In a span of seven years, Billy Graham had rocketed out of a basement in northern Illinois to become the best-known, if not yet the most influential, leader of a resurgent Evangelical movement. Not since the 1830s had revivalistic Christianity enjoyed the popularity it experienced during the postwar years, and not since Charles Finney had an Evangelical preacher been so in tune with the mood of a nation and so ready to become the symbol of one of its most vital religious traditions as was Billy Graham in 1952. In the years immediately following the war, the nation had thrown itself into an effort to reestablish a semblance of normalcy and stability. In some respects, it succeeded tremendously, but the euphoria stimulated by victory and postwar prosperity soon gave way to new attacks of anxiety. Because it won the war and rebuilt an economy that had lain in ruins a decade earlier, America was thrust into the unsought but well-earned role as leader of the free world. By pumping billions of dollars into foreign aid between 1947 and 1952, it helped its battered allies and enemies avoid total collapse but also inherited some of the resentment aimed at those countries by their colonies and by developing nations unhappy with Western domination. The greatest threat, however, came from the Soviet-led Communist bloc. The temporary sense of atomic invulnerability vanished in a mushroom cloud when Russia crashed the nuclear club in 1949. Communism seemed to be spreading all over the world, and the United States felt it had no choice but to try to contain it. That entailed frustrating efforts to influence the United Nations, where the Soviet Union repeatedly and effectively vetoed most attempts to check its tentacular reach and increased deployment of resources and personnel to lands where Americans were not always welcome and where those in power were not always paragons of democratic government. When Graham and his team met with President Truman in the summer of 1950, the Commander in Chief had mentioned the possibility of sending troops to Korea. A few weeks later, just five years after America concluded what it hoped would be its last war, its young men were once again bound for a distant land, a land most Americans knew or cared little about, in an attempt to rescue it from Communist invasion. A nation so recently proud and confident had been cast anew into turmoil. In this anxious state, it was vulnerable to two ancient and proven appeals: the placing of blame on a scapegoat and the assurance that old, familiar truths were still valid. Billy Graham intuitively understood how to seize that moment. He hammered away at communism, accusing it of trying to undermine the very foundations of Western civilization and damning any effort at appeasement or compromise. At the same time, he trumpeted assurance that the world had not slipped from God’s pocket, that those who were vigilant and put their trust in the verities that had brought them this far could manage an uncertain future with confidence because God was on their side.
Graham’s largest campaigns in 1952 were in Houston, Texas, and Jackson, Mississippi, but the most important was a five-week crusade in the nation’s capital. Morrow Graham feared her son was taking on too much, too soon, and warned, “Billy, you are now going to your Waterloo.” Her assessment proved overly pessimistic. BGEA claimed a total attendance of 307,000. Time placed the figure at 500,000 and implied, by failing to point out that many people attended the crusade more than once, that Graham had preached to one third of Greater Washington’s 1.5-million population. But even the more modest figure represents a good response for the dead of winter, and attendance would surely have been greater had it not been for the National Guard armory’s 5,310-person capacity. The high point of the crusade was a climactic rally that drew 40,000 people to the steps of the Capitol despite a steady rain. When Graham first broached the idea of preaching and originating an Hour of Decision broadcast from the Capitol, he was told it would be impossible to arrange, but a call to Sid Richardson, one of House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s key supporters, led to an act of Congress permitting Graham to hold the first-ever formal religious service on the Capitol steps. “In those days,” Graham later observed, “you didn’t need anything but Sam Rayburn’s word for almost anything in Washington. And so we used the Capitol steps.”
That Billy Graham was able to stimulate acts of Congress signaled his growing influence in the political realm. The invitation to hold the crusade had been initiated by a bipartisan group of senators and representatives, several of whom attended regularly and worked as volunteers at the services, and he managed to forge important and enduring links to power during his sojourn in the capital. Unhappily for him, he was not able to repair the damage done by his 1950 White House prayer meeting. That abortive episode might have convinced a man of less ambition and confidence that he had tried to play out of his league. But Graham’s determination to gain approval for himself and the movement he fronted did not permit retreat. He had acted in naive ignorance, but he meant the President no harm or embarrassment; surely, so innocent a mistake would not be held against him for long. He sometimes poked fun at Truman— “Harry is doing the best he can,” he would say. “The trouble is that he just can’t do any better”—but the President was used to harsher criticism than that. Besides, Truman’s stock was not at its highest, and surely he could understand that association with a popular young preacher carried a symbolic blessing, even if the preacher was not his staunchest defender.
Harry Truman did not subscribe to this line of reasoning. After leaving the presidency, he once observed that Graham had “gone off the beam. He’s . . . well, I hadn’t ought to say this, but he’s one of those counterfeits I was telling you about. He claims he’s a friend of all the Presidents, but he was never a friend of mine when I was President. I just don’t go for people like that. All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.” Apparently, Truman eventually softened his assessment of the evangelist, but he had not done so by January 1952, and Graham had made little effort to mend the rift, if he even knew it existed. The communication between the evangelist and the White House regarding this crusade provides an illuminating contrast between a man whose desire for affirmation was a mainspring of his personality and a man barely able to summon conventional courtesy toward those whom he wished to avoid. A few weeks prior to the crusade, Truman informed his aides that “when, as, and if a request comes for Billy Graham to be received at the White House, the President requests that it be turned down. . . . “Unaware of Truman’s directive, Graham sent him a detailed preview of the campaign, noted that Oklahoma senator Robert Kerr would serve as crusade chairman, and added, “I would count it a high privilege and distinct honor if you could bring a few words of greeting [on opening day] and, if possible, stay for the entire service. We would be particularly thrilled to have Mrs. Truman and Miss Margaret join you on that occasion.” Graham then cannily suggested that such a favor could benefit the President and his party. Truman had talked of appointing an ambassador to the Vatican. Republicans saw this as a cynical political maneuver designed to nail down the Catholic vote in an election year, and many Protestants, whatever their party affiliation, opposed such an appointment on religious grounds. Aware that the President was in a tight spot, Graham said, “Due to some of the unfavorable publicity connected with the Vatican issue, I sincerely believe it would be of some advantage to you to join with us on that opening Sunday. You may be interested to know that I have refused to make any comment on the Vatican appointment because I didn’t want to be put into the position of opposing you.” A few days later, a White House memo reported that “at Key West, the President said very decisively that he did not wish to endorse Billy Graham’s Washington revival, and particularly, he said, he did not want to receive him at the White House. You remember what a show of himself Billy Graham made the last time he was here. The President does not want it repeated.” When the inevitable request came, Harry Truman’s “very decisive” declination was sanitized by his secretary into a polite “I’m very sorry I must send you a disappointing reply.”
“Graham was disappointed, to be sure. The President’s approval would be a marvelous coup, irrefutable evidence that he and his ministry had national significance. At the same time, he felt Mr. Truman was making a tactical error. Just four days before the opening service, he wrote to the President’s secretary, informing him that “this campaign is being watched with probably more interest than probably any religious event since the founding of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, and I do feel it would be advantageous for the President to give some word or to make a personal appearance at some time during these meetings.” The President was not persuaded, but Graham would not give up. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, he seemed determined not to let go until he had wrung a blessing from his adversary. When Truman made good on his promise not to attend the opening service, Graham set a new goal. If Sam Rayburn and Congress could set aside normal regulations to permit him to preach on the Capitol steps, surely the President could set aside an hour or two to attend that service. Jerry Beavan sent Truman a resolution by 225 ministers who urged him to be present at that rally. Graham followed immediately with a letter noting that ABC would broadcast the service coast-to-coast and that “the clergy of the Washington area, together with literally thousands of their colleagues, would rejoice to know that their chief executive was in attendance on this occasion.” He then called the White House to issue a personal plea that Truman attend the service. An aide who took the call reported that Graham stressed that he “believes the President will go down in history as one of the most courageous men of all times,” reiterated his refusal to speak out on the Vatican issue, and observed that his ministry had received “some favorable publicity from various publications.” This time, Truman’s secretary informed Graham that “a previous engagement” would preclude the President’s attendance at the service, but that he “is nonetheless grateful for the kind thought which prompted your invitation and sends you his best wishes.” Finally, Graham stopped pestering the White House. He recognized he had been rebuffed—a Time magazine story described Truman’s nonappearance as a “snubbing”—but he resisted prophetic rebuke, limiting himself to a mild “I guess he was just too busy or something.” Privately, he may have taken pleasure in reports that the rally drew a bigger crowd than had Truman’s inauguration.
Harry Truman may have regarded Graham as a rube to be avoided, but other politicians saw him either as a kindred spirit or as someone whose friendship could convey a blessing. Approximately one third of all senators and one fourth of House members asked for a special allocation of seats for crusade services, and scores of congressmen attended the Capitol rally. With the help of such friends, Graham secured permission to hold prayer sessions at the Pentagon each noon throughout the crusade. Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson, father of religious broadcaster and 1988 Republican presidential candidate M. G. “Pat” Robertson, boosted Graham by authoring a unanimous Senate resolution to be read at a crusade prayer service, urging Americans to pray that “God may guide and protect our nation and preserve the peace of the world.” Graham’s sojourn in Washington also led to acquaintance with two men who would become his close and controversial friends, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, the latter another favorite of Sid Richardson’s. Of greater immediate moment, however, the attention he received apparently convinced Graham that he and his supporters wielded considerable political clout. Late in 1951 he had expressed the opinion, foreshadowing later predictions by the religious right, that “the Christian people of America will not sit idly by in 1952. [They] are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters. I believe we can hold the balance of power.” This bloc, he suggested, would be a coordinated effort in which church members would follow “the instructions of their religious leaders.” During the Washington crusade, he announced his desire to interview every potential candidate from both parties, revealing he had already met with Senator Estes Kefauver and General Douglas MacArthur (“He is one of the most inspirational men I have ever met. . . . He is deeply religious”), and expected to visit General Eisenhower during a March visit to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) near Paris. “The only one who has turned me down,” he noted pointedly, “is President Truman. I will not ask for another appointment.” Though careful to note that he would refrain from a public endorsement, he told reporters that he might well share his personal choice with a number of religious leaders “who probably will use my views as a guide.” He was also willing to commend his views to candidates. “If I could run for President of the United States today,” he volunteered, “on a platform of calling the people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected. There is a hunger for God today.” At first Graham brushed off any suggestion of personal desire for political office, but statements such as this stirred some imaginations, and a few months later, he told reporters that “numerous congressmen” and a former member of Roosevelt’s cabinet had approached him to run for the United States Senate from North Carolina, or perhaps even to consider the presidency in 1956. Apparently, he did not consider such suggestions far-fetched. America had not yet reached a crisis that demanded he sacrifice his ministry to enter politics, he said, but if that should happen, he stood ready to help: “If the country ever comes close to communism, I will offer myself in any capacity to lead the Christian people of this country in the preservation of their God-given democratic institutions.” In the meantime, he estimated he could swing at least sixteen million votes to the cause or candidate of his choice.
Despite Graham’s profession of neutrality during the early stages of the presidential campaign, it appears he already suspected who his choice would be. Several months earlier, in a letter to Sid Richardson, he expressed a highly positive evaluation of Dwight Eisenhower (named, it was said, for Dwight Moody) and a hope that the general would seek the presidency. Richardson shared the letter with Ike, who wrote to Graham in November 1951, thanking him for “the overgenerous personal allusions your letter made to me” and commending him for his “fight for the old-fashioned virtues of integrity, decency, and straightforwardness in public life.” Richardson then proposed to Graham that he “write General Eisenhower some good reasons why you think he ought to run for the presidency.” Graham protested: “Mr. Sid, I can’t get involved in politics.” The canny old operator pushed this objection aside. “There’s no politics,” he said. “Don’t you think any American ought to run if millions of people want him to?” When Graham agreed, Richardson grumped, “Say that in a letter,” and Graham did as he was bidden. Eisenhower’s earlier note to Graham was apparently a formal courtesy, and his compliments were generated by Sid Richardson’s appraisal of the evangelist rather than any firsthand knowledge. But this missive caught his attention, and he asked Richardson, “Who was that young preacher you had write me? It was the darndest letter I ever got. I’d like to meet him sometime.” Given this encouragement, Graham promptly requested an interview and Eisenhower agreed, though he insisted that his position as SHAPE commander ruled out any early declaration of intentions. In later years Graham has minimized his role in Eisenhower’s decision to seek the presidency, claiming his was just one voice among many. According to Jerry Beavan, who met with Eisenhower and his staff at Fontainebleau to iron out details of Graham’s visit, Richardson and several of his Texas cronies specifically assigned Billy the task of persuading the general to enter the campaign, and the Fontainebleau meeting proved pivotal in that decision.
Graham continued to feign impartiality, even to the point of declining invitations by both major parties to lead the opening prayer at their national conventions, but it was not hard to discern where his sentiments lay. He repeatedly criticized the Truman administration for the way America had entered the Korean conflict and for lack of resolve in pursuing victory. “How many of you voted to go into the Korean War?” he often asked, noting that “I never did.” The decision had been made by “one man sitting in Washington,” and just as all inherit the burden of Adam’s original sin in the Garden of Eden, “when Mr. Truman went to war in Korea, you and I went to war in Korea whether we liked it or not.” He told a Houston audience in May 1952, “The Korean War is being fought because the nation’s leaders blundered on foreign policy in the Far East. I do not think the men in Washington have any grasp of the Oriental mind; Alger Hiss shaped our foreign policy and some of the men who formulate it [now] have never been to the East.” The administration then compounded its original error, he charged, by refusing to follow General MacArthur’s advice to take whatever measures were necessary to win, choosing instead to drag out the war in a “cowardly” and “half-hearted” fashion at a cost of nearly two thousand American lives each week.
Throughout the spring and summer, Graham echoed the sentiments and sometimes the exact phrases of the Republican campaign, observing that it was “time for a change,” time to elect new leaders who would “clean up the mess in Washington,” time to get “a new foreign policy to end this bloodletting in Korea.” Asserting that “we all seem to agree there’s a mess in Washington,” he proclaimed that “the nation desperately needs a strong spiritual leader” who has “the fortitude and moral courage to clean out the ‘grafters and hangers-on’,” “a Moses or a Daniel [or a general] to lead them in this hour.” After Eisenhower gained the Republican nomination, Graham visited him at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver and presented him with a red Bible, which the general apparently kept with him and read frequently throughout the campaign. At this same meeting Eisenhower confided his concern that the public did not perceive him to be a religious man. To make a show of religion during a campaign, he feared, would appear insincere, but he told Graham he intended to join a church immediately following the election, win or lose. Whether the general’s approach was guileless or craftily calculating, it won Graham’s admiration, and the story found its way into the newspapers. Without question, Eisenhower recognized the potential value of Graham’s goodwill. In the early stages of the campaign, he wrote to Washington governor Arthur Langlie, cochair of Graham’s 1951 Seattle crusade, acknowledging Graham’s power to reach millions of voters and expressing his pleasure in the evangelist’s commendation of his “crusade for honesty in government” during several Hour of Decision radio broadcasts. Clearly, Eisenhower hoped for more, even though he recognized Graham and other religious leaders would have to be circumspect in their support. “Since all pastors must necessarily take a nonpartisan approach,” he conceded, “it would be difficult to form any formal organization of religious leaders to work on our behalf. However, this might be done in an informal way, and I am passing a copy of this letter . . . on to [campaign adviser] Arthur Summerfield. If you have further thoughts along this line, I would be most grateful for them.” Perhaps because they doubted his influence or feared some kind of backlash, Eisenhower’s staff was ambivalent toward Graham. They acknowledged that the general “likes and admires” the evangelist, but attempted to limit the number and length of his visits.
Keeping Graham’s favor proved wise. Not only did he continue to make Republican-flavored comments, but a few days before the November election, he revealed to the press that although he was still not taking sides, a personal survey of nearly 200 churchmen and religious editors from 30 states and 22 denominations indicated that 77 percent favored Eisenhower for president, while only 13 percent indicated an intention to vote for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. Predictably, such gestures won Eisenhower’s appreciation and affection and, after his thumping victory in the election, led to Graham’s being asked to serve as a religious consultant for the inauguration ceremonies.
The Washington crusade and his developing relationship with Eisenhower enhanced Graham’s symbolic importance as an official spokesman for Protestant Christianity. During the fall of 1952, he began to receive letters from chaplains and servicemen asking him to visit troops in Korea during the Christmas season. Cardinal Spellman visited the troops under the auspices of the Defense Department, but Graham was unable at first to obtain government sponsorship for his trip and was obliged to pay his own expenses, an inequity Harold Ockenga and other Evangelicals vehemently criticized. Jerry Beavan and friends in Congress, however, helped reduce Pentagon resistance to a morale-boosting visit, and accompanied by Grady Wilson and Bob Pierce, president of the Evangelical relief organization, World Vision, Graham soon set out on his first visit to the Far East, grandly announcing his plan to duck from bunker to bunker along the front “to assure the boys that prayers are being said for them at Christmastime.” In Tokyo, where he lunched with the emperor’s brother, visited wounded soldiers, and addressed nearly 750 missionaries (“I was told,” he reported, “that this was the largest gathering of missionaries on a mission field in history”), he was called in for an unexpected visit with General Mark Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East. On the day following that visit, Graham and his party received word that the Pentagon had decided not only to sponsor their trip but had ordered first-class treatment throughout their stay in Korea. With clear delight, Billy exulted, “We all became VIPs!” and, on returning home, disingenuously told his supporters of a privileged train trip in a general’s private command car, of having “a full escort with about ten jeeps to meet us” and an “entire staff lined up for review,” of “being briefed by every commanding general in every area,” and of being repeatedly offered “the seat assigned by protocol to [generals].”
The tour, however, was hardly an exercise in vainglory. At almost every stop, Graham and his colleagues visited orphanages set up by American GIs (and, in many cases, supported by World Vision) to care for children who had lost their families in the war. He was equally diligent in visiting numerous hospitals and MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) units where wounded soldiers were being treated. He saw, for the first time, sights that exceeded his imagination: “men with their eyes shot out—their arms mutilated—-gaping wounds in their sides and back—their skin charred by horrible burns,” a “big, tough Marine” so shredded by enemy bullets that “there was not enough body left to be made whole again.” When one man, permanently paralyzed and lying facedown in a canvas and aluminum rigging, said, “Mr. Graham, I would like to see your face,” Billy lay on his back, fighting tears as he softly talked and prayed with him. Seeing his countrymen suffer strengthened his conviction that Washington should seek a swift and decisive end to such carnage, but it did not make him a war monger. “I wish every American could stand [in the hospitals] with me,” he said. “They would have a new sense of the horror of war.” And he recognized that Americans were not the only ones to suffer. After seeing a Communist POW who had been “burned by a liquid fire,” he said, “Watching him I could not help but think of the terrible suffering that goes on in the Communist armies as well. I offered a prayer for them, too, for our God is not only the God of the Americans, but also of the Communists. I am convinced that we as Christians should pray daily for our Communist enemies.” Graham reckoned he had “wept more in Korea than in the past several years put together. These experiences changed my life. I could never be quite the same again. . . . I felt sadder, older. I felt as though I had gone in a boy and come out a man.”
Billy was scarcely less moved by his encounters with Korean Christians, who were already showing the dedication that would produce explosive Christian growth over the next forty years. In Pusan, shielded from subfreezing winds by a fleece-lined parka and heavy boots, and from possible Communist attack by a phalanx of military police brandishing rifles and machine guns, he spoke for four nights from an open-air platform to several thousand Koreans and GIs who sat on tiny straw mats or stood in the mud to hear him. In Seoul he attended prayer meetings that began at five o’clock in the morning. And in Taegu and other cities, he was shamed by Korean pastors who gripped his hand in gratitude for his coming, great tears coursing down their cheeks. “I felt so humble as I stood with these men,” he said. “I was not worthy to loosen their shoe latchets. These men had suffered persecution for Christ—-their families had been killed because of their testimony for Christ—their homes were gone, they had nothing of worldly possessions—and here they were, coming to listen to me preach the Gospel and thanking me for it. They were preaching to me, but they did not know it.” He was particularly moved by two pastors he invited to speak on an Hour of Decision broadcast he was sending back to America. Neither had ever spoken on the radio and Graham noticed one turning his head to brush back a tear just before his turn to speak. “Here,” he marveled, “were men who had faced death a hundred times, and who had suffered untold agonies for Christ—afraid before a microphone. My heart was deeply touched.”
As promised, Graham spent several days, including Christmas, at the battlefront itself. Flying in small planes and helicopters through thick fog, and so close to enemy artillery that exploding shells jarred the aircraft several times, he landed at tiny airstrips, donned a helmet and flak jacket as soon as he hit the ground, and preached to hundreds of grimy, unshaven, and fully armed GIs, some of whom had just returned from combat. On one hillside he preached from a makeshift platform decorated with an enormous painting of Jesus watching over a marine who had dropped his head on his arms to get a moment of rest during a break from battle; the picture had been painted in a frontline trench and trundled forty miles undercover of darkness in time for the service. After preaching, he spent as much time as possible visiting with the men, signing their Bibles—“usually I avoid signing my name in Bibles,” he said, “but here it was a privilege. Some of these Bibles were pierced and torn by bullets or shrapnel. All of them looked used and well read”—and going into trenches and bunkers to talk with those on active duty. Without exception, Graham found the men unusually receptive to his message, which he delivered without adornment.
The brevity of his trip did not deter Graham from feeling he had obtained a good grasp of the situation in Korea. Typically, and for the most part, he was highly positive. After a visit with South Korean president Syngman Rhee, arranged with the assistance of General James Van Fleet, he judged that the president “seems to have a firm grip on the country.” Virtually every general he met impressed him as a gracious man of out standing character, and he declared he had “never seen a private organization operate as efficiently as does the army. . . . The food is excellent, and medical care is unsurpassed anywhere.” The soldiers he talked to were “the finest of American youth.” Every one was “a rugged he-man . . . a courageous, red-blooded American,” yet with such an interest in spiritual matters that he “never saw a pinup picture at the front.” Within a few days of his arrival, he blithely offered the rather damning and simplistic observation that if President Truman had taken time to visit Korea, he would have ended the war. Then, apparently to compensate for Truman’s oversight, he announced he had his own plan to end the conflict and hoped to share it with president-elect Eisenhower as soon as he returned to the United States. His plan was a national day of prayer for God’s help in finding the precise solution to the war. Eisenhower apparently decided to rely on secular military expertise; the war continued for sixteen more months.
Graham wielded greater influence in the spiritual realm. Eisenhower became the first President ever to lead a prayer as part of his own inauguration, and shortly afterward he was baptized and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. Graham insists that both these actions were at the President’s own initiative, but he quickly stepped forward to applaud them and to assure his followers that the nation was in good hands once again. “It has been my privilege during the past year to talk with Mr. Eisenhower on two occasions,” he told his radio audience. “I have been deeply impressed by his sincerity, humility, and tremendous grasp of world affairs. I also sense a dependence upon God. He told me on both occasions that the hope of building a better America lay in a spiritual revival.” He added, “Another thing that encourages me about Mr. Eisenhower is that he is taking advice from some genuine, born-again Christians.”
In 1953 Graham conducted crusades in half a dozen American cities, the most successful a four-week effort in Dallas, at whose climactic closing service he filled the 75,000-seat Cotton Bowl in the largest evangelistic meeting ever held in America to that point. (In what would become a regular practice, he sent Eisenhower a report on the crusade, noting that the record-breaking crowd had lit matches and asked God’s blessing on the President. He then asked, in what would become a typical gambit, if it might be possible “to have a short chat with you about a matter of great importance.”) This crusade was also notable in that it marked the occasion of Graham’s formally placing his membership with the First Baptist Church in Dallas. His reason for maintaining membership in a church so far from his home in Montreat was disarmingly simple: “If I belonged to a Baptist church in the neighborhood, they would continually be asking me to work in church affairs. When I’m at home I attend my wife’s Presbyterian church and naturally they don’t ask me to do anything.” He did not mention that the Dallas church was also the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. That year Graham also published Peace with God, an extended statement of the theology and social thought contained in his sermons. A Christian Century reviewer declared that “as writing, it is just the dullest in a long, long time. The great evangelists wouldn’t have been caught dead preaching this pedestrian stuff. It never gets off the ground and so help me I can’t see how any amount of triple-fortissimo sincerity ever gives it flight.” He also predicted that ministers who had welcomed Graham’s crusades would withdraw their support after seeing what he really believed. In an ironic coincidence, the same reviewer praised a book written by Charles Templeton, describing Graham’s old friend as “alone in the Billy Sunday line in the verve and vitality of his preaching. The great ones were original and repeatable and quotable and aphoristic. Among the headliners today only Templeton is that . . . he is by himself in the grand tradition.” Despite such criticism, Peace with God, “written not for the theologians and philosophers but for the man in the streets,” and subsequently translated into thirty-eight languages, has sold more than two million copies and remains a useful compendium of the essential content of Billy Graham’s theology and preaching. He sent one of the first copies to President Eisenhower.
As he would throughout his life, Graham struggled with his fame and success. He realized he was achieving near-iconic status in the minds of a great many people. Near the conclusion of his Greensboro crusade, he told his audience, “I know you are going to be attached to this place. When this tabernacle is torn down a month from now, thousands of you will cry, and you’ll come in here and pick blades of grass to keep in your Bibles as souvenirs. I know you will. I have seen it happen.” Allowing his associates and others to refer to him as “Dr. Graham” on the grounds that the honorific title was useful in “appealing to a higher type of social strata” reflected his striving for human approbation, just as his soon-expressed preference for “Mr. Graham” or simply “Billy” reflected his concern that such striving was inappropriate. His currying favor with presidents and other notables made it clear that at some level not far beneath the surface, he relished the publicity and prestige he attained, but he passed over handsome opportunities to capitalize on them as fully as he might have. He rejected an opportunity to play Billy Sunday in a feature film, and when NBC offered him a million dollars a year to host a regular television program, he turned it down with scarcely a second thought, observing that he would not be willing to trade with the richest man on earth if it meant detracting from his work as an evangelist.
While Billy built his career as an itinerant evangelist, Ruth worked with comparable intensity to construct a stable homelife for their growing family. A third daughter, named Ruth but known from birth as Bunny (“because she looked like a rabbit”), had arrived late in 1950, and in 1952 the Grahams finally got a son, William Franklin III—“I’d have loved another girl,” Billy said, “but every man needs a son.” With the aid of the Bells, who lived across the street and served as full-time grandparents, Ruth gave the children a great deal of nurturing attention, but Billy’s long absences from Montreat could not but take a toll. Once, when Ruth brought Anne to a crusade and let her surprise her father while he was talking on the telephone, he stared at the toddler with a blank look, not recognizing his own daughter. In a turnabout a few years later, young Franklin greeted his father’s homecoming from a crusade with a puzzled “Who he?” The rest of the world, however, knew who he was, and that inevitably impinged on the family’s privacy. “We were on the sight-seeing tour,” Ruth recalled. “If the cars just kept going, we thought they were probably from the Episcopal center. If they just slowed down, we thought they were probably Presbyterians. The ones that actually stopped, got out of the bus, came down and looked in the bedroom windows and wandered all over—we knew they were from Ridgecrest,” a Baptist conference center on the other side of Black Mountain. “It got to be a joke. Bill said I was prejudiced against the Baptists, but that’s the way they were. They were so friendly—too friendly.” Displaying a bit of their father’s enterprise, the children capitalized on the attention. GiGi and Anne once stretched a rope across the road and demanded a dollar from those who stopped to look at their home. Bunny used a more subtle form of extortion. When Ruth commented that she always seemed to have more money than her allowance would warrant, Bunny innocently told her, “Just watch the next time a bus stops.” Ruth recalls, not without some pleasure, that “we watched, and she had her little red pocketbook on her arm and she wandered up to the gate where the bus was parked with her wistful little face and the pocketbook on her arm, and the inevitable happened. I put a stop to that.”
Ruth practiced a somewhat more lax form of discipline than Billy Frank and his siblings had endured. Despite Billy’s occasional comments on the benefits of corporal punishment and the children’s memory of frequent spankings, some acquaintances from this period remember that the Graham youngsters were less than models of decorum in their behavior at church and other public gatherings. Few, however, would criticize the children’s spiritual development. Motherhood and other domestic demands had not altered Ruth’s lifelong devotional bent. She usually kept an open Bible out on a counter and sometimes carried one in her hand to read while she vacuumed the floor. She saw to it that the children observed a daily “family altar,” similar in form and content to those on which she and Billy had been reared, though she always kept it short, lest the children come to resent it. She also took special pains to make her husband’s absences seem normal, following the advice of an old black man who had told her, “Make the least of all that goes, and the most of all that comes.” Leave taking was always kept unemotional, as if it were no more significant than a trip to the hardware store, and if the children commented on their father’s absence, they were told he had “gone somewhere to tell the people about Jesus.” GiGi remembered that “Mother never said ‘Daddy’s going away for a month.’ Instead, she would say, ‘Daddy will be home in a month. We’ll do such and such before he comes back.’” She also noted, particularly when she was younger, that “I thought everyone’s daddy was gone. And my granddaddy was such a father figure for us that it never hit me that it was all that unusual.” Whether perceived as unusual or not, the children did notice their father’s absence. Once, Ruth saw one of the girls sitting on the lawn, staring wistfully at an airplane in the distance and calling out, “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy!” A plane meant Daddy was going somewhere. “How much we missed him,” Ruth said, “only each one knows.” She read Billy’s letters aloud, guided the children as they prayed for their father and his work, and, on Sunday afternoons, gathered them together to listen to his voice on the Hour of Decision broadcast. Afterward, he usually called to talk with each of them. It was not easy, but both Billy and Ruth were determined not to let his career exact the kind of painful price the children of evangelists too often paid. “I like to think,” Graham reflected, “that we learned something about satisfying a growing child’s need for a father, even though he was so often away from home.”