A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham’s handling of his personal finances long reflected this same concern for propriety. Since he made the decision in 1952 to accept a specified salary instead of the much higher love offerings he could have reaped from his crusades, he and his board agreed that the benchmark for his wage would be the salary earned by a prominent minister in a large urban church. At the time, the figure was approximately $15,000. And when money was tight, as during both the marathon 1954 London crusade and the Madison Square Garden campaign in 1957, both Graham and his team took half-salary to keep expenses down. By the late 1980s, BGEA’s income was running over $70 million a year and the evangelist’s salary had risen to nearly $80,000, a figure he readily acknowledged to be an imprecise gauge of his true financial status, both because many of his expenses when he was away from Montreat were either paid for by the association or picked up by friends and supporters and because of the huge royalties his books earned. Still, repeated efforts of reporters and other Graham watchers failed to turn up any of the usual signs of great personal wealth or evidence that he was squirreling away stockpiles of money to squander during some long-postponed rainy season. His mountain home is worth perhaps $500,000 today, but more for the 150 acres it sits on than for the log-and-asbestos-siding structure itself. It is unquestionably a marvelous dwelling, but that is due more to Ruth Graham’s taste and ingenuity than to any obvious outlay of money.

  Graham stopped accepting free clothes during the 1960s but did not follow a rigid policy of refusing all gifts. When he played golf regularly, he paid for membership in the Black Mountain and Biltmore country clubs, both near Asheville, but his membership at Grandfather Mountain, another North Carolina club, was paid for by the developer, and Jack Nicklaus gave him a membership at John’s Island Country Club in Vero Beach, Florida. He long accepted free rooms at Marriott Hotels and Holiday Inns and was often the guest of admiring hoteliers in crusade cities. He defended this practice by pointing out that “there’s nothing in the Bible that says I can’t accept freebies,” but he routinely turned down ultraluxurious accommodations to avoid creating an impression that might harm his ministry. Fending off generous well-wishers could be difficult. June Carter Cash, after watching Ruth shiver on a crusade platform one evening, presented her with a full-length hooded mink coat. Ruth told June she could not even appear in public wearing such an obviously expensive coat, much less on a crusade platform. June told her to “wear it to the barn. Wear it in the car. Wear it out walking with Billy in the snow on the mountain. But stay warm!” She followed that directive for a while, using the coat as an everyday wrap—once showing up at a friend’s house with asbestos gloves as accessories—but eventually got June’s permission to donate it to a charity auction. Friends who knew what she had done, however, bought it for twice its true value and gave it back to her, with strict instructions that she not try to get rid of it again. In similar fashion, Billy turned down the offer of several board members to provide him with a corporate jet with all expenses paid for five years. “Ruth and I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it,” he recalled. “We just felt BGEA couldn’t have an airplane.”

  If he so chose, Graham could have easily amassed considerable wealth from honoraria for speeches and royalties from his books, virtually all of which have been best-sellers. He received thousands of invitations to speak each year, many with the promise of large fees, but he turned down most and took no honoraria for those he accepted. Since 1960 all his royalties went into a general trust administered by the First Union National Bank in Charlotte, which disbursed it to facets of his ministry or to other charities. Much of more than a million dollars earned by Angels, for example, went to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton. The royalties from Approaching Hoofbeats, which sold over 500,000 copies, helped pay for the follow-up after Amsterdam ’83. He explained that he had the right to make an exception and hold out a portion of the money each year but said in 1989, “I’ve only done it once and that was this last year because Ruth and I felt we just had to have some extra money coming in. We had to help some of our children and grandchildren a little bit. Especially with the education of grandchildren.” Then, quite accurately, he added, “Of course, I could have kept it all.”

  The Grahams’ tastes were far from exotic or expensive. At home they had a housekeeper, but Ruth did most of the cooking herself and the fare was delicious but absolutely unpretentious: homemade soup, pounded steak or leftover ham, turnip greens and creamed corn, and marvelous made-from-scratch biscuits. But Billy didn’t require even that level of preparation. “If I’m not here,” she said, “his favorite meal is baked beans, Vienna sausages, and canned tomatoes. Can you think of anything worse? They’re all the same color, for one thing.” He chuckled at his own plebeian preferences, adding, “I share the beans with the dogs.” None of it seemed to be an act. In an early conversation over club sandwiches in a New York hotel room, he explained that he seldom went out to restaurants because constant interruptions from well-meaning admirers made it difficult to finish a meal. He had made a rare exception the night before. “Fred Dienert loves to go out to real nice restaurants, so he just insisted we go to Trader Vic’s.”

  Graham’s personal offices in both Minneapolis and Montreat served as an index of his attitude toward vulgar display. The Minneapolis office, which he seldom used, was extremely modest, smaller than several in the same area, and it opened directly onto a large warren of modular “action offices” filled with secretaries and middle-level managers. Its simple furnishings and few pictures conveyed no sense that it belonged to the central figure in the organization, and staff members felt little hesitation at saying, “Why don’t you just work in Mr. Graham’s office? Nobody’s using it today.” His office at the Montreat headquarters was larger, but scarcely more opulent. Were it not for several family photographs and a copper plaque bearing a likeness of L. Nelson Bell, few would suspect its occupant’s identity.

  Team members generally followed Graham’s example of frugality. Their modest middle-class homes gave no hint they were occupied by world travelers. Cliff and Billie Barrows, for example, live in a thoroughly pleasant wooden home on a hilltop on the edge of Greenville, South Carolina. The view from the kitchen window is lovely, and the house is large enough to have reared five children comfortably, but it lacks any sign of ostentation. A few feet away stands a small cabin that houses offices for Barrows, his associate Johnny Lenning, and their secretary. It also contains a tiny studio where Cliff and Lenning produced the Hour of Decision broadcasts. The two men built the cabin themselves, and BGEA paid no rental for its use. Barrows paid a yardman out of his own pocket, but he and his two co-workers handled the janitorial duties themselves. He did not seem to count it remarkable that the most popular religious radio program in history was put together in a little wooden building in his backyard. “That’s just one of the phases of our job,” he said with a shrug. “A very small part.”

  Graham and his associates clearly felt that reliance on a strong board invested with real authority was a major factor in protecting him from the scandals that rocked the world of television evangelism in the late 1980s. “I don’t think Jim Bakker intended to do those things,” George Wilson observed. “He just slid into it. He didn’t have anybody around to tell him it was wrong. I don’t think he started out to be dishonest. Billy knows that any man has feet of clay and had better mind his steps.” Precisely because neither Graham nor his lieutenants felt immune to temptation, they consistently stressed the need for help in keeping a check on their baser inclinations. Millie Dienert volunteered that “I have always appreciated, from a moral point of view, how clean the men have been in their attitude toward the [secretaries]. The doors are always left open. There is a high regard for the lack of any kind of privacy where a boss and his secretary are involved. At times, I thought they were going a little too far, that it wasn’t necessary, but I’m glad they did it, especially today. They have kept everything above reproach. When you are working on a long-term basi
s with the same person, constantly, in hotels, where the wife is not there and the secretary is, that is a highly explosive situation. You have to take precautions. I have always respected the way they have handled that. It has been beautifully done.”

  Graham himself lamented the tribulations Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts had brought on themselves by illegal, immoral, and outrageous behavior. “I’ve prayed for them a lot,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. He maintained positive feelings about his old friend, Oral Roberts, but acknowledged substantial misgivings about some of the directions Roberts had taken in later years. “Oral invited me to give the dedication speech at the City of Faith. He also invited Gene Mayberry from the Mayo Clinic. I called Gene to ask him what he was going to do, and he said he was waiting to see what I was going to do, because his colleagues didn’t think he should lend the prestige of the Mayo Clinic to Oral’s university. I told Gene I just didn’t feel led to go. It was very inconvenient for me—I was supposed to be in Dallas that day for a Billy Graham Day at the First Baptist Church—but there was also something in my heart that said, ‘Don’t go.’ I love Oral. I believe at times he is a real man of God. At times, though—that tall Jesus and all those other things he has said—he talks about things that are just foreign to me. Among all those people, I like Oral best, but when he does things like that, people outside of Christ get very skeptical and cynical.”

  Graham barely knew Bakker and Swaggart, and when the scandals broke, he resolutely tried to refrain from making any public comments about their plight. As reporters besieged him with requests for interviews and editors offered him space in their magazines and newspapers, he anguished over what he might say. “Forty years ago,” he noted, in a pained voice, “we took steps to avoid this, but if I say that, I’ll come off sounding self-righteous, and I don’t want to do that. I may still make some bad mistakes.” As much as the debacle saddened him, he was able to see a bright side to the series of seamy episodes. “A couple of big names have crashed,” he observed, “but it’s like the thousands of flights at O’Hare in Chicago. The overwhelming majority don’t crash. We have so many television evangelists doing marvelous work for God. . . . Jesus had just twelve people. One betrayed him, one denied him, one doubted him, . . . [so] we’ve had it all through the history of the church. . . . I don’t think the church-at-large has been hurt in any way. ‘The gates of hell will not prevail against it,’ Jesus said. Things like this have happened down through church history—Protestant and Catholic—but the work goes on. . . . The work of the Lord continues. In its own backhanded way, I think it may help the church. . . . It’s making everybody look to their financial integrity and responsibility. And to their personal lifestyles. Public evangelists must watch themselves very carefully.”

  Most observers credit Allan Emery with bringing some needed bureaucratic rationality to the association when he agreed in 1978 to serve as president of the association and chair of the executive committee. Emery handled a number of uncomfortable situations for which Graham was unsuited either by temperament or by image. “Billy always wears the white hat,” he explained, “and he has to. He does it very beautifully.” If someone has to make a mistake or rankle sensitive feelings, it works better if Graham is not the culprit. “I’m expendable and he isn’t,” Emery said. “I’m perfectly happy in this system.” As Emery’s comments imply, even in an organization with an unusual record for harmony, unpopular decisions must sometimes be made and unsuitable people must sometimes be fired. Graham seldom participated directly in those proceedings. “Confrontation is not a thing Bill likes to do,” Cliff Barrows acknowledged. Some people are able to confront and say no and move right ahead. We’ve got people in our organization who can do that, but I don’t think that’s my forte, nor Bill’s. We don’t relish it. That has characterized his whole life—and mine, to a certain extent. We don’t want to disappoint anybody. We say yes to everybody as much as we can. That’s been one of the most difficult things we have had to deal with over the years.” Asked about this, Graham conceded both that he avoided confrontation and that this trait sometimes caused frustration for those around him. “Whether it’s a fault or an asset,” he said, “I don’t know. But my father was that way. I never saw him lose his temper more than once or twice in my whole life. I think I inherited some of his characteristics along that line. Ruth thinks I am far too easygoing. She says, ‘You ought to talk stronger. You ought to stand up to some of these people and say what you feel.’” He paused, chuckled, and added, “So far, I have resisted, quite largely, her advice.”

  Not surprisingly, most of the people who held key positions in the organization—with George Wilson a notable exception—manifested a similarly conciliatory style, a circumstance that created awkwardness when a team member was not performing adequately or when colleagues found it difficult to work together. “We have been so blessed,” T.W. said. “So many in our organization have been with us for decades. But we’ve had to get rid of a few. We talk to them and try to get them to shape up. On occasion, we ask them, ‘Are you sure you are where God wants you?’ If they can’t change, they will usually resign. That makes it easy on us.” A staffer guilty of legal or moral trespass would likely be confronted swiftly and either dismissed immediately or given explicit instructions as to what steps needed to be taken. Inadequate performance or an irritating personal style were apt to elicit a far more uncertain set of signals. In discussing former colleagues, association veterans sometimes observed, with a wry smile, that “it was felt the gifts God had given him could work most effectively outside the organization,” or “he came to sense that his presence was no longer required at every meeting.” Addressing the issue more explicitly, Lane Adams explained that if Graham felt someone no longer fit the ministry’s needs, “probably, that man would begin to be bypassed. Things that he was invited to participate in before, he would be left out of. Slowly but surely, it would dawn on him that he was getting a very gentle message that perhaps the time had come for him to put his feelers out and find something else to do.” According to Robert and Lois Ferm, what may seem to be a rather cowardly way of dealing with conflicts stemmed at least in part from Graham’s own generous nature. “Billy won’t believe anything bad about a person. He is so lenient and fair. Not long ago, he had to let one man go, but he gave him a year’s wages, so that he could maintain his family until he found another job. He would never leave anyone hanging.”

  No characteristic of Billy Graham’s organization stood out more clearly, or was accorded more importance by those who have viewed the ministry at close range, than the fact that nearly all of the men who started out with him in the 1940s were still by his side in 1990, and that most of the “newcomers” had been with him for at least a quarter of a century. While in some Evangelical circles vaunting ambition, fragile egos, and naked pride have created chronic tension and high turnover, BGEA is famous for its organizational stability and internal harmony. It is not without spot or wrinkle, and almost any member of the association can point to minor flaws, but it is nevertheless an impressive monument to Billy Graham’s leadership and a remarkable example of effective nontraditional bureaucratic organization.

  At the heart stood the inner circle of Graham, Barrows, George Wilson, T. W. Wilson, and Walter Smyth. Nelson Bell held a spot there until his death, as did Grady Wilson until heart disease moved him to the sidelines in the late 1970s. Bev Shea and Tedd Smith, who were at Graham’s side as long as the others, are beloved and respected figures but have not wielded the same kind of influence and power. “You cannot break into that circle,” Lane Adams observed. “There is no way to catch up. It isn’t that they don’t care about what you think. It’s simply that you haven’t been around for forty years.” Johnny Lenning, who worked at Cliff Barrows’s side since 1959, agreed. “Quite a few of us have been around for twenty or twenty-five years,” he noted, “but that’s not forty years.”