Billy Graham opened the second half of the century with a little-heralded campaign in Boston. The leaders of the Evangelistic Association of New England, who had watched Billy Sunday’s 1917 crusade spawn over fifty new churches, hoped Graham might kindle similar fire in a region whose religious life was now shaped by a Roman Catholic majority and a cultural elite comprised largely of Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians. Actual expectations, however, were modest. After a delegation scouted Graham’s 1949 Baltimore campaign, the association decided to sponsor only one service, on New Year’s Eve. They felt Graham’s style was too intense to appeal to New Englanders, and his reputation insufficient to justify a greater commitment. Allan Emery, Jr., whose father had brought Billy Sunday to Boston, served as general chairman for the service and helped persuade his pastor, Harold John Ockenga, to invite the young evangelist for a ten-day continuation effort at the venerable Park Street Church, New England’s most prestigious Evangelical congregation. Ockenga, a scholarly man and probably the single most influential figure in Evangelical circles at the time, had refused a YFC request to have Graham hold a rally in 1947, primarily because he knew nothing about him and was not inclined to throw his prestige behind an untested product, particularly a southern Bible school preacher with a known penchant for loud suits and hand-painted ties. In the interim, however, he had learned more about Graham and figured that at worst, he could do no real harm in ten days.
Helped by publicity from the recent Los Angeles revival, the sparsely advertised New Year’s Eve service at Mechanics Hall drew more than 6,000 people, a surprise that led Ockenga to reserve the auditorium and announce a service for the next afternoon. That impromptu and (apart from announcements in churches the next morning) unpublicized gathering packed the building again. The scheduled evening service a few hours later filled the Park Street sanctuary and two auxiliary rooms and left more than 2,000 would-be worshipers frustrated because they could not get in. This unexpected response unnerved Graham. Though he believed God had been at work in Los Angeles, he also knew that months of preparation, thousands of dollars spent on promotion, and a windfall of publicity had contributed to that campaign’s success. But in Boston, with little preparation or publicity, the response was similar. This both exhilarated and terrified him. As soon as the service ended, he called Emery and Ockenga into a room and asked them to pray “that the Lord will keep reminding me of the fact that this is all of grace and to Him is all the glory, because I realize if I take the smallest credit for anything that has happened so far, that my lips will turn to clay.” Emery was astonished: “Instead of praying for the various problems we might foresee, such as finances, follow-up, converts, or anything else, here, after this unexpected triumph, Billy’s concern was that the Lord keep his hand on him. He also wanted us to [help] him continue moment to moment to give God the glory. This is something we had never seen before. I will never forget it, because as I look back and as I continue to see his ministry, I see that same ingredient, that same principle at work in his life: ‘To Him is all the glory.’ He has wanted to stand behind, to hide, as it were, so there wouldn’t be any temptation for him to take credit for what he sincerely believes and knows to be the work of God himself.” If what followed fell short of the Great Awakening stirred by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, it did cause dry bones to rattle in normally sedate New England. The announced run of nine days stretched to eighteen, and under pressure from crowds that consistently exceeded the capacity of every venue, the revival itself became itinerant, moving, as booking schedules permitted, from Park Street Church to Mechanics Hall, to the opera house, to Symphony Hall, back to Mechanics Hall, and finally to Boston Garden for a climactic service that attracted more than 25,000, of whom 10,000 were turned away. The crowds themselves drew attention, not only for their size, but also for their practice of singing hymns as they walked along the streets or rode home on subways and buses after the meetings. One lifelong New Englander remembered that “there was just a spirit of unanimity, joy, and happiness that I’ve never seen since.”
That Graham created a sensation in Los Angeles probably impressed few Bostonians, but the press could not afford to ignore stories in Time and Life and on the major wire services. Still, a precampaign press conference at the Hotel Bellevue drew few of the city’s top reporters. Graham opened the session in disarming fashion by good-naturedly chiding his sponsors for referring to him as “Doctor,” noting that the title was honorary, not earned, but the questioning was rather perfunctory until a reporter asked Graham how much money he expected to garner from the effort. The evangelist explained that the Northwestern Schools paid him $8,500 a year (he had finally started accepting a salary), that he would receive no income from the crusade, and that a committee from the Park Street Church would release a full, audited financial statement when the meetings ended. The reporter kept pressing Graham to admit he expected to get rich from his campaigns. Seldom has an evangelist been armed with a better reply to this ubiquitous question. Just before the press conference began, a bellman handed Graham a telegram, which he read and stuck in his pocket without comment or discernible reaction. “I can still see him,” Allan Emery recalled. “He took out that crumpled telegram and said, ‘Sir, if I were interested in making money, I would take advantage of something like this.’” The telegram, according to Emery, offered Graham a substantial sum—“something like $250,000”—to star in two Hollywood films. As the reporters passed it around, judging both it and Billy Graham to be authentic, their attitude visibly changed. “From then on,” Emery said, “we got nothing but the top reporters, and we got front-page coverage on every single one of the five dailies.”
Whatever the precipitant, the coverage was remarkable. Graham was the hottest thing around in the dead of a typical New England winter, and newspapers outdid themselves to see who could depict him and his crusade in the most vivid terms. Describing him as a “swashbuckling southerner” whose “chic gray suit with draped lapels and bright blue and orange tie” made him look “as if he belonged in the star’s dressing room of a musical comedy rather than in a pulpit,” they gave every service extensive space, in editorials and cartoons as well as news stories, and frequently printed his words in bold type, a journalistic equivalent to a red-letter New Testament. In return he rewarded them with some of the most colorful preaching of his career—so colorful, in fact, that although he began to disown some of his statements within a year or two, he had not completely lived them down four decades later.
Railing against communism as “a fanatic religion supernaturally empowered by the devil to counteract Christianity,” he predicted the “imminent deification of Joseph Stalin” in the Soviet Union, with “his birthday celebrated as we do Christ’s.” While being careful not to set precise dates, he predicted Christ would return within ten to fifteen years and offered a memorable image of the tumult the rapture would cause: “Wait till those gravestones start popping like popcorn in a popper. Oh boy! Won’t it be wonderful when those gravestones start popping?” Graham could look forward to the rapture with such joyful anticipation because he had no doubt he would be caught up with Jesus in the clouds to flourish during the millennium, and would have no reason to shudder when, at the Last Judgment, God gives the awesome command, “Start up the projector!” Because he had accepted God’s gracious gift of salvation, he felt certain he would spend eternity in heaven, which he regarded as a place “as real as Los Angeles, London, Algiers, or Boston.” He informed his Boston audience that heaven is “sixteen-hundred miles long, sixteen-hundred miles wide, and sixteen-hundred miles high . . . as much as if you put Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, and half of Russia in one place. That is how big the New Jerusalem is going to be. Boy, I can’t wait until I get up there and look around.” His view of how the redeemed would spend eternity was equally concrete: “We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties and the angels will wait on us and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible.” Food for these parties would be plucked from “trees bearing a different kind of fruit every month,” and Graham himself might provide entertainment and organize the recreation since he “hoped to be able to sing, play the trombone and violin, and play football and baseball as well as the best.” He also depicted hell in vivid terms, asserting that its denizens would meet regularly to hold prayer meetings, begging for mercy and remembering the times they had passed up the chance to respond to the invitation at an evangelistic meeting.
Graham also amazed his Boston audiences with his use of a technique George Whitefield had used to good effect in these same environs two hundred years earlier, that of dramatizing biblical stories by slangily updating the lines and acting out all the parts. Appearing in the title role of “The Feast of Belshazzar,” a favorite sermon he had honed and polished on the YFC circuit, he preened and strutted and boasted that “I’m going to put on a party that will be the biggest shindig in Babylon.” Slipping deftly into the role of narrator, he observed that Belshazzar “was one of those smart fellows who think they can do as they please and forget all about God. But, brother, that’s where he was wrong. That’s where everyone is wrong who thinks he can get away with any kind of living. It makes no difference if you are the king of Babylon or the President, or anybody important. You are no exception to the law of God. He don’t care how big your name is or whether you came over on the Mayflower.” Then, introducing Daniel, who interpreted “the handwriting on the wall” that foreshadowed Belshazzar’s imminent assassination, Graham explained that “Daniel was a pal of the boss—the King of the Medes and Persians. Some jealous guys were out to get him, so they trained their spyglass on him one morning when he was praying and had his Venetian blinds up. They tattled to the King. The King was on the spot, so he said to his lawyers, ‘Find me a couple of loopholes so I can spring my pal, Dan.’ They just couldn’t find a loophole and the King had to send Dan to the lions.” Matching actions to words, he described what happened next: “Old Daniel walks in. He’s not afraid. He looks the first big cat in the eye and kicks him and says, ‘Move over there, Leo. I want me a nice fat lion with a soft belly for a pillow, so I can get a good night’s rest. . . . “In another sermon he recreated the plight of the Prodigal Son, tossing imaginary slop to invisible hogs with such flair that “hundreds of persons who had never fed a hog nor seen one fed felt sure that Billy Graham must have learned firsthand how that was done.” Then he pranced around like an uppity pig to make the point that “even if you gave a pig a bath, gave it a Toni, and sprinkled it with Chanel No. 5, it would still, like an unregenerate sinner, revert to the mud puddle as soon as you let it loose.”
Graham’s theatrics captivated some observers. After hearing him deliver several such sermons, one reporter wrote admiringly of the evangelist’s dramatic range: “He prowls like a panther across the rostrum. . . . [H]e becomes a haughty and sneering Roman, his head flies back arrogantly and his voice is harsh and gruff. He becomes a penitent sinner; his head bows, his eyes roll up in supplication, his voice cracks and quavers. He becomes an avenging angel; his arms rise high above his head and his long fingers snap out like talons. His voice deepens and rolls sonorously—the voice of doom. So perfect are the portrayals that his audience sits tense and fascinated as his sermons take on a vividness, a reality hard to describe.” Others admitted the tension but had little difficulty describing the reality. Ruth Graham, for one, thought it an unseemly display and did not hesitate to let him know it. “As an actor,” she volunteered, “I’m afraid he is pretty much a ham. When he starts that kind of acting sermon, I usually start to squirm. If I’m anywhere in sight, he is sure to see me and know what’s the matter.” Her counsel to him was simple and direct: “Bill, Jesus didn’t act out the Gospel. He just preached it. I think that’s all He has called you to do!”
Reporters loved Ruth’s candor on this and other matters, such as her husband’s penchant for bright clothes—“We have a domestic compromise,” she revealed. “I buy my hats. He buys his ties”—and gave her ample opportunity to fashion responses she would use again and again over the years as their counterparts all over the world asked her what it was like to be the wife of a famous evangelist. She conceded that “the kids get so they don’t know what their daddy looks like” but contended that having her parents live just across the street made her job easier and allowed her to slip away to spend a few days with her husband during most of his meetings. People often asked, she acknowledged, how she and the wives of Graham’s associates could stand to have their husbands away from home for so long. Her answer was a blend of piety and pragmatic realism: “We know how important their work is. Then, too, we are spared the monotony of ordinary married life. . . . When we do have a chance to talk together, there are so many things we want to say. Every conversation is important. It’s more than news about the office or what happened at the grocery store, so I always get a lift in talking with Bill.” She and Billie Barrows, both quite lovely women still in their twenties, also pointed out that good conversation was not the only pleasure provided by reunions with their husbands. “Every time we get together,” they agreed, “It’s like another honeymoon,” though Ruth revealed that the hectic pace of crusades so tired Billy that he typically slept through most of his first few days at home following a campaign. “It’s like being married to Rip Van Winkle,” she said, but she reiterated her now-standard declaration that “I’d rather have Bill part-time than anybody else full-time.”
Graham professed to feel resistance to his efforts: “There are thousands in Boston who wish his revival would hurry and get over. . . . They don’t want a revival. They don’t want people to be saved. They hate the gospel.” But if such animosity existed, it was either suppressed or voiced only in private; among the five daily newspapers, not one published a negative article about either Graham or his campaign. The Globe ventured that he was “perhaps the lowest-paid evangelist of modern times,” and a Herald-Traveler editor wrote that “Graham is not mercenary. He takes the stigma of money off evangelism. . . . He should have the support of every Christian church in America.” As the campaign continued, the papers treated him not only as an evangelist but as the public figure he was rapidly becoming, complete with appropriate myths. In a special souvenir edition, the Boston Post reported he had played professional baseball in North Carolina and was aiming for diamond greatness before entering the ministry. Reporters pressed for his opinion on such topics as the death penalty and received the cautious responses that would come to characterize his public style: “I don’t say [the defendant in a controversial mercy-killing case] deserves death, but if we let this pass, who is to say who is to die and who is to live?” Occasionally, he ventured further, then stepped back quickly to avoid giving offense. Asked his views on foreign aid, he asserted that revival would do more than the Marshall Plan to combat evil and warned that “we are going to spend ourselves into a depression. We can’t keep on taking care of the whole world.” Then, when he noticed that every reporter present was writing down what he had said, he became flustered and added with a sheepish grin, “But don’t anybody tell Mr. Truman I said so.” As a measure of his growing stature, he was invited to offer prayer at a session of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where a rising young legislator, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, introduced him to the assembly.
Graham had not expected all this success and attention, and when the overflow turnout at the Boston Garden indicated the revival still had plenty of fire left in it, he was, like the Apostle Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, reluctant to come down. Prior commitments and increasing difficulty in hiring suitable auditoriums led him to leave the field temporarily, but not before announcing he would return as soon as possible in the spring. On the train west, he seriously considered turning back but did not. Among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of opportunities chosen or waived during his long career, Graham always looked back on the decision to end the Boston campaign as one of two or three times when he “possibly disobeyed the voice of God” by allowing the demands of his schedule to overpower the inclination of his heart.
The next major campaign, a three-week stint in Columbia, South Carolina, marked a further stage in the growth and maturation of Graham’s revival machine. At his suggestion, the sponsoring Layman’s Evangelistic Club hired Willis Haymaker, who had done advance work for Gipsy Smith and Bob Jones senior and junior to organize prayer groups, encourage cooperation across denominational lines, and arrange for scores of small gatherings at which Billy and his associates could appear before and during the crusade. Haymaker also installed Billy Sunday’s delegation system, in which cooperating churches reserve large blocks of tickets for specific nights, a technique that assured good attendance at every service. The veteran advance man proved so effective that Graham persuaded him to join the team as his chief crusade organizer, a position he held until his retirement in 1979. It was Haymaker who suggested using crusade, instead of the more modest campaign, a change first implemented at the Columbia meeting. Graham also added Tedd Smith, a young classical pianist just out of the Royal Conservatory of Music at Toronto. The basic “platform team” formed at this 1951 crusade—Graham, Barrows, Shea, Grady Wilson, and Smith—was still intact thirty-six years later when the evangelist returned for his second Columbia crusade in the spring of 1987. More significant than the size and enthusiasm of its crowds—more than 40,000 attended the closing service at the University of South Carolina stadium—the Columbia crusade enabled Graham to forge stronger bonds with the political and cultural establishment. Governor Strom Thurmond underscored his personal endorsement of the crusade with a notable disdain for the ostensible barrier between Church and State. He brought prominent guests to services and insisted that Billy and Grady stay in the governor’s mansion. He invited the evangelist to address the state’s general assembly, arranged for him to speak at school assemblies, and declared the closing day of the crusade South Carolina Revival Rally Day. Then, when the crusade ended, he provided Graham and his team with a police escort for a quickly arranged two-week preaching tour of the state that included a triumphant return to Bob Jones University, where Bob Jones, Jr., introduced him to a packed house and those who could not get in heard his sermon about Belshazzar broadcast live over the campus radio station, WMUU (an acronym for World’s Most Unusual University).
The most celebrated of Governor Thurmond’s “pew packers” was Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time and Life. Both magazines had already run stories about Graham, but Luce himself had not paid much attention until financier and statesman Bernard Baruch, who had a home in South Carolina, showed him a Columbia newspaper’s account of the young evangelist’s speech to the general assembly. Luce, himself the son of missionaries, was interested in the possibility of religious revival and was also impressed by Graham’s emphasis on Russia’s possession of the atomic bomb. Since he and his wife, Clare, were vacationing in Charleston, he went to Columbia to attend the crusade and spent long hours with Billy at the executive mansion, also as Governor Thurmond’s guest. The following week Time carried a substantial article that if not entirely complimentary—it pointed out that the 7,000 decisions registered in Graham’s crusade seemed meager compared to the 25,000 souls harvested in Columbia by Billy Sunday in 1923 and noted that 80 percent of the inquirers were already church members—still enhanced Graham’s position as a man worth watching.
Immediately after the South Carolina tour, Graham made good on his promise to return to New England. After a brief stand in the Boston Garden, he launched a sixteen-city tour, accompanied this time by a press corps shepherded by Gerald Beavan, who had taken leave from Northwestern to help with media relations and publicity. On the first trip, Grady Wilson had pecked out press releases in his hotel room, and Robert Van Kampen, who had come from Illinois to help out, had done his best to answer the mail and filter requests for interviews. As executive secretary and public relations director, Beavan now took on both of these men’s roles, controlling access to Graham and serving as an almost constant companion. When Graham fell ill in Hartford for several days (Jack Wyrtzen drove up from New York to fill in for him), Beavan stayed at his bedside and read to him from Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul and Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind. From that experience, Graham began to consider writing a book on the same theme. Published in 1953, it bore the title Peace with God.
If Strom Thurmond’s political patronage boosted Graham’s career, his next brush with secular power nearly undid him. Billy had an uncommon determination to stand out from the herd. In part, this impulse involved nothing more complicated than a desire to be admired, a need sufficiently well distributed as to require little explication. Without question, Billy Graham wanted to be somebody—somebody important, somebody famous, somebody who stood in the circle of other somebodies. In part he fastened himself to the Fundamentalist luminaries who visited Florida Bible Institute, curried the favor of rich Evangelicals like R. G. LeTourneau and British weapons manufacturer Alfred Owen, delighted in winning the souls of pop stars and athletes and gangsters, and reveled in the attention paid him by William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce because they gratified that portion of his ego that conversion and baptism and agonizing prayers of surrender would never fully regenerate or subdue. But to dismiss his fascination with celebrity, influence, and power as nothing more than garden-variety social climbing is to misunderstand Billy Graham quite seriously, for even more consuming than his desire to find favor with his fellows was his passion to be approved by the Ultimate Somebody: Almighty God. Nothing impelled Graham more powerfully than the hope he expressed while contemplating the northern lights at Maranatha: “to do something great for the Lord.” From the earliest stages of his ministry, he understood intuitively that his message would reach more people, appear more legitimate, and have a greater impact if he were viewed as an important man whose friendship and opinion and counsel mattered to people of property, power, and prestige. He also understood that his lower-order ambitions could easily overwhelm and corrupt his higher desires. Awareness of this vulnerability would haunt him throughout his career as he wrestled to conquer his humanity.
By 1950 Graham had experienced notable popular acclaim, won respect in Evangelical circles, and shown that like Finney and Moody and Sunday, he would have no trouble financing his ministry. The key realm he had yet to penetrate was politics, and since much of his preaching featured political themes, he sought to ingratiate himself with political figures with an eagerness that seemed almost desperate. Strom Thurmond’s blessing was his first breakthrough, but it was not his first effort. Early in 1949, in what seems to have been a clear case of overreaching, he wrote President Truman to request a brief visit with him. When the President’s secretary reported that Mr. Truman’s schedule was too packed to permit an appointment, Graham wrote that he understood but asked the secretary to let the President know that “over 1,100 students at these Northwestern Schools are praying daily that God will give him wisdom and guidance” and that “we believe our President to be a man of God. We believe him to be God’s choice for this great office.” While in Boston he told a reporter that his whole ambition was “to get President Truman’s ear for thirty minutes, to get a little help” in spreading the gospel, and he worked hard to satisfy that ambition. He sent a telegram urging the President to declare a national day of repentance and prayer as a step toward lasting peace. After Communist forces invaded South Korea a few weeks later, he sent another wire with the following bit of encouragement and foreign-policy advice: “MILLIONS OF CHRISTIANS PRAYING GOD GIVE YOU WISDOM IN THIS CRISIS. STRONGLY URGE SHOWDOWN WITH COMMUNISM NOW MORE CHRISTIANS IN SOUTHERN KOREA PER CAPITA THAN IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD WE CONNOT LET THEM DOWN. EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM.”
Perhaps feeling that his telegrams had endeared him to Truman, he renewed his request for a personal visit. The President resisted, but with the assistance of Massachusetts congressman John McCormack, Graham finally obtained an appointment for July 14, 1950. When he managed to get the invitation widened to include Barrows, Beavan, and Grady Wilson, the four of them got so excited, Grady recalls, that “we were jumping up and down in our hotel room.” As they puzzled over how to make a good impression on Truman, Grady remembered that newspapers often pictured Truman wearing a Hawaiian sport shirt and white buck shoes at his Key West retreat and suggested they meet the chief executive in bucks of their own. Graham, who already had a pair of the shoes, loved the idea and dispatched Grady to a Florsheim store to purchase three more pairs for his friends. Thus shod, and attired in matching ice cream suits and colorful hand-painted ties that made them look like hospital orderlies at the racetrack, they readied themselves for a visit with the most powerful leader in the non-Communist world. The meeting was scheduled for noon, and Truman’s appointments secretary recommended they arrive a few minutes early. That suggestion was hardly needed. Often nervous and always punctual, Billy had broken his watch and, according to Barrows, pestered his friends for the time “on an average of twice a minute.” When the four awestruck men finally entered the Oval Office, Truman received them warmly, listening courteously to Graham’s call for a national day of prayer and sharing a few observations about the possibility that some kind of police action might be needed to resist communism in Korea. As their scheduled thirty minutes drew to a close, Graham asked the President if they might “have a word of prayer.” The chief executive, not famous for piety, said, “I don’t suppose it could do any harm.” Billy put his arm around Truman and began to pray, Cliff chimed in with “Do it, Lord” and several fervent “Amens,” and Grady peeked to find the President taking in the scene with what appeared to be bemused detachment.
As the group left the President’s office, a clutch of reporters descended on them, and Graham, unaware he was violating protocol, freely related what Truman had said and acknowledged they had prayed together. He balked when photographers asked him to re-create the pose they had struck, explaining he thought it improper to simulate prayer, but not wanting to disappoint them, he said, “On second thought, my team and I were going to go out on the White House lawn and just give God thanks for this privilege of visiting with the President of the United States. I suppose you could take a picture of that.” The next morning, newspapers all over America ran a photograph of the young innocents, dazzling in their white raiment and poised on one knee like a southern gospel quartet. With typical generosity, Billy described the President as “very gracious, very humble, very sweet,” but the stories and photographs irritated Truman mightily. Washington columnist Drew Pearson reported that the evangelist was persona non grata at the White House, but Graham seemed oblivious to his gaffe. When he sent a thank-you note a few days later, he requested an autographed picture, reiterated his call for a day of repentance and prayer, and let the President know that his was a voice worth hearing. “It is my privilege,” he observed, “to speak to from five to twenty thousand people a night in each and every section in America. I believe I talk to more people face-to-face than any living man. I know something of the mood, thinking, and trends in American thought.” Having established his credentials, he repeated his hard-line position on foreign policy, urging Truman to order “total mobilization to meet the Communist threat, at the same time urging the British commonwealth of nations to do the same. The American people are not concerned with how much it costs the taxpayer if they can be assured of military security.” Graham got the photograph he requested but little else. A few months later, the President curtly declined a request to send a telegram in support of a Rose Bowl rally at which Billy was the headliner, and not until long after he left office did Truman come to regard his erstwhile prayer partner as much more than a publicity-grubbing God huckster. Graham has retold the story of this abortive visit so frequently, often to justify his refusal to reveal the substance of his conversations with other world leaders, that the embarrassment it caused him obviously ran deep. The best analysis, however, came from Grady Wilson who, chuckling and shaking his head as he recalled the incident, offered the uncomplicated but irrefutable observation: “We were so naive.”
Naivete notwithstanding, Billy Graham had made astonishing strides in less than twelve months, emerging from relative obscurity to become the best-known evangelist of his generation. He scored resounding triumphs in settings as strikingly different as Los Angeles, New England, and Bible-belted South Carolina. And he assembled a team of colleagues who, when it came to evangelistic campaigns, not only knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it but were rapidly gaining the confidence to insist it be done their way. Both the Boston and Columbia crusades had been hampered and ultimately cut short in full flower by the lack of suitable auditoriums. For the Portland, Oregon, crusade, which began in July 1950, Graham persuaded the sponsoring committee, led by an old friend from Youth for Christ, to construct a 12,000 seat wood-and-aluminum tabernacle the size of a football field, but even this proved inadequate. The opening service drew a standing-room-only crowd of well over 20,000, the first week’s attendance exceeded 100,000, and an estimated 250,000 tried to get in during the second week. At times the enthusiasm for the young preacher resembled that associated with movie stars. When approximately 30,000 women gathered for a “Ladies Only” meeting one hot August morning, they tore down traffic barriers, climbed on automobiles, and generally behaved so boisterously that team members had to call police to keep the dear sisters from wrecking the tabernacle. By the time the crusade ended its six-week run, the aggregate attendance exceeded a half million, even by conservative estimates.
Successful as it was, the Portland crusade’s status as a landmark in Graham’s ministry owes less to what occurred inside the tabernacle than to external developments that happened to fall into place during that period. The first involved Graham’s entry into major-league religious broadcasting. As he contemplated his remarkable success and increasing fame, he naturally considered various means of expanding and extending his ministry. The most obvious route seemed to be through radio or, possibly, the fledgling medium of television. A few months before the second New England tour, when spring was still too raw to attract many visitors to the New Jersey shore, Dr. Theodore Eisner, pastor of an interdenominational Evangelical church in Philadelphia and president of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), followed what he regarded as an “impression” from God and drove down to Ocean City to spend the night in a cabin he and his son-in-law had rented. The next morning, when he entered a diner in nearby Somers Point, he heard cries of “Doc! Doc!” coming from a booth in the back where Billy Graham and Cliff Barrows, who were attending a conference in the area, were having breakfast. “We were just talking about you,” Billy said. “We want to do something on radio or television, and we don’t know how to do it. We need help.” As president of NRB, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals to protect and promote Evangelical programs, Eisner understood religious broadcasting well and was able to help them sharpen their focus. He also promised to tell his son-in-law, Fred Dienert, an advertising and public relations man, of their interest in developing a program.
Dienert and his partner, Walter Bennett, specialized in religious accounts and leapt at the chance to work with Graham, but they soon discovered that Eisner had not handed them a neatly wrapped gift. Throughout his ministry, Graham’s pattern would be to pursue a new idea or opportunity with great enthusiasm, perhaps committing substantial money and personnel to its exploration and execution. Then, as he reflected on the time and expense and effort it would require and contemplated visions of failure and embarrassment, he would either retreat, convinced the idea could not possibly succeed, or agree to continue only after assuring himself and others that he would bail out at the first sign of trouble. By the time Dienert and Bennett approached him a few days after the conversation with Eisner, he had already cooled on the whole idea. When they went to Montreat soon afterward with word that the ABC network would offer him a prime Sunday-afternoon slot, Graham remained adamant. Though they assured him the program could originate from any city where his travels took him, he reckoned the demands of a weekly program to be excessive and the cost—$92,000 for thirteen weeks—astronomical.
The two agents, certain Graham would change his mind, waited for his call, but none came. At first they told themselves he was contacting wealthy friends, trying to raise money for the venture. Finally, with no invitation or advance notice, they flew to Portland to press him for a decision. Graham never liked to transact business during a crusade, and for several days, he refused even to see them. Finally, as they prepared to return to the East Coast, he called them to his hotel room. Dienert recalled that “the room was very unpretentious—a little room with one table and one chair and a single bed. Billy had on a baseball cap and a pair of green pajamas and was walking back and forth, back and forth. He told us some friends had indicated they would do something to help, but nothing definite. Frankly, I think he might have been a little discouraged. We explained to him that if he could raise just $25,000, that would pay for at least three weeks, and contributions from listeners should take care of it after that. Then he said, ‘Guys, let’s pray.’ I have never been in a prayer meeting like that in my life, and I never expect to be in another one like it. You could feel the power of God in that room. Walter got down on one side of the bed, and I got down on the other. Billy knelt at the one chair and started to pray. I can’t tell you all that was in the prayer, but I know this: The pipeline was open. I knew he was talking to the Lord, and I knew the Lord was listening. He said, ‘Lord, Eve got this little house in Montreat. I’ll be glad to put a mortgage on it. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. You know my heart. We don’t have the money, but I would like to do it.’ It was a great prayer, a really terrific prayer! Then Billy said, ‘Lord, I want to put out a fleece. I want $25,000 by midnight.’ Well, I’ve heard a lot of prayers, but I never heard anybody proposition God like that: $25,000 tonight or we don’t go! On the way out of the room, I said, ‘Billy, how about giving the little people a chance?’ And he said, ‘I’ll do it tonight.’ Well, he was drawing 20,000 a night in Portland, so we figured if he got just a dollar apiece, that would be $20,000 and, frankly, if you ask God for $25,000 and he gives you $20,000, that’s pretty close.”
At the service that evening, Graham’s unwillingness to push the issue seemed almost perverse. He made no mention of a radio program at the time of the offering. When he finally did speak of it, he rested content with noting that “a couple of men are here to see us about going on radio. The time is available; we can let the tobacco people have it, or we can take it for God. If you want to have a part in this, I’ll be in the little room by the choir area after the service tonight.” Dienert sank in his seat, certain “the whole thing was shot.” To make matters worse, a guest preacher sharing the service that evening not only spoke too long but, when Graham gave the invitation, got up again and confessed his own shortcomings at length. By the time he finished, the entire crowd had stood for twenty-five minutes. Dienert thought to himself, “By Golly, can’t somebody make it easier? Who, after standing this long, is going to line up and give Billy another gift?”
What followed became one of the favorite stories in the Graham hagiography. People did indeed line up, dropping checks, bills, pledges, even a few coins into a shoe box held to receive their offerings. When the money was counted, Billy had $23,500 in cash and pledges for the program. Dienert and Bennett were ecstatic until Graham reminded them, “I didn’t ask for $23,500. I asked for $25,000.” To accept this as a sign from God, he cautioned, might be to fall into a Satanic trap. For the same reason, he refused Bennett’s offer to have the agency make up the difference. As the two befuddled and crestfallen admen sought consolation in the company of Barrows and several other friends at Louie’s-on-the-Alley, a little seafood restaurant favored by the team, Graham and Grady Wilson returned to the Multnomah Hotel, where the desk clerk greeted them with two envelopes and several telephone messages. The two letters were from wealthy Texas businessmen Bill Mead and Howard Butt, Jr., both of whom were avid believers in evangelism—Butt, a supermarket magnate known as God’s Groceryman, had himself been a leading figure in the Southern Baptist Youth Revival movement of the 1940s. Accounts of the number and distribution of checks and pledges vary, but all agree that contributions from Mead and Butt were crucial and that these last-minute gifts brought the total to exactly $25,000. To Graham, not unreasonably, it seemed a clear sign God was calling him to a radio ministry.
The shoe box full of money posed a problem. Graham learned that if he deposited it in his own name, even temporarily, he would be liable for personal income taxes, and contributors could not claim their gifts as deductions. Probably because they feared a network radio program could easily become a financial albatross, Northwestern’s board felt any such venture should be independent of the schools. Graham called George Wilson for advice, and Wilson offered a simple solution: “You need a little nonprofit organization, with you and your wife and myself on the board, and you can control it.” Graham replied, “Well, get some papers together and come on out here.” Anticipating such a need, Wilson had collected sample incorporation documents from several nonprofit organizations: “So I dictated the articles and bylaws, and took it to a lawyer and had him put in a few commas and whereases. One thing I didn’t want changed was Article 1: ‘To spread the gospel by any and all means.’ Knowing Billy, I knew he wasn’t going to stick just to crusades. So that covered it, and still does: ‘any and all means.’” Armed with the articles of incorporation, Wilson flew to Portland where he joined Cliff Barrows, Grady Wilson, and Billy and Ruth Graham as the charter members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), a name reportedly chosen over Graham’s strenuous objections. On his return to Minneapolis, George Wilson leased a one-room office near the Northwestern Schools, hired a secretary, and began thirty-six years of day-to-day control of the organization.
Graham’s film ministry began in Portland as well. A year earlier in Los Angeles, a young filmmaker, Dick Ross, had talked to him about extending his reach through motion pictures. As their first major venture, Ross produced a color documentary called The Portland Story, later renamed Mid-Century Crusade and widely used to publicize Graham’s ministry and to show potential sponsors how a crusade worked and could benefit churches in their city. Within a year, Billy Graham Evangelistic Films, later renamed World Wide Pictures, with headquarters and studios in Burbank, California, began turning out a steady stream of documentary and fictional films, the latter mostly retellings of broken lives mended by attendance at a Billy Graham crusade. Ross also helped produce Graham’s new radio program, the Hour of Decision, a name Ruth suggested. The first broadcast, originating from the Atlanta crusade in the Ponce de Leon baseball stadium on November 5, 1950, opened with Tedd Smith’s adaptation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” introductory remarks by Cliff Barrows (“each week at this time . . . for you . . . for the nation . . . this is the Hour of Decision!”), and songs from the choir and congregation. Jerry Beavan described the 10,000-seat steel and canvas tabernacle centered on second base and noted that “where short days ago baseball pitches rocketed across home plate, now the Gospel message is driven home to the multiplied thousands who have been in attendance for every service.” Then Grady Wilson read Scripture, and George Beverly Shea intoned “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story.” These preliminaries over, Cliff Barrows announced dramatically, “And now, as always, a man with God’s message for these crisis days, Billy Graham.”
True to his billing, Graham began his sermon on an arresting note: “An Associated Press dispatch from Hong Kong in the Atlanta Constitution this morning states . . .” Three days earlier, Chinese troops had entered the Korean conflict, a development Billy managed to inflate into a precursor of imminent world war, possibly involving a hydrogen bomb. Declaring those “crisis days” to be “the most tragic and fateful hour in world history,” he proclaimed that none but the Prince of Peace could bring true and lasting tranquillity to individuals and nations and called on listeners, wherever they might be, “to say an eternal yes to Christ.” Then, after a short prayer, he closed with the signature benediction: “And now, until next week, good-bye and may the Lord bless you, real good.” The team was elated with the smoothness of the production, but perhaps no one found greater satisfaction than Frank Graham, who had driven down from Charlotte to share in his son’s hour of triumph. Frank’s pleasure went beyond fatherly pride; at last, it seemed, he felt relieved of the burden old Brother Coburn had placed on him at the Plank Meetinghouse by predicting he would become a preacher. When an Atlanta reporter asked Mr. Graham when Billy had been called to preach, he told him, “About ten years before he was born.”
No mention of money occurred on that first program, but Barrows did ask people to let them know if they felt the broadcasts “meet a need across the land.” Soon he began to remind listeners, in the briefest manner possible, that the program’s continued existence depended on freewill offerings: “Send your letters to Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s all the address you need.” No greater urging was needed. The Hour of Decision caught fire immediately and within five weeks attracted the largest audience the Nielsen rating service had ever recorded for a religious broadcast. In his cautiousness, Graham had ordered the Bennett agency to contract for only 150 stations, the smallest segment of the network ABC would sell, and had made it clear he would cancel immediately if contributions from listeners did not cover the costs. Within a few months, the program aired on all 350 network stations, soon spread to nearly 1,000 stations in the United States, and reached many other parts of the world on at least 30 shortwave stations. Graham’s entry into electronic evangelism stretched him and his ministry in other ways. During the YFC days, a talented preacher could build a reputation with two or three good sermons, and even the longer crusades required no more than a relatively modest stock of material. A weekly program, however, heard by an estimated twenty million people, forced Graham to expand his reading and seek assistance in satisfying the relentless need for fresh material. With Dick Ross’s help, Cliff Barrows quickly assumed primary responsibility for production, overseeing both the more nerve-racking live broadcasts of crusade services and the composite programs in which he blended taped segments from various crusades with a studio sermon from Graham. In mid-1951, Graham launched a television version of the Hour of Decision. Some programs featured filmed segments from live crusades, where Graham was at his best, but most were studio productions that showed him in a study or living room setting. They often included obviously rehearsed interviews and did not allow him to preach with the kind of intensity and effectiveness he could manifest before a large crowd, though he did eventually become more at ease with the conversational format. The program ran for nearly three years on the fledgling ABC television network, but neither Graham nor his associates have ever regarded it as a particularly memorable or effective effort. Years later, he told an interviewer, “They are interesting films, but I can’t find anyone who ever saw one! Prime time on Sunday nights on network TV, and no one remembers.”
The media ministry required dramatic changes in the scope of Graham’s organization and outreach. The most significant immediate result was the flood of mail that cascaded into the Minneapolis headquarters. From a small packet a postman could carry in one hand, the response grew to more than 178,000 letters during 1951, and twice that the next year. Back in Florida, W. T. Watson had stressed the importance of a mailing list. Billy now told his associates, “Let’s collect all the names we can. I’d rather have the name and address of somebody who supports us than a dollar bill.” Thereafter, in crusades and on the radio, the team put more emphasis on gathering names than on asking for contributions. Badgering people into giving money could offend them; contacting them several times a year with requests for prayer and low-key reminders of financial need would surely prove more effective in the long run. George Wilson, initially skeptical about the value of a mailing list, became one of the leading direct-mail experts in the country. Throughout his ministry, Graham would use a variety of assistants and ghostwriters to help with sermons and publications, but with rare exceptions, he would personally write every letter going out to the list over his signature. “That’s been my own thing,” he explained, “because I felt that God had given me a rapport with our listeners, and people, and I felt I knew what to say.”
Mainly to take care of the mail, BGEA purchased a modest office building and expanded the staff from George Wilson and a secretary to approximately eighty employees by 1954, and by half again that many a year later. The letters brought more than enough money to ease Graham’s anxiety over paying for the Hour of Decision and enabled him to be a bit bolder in seizing other opportunities for ministry. They also brought so many requests for personal and spiritual advice that in 1952, at Walter Bennett’s suggestion, he began his syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer.” Then, as requests mounted for sermons, books, sheet music, and recordings aired on the programs, Graham and Wilson formed a retail company called Grason, a taxpaying entity whose profits were fed back into BGEA.
The ministry’s growth and the accompanying increase in income both called for and made possible a more businesslike arrangement for handling the team’s compensation. Despite aggregate attendance of 500,000 and successful inauguration of the Hour of Decision, the Atlanta crusade produced a major embarrassment for Graham. Though he had not sought it, the crusade committee had taken up a substantial love offering for him and his team at the closing service. The next day, the Atlanta Constitution ran two pictures side by side. One showed a group of happy ushers, holding up four large sacks of money; the other showed Billy Graham waving and smiling broadly as he got into a car in front of the Biltmore Hotel, just prior to leaving Atlanta. The pictures appeared in newspapers throughout the country, implying once again that itinerant evangelists, Billy Graham included, were still trying to prove that one could serve both God and mammon. Deeply stung, Graham determined to put all trace of the Elmer Gantry image behind him and asked Jesse Bader, secretary for evangelism at the National Council of Churches, for advice. Bader advised him to have BGEA put him and his team on fixed salaries unrelated to the number of crusades they might hold in a given year. Graham agreed and pegged his own salary at $15,000, comparable to that received by prominent urban pastors at the time but less than he could have made from love offerings—his income from the Atlanta crusade alone came to $9,268.60. He would later accept money for his newspaper column and royalties from some of his books, but never, after the system took effect in January 1952, would he or his team accept another honorarium for their work in a crusade.
In addition to the thousands of dollars pouring into Minneapolis each week, mostly in small amounts, Graham’s widely publicized pronouncements on the Satanic evils of communism, the God-blessed superiority of the free-enterprise system, and the need to return to the old-fashioned values and virtues of individualist America attracted the favor of several folk able to offer more substantial support. During his 1951 Fort Worth crusade, the crusty Texas oilman, Sid Richardson, less well-known for piety than profanity, took a special liking to him and introduced him to other rich and powerful people, including his personal attorney, John Connally. Another early backer was millionaire industrialist and investor Russell Maguire, an ardent anti-Communist who made a fortune in oil and the manufacture of electrical equipment and Thompson submachine guns, and who contributed a substantial amount of it to various organizations described as fascist by the U.S. attorney general. Not long before he met Graham, Maguire had stirred a controversy by backing the distribution of Iron Curtain over America, a book the Methodist publication Zion’s Herald described as the “most extensive piece of racist propaganda in the history of the anti-Semitic movement in America.” He had also been forced out of a Wall Street brokerage position for “flagrant violations” of the law. Maguire invited Graham to his Palm Beach estate and offered to underwrite the salaries and expenses for him and ten other evangelists selected by him just to keep preaching what he was already preaching. Graham graciously declined this offer, explaining that unfortunately, he did not know ten evangelists with whom he would be willing to be associated in such a venture. When Maguire then offered to free him from all fund-raising activities by underwriting anything he wanted to do, Billy still demurred. W. T. Watson, who helped arranged the meeting and was present at the conversation, marveled at Graham’s reaction. “Most folks would have thought the millennium had come,” he said, “but Billy didn’t bat an eye. He said, ‘Mr. Maguire, I can’t accept it. My work is a spiritual work. We’re getting about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand letters a week. Not all of those letters have a little money in them, but every one of them will say, ‘We’re praying for you.’ If they know there’s a rich man underwriting my work, they’ll stop praying and my ministry will take a nosedive. I can’t accept it.” He did, however, accept $75,000 to help with his new film ministry. Given the backing of such men as Richardson and Maguire, it was probably not sheer coincidence that the first two fictional features produced by Graham’s studio were Mr. Texas, the story of a hard-drinking Texas cowboy who found Christ at the end of his rope, and Oiltown U.S.A., which tells of a millionaire Houston oilman’s conversion and was promoted as “the story of the free-enterprise system of America . . . of the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire.” The televised version of the Hour of Decision also benefited from a healthy infusion of funds from wealthy Texas supporters. Perhaps influenced by this rewarding association with Texas, Graham began wearing a large western hat, providing newspaper photographers with a favorite image until he decided it was drawing too much attention and put it into retirement, along with a pair of green suede shoes and a shiny green suit that had prompted one reporter to describe him as a “Gabriel in Gabardine.”
Other 1951 events confirmed Graham’s place as an increasingly popular public figure. In Memphis, at the invitation of the Chicago & Southern Airline, he held an airborne service aboard a four-engine Super Constellation plane that had been outfitted with a portable pump organ and a small gray pulpit from which he preached on “Christianity vs. Communism” and prayed that “the great C & S Airline may be blessed as never before.” Noting that it was the first time he had ever preached above Memphis or any other city, and probably the first time God’s Word had been proclaimed on a commercial airline, he declared optimistically, “I think this trip will set a precedent.” In Seattle, Governor Arthur Langlie served as cochairman of his crusade. Back in Los Angeles, 25,000 people, including Cecil B. De Mille and other moguls of the motion-picture industry, attended the gala premiere of Mr. Texas. The projector broke in the middle of the screening, the film was achingly amateurish—at the film’s climax, the penitent cowboy says, “All my life, I’ve been riding the wrong trail. . . . I’m turning back. I’m going God’s way. I think it’s going to be a wonderful ride”—and reviews were terrible, but five hundred people answered the invitation at the picture’s conclusion, a response Graham regarded as “God’s seal of approval on our weak and faltering beginning in making dramatic motion pictures.” Overseen from Washington, D.C., by Walter Smyth, who had previously headed Youth for Christ in Philadelphia, the film ministry’s first efforts did have a definite catch-as-catch-can quality to them. Dave Barr, another Youth for Christ veteran who was the first man Smyth hired to help in the new venture, recalled the early days with amusement. “Redd Harper [a singing cowboy who starred in Mr. Texas] and I would go around and show it in churches and auditoriums. We’d have a can of film, a guitar, two suitcases, and a bunch of copies of the Gospel of John. Walter would call us every day to tell us where to go next. My job was to introduce Redd. He would sing a little and give his testimony, then we’d take an offering, show the film, and give the invitation. Many times we were so disorganized that we’d just throw the offering in a cardboard box in the back of the car and take it to the bank the next day. There was no blueprint to follow, but thousands of people came to see that film. It was the first Christian western. When Oiltown came along, we tried to profit by what we’d learned, and pretty soon we were in bigger auditoriums, with more publicity and counselor training. And it just grew from there.”
Despite the increased emphasis on media, crusades remained the heart of Graham’s ministry, and they reached almost full maturity by 1951 with the installation of an extensive counseling and follow-up program overseen by Dawson Trotman, who agreed to spend six months a year helping Graham increase the likelihood that those who made decisions in his crusades would be incorporated into active churches. By early 1952 the evangelistic ministry so consumed Graham’s time and energy and imagination that he began to doubt he could carry on much longer. In what witnesses described as a “low, resigned, and reflective” voice, he told a group of Pittsburgh churchmen: “I’ve always thought my life would be a short one. I don’t think my ministry will be long. I think God allowed me to come for a moment and it will be over soon.” On another occasion, he volunteered that he thought his name was high on “Communist purge lists” and that he expected to die the death of a martyr. With encouragement from Ruth, he resigned his post at Northwestern, but this was hardly preparation for shutting down his ministry. Free at last of a responsibility he had never sought, Graham was poised to attempt to win for Evangelical Christianity a status it had not enjoyed since the days of Charles Grandison Finney.