A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Response to the crusade reflected the religious situation in participating countries. In Norway, where Evangelicals were cooperating on a nationwide scale for the first time in their history, interest and enthusiasm ran so high that church leaders predicted Graham could hold successful crusades in any city in the country. In neighboring Denmark, however, one of Copenhagen’s finest auditoriums was no more than a quarter full on opening night and never reached capacity. Austria showed similar diversity, with near indifference in Vienna, better reception in Graz, and excellent crowds and response at Salzburg, where the services were piped into the Mozarteum. In strongly secular France, attendance was rather poor, but those who came responded warmly to Graham and his message. In Zagreb large crowds overflowed from the cathedral into an auxiliary hall. Once again Graham proved to be exceedingly popular with German audiences, leading the Reverend Johannes Heider, pastor of Dortmund’s largest state (Lutheran) church, to observe that “the simple proclamation of the Bible by Billy Graham has brought more results than we ever expected and it, too, has brought many problems to modern German theologians. The hearts of Protestant pastors in Germany, through the preaching of evangelist Graham, have been opened to the unchanged, authoritative Gospel message.”

  Not all of the unusual occurrences at crusades involved opposition to Graham and his message. The 1969 Anaheim crusade stands out in the memory of several team members because of a small personal drama. By marrying Leighton Ford, Jean Graham traveled in her brother’s circles and shared at least to some extent in his triumphs. Their sister Catherine married Samuel McElroy, who had also taken a position with BGEA, working in the organization’s small Charlotte office. But Melvin, six years Billy’s junior and so different in appearance as to appear almost unrelated, remained at home, where he continued to farm and run a dairy. For years he repeatedly declined the inevitable invitations to speak, since he realized they stemmed from his being Billy Graham’s brother and not from any prowess as a pulpiteer. “This made me withdraw into a shell,” he told a reporter in 1968. “I felt far beneath [Billy Frank]. Maybe in a sense I still do. But in recent years, I’ve come to think that God has placed us all in strategic jobs. Billy has the gospel to preach. And I have my farming. Since I took that outlook, the world has changed for me.”

  A man of good humor, Melvin learned to laugh at some of the ironies of being brother to the world’s most renowned preacher. “A lady called me several years ago in the wintertime,” he remembered. “She wanted some manure for her rose garden, in one of the great big homes here in Charlotte, over in the exclusive part of the city. Of course, I had a lot of it from the dairy, so I took her a load. Her regular yardman had the flu and she asked me if I would mind spreading it, so I did, even though I didn’t usually do that. She came out there and sat on the back steps to watch me. I was throwing that stuff all over that big old formal rose bed, with a rock wall around it—must have been about two hundred beautiful rosebushes in it. And she started kind of laughing to herself, and I said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I thought maybe I was doing something wrong. She said, ‘Are you Dr. Billy Graham’s brother?’ I told her I was, and she said, ‘Well, it seems you brothers have sort of drifted apart.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she said, ‘Doesn’t he spread the gospel?’ I said, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ and I told her where he was in a crusade right then—it was in Chicago. And she said, ‘And you’re out here spreading manure. That seems pretty far apart.’ I told her, ‘No, Ma’am, it’s not. He’s up there working on poor souls, and I’m down here working on poor soil.’”

  As he grew older and more comfortable with himself, Melvin began to speak a bit at his home church, but he never spoke at one of Billy’s meetings until the Anaheim crusade; indeed, he had never even been to California, since, as he explained, “A dairy farmer stays home.” But as he stood before the giant crowd in the stadium where the California Angels played baseball—-drawing only twice as many fans over a whole season as his brother would draw in ten days—his weather-beaten face, thin hair, and country accent heightening the contrast with his smooth, urbane sibling, he told a moving story. Fighting understandable nervousness, he related how he had sometimes felt “squashed and pressed down” by comparison to a brother who spoke to millions in public and to some of the world’s most powerful and famous individuals in private. Then he told of reading in the Bible “about Moses, who complained to the Lord that he had a slow mind and a slow tongue.” He also read what God said to Moses, and as it had with Moses, “the fire began to burn,” and he recognized his own responsibility to tell others about Jesus. According to one eyewitness, countless people in the stands found it impossible to hold back tears of empathy and appreciation, and many of those who came forward at Billy Graham’s invitation told their counselors that they had made their decision during Melvin’s testimony. Twenty years later, Melvin would be preaching at least twice a month at churches throughout and beyond the Piedmont region and could easily fill the other Sundays if he did not prefer to be at home. Reflecting on his abilities as a speaker, he offered a modest, but not falsely self-deprecating, assessment: “I’m not an ordained preacher, but I think I’ve studied the Bible to the point that I can get up a message.” He recognized that he would not have received many of the invitations had he not been Billy Graham’s brother, but he had come to regard that as an advantage rather than a burden. “For years,” he admitted, “I never would speak. I just wouldn’t do it. I’d get the idea that they were comparing me to Billy, you know, and I knew that wouldn’t work.” Now, however, “After all these years, it doesn’t bother me as it once did. Besides, I’m proud of him. What I’m saying is that I think a lot of him.”

  Millions shared Melvin Graham’s admiration for his brother. In the 1970 list of men most admired by Americans, Billy Graham placed second, right behind Richard Nixon and just ahead of Spiro Agnew. He also made the list of best-dressed men, an accolade that seemed to puzzle as much as please him. He reported that he always wore Jarman shoes, out of loyalty to BGEA board member Maxey Jarman, but indicated he took a more passive role in selecting his wardrobe than did other members of the best-dressed club, which included Liberace. “Nearly all the clothes I wear are given to me,” he revealed, “so I guess they must be the latest style.” (In fact, off camera, Graham dresses almost entirely for comfort rather than style, sometimes with comical results. Ruth recalled an afternoon on a European beach when she saw “the strangest-looking apparition coming toward me. It was a tall, lean male in bright-red trunks [wearing] laced-up hushpuppies, yellow socks, and a baby-blue windbreaker, topped by a funny yellow hat that was slightly too small for him but rammed down to his ears. And as if that weren’t enough, he had on the largest pair of sunglasses I’d ever seen. I was both amused and fascinated, when all of a sudden it dawned on me: ‘Oh, no, he’s mine!’”) Sartorial splendor, of course, was not the real point. Americans placed him in the same rank with the President and admired the way he dressed because they saw in him an apotheosis of their own best selves—an upright, honest, attractive man dedicated to the fundamental verities they, too, espoused. To admire him was to admire not just themselves, but the best and most attractive in themselves. He had his critics, to be sure, but just as the folk who chose him to be the grand marshal of the 1971 Parade of the Roses explained, he was to most Americans “a symbol of hope, peace, and renewed faith in God and a world-recognized leader as well as a friend of mankind.”

  Graham understood that his role in the Parade of the Roses would draw wide attention and was willing to share the sunlight with a friend; on the morning of the parade, he tried to reach Nixon and told an aide that if the President could return his call within an hour, he would make a point of mentioning their conversation publicly “as opportunities presented themselves throughout the day.” But the tribute that pleased him most came when the people of Charlotte, North Carolina, declared him a prophet with abundant honor in his own country and proclaimed October 15, 1971, as Billy Gr
aham Day. Once again Graham thought it would be a fine thing if he and Richard Nixon could give each other a boost on this occasion. As soon as the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce announced its plans to praise its native son, the Nixon staff began to assess the event’s potential to aid the President. Television executive and Chamber of Commerce president Charles Crutchfield, an old friend of Graham’s and a strong pro-Nixon man, informed White House aides that Graham was “not sure it’s something the President should do,” that after Knoxville, “this one would be reaching.” Still, Crutchfield felt if the President could see his way clear to take part in the ceremonies, “it would be a tremendous thing for Graham and his family.” Even before details of the day were roughed out, H. R. Haldeman readily agreed that Nixon should try to attend, and he and other staffers began to calculate how Billy Graham Day could work to Richard Nixon’s benefit. As soon as Nixon agreed to participate, White House staffers seized control, noting in one memo that the suggestions of the local organizing committee were “totally impractical in terms of benefit to us” and that one of Nixon’s advance men would “have to make all of the decisions” about logistics, in part because the local leaders were “socially prominent appointments” who were “not prepared to work.”

  Graham’s concern about the President’s participation seems to have stemmed from his fear that opponents of the administration’s Vietnam policy might use the occasion to mount an embarrassing protest, a prospect he naturally wished to avoid. The President’s men also foresaw that possibility—and leapt at the chance to have Nixon stand beside Billy Graham in the face of unholy persecution. A few days before the celebration, a Secret Service reconnaissance team informed the White House that “very serious intelligence reports” indicated a high probability that a Nixon visit would set off disruptions, with “extremely obscene signs” and, quite likely, attempts at violence against both Nixon and Graham. Instead of arranging a last-minute, face-saving emergency pullout, Haldeman wrote “Great” and “Good” in the margins of the report. He approved of plans to keep demonstrators out of the coliseum where the President would speak, but only “as long as it is local police and volunteers doing it—not our people.”

  On the eve of the grand celebration, at a country-club reception arranged by Holiday Inns (whose key executives were avid supporters of his ministry), Graham could not resist reflecting on how far he and his profession had come since the days of Mordecai Ham. “When I started preaching twenty-five years ago,” he remarked as he scanned the elegant assembly gathered to honor him, “people associated evangelism with emotionalism and nonintellectualism. Religion itself was back-page copy. But now, just look at all this!” That sense of satisfied accomplishment could scarcely have diminished as October 15 broke cool and clear over his native city. School children got the day off, municipal courts and many of the city’s largest stores closed (at Charles Crutchfield’s suggestion), and Western Union delivered stacks of congratulatory telegrams from such respectable souls as Arnold Palmer, Bob Hope, Pat Boone, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Stack, Randolph Scott, Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Lawrence Welk, General William Westmoreland, and from across the waters, Haile Selassie and Prince Rainier. On hand to pay tribute in person were South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, a delegation of North Carolina lawmakers led by Senator Sam Ervin and Governor Bob Scott, Reader’s Digest publisher Hobart Lewis, and Treasury Secretary John Connally.

  Obviously, the brightest star in Graham’s earthly crown that day was the appearance of the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the free world, who descended into Charlotte to pay homage to a native son who had once ridden a bicycle out on Park Road and preached to passersby in front of Belk’s department store. As he deplaned from the gleaming Spirit of ’76, Nixon looked properly presidential in a conservatively tailored dark gray suit and silverfish tie. Waiting to meet him on the tarmac, Graham looked embarrassingly evangelistic in a blue-checked, bell-bottomed outfit that he admitted was “a little louder than I thought it was. I bought it at Finchley’s in New York especially for the occasion but I didn’t know the blue checks would light up in the sun.” Any discomfort he felt, however, quickly turned to exhilaration as the two friends rode into the city in the presidential limousine. As their motorcade pushed its way along streets jammed with well-wishers thrilled at the chance to see such a concentration of celebrities, Nixon showed Billy how to wave and how to allow the adoring throngs to touch him without risking injury—“With the palm turned backwards—-this way you can’t hurt them by getting your hand pushed back, and you won’t hurt your hand, either.” Meanwhile, at the downtown coliseum, Secret Service agents, local police, and a band of volunteer marshals worked to sanitize the crowd by purging it of people carrying anti- administration signs (“One-Two-Three-Four—We don’t want your F_____g War”), sporting beards or wearing non-Republican clothes, looking as if they might be about to shout obscenities, or behaving in any manner deemed to be suspicious. The marshals, identified only by unmarked red armbands, hustled obvious nonconformers away, sometimes quite roughly, from areas where they could confront or even be seen by Graham and Nixon. They confiscated film from cameras, as well as critical signs and banners, and in the Observer’s delicate phrase, “exchanged derogatory titles” with those who objected to their heavy-handed tactics. Scores of suspected troublemakers bearing valid passes to the coliseum ceremony were told their tickets were counterfeit and were barred or ejected from the building. A mother whose grade-school son had asked her to take him to the celebration “so Billy Graham could save him” made the mistake of picking up a small banner one of the protesters had dropped and was rudely shunted away from the entrance. Another woman was ejected simply because she laughed at the sight of Secret Service agents dragging a teenage girl from a ladies’ restroom. Even Governor Scott complained that he had been jostled and rudely treated by the Secret Service, perhaps because of what the Charlotte Observer described as a “mod-bangs hair style.”

  The precise identity and affiliation of the marshals was something of a mystery at the time, but a later investigation identified them as members of a local VFW post, recruited through contacts in Washington with the knowledge and approval of the White House. Following the event, Nixon sent a letter of commendation to the group’s leader, Ernie Lee Helms. Then, when fourteen people ejected or excluded from the coliseum brought an $840,000 case against Helms and his cohorts, Nixon lawyer John Dean flew to Charlotte to advise Helms to keep quiet and the lawyer representing Helms stayed in frequent touch with Dean by letter and telephone as the case progressed. Eventually, a jury decided that both the damage suit and federal indictments against the self-deputized marshals were invalid—“against the weight of the evidence,” according to the judge in the case—but not before White House aides acknowledged collaboration in the vigilante effort. As one witness explained, the President’s staff regarded such heavy-handed measures as justified, since the occasion was not just another visit by the chief executive, but was “in some respects a religious ceremony.”

  The heart of the ostensibly sacred occasion was an outpouring of mutual admiration between Graham and Nixon. After characterizing his fellow Carolinians as the finest people in America, Graham asserted that if the nation had more people like them, “we would have little of the problems we have today in the country.” Becoming more specific, and perhaps aware that none of the people who knew better would contradict him, he said, “In our home, we also wrestled with poverty, if you go by today’s standards, except we didn’t know we were poor. We did not have sociologists, educators, and newscasters constantly reminding us of how poor we were. We also had the problem of rats. The only difference between then and now is we did not call upon the government to kill them. We killed our own!” When the applause for that bit of revisionist autobiography and Republican orthodoxy died down, Graham began to praise his honored guest. He recalled having made a suggestion to Nixon and having the President reply, “Billy, I don’t thi
nk that would be morally right.” When he thought about it more carefully, he said, “I realized he was right. At that moment I felt that he was the preacher and I was the sinner.”

  When the time came for Nixon to return the compliments, he did not disappoint. He commended the proud people of the Piedmont for having “contributed to America and the world one of the greatest leaders of our time—the top preacher in the world!” He praised Graham for decades of inspiring Americans to espouse and uphold a strong religious faith, without which, he ventured, no nation can be great. Finally, he allowed that it was not farfetched to think that “when the history of this time is written,” it would not be a scientist or statesman or some other secular leader but their own beloved Billy Graham who would be credited with having performed “the most important works.”

  Despite the overzealous efforts of Ernie Helms and his VFW buddies, not all the opposition could be screened out. Some ordinary-appearing citizens managed to chant or wave signs damning Nixon, the war, and occasionally, Billy Graham’s role in rendering unto Caesar what belonged to God. After the ceremony, as the two men and their wives walked through a sea of people on their way to a small and extremely exclusive reception a short distance from the coliseum, a young man pushed his way through to Nixon, grasped his hand, and loudly accused him of being “a murderer” who had “spoken platitudes for the proletariat.” Even though clearly euphoric over the glory that had come to him that day from “the kingdoms of this world,” and perhaps rendered amnesiac by the cross-shaped sandwiches and a thirty-pound biblicoform cake served at the reception, Graham could not have failed to notice these vigorous exceptions to the triumphant mood of the occasion. That, however, is precisely what he claimed. Asked a few days later about the sputterings of protest and the unnecessarily aggressive action against the protesters, he blithely replied, “I’m sorry, I haven’t heard about it. . . . It’s unfortunate if it did happen, but I’m sure [the overreaction] was not deliberate. Anyway, you can’t blame it on the President.”