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Groton Daily Independent
Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 223 ~ 37 of 52
His rst White House visit with Lyndon Johnson, scheduled to last only minutes, stretched to several hours. He urged Gerald Ford to pardon Richard Nixon and supported Jimmy Carter on the SALT disarma- ment treaty. He stayed at the White House with George H.W. Bush on the eve of the rst Persian Gulf War.
His presidential ties proved problematic when his close friend Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal in 1974, leaving Graham devastated, embarrassed and baf ed.
Later, tapes released in 2002 caught the preacher telling Nixon that Jews “don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”
Graham apologized, saying he didn’t recall ever having such feelings. He asked the Jewish community to consider his actions instead of his words.
At the height of his career, he would be on the road for months at a time. The strain of so much preach- ing caused the already trim Graham to lose as much as 30 pounds by the time one of his crusades ended. His wife, Ruth, mostly stayed behind at their mountainside home in Montreat to raise their ve children: Franklin, Virginia (“Gigi”), Anne, Ruth and Nelson (“Ned”). Ruth sometimes grew so lonely when Billy was traveling that she slept with his tweed jacket for comfort. But she said, “I’d rather have a little of Bill than
a lot of any other man.”
Beyond Graham’s TV appearances and speaking engagements, he reached multitudes through network
radio, including “The Hour of Decision,” lm and newspapers.
One of Graham’s breakthrough lms was “The Restless Ones,” made in the 1960s, about morally adrift
teens in Southern California who found the strength to withstand temptation after attending a Billy Gra- ham crusade.
In the 1950s he created a syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer,” which at its height reached tens of millions of readers.
Early on, he took up the cause of ghting communism, preaching against its atheistic evils. But he was much less robust in his support for civil rights and did not join his fellow clergymen in the movement’s marches, a position he later said he regretted.
“I think I made a mistake when I didn’t go to Selma” to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he said in a 2005 interview. “I would like to have done more.”
Still, Graham ended racially segregated seating at his Southern crusades in 1953, a year before the Supreme Court’s school integration ruling, and long refused to visit South Africa while its white regime insisted on separating the races at meetings.
Graham’s integrity lifted him through the dark days of the late 1980s, after scandals befell TV preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
Graham had resolved early on never to be alone with a woman other than his wife. Instead of taking a share of the offerings at his crusades, he drew a modest salary from his ministry, which was governed by an independent board, instead of by friends and relatives.
“Why, I could make a quarter of a million dollars a year in this eld or in Hollywood if I wanted to,” Graham once said. “The offers I’ve had from Hollywood studios are amazing. But I just laughed. I told them I was staying with God.”
Later in his career, Graham visited communist Eastern Europe. Increasingly, he appealed for world peace.
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on Nov. 7, 1918, on a rural dairy farm near Charlotte. His path began taking shape at age 16, when the Presbyterian-reared teenager committed himself to Christ at a tent revival.
After high school, he enrolled at the fundamentalist Bob Jones College, then transferred to Florida Bible Institute in Tampa. There, he practiced his sermonizing in a swamp.
He still wasn’t convinced he should be a preacher until a soul-searching, late-night ramble on a golf course.
“I nally gave in while pacing at midnight on the 18th hole,” he said. “’All right, Lord,’ I said, ‘If you want me, you’ve got me.’”
A 1949 Los Angeles revival in a tent dubbed the “Canvas Cathedral” turned Graham into evangelism’s rising star. Legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst had ordered his papers to hype Graham, though the evangelist said he never learned why.