham made, put a more positive face on Graham’s resistance to being pinned down. “How can you be in God’s will and pray for His leadership if you’ve already got a fixed idea about what you are going to do? The very fact that he’s willing to change, that he’s flexible—that’s because he always seeks God’s guidance. And he does that with his schedule. If there’s a part of the world where he feels God is impressing him to go, he’ll postpone something and go.” Wilson’s theological gloss on Graham’s notorious flexibility would not have displeased the boss. Recalling that “a lot of times I would go into a city [to help prepare for a crusade] and he wouldn’t even know where I was for a year,” Robert Ferm once faced Graham with the frustrations his open-ended way of operating generated in his staff. “It would help all of us,” Ferm told him, “if you would be more specific as to what you want us to do.” Graham hesitated not a moment. “When God called me to the work of evangelism,” he shot back, “I had to realize that it’s only the Holy Spirit that can give the answer to questions. And if that same Holy Spirit can’t guide you, you’ll know it yourself and you’ll probably drop off the team. But don’t expect me to tell you what to do.” Ferm smiled at the memory. “That was a definite point of view of his,” he said. “I only brought it up that one time.”
Graham relied heavily on his board of directors. An all-too-familiar pattern in independent evangelistic ministries has been for the ministry’s board (which is required for the ministry to qualify as a nonprofit, tax-free organization) to consist of the evangelist, his wife, son, son-in-law, brother-in-law, closest assistant, lawyer, and one or two ciphers. In such an arrangement, the chances for financial and ethical laxity are enormous. Perhaps no single organizational measure Billy Graham took did more to keep him out of hot water and to undergird his reputation for fiscal integrity than his recruitment of and submission to an impressively strong board. Graham, Cliff Barrows, T. W. Wilson, George Wilson, and Franklin Graham were all on the board, as were E. V. Hill and another minister or two, but they were surrounded by such successful Christian business and professional men as CEOs Robert Van Kampen, William Walton (Holiday Inns), Bill Mead (Campbell-Taggart Industries), Bill Pollard (ServiceMaster); Carloss Morris (Stewart Title Company), Frank Coy (Day Company department stores in Cleveland); Montgomery Advertiser editor and publisher Harold Martin; former Minnesota governor Harold LeVander; financial manager and former Harvard University Corporation treasurer George Bennett; Dallas banking executives Bill Seay and Dewey Presley; and former postmaster general Marvin Watson. The larger board, which stood at twenty-seven in 1990, had final jurisdiction, but much of the real work of oversight was performed by a nine-member executive committee, chaired by Allan Emery. This committee met approximately ten times a year in person and convened on the telephone as needed. Neither Graham nor any other person paid by the association or in a position to benefit financially from any of its operations served on the executive committee. “That board has people on it,” Ed Plowman observed, “who are not accustomed to having someone walk in [as some well-known evangelists do] and say, ‘Here is the way we are going to go.’ They took what Billy said seriously, but not as a blank check they would sign without examination. And they took a much stronger stand in later years than they used to. The board would definitely call his hand on certain things—‘Who gave you authority to do that? We have a budget here and we have to stick with it.’ That happens.” George Bennett, the former Harvard treasurer, agreed. “I have served on many boards,” he noted, “but I have never been associated with an organization that has such high standards of business procedure and financial controls as BGEA.”
Graham’s handling of his personal finances long reflected this same concern for propriety. Since he made the decision in 1952 to accept a specified salary instead of the much higher love offerings he could have reaped from his crusades, he and his board agreed that the benchmark for his wage would be the salary earned by a prominent minister in a large urban church. At the time, the figure was approximately $15,000. And when money was tight, as during both the marathon 1954 London crusade and the Madison Square Garden campaign in 1957, both Graham and his team took half-salary to keep expenses down. By the late 1980s, BGEA’s income was running over $70 million a year and the evangelist’s salary had risen to nearly $80,000, a figure he readily acknowledged to be an imprecise gauge of his true financial status, both because many of his expenses when he was away from Montreat were either paid for by the association or picked up by friends and supporters and because of the huge royalties his books earned. Still, repeated efforts of reporters and other Graham watchers failed to turn up any of the usual signs of great personal wealth or evidence that he was squirreling away stockpiles of money to squander during some long-postponed rainy season. His mountain home is worth perhaps $500,000 today, but more for the 150 acres it sits on than for the log-and-asbestos-siding structure itself. It is unquestionably a marvelous dwelling, but that is due more to Ruth Graham’s taste and ingenuity than to any obvious outlay of money.
Graham stopped accepting free clothes during the 1960s but did not follow a rigid policy of refusing all gifts. When he played golf regularly, he paid for membership in the Black Mountain and Biltmore country clubs, both near Asheville, but his membership at Grandfather Mountain, another North Carolina club, was paid for by the developer, and Jack Nicklaus gave him a membership at John’s Island Country Club in Vero Beach, Florida. He long accepted free rooms at Marriott Hotels and Holiday Inns and was often the guest of admiring hoteliers in crusade cities. He defended this practice by pointing out that “there’s nothing in the Bible that says I can’t accept freebies,” but he routinely turned down ultraluxurious accommodations to avoid creating an impression that might harm his ministry. Fending off generous well-wishers could be difficult. June Carter Cash, after watching Ruth shiver on a crusade platform one evening, presented her with a full-length hooded mink coat. Ruth told June she could not even appear in public wearing such an obviously expensive coat, much less on a crusade platform. June told her to “wear it to the barn. Wear it in the car. Wear it out walking with Billy in the snow on the mountain. But stay warm!” She followed that directive for a while, using the coat as an everyday wrap—once showing up at a friend’s house with asbestos gloves as accessories—but eventually got June’s permission to donate it to a charity auction. Friends who knew what she had done, however, bought it for twice its true value and gave it back to her, with strict instructions that she not try to get rid of it again. In similar fashion, Billy turned down the offer of several board members to provide him with a corporate jet with all expenses paid for five years. “Ruth and I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it,” he recalled. “We just felt BGEA couldn’t have an airplane.”
If he so chose, Graham could have easily amassed considerable wealth from honoraria for speeches and royalties from his books, virtually all of which have been best-sellers. He received thousands of invitations to speak each year, many with the promise of large fees, but he turned down most and took no honoraria for those he accepted. Since 1960 all his royalties went into a general trust administered by the First Union National Bank in Charlotte, which disbursed it to facets of his ministry or to other charities. Much of more than a million dollars earned by Angels, for example, went to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton. The royalties from Approaching Hoofbeats, which sold over 500,000 copies, helped pay for the follow-up after Amsterdam ’83. He explained that he had the right to make an exception and hold out a portion of the money each year but said in 1989, “I’ve only done it once and that was this last year because Ruth and I felt we just had to have some extra money coming in. We had to help some of our children and grandchildren a little bit. Especially with the education of grandchildren.” Then, quite accurately, he added, “Of course, I could have kept it all.”
The Grahams’ tastes were far from exotic or expensive. At home they had a housekeeper, but Ruth did most of the cooking herself and the fare was delicious but absolutely unpretentious: homemade soup, pounded steak or leftover ham, turnip greens and creamed corn, and marvelous made-from-scratch biscuits. But Billy didn’t require even that level of preparation. “If I’m not here,” she said, “his favorite meal is baked beans, Vienna sausages, and canned tomatoes. Can you think of anything worse? They’re all the same color, for one thing.” He chuckled at his own plebeian preferences, adding, “I share the beans with the dogs.” None of it seemed to be an act. In an early conversation over club sandwiches in a New York hotel room, he explained that he seldom went out to restaurants because constant interruptions from well-meaning admirers made it difficult to finish a meal. He had made a rare exception the night before. “Fred Dienert loves to go out to real nice restaurants, so he just insisted we go to Trader Vic’s.”
Graham’s personal offices in both Minneapolis and Montreat served as an index of his attitude toward vulgar display. The Minneapolis office, which he seldom used, was extremely modest, smaller than several in the same area, and it opened directly onto a large warren of modular “action offices” filled with secretaries and middle-level managers. Its simple furnishings and few pictures conveyed no sense that it belonged to the central figure in the organization, and staff members felt little hesitation at saying, “Why don’t you just work in Mr. Graham’s office? Nobody’s using it today.” His office at the Montreat headquarters was larger, but scarcely more opulent. Were it not for several family photographs and a copper plaque bearing a likeness of L. Nelson Bell, few would suspect its occupant’s identity.
Team members generally followed Graham’s example of frugality. Their modest middle-class homes gave no hint they were occupied by world travelers. Cliff and Billie Barrows, for example, live in a thoroughly pleasant wooden home on a hilltop on the edge of Greenville, South Carolina. The view from the kitchen window is lovely, and the house is large enough to have reared five children comfortably, but it lacks any sign of ostentation. A few feet away stands a small cabin that houses offices for Barrows, his associate Johnny Lenning, and their secretary. It also contains a tiny studio where Cliff and Lenning produced the Hour of Decision broadcasts. The two men built the cabin themselves, and BGEA paid no rental for its use. Barrows paid a yardman out of his own pocket, but he and his two co-workers handled the janitorial duties themselves. He did not seem to count it remarkable that the most popular religious radio program in history was put together in a little wooden building in his backyard. “That’s just one of the phases of our job,” he said with a shrug. “A very small part.”
Graham and his associates clearly felt that reliance on a strong board invested with real authority was a major factor in protecting him from the scandals that rocked the world of television evangelism in the late 1980s. “I don’t think Jim Bakker intended to do those things,” George Wilson observed. “He just slid into it. He didn’t have anybody around to tell him it was wrong. I don’t think he started out to be dishonest. Billy knows that any man has feet of clay and had better mind his steps.” Precisely because neither Graham nor his lieutenants felt immune to temptation, they consistently stressed the need for help in keeping a check on their baser inclinations. Millie Dienert volunteered that “I have always appreciated, from a moral point of view, how clean the men have been in their attitude toward the [secretaries]. The doors are always left open. There is a high regard for the lack of any kind of privacy where a boss and his secretary are involved. At times, I thought they were going a little too far, that it wasn’t necessary, but I’m glad they did it, especially today. They have kept everything above reproach. When you are working on a long-term basis with the same person, constantly, in hotels, where the wife is not there and the secretary is, that is a highly explosive situation. You have to take precautions. I have always respected the way they have handled that. It has been beautifully done.”
Graham himself lamented the tribulations Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts had brought on themselves by illegal, immoral, and outrageous behavior. “I’ve prayed for them a lot,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. He maintained positive feelings about his old friend, Oral Roberts, but acknowledged substantial misgivings about some of the directions Roberts had taken in later years. “Oral invited me to give the dedication speech at the City of Faith. He also invited Gene Mayberry from the Mayo Clinic. I called Gene to ask him what he was going to do, and he said he was waiting to see what I was going to do, because his colleagues didn’t think he should lend the prestige of the Mayo Clinic to Oral’s university. I told Gene I just didn’t feel led to go. It was very inconvenient for me—I was supposed to be in Dallas that day for a Billy Graham Day at the First Baptist Church—but there was also something in my heart that said, ‘Don’t go.’ I love Oral. I believe at times he is a real man of God. At times, though—that tall Jesus and all those other things he has said—he talks about things that are just foreign to me. Among all those people, I like Oral best, but when he does things like that, people outside of Christ get very skeptical and cynical.”
Graham barely knew Bakker and Swaggart, and when the scandals broke, he resolutely tried to refrain from making any public comments about their plight. As reporters besieged him with requests for interviews and editors offered him space in their magazines and newspapers, he anguished over what he might say. “Forty years ago,” he noted, in a pained voice, “we took steps to avoid this, but if I say that, I’ll come off sounding self-righteous, and I don’t want to do that. I may still make some bad mistakes.” As much as the debacle saddened him, he was able to see a bright side to the series of seamy episodes. “A couple of big names have crashed,” he observed, “but it’s like the thousands of flights at O’Hare in Chicago. The overwhelming majority don’t crash. We have so many television evangelists doing marvelous work for God. . . . Jesus had just twelve people. One betrayed him, one denied him, one doubted him, . . . [so] we’ve had it all through the history of the church. . . . I don’t think the church-at-large has been hurt in any way. ‘The gates of hell will not prevail against it,’ Jesus said. Things like this have happened down through church history—Protestant and Catholic—but the work goes on. . . . The work of the Lord continues. In its own backhanded way, I think it may help the church. . . . It’s making everybody look to their financial integrity and responsibility. And to their personal lifestyles. Public evangelists must watch themselves very carefully.”
Most observers credit Allan Emery with bringing some needed bureaucratic rationality to the association when he agreed in 1978 to serve as president of the association and chair of the executive committee. Emery handled a number of uncomfortable situations for which Graham was unsuited either by temperament or by image. “Billy always wears the white hat,” he explained, “and he has to. He does it very beautifully.” If someone has to make a mistake or rankle sensitive feelings, it works better if Graham is not the culprit. “I’m expendable and he isn’t,” Emery said. “I’m perfectly happy in this system.” As Emery’s comments imply, even in an organization with an unusual record for harmony, unpopular decisions must sometimes be made and unsuitable people must sometimes be fired. Graham seldom participated directly in those proceedings. “Confrontation is not a thing Bill likes to do,” Cliff Barrows acknowledged. Some people are able to confront and say no and move right ahead. We’ve got people in our organization who can do that, but I don’t think that’s my forte, nor Bill’s. We don’t relish it. That has characterized his whole life—and mine, to a certain extent. We don’t want to disappoint anybody. We say yes to everybody as much as we can. That’s been one of the most difficult things we have had to deal with over the years.” Asked about this, Graham conceded both that he avoided confrontation and that this trait sometimes caused frustration for those around him. “Whether it’s a fault or an asset,” he said, “I don’t know. But my father was that way. I never saw him lose his temper more than once or twice in my whole life. I think I inherited some of his characteristics along that line. Ruth thinks I am far too easygoing. She says, ‘You ought to talk stronger. You ought to stand up to some of these people and say what you feel.’” He paused, chuckled, and added, “So far, I have resisted, quite largely, her advice.”
Not surprisingly, most of the people who held key positions in the organization—with George Wilson a notable exception—manifested a similarly conciliatory style, a circumstance that created awkwardness when a team member was not performing adequately or when colleagues found it difficult to work together. “We have been so blessed,” T.W. said. “So many in our organization have been with us for decades. But we’ve had to get rid of a few. We talk to them and try to get them to shape up. On occasion, we ask them, ‘Are you sure you are where God wants you?’ If they can’t change, they will usually resign. That makes it easy on us.” A staffer guilty of legal or moral trespass would likely be confronted swiftly and either dismissed immediately or given explicit instructions as to what steps needed to be taken. Inadequate performance or an irritating personal style were apt to elicit a far more uncertain set of signals. In discussing former colleagues, association veterans sometimes observed, with a wry smile, that “it was felt the gifts God had given him could work most effectively outside the organization,” or “he came to sense that his presence was no longer required at every meeting.” Addressing the issue more explicitly, Lane Adams explained that if Graham felt someone no longer fit the ministry’s needs, “probably, that man would begin to be bypassed. Things that he was invited to participate in before, he would be left out of. Slowly but surely, it would dawn on him that he was getting a very gentle message that perhaps the time had come for him to put his feelers out and find something else to do.” According to Robert and Lois Ferm, what may seem to be a rather cowardly way of dealing with conflicts stemmed at least in part from Graham’s own generous nature. “Billy won’t believe anything bad about a person. He is so lenient and fair. Not long ago, he had to let one man go, but he gave him a year’s wages, so that he could maintain his family until he found another job. He would never leave anyone hanging.”
No characteristic of Billy Graham’s organization stood out more clearly, or was accorded more importance by those who have viewed the ministry at close range, than the fact that nearly all of the men who started out with him in the 1940s were still by his side in 1990, and that most of the “newcomers” had been with him for at least a quarter of a century. While in some Evangelical circles vaunting ambition, fragile egos, and naked pride have created chronic tension and high turnover, BGEA is famous for its organizational stability and internal harmony. It is not without spot or wrinkle, and almost any member of the association can point to minor flaws, but it is nevertheless an impressive monument to Billy Graham’s leadership and a remarkable example of effective nontraditional bureaucratic organization.
At the heart stood the inner circle of Graham, Barrows, George Wilson, T. W. Wilson, and Walter Smyth. Nelson Bell held a spot there until his death, as did Grady Wilson until heart disease moved him to the sidelines in the late 1970s. Bev Shea and Tedd Smith, who were at Graham’s side as long as the others, are beloved and respected figures but have not wielded the same kind of influence and power. “You cannot break into that circle,” Lane Adams observed. “There is no way to catch up. It isn’t that they don’t care about what you think. It’s simply that you haven’t been around for forty years.” Johnny Lenning, who worked at Cliff Barrows’s side since 1959, agreed. “Quite a few of us have been around for twenty or twenty-five years,” he noted, “but that’s not forty years.”
These men, in essence, spent almost all of their adult lives together, united in spirit and by telephone even when separated geographically. “When you have been together and worked together for so many years,” Barrows pointed out, “you just know one another. You know what the others are thinking, how they are going to react.” None, perhaps, was more important to the unity of the organization than Barrows himself. In a brief but singular tribute in 1986, Graham told the nearly 10,000 evangelists gathered at Amsterdam that “God has given me mighty men, but the mightiest of all has been Cliff Barrows.” Graham knew Barrows was ill, suffering from what proved to be a tumor that sidelined him for almost a year, but it was not compensatory praise. No man in the association, save Graham himself, comes in for higher praise, and several ministry veterans admitted that “Cliff is the guy to go to if there is a real problem.” One key function Barrows served was to discourage power plays on the part of other members of the association. “If anybody could have built a following for himself,” Lenning observed, “it would have been Cliff, because he is such a warm person. But he has not done that. He has been a model for other people in the organization. If the number two man isn’t grabbing for power, it’s harder for anyone else to do it.”
T. W. Wilson, almost invisible publicly, continued to be almost indispensable privately. As Graham’s servitor, shadow, and shield, he arranged travel and lodging, provided confidential companionship, protected the evangelist from the endless stream of petitioners who want “just fifteen minutes” of his time, and performed any other task, large or small, that needed performing. With Graham since the night they answered Mordecai Ham’s challenging call together, Grady Wilson played a vital role in the organization until serious heart attacks in 1977 and 1978 forced him to curtail his activities. After illness made it impossible for him to keep a full schedule, Grady still made it to several of Graham’s crusade services each year and continued to preach on occasion, even when congestive heart disease made it necessary for him to spend a fair portion of each day in bed. He remained a beloved figure until his death early in the fall of 1987. At the Columbia crusade during the spring of that same year, he drew affectionate greetings and smiles as he strolled through the hotel lobby, wearing a raffish plantation hat and sporting a cane over which a rattlesnake skin had been stretched, so that its ferocious fanged head appeared to emerge out of his gnarled fist. The cane seldom failed to attract a comment, and Grady never failed to point out that he was “the only snake handler on the Billy Graham team.” The offspring of other team members, young adults themselves, pumped his hand and hugged him and instructed their children to “love Uncle Grady’s neck.” When old friends asked him how he felt, he assured them he didn’t fear meeting his Maker but was enjoying what time he had left in this earthly realm. “I’m ready to go,” he said more than once, “but I’m not getting up a load right now.” And when an old friend asked when might be a good time to get together for a visit, he told him, “I’m free between now and the rapture.”
When it finally came time for Grady to go, his spirits seldom sagged. Doctors and nurses told family members he had changed their lives as they watched him face death with such equanimity. When a young nurse asked him, “Aren’t you just a little bit afraid?” he replied, “Honey, why should I be afraid? I’m going to see Jesus.” His daughter Nancy, a nurse and missionary herself, sat with him as death came near. The last words he heard as he drew his final breaths were the soft reassurance that “we love you. It won’t be long till we see you in glory.” At the funeral Billy Graham told the story of Grady’s first sermon, when he borrowed and twisted the stem off Billy’s watch, and he used the four points Grady had made in that first sermon to structure his own remarks. The last point called for listeners to make a decision for Christ. Bev Shea sang, and friends and family spent at least as much time laughing as crying. They missed Grady, to be sure, but none doubted where he had gone, and all of them expected to see him again.
Walter Smyth did not spend as much time in Graham’s physical presence as some other members of the inner circle, but contact between the two men was constant, particularly since the early 1960s, when Smyth moved into position as head of team operations and, later, as vice president of the association with special responsibility for international operations. When Smyth left Youth for Christ to go to work for Graham in 1950, Evangelical publisher William B. Eerdmans raised a caution. “Why put all your eggs in one basket?” he asked. “What if something happens to Billy Graham?” Smyth told Eerdmans that if something happened, God would have some other work for him to do. Reflecting on that memory in his small office in Amsterdam, waiting for the 9,600 evangelists who would soon start pouring in from all over the world, he said, “And here we sit, thirty-six years later. When I started out, I had no idea all this could happen. We were fumbling. We were stumbling. We didn’t know what was going on. Nobody in the longest stretch of the imagination ever expected it to run this long. And here we are today with more invitations and larger crowds and bigger responses than ever.” How did he account for that? “You can’t explain it, except for God.”
Knowledgeable observers often acknowledged a low-key but discernible rivalry between Smyth and George Wilson, perhaps inevitable in a situation in which one man’s job is to control the purse strings and the other’s is to see to it that his projects get the resources they need, and several suggested that a major reason the team’s offices were in Atlanta from 1965 to 1977 was because Smyth and other team members wanted to get out from under Wilson’s close supervision. However real and deep that rivalry—and Billy Graham’s men do not speak freely of friction in their ranks—Smyth enjoyed an enviable reputation for spotless character, great personal warmth and wisdom, indefatigable commitment to the ministry’s goals, and astonishing patience with his underlings. Bob Williams, who adopted Smyth as a mentor, recalled an occasion when a staff member was causing notable tension among his colleagues. “I found Dr. Smyth sitting in his office, praying and weeping about this man—the man we all wanted to choke.” Then, with a smile that acknowledged the tensions his own ego and brisk style had some times created, Williams added, “I have heard several times that he has wept over me.” Billy Graham paid a similar tribute to Smyth’s forgiving spirit. “I don’t know that I ever had an argument with Walter,” he mused, “and it’s his fault.”
Pressed up against this inner circle, vital to the organization and held in high esteem, were second and third tiers comprised of such men as John Corts, Sterling Huston, Howard Jones, Ralph Bell, John Wesley White, Alexander Haraszti, John Akers, and the various crusade directors and special-purpose men and women who attended to whatever task needed doing. Leighton Ford was a kind of first among equals in this company before leaving BGEA in 1986. One insightful observer with close ties to the association described Ford as theologically “so conservative he squeaks” but credited him with being “just about the only one who was not absolutely sure of everything” and with having a special sensitivity to the social implications of the gospel and the concerns of non-Western people. Now, under the aegis of the Leighton Ford Ministries, he holds crusades and devotes special attention to training younger evangelists in what he characterizes as an effort to repay the encouragement Billy Graham gave to him. For his part, Graham seemed happy with the arrangement. “I told Leighton twenty years ago, ‘You cannot establish yourself as long as you are staying in my shadow.’ And I’ve talked to him several times since, and finally, he began to see it. So he worked out a plan and we agreed to help him financially, which we have done. I think this last year we gave him about $400,000. We’ll continue to do that if we have enough ourselves.” (In fact, BGEA’s IRS returns indicate that contributions to Ford’s ministry during the year in question amounted to $226,494. No contributions were listed for 1987 or 1988.)
The problem of living in Billy Graham’s shadow was not peculiar to Leighton Ford. “We only need one preacher and one song leader,” Johnny Lenning pointed out, “so there’s not room for a lot of competition. We have lost some good men who did not want to be subjugated to Billy and who left to form their own ministries.” Tedd Smith agreed. “People come to hear Billy Graham,” he observed. “You know that and you work with that. You are either very happy with that, or you don’t work out.” Fortunately, most team members found satisfaction in being part of the first rank of big-league evangelism. To be sure, pride found its outlets. Veterans sure of their own place will smile and suggest that one watch the little shuffles that occurred when Graham left his hotel for a crusade service or a press conference as certain members of the organization jockeyed to see who got to ride with Billy and who rode in the second car or the van. And in a circle where honorary doctorates from Christian colleges are as ubiquitous as pocket testaments, those who never managed to garner one or who chose not to flaunt either earned or honorary distinctions poked gentle fun at those who introduced themselves as “Doctor.” Despite such occasional outcroppings of vainglory, members of the Graham team appeared remarkable in their ability to divert attention from themselves to their leader and to the cause they served. “There’s not much upward mobility,” Lois Ferm observed, “but you just have to come to grips with that. My own personal attitude is that I feel very honored and thrilled to be a part of this great movement in history. An important factor, of course, is that Billy himself thinks you are the greatest thing that ever came down the pike. He’s convinced of it. You know that anybody else with your credentials could do the job just as well as you, but he doesn’t believe that. As long as he doesn’t believe it, who am I to disagree with him?”
No one pretends that working for Billy Graham was an unbroken idyll. Crusade directors write and speak of the loneliness they sometimes felt when moving to a new city, even though they typically took a small core of associates with them. Men who spent more than half their time away from home acknowledged that this put a strain on even the most long-suffering of wives and understanding of children. Faithful workers down in the ranks devoted their lives to Billy Graham’s ministry, then sometimes wondered if he knew they exist. And those who have experienced dark nights of the soul occasionally admit that the genuine closeness and family spirit that pervaded the organization when things were going well, or when illness or death or other kinds of externally caused problems to arise, were not always manifest in less straightforward circumstances. “There is a need for more pastoral care within the team,” one former team member alleged. “There could have been more closeness in times of trouble, more help when there were pressures and problems. People in the association have an enormously hard time facing conflicts and personal problems. It’s almost considered a sign of weakness if you confess a problem. They tend to give you a straight spiritual answer—if they ever discover the problem—without looking at the sociological or psychological aspects. They can win an argument without helping the person. There can be a sort of condemnation for failures, faults, and sins, instead of a spirit of helping people seek and find forgiveness, and work out their problems.”
Whatever the truth of that assessment—and a sufficient number of present and former team members sounded similar notes to make it seem plausible—it is also quite apparent that the level of personal harmony and mutual commitment among at least a fairly wide circle of key personnel was truly remarkable. John Stott, who lauded Graham for surrounding himself with able men, observed that competence was not their only distinguishing mark. “They truly love each other. And they are extremely loyal to each other. They’re like overgrown schoolboys. It’s endearing.” Stott’s country man, the Reverend Gilbert Kirby, agreed: “It’s the most effective small team I have ever seen. You can liken it to the apostolic party with Paul, traveling around Asia Minor, going to strategic places. I don’t know when there has been another small team like it. Certainly not in this century.”