Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  But Ken Strachan, who lived in Costa Rica (and whose wife, Elizabeth, was one of Ruth’s closest friends), was constantly urging me to go. He was the most respected Protestant leader in Latin America, as was his father before him, who had founded the Latin America Mission. Ken held the same view I did: that there needed to be a coming together in some way and some form between Catholics and Protestants. He worked toward that end, much to the displeasure of some of his colleagues in the Latin America Mission.

  Ken was a thoroughgoing evangelical and had a terrific network. He worked through all the Protestant organizations (and as many Catholic organizations as he could) throughout Latin Amer-ica. He was so highly respected that when people got a letter from him about our coming, they paid attention.

  THE CARIBBEAN

  Partly in response to all those invitations, we toured a number of the Caribbean countries in 1958. The crowds everywhere, I was pleased to discover, were overwhelming. And there was a good reason for that: many people on the islands had been listening to me for years over the radio. Our program came on at six in the morning (before they went to work) and at six in the evening (after they had returned home). They might not have recognized my face, but they knew my voice.

  Our largest audience was in Barbados. Grady had started the Crusade there, along with singer Ethel Waters. Ethel was making a deep impression on the local population with her call for love and harmony between the white and black races.

  Someone had arranged for me to stay without charge at a posh club, the St. James; but when I realized that the local population was not too kindly disposed toward the tourist hotels and resented the displays of wealth and moral laxness among the tourists, I decided to stay instead in a small, unpretentious hotel.

  Before I could sign in, however, the British governor-general invited me to be his guest at the official residence. Although I accepted with genuine gratitude, it was an old place, and not very comfortable. As we drove past the Hilton Hotel on our way to the meetings, I admit I looked at it with longing eyes.

  The governor-general, Sir Robert Arundell, we were given to understand, was not too enthusiastic about our visit to Barbados, but he went to each meeting. Apparently, from his friends and contacts in London, he had heard a few good words about us.

  I was scheduled to preach at the closing service. That evening he drove me to the meeting place in his Rolls-Royce, one of five cars in our party. The crowd was dense, and the streets were narrow. If it hadn’t been for the police escort—a little truck that boasted a bell instead of a siren—we would never have gotten there.

  The crowd pressed upon us, clapping and shouting. As we arrived at the back of the platform the pianos began to play “God Save the Queen.” We stood at attention through the last note and then were escorted by the chief of police to our seats.

  The crowd stretched as far as the eye could see. Jerry Beavan put attendance at 60,000; the police estimated 75,000. Lady Arundell felt that half the island—or 100,000 people—had come. It was one of our largest crowds to date. Two thousand cars were parked at the edges of the crowd, and their passengers remained inside; but the amplification system was one of the best we had ever used, and they could hear every word through their open car windows. In that huge crowd, we could sense the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

  As we left the meeting, the governor-general got a rude shock. Surrounded by people, our car was rocked back and forth. He called for the police, who finally got the crowd away from the car and gave us an escort back to the official residence. I tried to reassure him, explaining that the people were just happy—they were waving and shouting, “God bless you!”—but he thought they were drunk.

  We visited most of the Caribbean islands during that trip. In addition, we held rallies of a day or two’s length in cities in Ven-ezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico. It was an exhausting time, so when Jerry—at a brief break in the schedule—told us he had made reservations for us to relax at a nice, quiet hotel on one of the islands, we were delighted. But instead of a pleasant time of relaxation, we had exactly the reverse. The spartan hotel had no beach. The food was bad. We had to boil our drinking water. From that moment on, with tongue in cheek, we thanked Jerry at every opportunity for his thoughtfulness and hospitality!

  Shortly after taking off from the island’s grass runway for the brief trip to Trinidad, one of our little plane’s two engines began to sputter, but we made it safely to our destination. On landing, we went directly to the Pan American Airlines guest house for a night’s rest before leaving early the next morning for Panama.

  Oddly enough, a year and a half later, in mid-1960, a similar thing happened on our flight to Rio de Janeiro to attend the Baptist World Alliance. We were flying from Puerto Rico with a stop scheduled in Belém, Brazil, where the plane would refuel. The trouble began late at night. We had sleepers, and I was up in my bunk resting. Stephen Olford and Grady were also in theirs; Martin Luther King, Jr., was with us and was sitting up reading. One of the DC–7’s motors caught fire, and the captain announced that we would be making an emergency landing in Trinidad. While the other passengers milled about waiting for instructions, I knew exactly what to do: “Let’s get a taxi and go straight to the Pan Amer-ican guest house we stayed in before,” I suggested. It was good to have a familiar haven at one or two in the morning.

  We had boarded that plane for Rio de Janeiro, as I said, in Puerto Rico, where we all had stopped for a couple of days’ rest before the conference. We had stayed at the Hilton Hotel there and done a lot of swimming and praying together. I had known Martin Luther King, Jr., for several years. His father, who was called Big Mike, called him Little Mike. He asked me to call him just plain Mike.

  When we got to Rio, I gave the closing address for the Baptist World Alliance in the Maracanã Stadium; it is one of the largest in the world, with a capacity of 200,000 people, including standees. While in Rio, I gave a dinner at the Copacabana Hotel, which—though I didn’t realize it then—was owned by my father-in-law’s brother, who had built a business empire down there. The dinner was in honor of Mike, and I invited Southern Baptist leaders from the United States to come. I wanted to build a bridge between blacks and whites in our own South, and this seemed like a good opportunity to move toward that goal. Our Texas businessman friend Howard Butt joined us for dinner. When the meal was over and we had made all our speeches, I said a final word: “I’d like to thank our host, Howard Butt, for this marvelous—and expensive—dinner.” That was the first time Howard had heard he was the host!

  During our brief stay in Rio, some Mississippi Baptists came up to Grady to welcome him. As they were talking, Mike came by and slapped Grady on the shoulder and greeted him warmly. Our friendly relationship with Mike made the point with my Baptist friends.

  SOUTH AMERICA

  In 1959, the year before we accepted the invitation to go to South America for meetings in 1962, a band of Communist revolutionaries under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara came to power in Cuba. Two years later, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Castro, setting the stage for his close economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union. Cuba soon embarked on an aggressive program to export Castro’s revolutionary (and antichurch) ideas to other Latin American countries. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962) not only focused the United States’ attention on its neighbors to the south but also sent shock waves through almost every Latin American government.

  Back to 1960. In that year, we received a formal appeal urging us to come to South America as soon as possible: “The rapid social and political changes which [South America] is undergoing,” a group of leading pastors from several countries wrote to me, “demonstrate convincingly that we ought to take advantage of the present hour. We cannot overlook the devastating inroads which foreign political ideologies are making.”

  Shortly afterward, we accepted invitations to make two extended trips to South America during 19
62—the first in January and February, the second in September and October. Although my goals were not political, I could not ignore the possibility that the changing political situation might soon end any opportunities for open evangelism in these countries.

  The first tour lasted slightly over a month. Bill Brown and Charlie Riggs went before us to make arrangements and to teach counselor-training classes. Working with them was Charles Ward, a very knowledgeable and seasoned missionary living in Quito, Ecua-dor. Chuck worked in evangelism with The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) and later joined our staff and represented us for many years throughout the Spanish-speaking world (along with Norm Mydske, an energetic and able man who also worked with TEAM for many years and later became our director of Latin American ministries).

  As we had done in Africa, we utilized several of our associate evangelists—including Grady, Joe Blinco, Leighton Ford, and Roy Gustafson—to begin the Crusades in the main cities. We had a full musical team with us, including Cliff Barrows, Tedd Smith, and Ray Robles, a baritone soloist who was known in much of Latin America.

  Russ Busby also came along to document the trip photographically. This was his first international trip since joining our Team. Formerly a portrait photographer by trade, he had also done some work with The Navigators. At one stage in his long career with us, President Johnson tried to lure him away to become the official White House photographer. Russ declined, saying he felt God had called him to our ministry.

  Venezuela

  We began the South American tour on January 20 and 21 in Caracas, a modern and beautiful city that reminded me in some ways of San Francisco; it was pleasantly cool at an altitude of three thousand feet. Two meetings were held in the large Nuevo Circo Bull Ring. The first night, I came through the entrance that the matador traditionally used; the next night, I came out where the bull always entered the ring. The crowd applauded both times.

  Like most Latin Americans, the Venezuelans were spontaneous and effervescent. Those first nights, though, during the preliminaries, it distracted me to see them talking and moving around. But when I stood up to preach from the Bible, they became quiet and attentive, something I could explain only as the work of the Holy Spirit in answer to prayer. Veteran missionaries expressed gratitude for the 18,000 people who came those two nights; hundreds of inquirers went forward, exceeding our expectations for the Crusade. We found the political situation very tense, however: there were riots in several areas of the country during our stay. The day we left Caracas, sixteen people were killed by gunfire in broad daylight, and the U.S. Embassy was bombed. An hour after our car left the city for the airport, the police banned all automobile traffic.

  We flew from Caracas to Maracaibo for two nights of meetings. The Maracaibo Basin, we were told, was the third-largest oil-producing area in the world, and the source of much of Venezuela’s wealth. Our friend J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil in Philadelphia, arranged for one of his company’s boats to take us on a tour of Lake Maracaibo, where thousands of wells were located— a forest of oil derricks rising out of the water. I had never seen anything like it before. In Maracaibo proper, we found the political situation very volatile, although the tension did not seem to affect attendance at the public meetings. Eleven radio stations carried the message to the whole country.

  My first day in Maracaibo, I was invited to address the state legislature. When we drove up to the legislative building, we could see that a crowd had gathered for some kind of demonstration, apparently against the government. Half of the legislators did not show up; they were too afraid to come, I was told. The only ones who did come were the left-wingers and the Communists.

  I was also invited to a smaller midday meeting, as I recall, in another building nearby. The man who invited me seemed to be a Christian leader, so I agreed to go on condition I could preach the Gospel. When we arrived at the meeting, we could see that everything was very secretive, although—since none of us knew Spanish—we couldn’t tell what the people were talking about.

  I was introduced to the perhaps 50 people in attendance by a man who had two pearl-handled pistols tucked into his belt. He reminded me of characters in the old cowboy movies Ruth and I enjoyed watching occasionally on television.

  When I got up to speak, I could see soldiers out front unloading guns from trucks. Not long into my remarks, a rock smashed through a window, followed by a bullet or two. We ducked under the table. Newsweek said I was praying the Lord’s Prayer; I don’t remember what I was praying, but the man who introduced me said we had better get out. Our escort told us we would have to stay in a back room for a time, however; he needed to size things up for himself. On our way down the narrow hall, three young girls ran toward us. “Yanqui no! Castro si!” they yelled as we passed each other.

  While waiting in the back room with the lights out, I made a suggestion to Russ: “Why don’t you go out and get some pictures of what’s happening? They might be some of the best pictures of your life.”

  “No, thank you,” he said firmly. “They might be the last pictures of my life!”

  At last our escort reappeared and told us we would have to sneak out through a side door into an alley. Although we had no way of knowing if it was a trap, we followed him anyway. He had one last thing to say: “If anyone starts shooting at you, just stop. Don’t move: they’re very poor shots, and if you start moving, they might hit you!”

  No one was in the alley when we emerged, and moments later our car came around the corner to get us. Five minutes after we left, we heard later, the demonstration outside turned more violent; windows were broken in, doors were knocked down, the place was peppered with bullets, and at least one man was wounded. We never were sure exactly what the demonstration was all about. That evening we drove back over there to see what it looked like after the shooting. It was as quiet as it could be.

  Colombia

  Our next stop took us to Barranquilla, Colombia. We heard, shortly before our arrival, that the mayor had canceled our permission to use the municipal baseball stadium; but the local committee hurriedly obtained the grounds of a local Presbyterian school. The mayor’s ruling caused such an uproar in the community over the issue of religious freedom that many people who might not otherwise have heard of the event came out of curiosity, and it turned out to be among our largest meetings in the northern part of South America.

  When we arrived in Bogotá, we were greeted by a police escort and a limousine that saw us safely to the hotel.

  While I was in Bogotá, a former president of Colombia told me that although most Colombians identified themselves with the Catholic Church, only a small percentage actually practiced their faith. Some years later, during a visit we made to the Vatican, a number of church officials expressed the same concern to me about Catholics whose commitment to Christ was only nominal; one of them told me it was the greatest challenge facing the Roman Catholic Church today.

  From Bogotá we flew to Cali. Lee Fisher, Cliff Barrows, and I were together on the plane. Among our fellow passengers were two Colombian students from Yale who were going home for the holidays—one behind us, the other in the front. They began to throw things at each other. At first I didn’t mind—though I was getting hit on the side of the head with magazines, the exchange seemed fairly friendly—but things got out of hand when they began to yell and get unruly.

  The co-pilot came back and talked to them, but rather than toning things down, they talked back to him. A very strong man, the co-pilot hauled them up front and handcuffed them to a seat. He and the pilot then turned the plane around and headed back to Bogotá, where the police took the troublemakers off the plane.

  One of the most important people on the South American trip was my interpreter, Dr. José Fajardo. A member of the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination, he was brought by the BGEA to the United States to study; he was an excellent interpreter and a real man of God. I did not know the importance of Cali in José’s mind at that time, but it was his hometown, and
he was anxious that the meetings be successful.

  And they were: we spoke in the soccer stadium to crowds that seemed eager to hear the Gospel. On closing night, after the meeting was concluded, guerrillas came down from the mountains and killed fourteen people not far from where we were staying. We had been warned that we were in a dangerous situation; now it was clear that we were.

  A girl I had dated at Wheaton came to see us in Cali. For decades she and her husband had been doing pioneer missionary work at a spot some hundred miles from Cali. She was crippled now and in a wheelchair.

  I encountered many other acquaintances on that trip. Wher-ever I went, throughout Latin America, I met missionaries I had known in other times and places—Youth for Christ, Wheaton, Northwestern Schools, my days on the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board—and those encounters gave me a whole new appreciation of what the missionaries were doing (and what they were up against).

  Ecuador

  In Quito, Chuck Ward and his wife, Margaret, had us over to their house for a memorable evening of fellowship. Among their guests were three of the widows of the missionaries who had been killed five years before by the Auca Indians in the Ecuadorian jungle; several of those missionaries were graduates of Wheaton College. Few events in recent years had attracted so much coverage in both the secular and religious press. The story of their martyrdom for Christ had challenged hundreds of young men and women to give their lives to missionary service.

  In Quito, which was ten thousand feet above sea level, I had trouble preaching; because there was less oxygen in the air, I felt a bit breathless even when talking in normal conversation. For our next meeting, we descended to sea level in Guayaquil. That meeting was larger than our first assembly in Ecuador—and a great relief to my lungs.

  Peru and Chile

  Further meetings in Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile, brought us down the western side of South America. Elections in Peru were only a few months away at the time of our visit. Already we could sense tension in the air as conflicting parties demonstrated.