Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  Then our beloved Ethel Waters got up to sing. She wagged her finger at that group and spoke to them with a humility and authority uniquely her own. “You chillun there, you hush now!” she shouted. “If I was sittin’ by you,” she said, bringing her hands together with a loud slap, “I’d give you a smack!” The audience was stunned. “Then I would hug you and tell you that I loved you,” she added.

  Her sweet spirit won out. Several of that group came forward, Charlie Riggs noticed, when I gave a Gospel Invitation at the close of the meeting. One of the leaders of that protesting group was converted to Christ and later worked in several Christian organizations.

  When the offering plate was passed that night, President Nixon found himself with an empty wallet. With some sleight of hand, I managed to slip him all the bills in my pocket. It was quite a feat—no one in the vast stadium seemed to notice it. I myself forgot about it until, months later, I received a “Dear Billy” letter from the White House, dated October 2.

  “A number of presidents have looked to you for spiritual sustenance over the years,” he wrote, “but I suspect I was the first to hit you for a loan. . . . I deeply appreciated the emergency financing which you quickly arranged for me that evening in Knoxville. I only wish that all the money problems that confront me could be handled that efficiently.

  “While deficit financing can be useful in a pinch, the time always comes when the deficit must be funded. In keeping with my concern for fiscal responsibility, I am hereby repaying your loan of May 28.”

  Another disruptive episode occurred when Nixon came to Charlotte on October 15, 1971, honoring me by attending “Billy Graham Day” there—an event sponsored by the city. He and I stood in an open convertible that moved slowly through town. The streets were jammed on both sides. I reached out to take people’s hands.

  “You’ll break your hand that way,” said Nixon. “Hold your hand out sideways so that you will just barely touch people in the direction you’re going.”

  We completed the drive without incident but encountered hecklers—antiwar demonstrators, for the most part—outside the coliseum, where I was scheduled to speak. Although we felt some tension, the protest didn’t escalate into violence.

  In my comments that day, I referred to his impending trip to China, which proved to be so history-making. I said of the Great Wall, built mainly in the third century b.c., that “for defensive purposes the wall proved to be a gigantic failure. When China’s enemies wanted to breach it, they didn’t have to knock it down. All they did was to bribe the gatekeeper.”

  Then I spoke of our nation’s need for inner spiritual and moral commitment and strength. Senator Sam Ervin was there on the platform, as was John Connally, who was then secretary of the treasury. I deeply appreciated that day, more than I can ever tell. Many of my high school classmates were there, and most of my friends from the Charlotte area. It was a great and wonderful moment for my family.

  I appreciated Nixon’s coming to events such as these—the Knoxville Crusade as well as the more personal celebration—as my friend. He certainly knew and appreciated what our Crusades were about. Before his mother’s funeral service, he talked with me for a few minutes about her faith.

  “Dick, do you have that same kind of faith?” I asked.

  “I believe I do,” he said quietly.

  “That’s the only way you can be guided in life, and it’s the only way you can get to Heaven,” I said, and then I prayed for him. He later told me that was one of the great moments of his life, and I believe he meant it.

  Although I often prayed in his presence, I never heard him pray himself, except for grace at mealtimes. That was his Quaker way, to keep piety private. “We sit in silence,” he explained to me. His daughter Julie described him to John Pollock as “a very reserved person anyway.” He was private about many things he believed—almost the exact opposite of Lyndon Johnson in temperament.

  When the Nixon Presidential Library was dedicated at Yorba Linda, California, in 1990, the organizers offered to fly me from Los Angeles in a helicopter to lead a prayer. That night, at the banquet for 1,000 guests at the Century Plaza Hotel to honor the Nixons’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I gave another prayer at his request. Three years later, fulfilling a promise I had made to him several months earlier, I flew back from working on a book in Europe to conduct the memorial service for his loyal and lovely wife at the library in Yorba Linda.

  The service for Pat was primarily for the family and some of their closest friends. As I walked into the little garden in front of the house where Nixon was born, he broke down and cried. I put my arm around him, and we walked to where he was to be seated. He and Pat had loved each other very much. I remembered going on a plane with her to participate in the inauguration of the new president of Liberia; on that flight, she told one or two of us of her great and deep love for him. “He’s my man,” she said proudly.

  Like all human relationships, mine with Richard Nixon was bittersweet. Our laughter was interspersed with tears. We shared both delights and doubts. I prayed for him in agony and in ecstasy. Our disagreements were honest, yet our friendship was close.

  On April 19, 1994, I was in New York to attend a small dinner hosted by the North Korean ambassador to the U.N., Kim Jong Su; he had assisted us in arranging our visit to his country earlier in the year. T.W. was staying with me at the Marriott Hotel. My son Ned, who was living in Seattle, called to tell me that he had just heard on the news that Nixon had had a stroke at his home in New Jersey. I immediately tried to find out where he was. I tried to reach Tricia and Julie. Unable to reach them, I then called the White House, but neither the operator nor the secretary to the President knew anything more about it. I asked to speak to President Clinton, who had only just heard the news and did not yet know which hospital in the New York area Nixon had been taken to. I told him I would go over and see Dick as soon as we learned where he was. He promised to call me as soon as he knew, and in a few minutes he was back on the phone to give me the details.

  When I arrived at the hospital, television cameras were already being set up. I went in the emergency entrance and was met by a hospital official who took me straight to Tricia. In a room next to the alcove where the doctors were at work on her father, I talked with her, quoting some Scripture and praying with her. Then we talked about the family, especially about her father and all that he meant to those who knew him.

  When Julie arrived from Philadelphia about an hour later, we had another time of prayer. Then I told them that I was going back home to North Carolina, where I would wait for further news. I asked them to please keep in touch with me.

  The next evening, Tricia called to tell me that her father would not last long. She and her sister both wanted me to officiate at the service in California; Dick himself had expressed the same wish to me some twenty years before. Tricia suggested that if I had the time, I should go to Yorba Linda to help in the arrangements and to get adjusted to the three-hour time difference from the East Coast. I immediately left for California.

  When the time of the funeral was announced, President Clinton called me and asked how I thought the family would feel if he and Hillary were to come. I said I was sure they would be honored but I would have to check. Tricia and Julie agreed that they would be more than welcome. I called the President back, and he said they would be there.

  This changed the situation. I was officiating on behalf of the family, of course, but now it was becoming more of a state funeral. Immediately, I was in touch with the military personnel who were handling the complex details of the service. By now hundreds of dignitaries and heads of state were expected to attend.

  T.W. and I checked into the Fullerton Marriott Hotel, not far from the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, where the service was to be held. Since there were to be so many speakers, someone suggested I cut my remarks to six minutes. Military chaplain Bill Perry, however, who was in charge of the program, came to my hotel room and graciously insisted—in point
of fact, he ordered—that I stick to my original planned time of fourteen minutes.

  I remembered one of my last conversations with Nixon. It was in New York some months earlier. When I called, he suggested lunch. We ate at a table outside the restaurant, watching all the cars go by and talking philosophy and theology.

  “Dick,” I said at one point, “we don’t have many years left, you and I, and I pray that we’re both ready to meet the Lord. The Scripture says, ‘Prepare to meet God’; if either of us is not prepared, we had better get ready.”

  Then once again I outlined the Gospel for him—though of course he already knew it well.

  Before his funeral in California, 40,000 people filed by his casket in the rain. The following morning, it fell to my lot to do something quite out of character for me: I was to be the official greeter of the family members, the American presidents, and the many other distinguished guests. As they arrived, I escorted them into the library, where they were served coffee.

  The service itself was personally difficult for me, not just because of the media attention but because I, like so many others that day, was saying good-bye to a man whose friendship I had valued across the years.

  Several of the speakers alluded to his complex personality and the difficulties that had led to his resignation from the presidency.

  “Today is a day for his family, his friends, and his nation to remember President Nixon’s life in totality,” President Clinton said in his remarks. “To them let us say, ‘May the day of judging Pres-ident Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.’”

  The overwhelming emphasis was on the former President’s positive contributions, including his dramatic breakthroughs in foreign policy.

  As for my own remarks, I was determined not only to express my own personal reflections on Mr. Nixon himself but also to speak directly to the family and to the others gathered there about the Christian hope of life beyond the grave. “The world has lost a great citizen, America has lost a great statesman, and those of us who knew him have lost a personal friend,” I said. “His public service kept him at the center of the events that have shaped our destiny.”

  Then, as the service reached its conclusion, I strayed somewhat from my prepared text. I looked out at the five living presidents and their wives who were sitting there and all the other dignitaries who were present, and speaking to them (as well as to the Nixon family and to myself) I reminded them that someday every one of us will be lying in a casket.

  “John Donne said that there is a democracy about death. ‘It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.’ I think today every one of us ought to be thinking about our own time to die, because we too are going to die and we are going to have to face Almighty God with the life that we lived here.

  “There comes a time when we have to realize that life is short, and in the end the only thing that really counts is not how others see us here, but how God sees us, and what the record books of Heaven have to say. . . .”

  “For the believer who has been to the Cross, death is no frightful leap into the dark, but is an entrance into a glorious new life. . . .

  “For the believer, the brutal fact of death has been conquered by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  “For the person who has turned from sin and has received Christ as Lord and Savior, death is not the end.

  “For the believer there is hope beyond the grave. . . .

  “Richard Nixon had that hope, and today that can be our hope as well.”

  25

  The Healer from Michigan

  President Gerald Ford

  History has not given him a lot of credit yet, but in my view Pres-ident Gerald Ford helped save the integrity of this country’s demo-cratic institutions after Watergate. In spite of the bitter campaign he and Jimmy Carter had fought, President Carter was able to say in his 1977 inaugural address that he wanted to thank his predecessor “for all he’s done to heal our land.” I agree completely with that assessment.

  I cannot remember when I first met him. I knew him for years while he was in Congress. Certainly, most times I went to Capitol Hill, I saw him. I knew him to be a professing Christian, and we had several times of prayer together. He was always warm, friendly, and outgoing to me.

  A lot of us Christians saw him as a spiritual leader as well as a political one. He came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I had held one of my first citywide Campaigns and where many people had strong ties with the Reformed churches that originally came from Holland. His roots were in that soil, and he brought its values with him. As a representative, he lived in a modest house in Alexandria, picking up the morning paper from his doorstep just like millions of other men and women. Even in the White House, he kept in touch with those spiritual roots: a mutual friend back in Grand Rapids, Billy Zeoli, a Christian filmmaker, served as a kind of counselor to him, stopping by the White House periodically to give him a verse of Scripture and pray.

  Gerald Ford inherited one of the worst situations any man ever faced going into the presidency: because of their disappointment and dismay over Watergate and its cover-up, a high percentage of the American people had lost faith in the Oval Office. I wanted Ford to initiate the healing by pardoning Richard Nixon. Although I had personal reasons as well, I believed that a pardon would be good for the office of the presidency.

  When the former President went back to his home in San Clemente, California, he developed thrombophlebitis, a dangerous disease of the leg veins. I myself had had it and knew how life-threatening it could be. The blood clot in his leg eventually traveled to other parts of his body, and for a time he hung between life and death.

  When he lay in the hospital so ill, Ruth got a friend to charter a small plane and fly it back and forth past the hospital at Long Beach. Behind it trailed a banner that said “nixon—god loves you and so do we.” He saw it from his hospital window, we learned, but he did not know its source until later. We would like to think it was an encouragement to him.

  Ruth and I were staying in Pauma Valley, California, in a little cottage we had been given just over the mountains from Palm Springs. Situated on the Pauma Valley golf course (which itself lay at the edge of an orange grove), it was only three and a half rooms—but we loved it. (After the children were grown, we decided to give it away so that it could be sold and the money used for the Lord’s work.)

  From Pauma Valley, I phoned Bob Finch, one of Ford’s close political advisers, to talk to him about my friend’s situation: “Bob, if Nixon has to go through a Watergate trial, perhaps even a prison sentence, just the thought of it might kill him.”

  Bob suggested that I call Herb Klein; at the time editor of the San Diego Union, he had been communications director in the Nixon White House. I explained the reasons I favored a pardon, including the possibility that it would save Nixon’s life. I also expressed my conviction that drawn-out trial proceedings—which is the way Washington usually does things—could keep President Ford from effectively governing the country. Herb agreed with my assessment.

  “Billy,” he added, “you’re the only one that I think Ford would listen to at this time. Why don’t you call him directly and see what he says?”

  This surprised me. Reluctantly, I decided to follow through on his suggestion, although I knew that others also were surely urging the President to take action, one way or the other.

  In none of this did I confer with Nixon. In fact, during the last days he was in office, I could not get near him or even talk to his secretary or his children. He had given an order, one of his friends told me later, to keep Billy Graham away from him. I never asked him about that in our many subsequent conversations, but I am convinced he was trying to spare me from being tarred with Watergate.

  Acting on Herb Klein’s suggestion, I called Anne Armstrong at the White House and told her my concerns. She agreed to pass them on to Ford’s chief of staff, General Alexander Haig. That afternoon, General Haig phoned me
and we talked for about ten minutes. He too seemed to agree with me and said President Ford would call on Sunday morning.

  I stuck by the phone in Pauma Valley on Sunday morning and did receive a call from the President. “Well, it’s a tough call, a tough decision,” said President Ford after listening to me. “There are many angles to it. I’m certainly giving it a lot of thought and prayer.”

  “Mr. President, I’m praying for you constantly,” I replied.

  He said he would get back to me. Later someone from the White House—Anne Armstrong, as I recall—phoned. “You’ll be interested to know,” she said, “that the President is going to have a statement about the Nixon pardon in a day or two.”

  When the pardon came, the expected furor broke loose. Millions of people were gratified; in spite of everything, Nixon still stood rather high in public opinion. On the other hand, his enemies—and he had made plenty of them through the years—were extremely unhappy. Many bitter editorials were written, and Ford’s public approval rating fell by twenty or twenty-five percentage points. Some people later claimed that the pardon contributed to his loss in the presidential race that followed, though in my judgment it didn’t. I believe he lost mainly because people wanted a new administration without all the lingering weight of Watergate.

  Years earlier I became acquainted with Leon Jaworski of Houston, Texas, the special prosecutor in the Watergate trials. I believed him to be a fair man and a committed Christian. He told me some of the things that had gone on behind the scenes, some of the agonizing decisions he’d had to make. That information strengthened my assurance that Ford had done the right thing, and the pardon did succeed to some extent in helping us put Watergate behind us.

  As if all that were not enough, President Ford faced international tensions in the Far East and the Middle East, as well as inflation at home. I watched on television the rescue helicopters landing on top of the American Embassy in Saigon, sensing the desperation of the people who were scrambling to get on board. Having worked for the departing Americans, those who were left behind probably faced trial and imprisonment (or execution) at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Scenes like that must have affected our commander in chief far more deeply than they did a civilian like me. But I was affected. I had been in that embassy several times and could visualize it. I knew of the devotion of so many thousands of South Vietnamese to the United States. I too felt strongly the tragedy of Vietnam.