Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  and sorting out clothes,

  all say, “I love you,”

  when lovingly done.

  So—

  love

  without clinging;

  cry—

  if you must—

  but privately cry;

  the heart will adjust

  to the length of his stride,

  the song he is singing,

  the trail he must ride,

  the tensions that make him

  the man that he is,

  the world he must face,

  the life that is his.

  So—

  love

  without clinging;

  cry—

  if you must—

  but privately cry;

  the heart will adjust

  to being the heart,

  not the forefront of life;

  a part of himself,

  not the object—

  his wife.

  So—

  love!

  I returned home from our European tour at the beginning of April 1947, having been gone for six months, knowing that Ruth and I had weathered the slight tension in our relationship. Those months had also been a time of spiritual challenge and growth. My contact with British evangelical leaders during this and subsequent trips, especially with Stephen Olford, deepened my personal spiritual life. I was beginning to understand that Jesus Himself was our victory, through the Holy Spirit’s power. I developed an even deeper hunger for Bible study and new biblical insights for my messages. I quoted the Bible more frequently than ever before.

  At a YFC rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in February 1945—only a month after I had joined Torrey Johnson’s new venture—a man heard me preach who was now about to change my life radically. And that, incidentally, would lead me into great confusion about a great many things.

  7

  College President

  Northwestern Schools 1948–1952

  I had been with Youth for Christ for only a year or so when the venerable evangelical leader and educator Dr. W. B. Riley invited me to speak at a fundamentalist conference sponsored by his Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.

  I enplaned in Seattle. In Vancouver I had to switch planes, this time to a Lockheed Lodestar, in the pouring rain. Above the clouds in the moonlight, we could see the beautiful Canadian Rockies. After a few hours in the air, however, somewhere over Alberta, the stewardess came back and saw that I was the only one of the fourteen passengers who was still awake.

  “We’re having some difficulty,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “All the airports within the range of our fuel are closed because of snow,” she explained.

  “So we’re going back to Vancouver?”

  “We don’t have enough fuel.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “That’s what the pilot is trying to figure out right now.”

  I was, to say the least, nervous. Then the intercom crackled loudly enough to wake everyone up. The pilot announced that he had located a radio tower and was in communication with the ground. He was being told to set the plane down as soon as possible. The storm was worsening. There was an open field somewhere below, he understood. He found a hole in the clouds and dived through it.

  “It’s going to be bumpy,” he said. “We’re going to have to use our own lights to see what we’re doing. It’s a plowed field, but with the snow cover I won’t know which way the furrows are running. I’ll leave the wheels up, and we’ll slide in the snow.”

  The stewardess told us to lean forward and bury our head between our knees.

  The pilot reassured us that we were so low on fuel that there should be no fire.

  When we landed, we bumped hard. People screamed and hollered as we came to an abrupt stop. Several of the passengers suffered severe bruises from the seatbelts, but no one was killed or seriously injured. I too had some bruises but was otherwise all right.

  We spent what was left of the night in the plane. The pilot’s radio must have been working; he was in touch with a small town nearby. People there promised to send out a wagon with a team of horses at first light. The wagon took us to a waiting bus, and the bus took us the rest of the way to town. There the airline put us up in a boardinghouse. I was so shaken from the ordeal that I collapsed into bed and went right to sleep, although it was late morning. About an hour later, I was awakened by loud knocking. At the door was a Canadian Mountie.

  “I need you to come with me,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “A bank robber was registered in this room last night. Until we can be sure who you are, you’ll have to remain at the station with me.”

  Fortunately, the pilot and the stewardess were able to identify me as a fellow passenger.

  I eventually made it to Minnesota and spoke as scheduled. Dr. Riley startled me by saying privately that he believed I was God’s man to replace him as president of Northwestern Schools.

  Dr. Riley had established Northwestern in 1902 as a response to requests from young people in his congregation to give them systematic, intensive Bible study. Later he incorporated into his Bible school a liberal arts college and a theological seminary.

  He was now in his middle eighties, and I was in my late twenties. I didn’t take his offer seriously.

  This was not my first contact with Dr. Riley. Back in February 1945, the venerable clergyman and educator had sat on the platform in the old Minneapolis Auditorium as I preached at a Youth for Christ rally. Some 44 people responded to the Invitation that night, and he shared our joy. Next morning, he phoned one of his personal assistants at the school to ask who I was. Later he remembered that he had met me at Florida Bible Institute in the late thirties; he used to come south in the winter with Mrs. Riley and stay on the campus both as tourist and guest lecturer.

  For more than forty years, he had pastored First Baptist Church, a large church in downtown Minneapolis, making it one of the great preaching stations of the Midwest. He was an intellectual, a deep student of the Bible, and a man who spoke with authority and had the respect of liberals and fundamentalists alike. In vigorous contention with his denomination, then called the Northern Baptist Convention, he battled theological liberalism on many fronts, including the educational. William Jennings Bryan was reported to have called him “the greatest Christian statesman in the American pulpit.”

  Dr. Riley had the persuasive charisma of an Old Testament prophet: his figure was stately, his snow-white hair wavy, his nose hawkish, his eyes burning. To that charisma was added the formidable combination of his being both a scholar and a renowned preacher. He was a graduate of Southern Baptist Seminary and was looked upon as a national leader, especially among theological conservatives.

  In my more thoughtful and prayerful moments, I thought it might be just possible to become president of Northwestern. The lure was to lead an educational institution in a different direction from most of the other Bible schools and Christian colleges in the United States. The sort of school I envisioned was one from which we might send young people on fire with Jesus Christ and evangelism to the ends of the world.

  What Dr. Riley wanted was a young man like he himself had been sixty years before—someone who could instill Northwestern students with a passion to win people to Christ. He also wanted someone who had the potential for nurturing student recruitment, prayer support, and fund-raising among a broad constituency. With my nationwide Youth for Christ contacts and my growing visibility as an evangelist, it must have seemed to him that I met all his qualifications. That there might be educational and administrative deficiencies in me apparently did not bother him; he felt that a properly equipped staff and faculty could make up for those to a large extent. He also had a strong board, with fifty directors.

  The matter came to a head late in the summer of 1947. I was speaking at the annual Northwestern Bible conference at Medicine Lake, not far from Minneapolis. It was a rainy
afternoon when I got word that Dr. Riley wanted to see me. I made the trip as quickly as I could to his suburban home in Golden Valley. His wife, Marie, led me over to where he was lying on a couch. Raising his head from the pillow, the eighty-six-year-old man fixed his clear eyes on me and lifted a frail hand in my direction. With great certainty in his voice, he announced that I would wear his mantle as Elisha had worn the Old Testament prophet Elijah’s.

  His words seemed like a patriarchal blessing. When he died, he seemed to be saying, I must succeed him as president of the college he had founded four decades before. He insisted on at least designating me as the school’s vice president at large, whatever that meant.

  “But Dr. Riley, I can’t accept this responsibility. God hasn’t shown it to me. But if it’ll ease you, I’ll take it on an interim basis until the board can find a permanent president.”

  That seemed to satisfy him, and he relaxed. But I left his side with a troubled heart and walked out into the rain to think.

  Stalin had already broken the agreements made at Yalta and Potsdam; the Communists were attempting to take over China; and we were well into the Atomic Age. Surely, I felt, the Gospel of Christ was the answer to the predicament of humanity, because it was authentic, adequate, and available. It alone pointed the way to individual peace, social harmony, life adjustment, and spiritual satisfaction.

  I believed I was called to spread the Gospel. I also thought that through Christian education we could train men and women with a passion to present that Gospel. Did that mean that through education I could multiply my ministry? I felt so. My dilemma was deep and produced a feeling of uncertainty.

  Despite his declining health, Dr. Riley presided at a North-western Schools board meeting on October 1, 1947. I was present at his request, and he called on me to make a statement.

  “I have no clear indication from the Lord that I am to succeed Dr. Riley,” I said in part. “God called me into evangelism. I have a definite responsibility and commitment to Youth for Christ for the present. However, if it would . . . be . . . any help, I would be glad to become interim president in case of an emergency until the board could make some disposition of the office. . . . My position at the moment is that I am only Vice President at large.”

  I didn’t know how I could have made my position any clearer.

  At midnight on December 5, 1947, George Wilson called me at a Youth for Christ meeting in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “Dr. Riley has died,” he informed me.

  I was asked to preach at his funeral. Fortunately, my British friend Stephen Olford was visiting with me. I asked him to take over my speaking schedule. I traveled at once to Minnesota, preparing the funeral sermon on the plane. I decided to preach on the first eighty-six words of the first Psalm; Dr. Riley had died at age eighty-six, and Psalm 1, on the importance of God’s Word, so aptly described him.

  A prominent local pastor who led a prayer at the service later announced that he should have preached at the funeral and that he was the obvious successor to the presidency. Dr. Riley had had other ideas, he added disdainfully, and had recruited this young man.

  That pastor was probably right. My bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Wheaton College hardly qualified me to become a college president—the youngest one in the nation, I later learned—only four years after graduating myself. That was probably what a lot of the other board members and faculty thought too. At the next board meeting, however, the directors dutifully followed the founder’s mandate and named me interim president. (The board had fifty members, which I found too large for efficiency, but it included a number of leading businessmen, doctors, and other professionals.)

  I walked into the middle of existing emergencies on campus and created a few of my own. My second day on the job, the librarian came into my office and said that she couldn’t possibly make ends meet any longer on her small monthly salary. I agreed wholeheartedly and wrote out a slip for the treasurer, authorizing an immediate increase. Word of my generosity spread like wildfire through faculty ranks! Those underpaid folks had to do so much moonlighting through speaking engagements and other work that they were away from campus almost as much as I intended to be. A pay raise was merited for everyone.

  My enlightened generosity would have been a bold stroke, winning me instant acceptance by the faculty, if the school had had the money. But it didn’t. In fact, it needed a major infusion of cash. After decades of operating in Jackson Hall, the educational building belonging to First Baptist Church, Dr. Riley had decided to build an administrative and academic headquarters three blocks away, overlooking a little lake in Loring Park. Most of the money he raised was sunk into the excavation and the foundation pilings. At the time of his death, the project lacked funds for completion. The most urgent item on my presidential agenda was to raise money to finish the building.

  Settling into an executive office and running a school’s daily routines neither appealed to me nor suited my temperament. I was twenty-nine years old. My wife and two young daughters—Anne Morrow Graham was born in May 1948, a few months after I joined Northwestern—were at home in North Carolina. I myself was on the road at least one-fourth of the time from coast to coast as an itinerant evangelist holding youth rallies and organizing local Youth for Christ groups. Ruth had no desire to move to Minneapolis. I had the vision for Northwestern, but not the stomach. It did not help any that Ruth kept reminding me that I was called by God to be an evangelist, not an educator.

  To keep an eye on things while I was at the school, Marie Riley, officially as the dean of women and unofficially as the founder’s widow, understandably took a rather proprietary stance; wonderfully qualified, she kept her managerial hand on every aspect of the institution. She symbolized the authority that in her late husband had been almost absolute. If it had not been for her deep commitment to the Lord, her great talent and ability, and the warmth with which she always greeted me, I could not have handled the job.

  One of the great encouragements I had during this time was inheriting Dr. Riley’s longtime secretary, Luverne Gustavson. Be-cause she knew everything about the school, had known Dr. Riley, and could find filed letters in which he had outlined his thinking on policies and people, she was a great help to me.

  To keep an eye on things while I was away, I thought of my old friend T.W. Wilson. I began pressuring him to leave his own effective ministry with Youth for Christ to come help me as vice president. His educational credentials were no more impressive than mine. Physically, though, he was a big man who was not afraid to speak up for his convictions. He had been trained under Bob Jones and had been on his board and in YFC. That, along with his spiritual warmth and congenial sense of humor, rounded out the qualifications I thought were necessary for an assistant. I had many friends at the school and in Minnesota. But I had years of well-founded confidence in T.W., not only as a friend but as a watchdog when I was away.

  So he and his wife, Mary Helen, moved from their comfortable home in the South to the stern climate of Minnesota. That was more than I was willing to do; I stayed at an old hotel whenever I was in the city. But I was traveling constantly. Mainly for our children’s sake, Ruth wanted to stay near her parents in Montreat; I went there as often as I could.

  One night, as I was lying awake in North Carolina, I realized that we needed a catchy slogan that would illustrate what we wanted Northwestern to be. The Lord gave me the words “Knowledge on fire.” I took them back with me, and everybody seemed to feel they were exactly the slogan we needed.

  Absentee president though I was for much of the time during the next few years, I was aware that good progress in enrollment and finances at Northwestern camouflaged lingering campus unrest. The board did not know what to make of me. I had ideas, lots of them, and a few of them might even have been good for the school. But I wanted them to be put into practice immediately.

  “I am finding that schools are not made overnight,” I wrote to a minister friend in Michigan. “It takes much blood, sweat, te
ars, and prayer to make an institution. The school has been going through a great transitory period; it has growing pains. New ideas, new horizons, new attitudes, and new objectives are not always easy.” I went on to make reference to “jealous hearts . . . hurling criticisms at Northwestern that are totally unjustified.” I asked him for ideas on how I could get out of this responsibility.

  Another sore spot with some of the ultrafundamentalist board members was the Council of Churches’ sponsorship of my fall 1948 Crusade in Augusta, Georgia. It was the first time an interdenominational ministerial organization had given us all-out support. While some of the men on the board did not like it, I saw great new possibilities for evangelism in this development.

  A crisis in the school’s building fund made me forever skittish about wearing the two hats of evangelist and fund-raiser. For the first six months of my tenure as president, those two roles posed no conflict of interest for me. I felt that I could raise money for the school’s programs and departments while conducting youth rallies around the country. During that time, I accepted no salary from Northwestern; Youth for Christ was still paying my regular salary. Nevertheless, public perception was just the opposite, and that became a troublesome factor in ministry financing.

  I soon had to cut down my traveling schedule with Youth for Christ. Board, faculty, and students became increasingly close to my heart—especially the young people, as I listened to their exuberant singing in chapel services, or heard testimonies of the Lord’s blessing in their Christian outreach assignments, or had a chance for spirited conversation with individuals and small groups. I was a scant ten years older than many of them, and I felt more like their brother than their elder.

  I already had two Wilsons in my life, the brothers T.W. and Grady. At Northwestern I added a third, George—no relation to the first two. He was a layman, the business manager at Northwestern as well as the owner of a Christian bookstore downtown. He also had been director of the Youth for Christ rallies in Minneapolis, the largest YFC in America, averaging perhaps 10,000 at each rally. He had a remarkable youth ministry of his own, and his enthusiasm for Northwestern was a gift of God to my work there. In addition, he had a terrific personality and a lot of humor, as I had learned during our travels together in England.