Ruth, a Portrait

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I think of his wife, Ruth, who has been by his side, born in China of missionary parents, lived there three hundred miles from Shanghai for seventeen years and now giving him the support, the strength, that any man who is in the arena needs, needs when he goes home.”7

  Ruth listened from her honored spot and silently worried more, as the political encroachment upon her husband’s ministry continued.

  On Monday, January 22, 1973, Nixon began his second term by having Billy speak at the White House church service. That morning people convened in the spacious East Room with its parquet floors, gold draperies, mirrors, and crystal chandeliers. Nixon stood at the podium, flanked by portraits of George and Martha Washington. He talked of his mother, her deep Christian faith, and how she loved to hear any new preacher in her area. When Nixon was a student at Duke Law School, he went on to say, he received a letter from his mother saying she’d heard a young preacher by the name of Billy Graham.

  “‘I think he is going to go places,”’ Nixon quoted his mother. “I still have this letter.”

  A short time later, when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was to appear at the White House for a dinner in her honor, she requested that Billy Graham be included on the guest list. On March 1, just before the 8:00 P.M. dinner, the Grahams mingled with the other guests in the East Room. When Billy greeted the prime minister in the receiving line, she reached up and kissed him. At dinner, Meir sat between Nixon and Billy at table 12. Ruth sat at table 9 next to Speaker of the House Carl Albert, where she watched the proceedings with a bit of bemusement. A Jewish woman sitting at Ruth’s table stared suspiciously at Billy and Golda Meir, not realizing that the evangelist’s wife was sitting inches away from her.

  “What is Billy Graham doing sitting next to Madame Golda?” the woman asked of no one in particular as she picked at poached red snapper and wild rice. “Do you suppose he is proselytizing her?”

  “I would put my money on Madame Golda Meir,” Ruth replied dryly. “But never fear, when we get home tonight, I’ll straighten him out.”

  On August 9, Nixon resigned the presidency. The man revealed on the Watergate tapes was a man the Grahams felt they had never met. They felt sick with disappointment and disbelief. The only Graham friend who seemed undaunted was Ethel Waters, who one day remarked to Grady Wilson, “If my baby Dick said damn, he damn well needed to say damn!”

  The scandal, however, did not change the Grahams’ affection for Nixon. After listening to his resignation speech Ruth wrote, “He spoke from his heart, quietly, movingly, eloquently. This was the man we [saw] on other private occasions. Warm, human I still wonder, what did he do to warrant this?”

  Billy attempted repeatedly to reach Nixon but his telephone calls were never returned. It was as though an iron curtain had dropped between the Grahams and the Nixons. “I tried many times to get through to him, to just have prayer with him, to encourage him,” Billy recalled. “He wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” Later, he learned that Nixon had told his aides, “Don’t let Billy Graham near me. I don’t want him tarred with Watergate.”

  That fall, while Nixon was hospitalized with thrombophlebitis, a rather bold idea occurred to Ruth one night. Why not fly an airplane carrying a message up and down the beach in front of Nixon’s hospital? At her request, a friend arranged for an airplane to be rented in California. It pulled a banner that read: “NIXON, WE LOVE YOU—SO DOES GOD.” Photographs of this spectacle appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, but its perpetrator remained a mystery.

  The Grahams’ reaction to Watergate demonstrated a number of traits important to both of them. First, they were not likely to voice criticisms publicly, especially if their opinions risked breaking the pastoral promise of confidentiality. Both seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of forgiveness, and neither turned a back on a friend.

  As Barbara Bush observed, “They’re close friends to the Nixons. I mean they really are, still. They’re that kind of friend. They don’t think we’re perfect. And they don’t think the Nixons are perfect. But that doesn’t mean you drop a friend.”

  1. Ruth Bell Graham, Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977), 175.

  2. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Special People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).

  3. John Pollock, Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 106.

  4. Ibid., 174-75.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ironically, Senator Sam Ervin would later head the Watergate investigation on Capitol Hill.

  7. Records of the Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp. (October 15, 1971), Tape 35, Collection 45, Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton, Illinois.

  18

  CHAPTER

  A New Season

  TOP: RUTH ON MOTORCYCLE

  BOTTOM: MOTHER AND OLDEST DAUGHTER

  Oh, time! be slow!

  it was a dawn ago

  I was a child

  dreaming of being grown;

  a noon ago I was

  with children of my own;

  and now

  it’s afternoon

  and late,

  and they are grown

  and gone.

  Time, wait!

  —Ruth Bell Graham, 19741

  For her, it was autumn. It was the season when beauty rises with the sinking of the sap, igniting the hills in death. The moon, heavy and yellow, floats to the surface of night and sifts light over the cool features of the earth, illuminating what has been dark. It was the phase in a woman’s life when she begins to look like herself, in the end transfigured by the life she has lived.

  Ruth had become more lovely. Her face was older, and all she had ever been or done was etched there. It was the face of one who often smiles, her brow smooth with lines radiating from her eyes and fine creases lifting her cheeks in tucks. Her eyes were wide and expressive, flashing when she laughed and teased or felt fury she would not show. At pensive moments, when she was alone, weariness and wisdom wavered, a shadow. Her bones were more sharply defined and exquisite, her skin taut, and veins as prominent as a leaf’s.

  She was trim, if not a bit too thin, as she advanced into her seventies. More dapper and conservative in dress, she preferred tweedy suits with pocketed long skirts or trousers. She enjoyed simple leather boots and slippers, turtleneck sweaters, and long-sleeved blouses. Frequently, she wore a strand of pearls. The only jewelry she wore on her fingers was a wide gold band Ned had given to her, her wedding band and a guard ring. She wore simple pearl or gold earrings, and after her fiftieth wedding anniversary, a gold bracelet from Billy that was engraved with the names of their children and grandchildren. She disliked wristwatches, and few who had ever known her remembered seeing one. She pinned her silver-streaked hair in a French twist when her husband was away, occasionally tucking a fresh rose in the back. She wore it down, flipped up and brushing her shoulders, when he was home.

  Her children were almost grown. Her parents and the missionaries from her childhood were dying or already dead. By 1970 her father had suffered four heart attacks. Her mother was losing her eyesight, her body wracked with pain. In 1963 GiGi married Stephan Tchividjian, a Swiss psychologist. In 1966 Anne married Danny Lotz, a dentist and former University of North Carolina basketball star. Three years later Bunny married Ted Dienert, an advertising executive, and later would marry again.

  By 1983 Bunny and Anne would have three children each, and GiGi would have seven. The daughters implemented many of the childrearing techniques that had once been used with them. GiGi and Bunny had inherited a love of writing, publishing several books between them. Anne had inherited a zeal for teaching and would start a Bible class in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a weekly attendance of five hundred women. Later the numbers would grow, the outreach becoming international.

  Franklin and Ned were growing up, too, and their friends became Ruth’s friends, several of them visiting her when the boys weren’t around. Ruth took an active inter
est in her sons’ hobbies of rock climbing and automobiles, and attempted a few new ones of her own, such as motorcycles, hang gliding, and parasailing behind motorboats. This was not a great surprise to those around her. Family and friends had always known she was fearless, sometimes to the point of recklessness.

  In the early seventies, Franklin enjoyed waking up the college students on early weekend mornings by roaring his motorcycle beneath dormitory windows until rounds of soda pop bottles sent him on his way. It was easy to figure where Franklin got his temerity. Three times his mother swung into the black leather seat, determined to master the sport. The first try she zoomed along Old U.S. 70 in Black Mountain, knowing how to do just about everything except brake. She plunged over a steep embankment. A big tattooed truck driver stopped and peered down at her from the road, more than a little surprised to discover that this trim woman dressed in black and riding a Harley-Davidson wasn’t exactly a teenager.

  “Lady,” he asked, “can I help you?”

  “Thanks,” Ruth replied. “If you could just get it on the pavement headed in the other direction, I’ve a friend at the end of the road who’ll help me stop.”

  The second try landed her in a lake. On her third attempt, she accelerated instead of braking and crashed through her split-rail fence, severing a vein in her leg. She wasn’t exactly a benign influence in an automobile either. As coolies had scattered when Dr. Bell sped into sight in his Austin Healey, so Montreaters hugged the edge of the mountain roads for fear of meeting Ruth head-on around a curve. New drivers were warned to watch out for Mrs. Graham.

  While her husband served on the National Safety Council, preaching on film, “Drive unto others as you would have them drive unto you,” his wife was behind the wheel practicing situational ethics. She was known to careen around narrow, winding roads or fly along the highway, a shameless lawbreaker who got away with it, in her mind, by praying, “I’m sorry, but You understand.” She was cited only twice for speeding. In her first brush with the law, the patrolman realized who she was and suggested she pay the ticket when the station opened early the next morning. So no one will see you, he hinted.

  The second citation came after Ruth had driven fifty miles from Montreat to Waynesville to visit friends. At three o’clock that afternoon Billy telephoned her and said he was with a German businessman and wondered if she could serve them tea at four.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She sped along Old U.S. 70, the red needle creeping past eighty, when suddenly the ominous blue light flashed in her rearview mirror.

  “Could you please hurry with that?” she asked the trooper as he filled out the ticket. “And when you finish, please don’t follow me, because I’m going to do it again.”

  When Franklin bought a used early-model green Triumph Spitfire, it was clear he had inherited his mother’s race car talents and would outperform her. Not only did he drive fast, but he had a dangerous habit of zipping through the Montreat gate, entering through the exit arch, or exiting through the entrance. This seemed a good idea in the summer when he’d find himself locked into a long traffic jam of tourists who did not seem inclined to move along fast enough to suit him.

  Police Chief Pete Post finally caught Franklin in the act one afternoon. With blue light flashing, he chased him up the road toward the Graham mountain. At the lower remote-controlled gate, Franklin touched a button, accelerated through, and shut the gate in the policeman’s face.

  By virtue of his late arrival, Ned was more a second family than a fifth sibling. He was a sensitive, affectionate child with more than his share of charm and wild blood. A carbon copy of the young Billy Graham, he abounded in nervous energy and was as tall and thin as bamboo. He was persuasive and articulate, capable of talking his way in and out of anything. Perhaps the brightest child, he had a keenly analytical, inventive mind and was handsome, with sharp, refined features. His eyes were deep-set like his father’s but mercurial like his mother’s.

  By age ten he was teasing the little girls in school. At twelve he was a dandy, admiring Italian boots, leather jackets, and designer-label clothes. Like his father during his formative years, Ned was known around town for his girlfriends, none of whom enjoyed much in the way of longevity, until he would later meet and marry Mayo Clinic nurse Carol.

  Despite Ned’s talents, he did poorly in school. His mind froze when he took examinations, a symptom that had begun in the primary grades when a teacher repeatedly punished him harshly for minor infractions. In the spring of 1972, when he was fourteen, his parents decided to send him to Felsted School in Essex, England, a stately but stern public school located on acres of playing fields not far from the North Sea.

  That September, mother and son flew to London. Ruth checked into a dreary hotel near Hyde Park, where Donald Soper was again haranguing and a group of doomsayers were proclaiming that the end of the world was at hand. In some measure, it felt like the end of the world to Ruth, who did not want to leave her son and youngest child. On September 11, their last night together, they watched television in her hotel room and he briefly laid his hand over hers.

  “And it came as a shock to feel the weight of it,” she wrote in her journal that night, “and realize it was larger than mine. It was thirty-nine years ago this fall in Shanghai, China when a thirteen-year-old girl cried herself to sleep and prayed to die before morning. But morning came and she sailed for Japan and Korea. Today I’m glad. Only now it’s tonight. And boys don’t cry.”

  The next day they unpacked his belongings in the dormitory. It was a tiny room, scrubbed and Spartan with study desks, chairs, and space for little else. Honeysuckle grew on the wall outside his window, its sweet fragrance permeating the air. Nearby was a large room with rows of gray-blanketed iron cots where he would sleep with some twenty other boys. Later, Ruth stared through the taxicab window, watching him wave to her from the drive, clad in his navy blazer and gray slacks, lank and smiling. The ache in her heart was overwhelming, and as she flew home alone she could not really recognize that her life, her role, had forever changed.

  Felsted was to be a rather cruel experience for Ned, more wretched than his mother had imagined. He soon discovered that academically he was three years behind the other boys his age, deepening the very discouragement his family had sent him there to overcome, and he was unaccustomed to the hazing traditional in English preparatory schools. Older classmates were tyrannical, prone to mete out harsh punishments for obscure infractions. Ruth was horrified when she later learned that more than a dozen times during the bitter winter months, Ned was forced to sit in a bathtub while it was slowly filled with icy water until it reached his chin and one of the upperclassmen would dunk his head.

  More than ever before, Ruth was alone on the mountaintop. Even when her children were home for brief spells, she knew they were already gone. The world she had known was changing. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if it was for the better. By now the BGEA had grown into a worldwide organization with more than five hundred full-time employees. It included a movie studio called World Wide Pictures and the weekly radio program “Hour of Decision.”

  The vastness of Billy’s ministry made his family life more pressured and began taking him to remote, troubled areas of the world. In the fall of 1972 he ventured to Nagaland, the sparsely populated state between Assam and Burma, where headhunters and cannibals had once roamed the densely forested hills. Two nights before he was to leave, on October 29, he commented to Ruth as they were drifting off to sleep, “Well, a month from now you may be a widow.”

  “Life being what it is,” she replied, “I might beat you to it.”

  His increased travels to totalitarian countries kept her alert and uneasy. Accompanying him on one trip, for example, she decided she would locate the bugs in their hotel room. She had read enough spy novels to conclude that there must be surveillance devices in everything from the ice cubes to the telephone. The latter, of course, was where she looked first. Unscrewing the mouthpiece, she held it
up to the light, then close to one eye. She shook it a bit. No bug. Then the earpiece. Same procedure, no bug there either. Her husband, lounging on the bed with his hands behind his head, watched her with a somewhat dubious expression.

  “They know exactly what you’re doing,” he said.

  “There’s no way they can tell,” she retorted, holding up the telephone to show she had cleverly taped down the cradle so they couldn’t detect that it was off the hook.

  Satisfied that the telephone was bug-free, she peeled off the tape, pressed the receiver to her ear. To her dismay, there was no dial tone.

  “I think it’s dead,” she let Billy know.

  He sat up in a panic. Ordinarily he hated the telephone, but now that he was without one, he became obsessed with the thought of it. There were calls coming in, those to make, and itineraries to discuss. What if there was an emergency? He paced the length of the floor while she unscrewed, shook, banged, and rescrewed the mouth- and earpieces, unable to figure out what she had done wrong.

  She would have to be his messenger, he announced. Ruth slung her black raincoat over her nightgown and dashed out the door to begin contacting people he had suddenly decided must be reached right this minute. After running around the large hotel for a considerable time, she returned to the room, where she found him attempting to fix the telephone. He was having no better luck, and if there were any spies listening to the dialogue and disgust generated, they were generously entertained, although certainly no national secrets were learned. At last, in the flash of brilliance, Ruth followed the cord behind a couch to the wall socket. It was unplugged.