A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Immersion in his crusades provided Graham with a convenient reason to retreat from the national spotlight after the Watergate debacle, but the 1976 election campaign forced him to clarify his political stance. Though clearly scorched by his association with Nixon, he had not deemed it necessary to break all ties with the White House. He had played golf with Gerald Ford while Ford was still a congressman and, shortly after he became President, had called to offer congratulations and assurances of goodwill. He followed that with a long visit during which he and the new President prayed and read the Bible and a few weeks later allowed the Ladies’ Home Journal to publish a prayer affirming that “we acknowledge thy sovereignty in the selection of our leaders.” Still, early in 1976 he told a reporter he planned to “stay a million miles away from politics this year,” and he came close to a public breach with Campus Crusade leader Bill Bright over the latter’s efforts to launch a conservative Christian political bloc. Graham charged that Bright had contacted prayer and Bible-study groups spawned by his crusades in an effort to enlist them in his movement. He did not resign from Campus Crusade’s board, but he refused to serve as chairman of the Christian Embassy, a Washington mansion Bright purchased for use as a staging ground for evangelizing legislators and other government officials; and when the embassy opened, he chose not to participate in the dedication ceremonies. “Bright has been using me and my name for twenty years,” he complained. “But now I’m concerned about the political direction he seems to be taking.” Graham and Bright subsequently patched up their differences, but Graham never became a supporter of the Christian Embassy.

  Perhaps ignoring signs of Graham’s increased skittishness at political partisanship, Gerald Ford made no effort to distance himself from his predecessor’s favorite preacher. The new President declined an offer to attend a crusade in Norfolk, Virginia, but asked to be kept informed about future crusades, and he maintained occasional contact with the evangelist, assuring him that “Betty and I think of you and Ruth often, and we are deeply grateful for your wonderful friendship.” As he began gearing up for reelection, he clearly hoped to count on Graham for more than prayer. When Ruth’s health prevented Billy from attending the National Prayer Breakfast, an event at which an incumbent President typically displays all the piety he can muster, White House memos indicate that Ford’s staff was disturbed at his absence, and the President invited him to be in touch as soon as he felt free to travel, “so that arrangements may be made for us to get together for a visit.” Ford was known to share the Evangelical sentiments common to his Grand Rapids, Michigan, congressional district, but his interest in Billy Graham was not exclusively spiritual. As it began to look more likely that the Democratic candidate would be a southern Evangelical Christian, it seemed especially important for Ford to cultivate whatever ties he had within the Evangelical community. In late April a White House staffer directed colleagues to “keep your eye open for possible events that we could help hook Billy Graham into with the President.” Two days later, Ford sent a note to the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, congratulating it on its fiftieth anniversary and sending warm greetings to its pastor—Ruth Graham’s brother, Clayton Bell. That summer, when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the United States, Billy and Ruth Graham were one of only 150 couples invited to attend a state dinner in their honor. “All America wanted to come,” he recalled, “but they couldn’t invite but about 150 to 175 couples. Ruth and I were quite surprised to be invited. The invitation could have come from the Palace.”

  Graham thought well of Ford, but he thought better of maintaining a stance of political neutrality. At some point during late summer, after Carter’s nomination, the President decided to exercise his option to attend a crusade service. Graham was preaching in Pontiac, Michigan, in Ford’s home state, and it would have been easy to justify inviting the President to sit on the platform and offer a few words of greeting to the crowd. But in a letter that showed how far Billy Graham had come since the days when he fairly begged Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to grace his ministry with a visit, he told the President, apparently in response to a telephone inquiry, that he felt it would be impossible to ask him to address a crusade audience. “I think the backlash would not only hurt our ministry,” he wrote, “but would hurt you as people would think you were ‘using’ me.” He did, however, offer a fair-sized crumb: “If you came and sat in whatever area the Secret Service would decide is best, and were recognized from the platform, I am sure you would get a rousing reception.” Lest Ford envision that such an invitation might be interpreted as an endorsement, Graham added, “Of course, since I am maintaining a neutral position, as I always try to do in politics, I will also extend a similar invitation to Governor Carter. In the meantime, I am praying that God’s will will be done on November 2, and that the man of God’s choice will be elected.”

  Though Graham’s general political stance was closer to Ford’s than to Jimmy Carter’s, he faced a stronger-than-usual dilemma. In 1966 Carter chaired a film crusade in Americus, Georgia. He had not been particularly impressed with The Restless Ones, the crusade’s centerpiece film, but he was a devout, born-again Southern Baptist (truly converted, it was said, not long after hearing his pastor preach a sermon borrowed from Billy Graham) and he affirmed the main points of Evangelical belief. He was also one of the few church leaders willing to oversee an integrated public program, which Graham insisted upon. At the conclusion of the film each evening, Carter himself explained the gospel briefly and gave the invitation. Seven years later, while governor of Georgia, Carter chaired Graham’s Atlanta crusade and hosted the evangelist for an overnight stay in the Governor’s mansion. Still, the man who so fervently longed for piety in his presidents that he sometimes perceived it where others could not carefully avoided indicating a preference for his fellow Southern Baptist. To the contrary, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “I would rather have a man in office who is highly qualified to be President who didn’t make much of a religious profession than to have a man who had no qualifications but who made a religious profession.” In an ostensible and perhaps sincere show of the promised neutrality, he added that Ford and Carter held similar religious views, but some in the Carter camp, apparently including the candidate himself, felt Graham had been giving Evangelicals permission not to vote for the governor. Carter snapped, “I think what people should look out for is people like Billy Graham, who go around telling people how to live their lives.” In a similar display of pique, Carter’s son Jeff also criticized Graham’s statement, gratuitously (and erroneously) adding that Graham’s doctorate was a mail-order degree.

  Graham sought to defuse the building tension by dropping a note to Rosalyn Carter, telling her “to give Jeff a big hug. I have two sons and I understand.” Carter’s resentment was eased by winning the election. Graham immediately told the press that although he was not one of Carter’s advisers, they had been friends for years. The president-elect was, he asserted, “a leader we can trust and follow,” and he would personally be praying and “rootin’ and tootin’ for him.” Graham skipped the inauguration, the first he had missed since 1949, but he did attend a special presidential Prayer Breakfast a few days later, and he and Ruth spent yet another night in the White House. “Rosalyn asked if we wanted to sleep in the Lincoln Room,” Graham recalled, “and I told her, ‘No, I don’t. That bed has a hump right in the middle.’ I’d been there with both the Johnsons and the Nixons, so I knew how the beds slept. She said, ‘Really?’ She went back and felt it and said, ‘You’re right.’ So we slept in the Queen’s Room, across the hall. The same thing happened with the Reagans, but I think Mrs. Reagan got a new mattress for the Lincoln Room.” The two men had occasional contact after that, and Graham later characterized Carter as “the hardest-working President we’ve ever had.” He noted that “he doesn’t inspire love or loyalty in the way that Reagan does,” but added, “At the same time, you know he would struggle with you and do anything in the world yo
u asked him to, if he felt like he could.”

  It was understandable that the relationship between Carter and Graham never became particularly close. Graham was wary of the political spotlight, and given the evangelist’s ties to Nixon, Carter had little reason to believe Billy would ever become a major ally. Further, within months after Carter’s inauguration, BGEA was plunged into a crisis that made association with Graham seem more a liability than an asset. To the chagrin of his admirers and the snide smiles of cynics, it appeared for a time that Billy Graham and his righteous band, like so many of their predecessors, had been caught trying to serve both God and mammon.

  That Graham might be guilty of financial malfeasance came as a shock even to those who had excoriated him for his theology and his politics. After he made the decision in 1952 to stop taking love offerings and to place BGEA’s finances under the direction of a board of respected business- people, the association enjoyed a mostly unblemished record for financial integrity. No one receiving mail from several of the leading independent ministries can fail to be struck by the contrast between Graham’s fund-raising techniques and those of most of his colleagues. As frequently as every two weeks, others send letters bordered in red or black or Western Union yellow and labeled “Crisis-gram” or “Disaster-gram,” and claiming their ostensible author had been in prayer in the middle of the night (“My doctor says I have to get more rest, but how can I sleep with a heart so burdened for lost souls?”) when he realized the only hope for his financially strapped ministry lay in writing “you, Sister Chapman, one of the most faithful supporters I have had in twenty-seven years of serving God.” Graham’s letters, arriving once a month in a simple window envelope, report on what the ministry has recently accomplished and what lies just ahead, request continued prayer and, usually in no more than four or five sentences, apologetically asks supporters to send “as generous and sacrificial a gift as the Lord lays it on your heart to give.” And that’s it. No cries of desperation. No threats. No promises of a tenfold or hundredfold miraculous return on whatever they contribute. No requests for seventy dollars to celebrate his seventieth birthday, or forty dollars to commemorate forty years of crusade evangelism, or twelve dollars in honor of the twelve apostles or the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve white Edsels he had seen on the way to his prayer tower. Just “Here’s what we are doing. We think it’s the Lord’s will. If you’ll pray for us and send us a little money, we surely would appreciate it.” Ed Plowman, a veteran Graham associate, observed that the monthly letter “is one of the few things Billy does entirely himself. George Wilson applies his editorial touches and there’s very little besides that. It’s no professional fund-raising agency. It’s Billy. And it’s refreshing.”

  The radio and TV pitches follow a similar pattern. Unlike colleagues whose programs are often little more than hour-long begging bouts, Graham’s prime-time specials seldom devote more than two or three minutes to finances, and those appeals are carefully couched to avoid any hint of charlatanry. The refusal to employ half-truths, heart-tugging petitions, and misleading promises has saved Graham from a load of opprobrium. “Let’s face it,” Plowman said, “you don’t identify the Graham organization as being one of the sob sisters out with a tin cup, or with its hat in its hand all the time. Whatever problems the organization has had, they aren’t problems of exploiting the masses or shaking down little old ladies. Billy has so soft-pedaled the appeal for funds that this has contributed to the aura of integrity. People say, ‘I believe this man. I can trust him. I believe he is telling the truth.’” As a result of that approach, Plowman estimated that BGEA “is probably realizing only one fourth or one fifth of its potential income.” Plowman was not calling for a shift in tactics: “What I’m saying is that respectability and the impression of respectability comes at a high price to the Graham organization.”

  In addition to paying its own formidable bills, BGEA regularly makes substantial contributions to numerous other ministries and charities, a practice extremely unusual among parachurch ministries. Graham’s conviction that BGEA should spend all the money it receives, except for a prudent short-term reserve, made it difficult for his board to convince him he needed to establish a pension fund for himself and other members of the association. “We don’t worry about anything like that,” he told Carloss Morris during the mid-1950s. “It’s not the way we operate. We use whatever we get to put our radio program on new stations.” Morris countered with an example he could not ignore. “Old Mordecai Ham would come into Houston after he was way up in years,” Morris recalled, “and he would try to conduct a revival and not draw enough people to pay his expenses. I’d call some friends and we’d bail him out of the Rice Hotel and give him enough money to get to the next town. I told Billy, ‘No one takes care of old evangelists. If you don’t need anything for yourself, you need to make plans for Cliff and Bev and the others.’ Well, we finally got Roger Hull on the board. He was chairman of Mutual of New York—that’s a big one—and he pushed it and we finally got a pension plan put in.” Once convinced of the need, Graham not only accepted it graciously but insisted it be retroactive. Willis Haymaker, for example, was too old to qualify for benefits, but Graham saw to it that his old crusade mentor received what amounted to a full pension until the day he died.

  In a similar spirit of “taking no thought for the morrow,” Graham also resisted setting up a program of trusts, annuities, and life-estate agreements by means of which supporters could donate money, stocks, real estate, and other types of property to the association, gaining an immediate tax deduction and drawing regular interest income from the annuity until their death or some other designated point, at which time the property would belong fully to BGEA, to do with as it wished. “Billy didn’t want to become an institution,” George Wilson recalled, “but every day we lived we became more and more an institution, and people kept writing in, wanting to set up annuities. He didn’t understand it and I didn’t push it.” Finally, under continued prodding from the board and patient explanation by Wilson, Graham agreed to an annuity program, but only with the stipulation that donors would be completely protected against loss. Most ministries and other nonprofit organizations using this popular fund-raising strategy feel free to put a hefty portion of the gift—40 percent to 50 percent or, in some cases, substantially more—-directly into working funds in the actuarially reasonable expectation that the remainder will provide enough to cover the promised interest payments. In an unusually conservative policy, Graham and Wilson both insisted that none of the principal be touched as long as the donor was alive, so that if, for whatever reason, the ministry went bankrupt, no donor would be hurt financially. “We don’t need it and we don’t want to touch it,” Wilson explained. “There’s been too much religious skulduggery at that point.”

  To cultivate possible donors to this program, BGEA representatives call on people who make sizable donations to the ministry or who specifically express interest in some kind of annuity program. On a typical first visit, the field reps offer to take the prospect to dinner, always letting them pick the place, “so they won’t think we’re being too cheap or too expensive,” and if asked, explain how the annuity program works. They are instructed not to ask for money and are forbidden to accept any gifts themselves. They are also admonished not to use their contacts to set up their own organizations. But as one admitted, “It happens—as Billy Graham started by using his YFC contacts.”

  In 1977 approximately $147,000 worth of annuities were sold to a handful of supporters in Minnesota, where the association had not yet met all the requirements of an amended registration procedure and were not properly licensed to offer such investment instruments. The sticking point was BGEA’s reluctance to provide extensive financial information about its operations. When pressed by reporters, Graham claimed the Minnesota Securities Commission’s letter asking for fuller data had been lost and that as soon as he had learned the association was not in compliance, he had directed George Wilson
to furnish whatever information was needed. Wilson also described BGEA’s failure to provide the information as an “oversight caused by a clerical error.” That defense had flaws. The commission agreed that a letter had been lost, but the loss had occurred two years earlier. For the past nine months, a commission spokesman said, he had been negotiating with BGEA attorneys over whether the annuities were a security and needed to be registered, whether BGEA had to file a report at all, and if it did, how much information it must provide. “I would hardly call nine months of negotiations an ‘oversight,’” the agent tersely observed. While covering the story, reporters learned that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) had been trying unsuccessfully for five years to get Wilson to provide a copy of BGEA’s annual audit; because he had refused, the bureau would not put BGEA on its list of trustworthy charities. Such pressures quickly moved the association to meet the Securities Commission requests, and the annuity sales were approved as expected. The BBB would probably have been left hanging, however, had it not been for a nearly simultaneous revelation that threatened for a while to leave a sizable stain on Graham’s reputation for fiscal rectitude.