by Billy Graham
“You’ve just been kissed by William Randolph Hearst,” he responded.
I had no idea what the reporter was talking about, although I knew the name. Hearst, of course, was the great newspaper owner. I had never met the man, but like most Americans I had read his papers. The next morning’s headline story about the Campaign in the Los Angeles Examiner, followed by an evening story in the Los Angeles Herald Express— both owned by Hearst—stunned me. The story was picked up by the Hearst papers in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, and then by all their competitors. Until then, I doubt if any newspaper editor outside the area had heard of our Los Angeles Campaign.
Puzzled as I was, my curiosity was never satisfied. Hearst and I did not meet, talk by phone, or correspond as long as he lived. Supposedly, he had sent a message to his editors, “Puff Graham,” but there were so many stories about how we might have come to his notice and about why he might have been interested in promoting us that I did not know which, if any, was true. One of the more intriguing ones was that Hearst and his controversial partner, Marion Davies, disguised themselves and attended a tent meeting in person. I doubted it.
Time magazine pulled out all the rhetorical stops in its No-vember 14, 1949, issue: “Blond, trumpet-lunged North Carolinian William Franklin Graham Jr., a Southern Baptist minister who is also president of the Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis, dominates his huge audience from the moment he strides onstage to the strains of Send the Great Revival in My Soul. His lapel microphone, which gives added volume to his deep, cavernous voice, allows him to pace the platform as he talks, rising to his toes to drive home a point, clenching his fists, stabbing his finger at the sky and straining to get his words to the furthermost corners of the tent.”
The newspaper coverage was just the beginning of a phenomenon. As more and more extraordinary conversion stories caught the public’s attention, the meetings continued night after night, drawing overflow crowds. Something was happening that all the media coverage in the world could not explain. And neither could I. God may have used Mr. Hearst to promote the meetings, as Ruth said, but the credit belonged solely to God. All I knew was that before it was over, we were on a journey from which there would be no looking back.
A veteran police officer in Medford, Oregon, who had attended a Los Angeles meeting at the start of the third week, wrote to me shortly after he got home: “I am glad you have continued on. . . . and I pray God will continue to bless you and your good work there.” He added a postscript explaining the gift he had enclosed: “A small token to help you—and keep spreading that tent out.”
That was exactly what we had to do. As November began with a further extension of the Campaign, headlines as far away as Indiana screamed, “old-time religion sweeps los angeles.” Reporters were comparing me with Billy Sunday; church leaders were quoted as saying that the Campaign was “the greatest religious revival in the history of Southern California.”
One evening when the Invitation was given, I noticed a giant of a man, tears rolling down his cheeks, coming up with his wife to receive Christ. I did not know who he was, but I asked Cliff to have the audience sing one more verse of the final song to give them time to reach the front. Reporters recognized him, and the next day’s newspaper made a big thing of it: “EVANGELIST CONVERTS VAUS, SOUND ENGINEER IN VICE PROBE.” Jim Vaus was the electronics wizard who had allegedly served as reputed mobster Mickey Cohen’s personal wiretapper.
A few days after his conversion, Jim came to visit me.
“Billy, I told Mickey Cohen what happened to me. Instead of his getting angry, he said, ‘Jim, I’m glad you did it. I hope you stick to it.’”
There was a contract out on Jim’s life, but apparently it was not from Cohen.
“Billy, would you be willing to talk to Mickey if I could arrange it?” he asked.
“I’ll go anywhere to talk to anybody about Christ,” I shot back without thinking.
By arrangement, then, we slipped out of the tent by a back exit after the meeting one night, in order to avoid the press, and got away undetected in Jim’s car. As he drove toward Mickey Cohen’s home, I had mixed feelings—a little uncertainty and hesitation, to be sure, yet a deep-down boldness as well, because I knew I was going to witness to a well-known mobster in the name of Jesus Christ.
As we drove up to an unimpressive house in the exclusive Brentwood section of Los Angeles, I noticed a car parked across the street with a man sitting in it.
When we got out of our car in the driveway, Cohen opened the front door to greet us. I was surprised to see how short he was. He reminded me of Zacchaeus in the New Testament, the undersized tax collector who shinnied up a tree in order to see Jesus over the heads of the crowd (see Luke 19:1–10). Looking straight at me with curiosity in his big brown eyes, he invited us in.
“What’ll you have to drink?” Cohen asked.
“I’ll have a Coca-Cola,” I replied.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I think I’ll have one too.”
He went to get the drinks himself. Apparently, there was no one else in the house.
Jim told Mickey again how he had accepted Christ and planned to change his entire life; he described the peace and joy he now had.
Then I explained to Mickey, as simply and forthrightly as I could, the Gospel from A to Z. As we talked, I prayed inwardly (as I did when preaching to thousands in the tent) that God would help me to find the right words.
Mickey responded with some items about his own life, especially mentioning the charitable organizations he had supported and the good works he had done. Although he was of a different religious belief than I, he told me he respected me and certainly respected what Jim Vaus had done. Before we left, we had a prayer.
“WIRETAPPER IN CONFESSION AS EVANGELIST TRIES TO SAVE COHEN.”
That was one paper’s headline the next day. Without my knowledge or approval, the story of that visit had been leaked to the press—perhaps by the man I had seen in the car parked across the street, perhaps by a reporter who had been tipped off by someone in the Campaign organization, perhaps even by Cohen himself (who had a reputation for promoting his own notoriety).
Cohen denied the story. “I think the whole thing is a publicity stunt,” one newspaper reported him as saying, “and that’s what I’m tryin’ to avoid—publicity. . . . I don’t want to meet the guy. I haven’t got time.”
Lies of that magnitude were startlingly new to me, but I could not be discouraged about them. Ruth’s mother wrote to us about a prayer Gigi had offered on Cohen’s behalf: “Dear Jesus, thank You for the meetings, and dear Jesus, thank You for Mickey Cohen. Make him good and make him let Jesus put His blood in his heart.”
As the Campaign went into its fifth week, we rearranged the seating to accommodate 3,000 more chairs. When that wasn’t enough, crowds overflowed into the street. We added an extension, doubling the size of the 480-foot-long tent. Reporters were on hand to cover every meeting, and press accounts were positive.
The Associated Press put it on their priority “A” wire that went throughout the world. Both Life and Time magazines carried major stories. And the Los Angeles Times (the main competitor to the Hearst-owned papers) picked up the Campaign in a big way, of course.
People came to the meetings for all sorts of reasons, not just religious ones. No doubt some were simply curious to see what was going on. Others were skeptical and dropped by just to confirm their prejudices. Many were desperate over some crisis in their lives and hoped they might get a last chance to set things right. A few, we learned, were even sentenced to attend by a Los Angeles County judge, a woman who strongly supported the ministry and thought a night in the tent might do convicted offenders more good than a night in jail.
A minister from Yucca Valley took a leave of absence from his church so that he could be night watchman at the tent after each meeting ended. “Johnny” was the name he wanted us to call him by. He slept under the platform to keep an eye on the place. On
e night he heard something rattling the chain at the entrance.
“Who goes there?” he called out.
“Just me,” came the reply.
“What do you want?”
“I just want to find Jesus.”
Johnny led him to Christ right then and there.
As for Northwestern, I sent reports regularly to my secretary, Luverne Gustavson, in Minneapolis. Sometimes, forgetful of the two-hour time difference between California and Minnesota, I phoned George Wilson at his home at two in the morning, his time, to tell him what had happened at that night’s meeting.
Back in Los Angeles, we asked the Lord for yet another signal. Should we extend the meetings to a sixth week? Attendance was still growing, but I did not want numerical success to become our standard for discerning the will of God. We did not dare go forward without His direction.
A fierce storm was heading toward Los Angeles from the Pacific. If it hit the coast, it would wreak havoc on our huge tent and the thousands of folding chairs. We prayed that if God wanted us to continue, the storm would not reach Los Angeles. The next morning the newspapers reported that the storm had dissipated at sea, much to the surprise of the meteorologists. We entered the sixth week with high hopes and grateful hearts but with sagging shoulders. I had never preached so much or so hard in all my life. I had run out of sermons in my stockpile and was having to prepare a new one every day. That took up to six or eight hours. Increasingly, I forgot about illustrations and applications, though I knew they were supposed to be necessary to good sermon construction. In some of these later messages, I used mostly Scripture references. I had two or three old Bibles from which I clipped out passages to paste onto my outline. Then, from the platform, I read these as part of my sermon without having had to write them out longhand.
A movie star who was not a Christian offered me this word of spiritual wisdom: “Billy, you can’t compete with us in entertainment. We know all the ropes. If you get up there and preach what’s in the Bible, I’ll be on hand every night.” I tried to follow that advice.
On one or two nights at the height of the Campaign, we had new believers give their testimonies of what Christ had done for them. Their words made such an impression that afterward I sensed the Holy Spirit was already speaking to many, so I simply gave a brief explanation of the Gospel and an Invitation to receive Christ, and people came forward.
One night a man took a taxi from a tavern to the tent and ran down the aisle while I was preaching. I asked Grady to take him into the auxiliary prayer tent and then invited anyone who wanted to join them to come forward. Scores did, even though the sermon wasn’t finished. The man put his faith in Christ and began a new life by the grace of God.
Long after the crowds left, people drifted in singly or in pairs. Some were simply wanderers in the night; others, too troubled to sleep, were seeking something in that odd sanctuary. Johnny, the pastor-watchman, seated them in a row at the front and read Scripture to them, gave them the Gospel, and prayed for them.
Occasionally, I invited others to preach for me. T.W. came two or three times from Minneapolis. One night Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, spoke for me. I introduced them, and then I would come back to the pulpit and give the Invitation.
Besides the sermon preparation, I desperately needed time for prayer to unload my burdens to the Lord and to seek His direction for the preaching and for other ministry opportunities. Some mornings as early as five o’clock, I would go to Grady’s room to ask him to pray with me. Some time after the third week, he had to leave for a previous Campaign commitment back in the Midwest, but Cliff and Bev stayed with me to encourage me and do all they could to ease the load.
Under the leadership of a Lutheran spiritual leader, Armin Gesswein, organized prayer meetings were going on all over South-ern California as well as in other parts of the country. Students were praying in Christian colleges, businesspeople were praying in offices, families were praying in their homes, and congregations were gathering for special prayer meetings. “The mightiest force in the world,” as Frank Laubach called prayer, undergirded me and brought the blessing of God from Heaven to Los Angeles. (Laubach was a great advocate of teaching people how to read and write in areas of the world where education could not be taken for granted.)
Faithfully, day after day, 40 to 50 women prayed together on our behalf and then attended the meetings, sitting just in front of the platform each night with their faces full of expectant faith that God was about to work again.
The increasing media exposure brought a never-ending stream of requests for special appearances that often had me speaking three or four additional times each day: civic gatherings, churches, evangelism parties in the mansions of the rich and famous, school assemblies, and one-on-one interviews by the score.
When newsreels of the Campaign started appearing in theaters, people began to recognize us on the street. Of course, we had no staff to handle all the calls, letters, and telegrams that overwhelmed us in a daily avalanche. The word burnout was not in the popular vocabulary yet, but I was getting perilously close to that condition.
Before the end of that sixth week, I did not need to put out another fleece to find out whether I could continue the pace. That colorful writer for Time magazine had described me earlier as “trumpet-lunged” and having a “cavernous voice.” In the final weeks, though, I often felt too weak to stand at the pulpit, and some of my platform-pacing was necessary to keep myself from toppling over when I stood still. I had lost a lot of weight thus far in the Campaign; dark rings circled my eyes. Cliff and Bev (who had to commute back to Chicago one day each week for his radio broadcast) felt the strain too, as did our long-suffering wives. Billie Barrows at the piano worked as hard as any of us, and Lorin Whitney tirelessly played the organ. Ruth herself stayed up long hours each night counseling people. None of us would leave the little counseling tent until every person had been personally talked to.
Drained as I was, physically, mentally, and emotionally, I experienced God’s unfailing grace in perpetual spiritual renewal. I wanted the Campaign to close, but I was convinced that God wanted it to continue. All my personal reserves were used up; I had to put my entire dependence on the Lord for the messages to preach and the strength to preach them. “[God’s] strength is made perfect in weakness,” Paul wrote, “for when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9, 10, KJV). It seemed that the weaker my body became, the more powerfully God used my simple words.
There was another concern. My job was to be president of Northwestern Schools, and all of this Los Angeles ministry coincided with the first term of the academic year. Back in Minneapo-lis, students were wondering if their president was ever going to come home. Newspaper clippings were pasted up on a board to keep them informed, and they were praying for the Campaign, of course, thrilled at each report of what the Lord was accomplishing. Nevertheless, a few board members were murmuring about the school’s absentee president. Dr. Riley’s widow, Marie, had reason to question her late husband’s wisdom in appointing me his successor as president.
And there was still another concern: my family and the personal price they were paying while I was in Los Angeles. Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law, Rosa and Don Montgomery, came from New Mexico to join us for the closing week, bringing Anne, who had been staying with them. “Whose baby is this?” I asked when I saw the child in Rosa’s arms, not recognizing my own daughter. And the baby went to sleep crying for her aunt, not her mother.
But as the eighth week approached in Los Angeles, we all knew that the end had to come. Not that the blessings were diminishing. It was then that Louis Zamperini was converted. He was the U.S. track star who had pulled a flag bearing the Nazi swastika down from the Reichstag during the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Later, in the Second World War, he was shot down in the Pacific and drifted on a liferaft for forty-seven days. He survived attacks by Japanese pilots who swooped down on him for target practice. Finally, the Japanes
e captured him and put him in prison for two years. Although he was a famous athlete and war hero, he came home feeling unhappy, disillusioned, and broken in spirit. One night he wandered into our tent in Los Angeles with his wife and accepted Christ, and his life was transformed.
Finally, a closing day came for the 1949 Los Angeles Cam-paign, a month late. In anticipation, a pastors’ breakfast on Wednesday of the final week at the Alexandria Hotel drew 500 ministers and other Christian workers. They planned to spend one hour together but stayed for four, listening to testimonies by Hamblen, Vaus, Zamperini, and Harvey Fritts, who starred in a popular television show as “Colonel Zack.” In his report on the event, Claude Jenkins indicated that some people thought the breakfast was the spiritual highlight of the Campaign.
On Sunday afternoon, November 20, two hours before the start of the final meeting, 11,000 people packed the tent to standing room only. Thousands milled about in the streets, unable to get in. Hundreds left because they couldn’t hear. On the platform with me were 450 fellow ministers, to whom now fell the awesome challenge of shepherding those who had come forward through the weeks.
For that time, the statistics were overwhelming. In eight weeks, hundreds of thousands had heard, and thousands had responded to accept Christ as Savior; 82 percent of them had never been church members. Thousands more, already Christians, had come forward to register various fresh commitments to the Lord. Someone calculated that we had held seventy-two meetings. I had preached sixty-five full sermons and given hundreds of evangelistic talks to small groups, in addition to talks on the radio.
That evening, exhausted after the final meeting, T.W., Ruth, and I got on the Santa Fe Super Chief train, hoping to get a couple of days of rest traveling back to Minneapolis. We were greeted by the conductor and the porter as though we were some kind of celebrities. A strange experience, believe me.
As we knelt together to pray before climbing into our berths, we were both grateful and afraid. We could hardly find words to express to the Lord our thanks for His many mercies to us personally, and for His blessing on the Los Angeles Campaign. But we feared that we did not have the capacity to live up to our responsibilities. People were expecting so much from us now.