Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  I preached in several meetings before leaving Japan. I felt great liberty in speaking, and this confirmed in my heart that God had indeed sent us. Then we left for Korea. It was sunset as we approached the coastline. I could see why Korea was called the Switzerland of the Far East; the mountains were blanketed with snow. Little villages with their thatched-roof houses reflected the rosy tint of the setting sun. It was a picture of tranquillity. Only when we were on the ground and could see all the armaments, the devastation, and the poverty did we realize the enormity of the war.

  My first contact with the Korean people made me realize why my wife loved them so. They smiled when there was little to smile about, and they were deeply grateful for even the smallest gift.

  Over the next two weeks, I would travel under military supervision and in military transportation, preaching all over Korea, seeing how the Korean people existed in the towns and villages, and meeting the American GIs who represented us in the conflict. It seemed that everywhere we went there was despair and fear and danger. And yet every meeting, from gatherings at makeshift platforms near the fighting areas to more formal meetings in various cities, was packed with eager, enthusiastic audiences. Many hundreds responded to the Invitation to receive Christ and be converted.

  We had not been in Korea long before we developed a real affection for the children. Each night in our street meetings in the city of Pusan, the southernmost city in Korea, three or four hundred children sat right in front. From my seat on the platform, I would wink and smile at them during the preliminaries, causing them to cover their giggles with their hands. In the children’s hospitals and foundling homes, we saw babies sleeping on the floor.

  One night we had to walk what seemed like several miles in sticky, ankle-deep mud to reach “the Lighthouse,” a home for blind children. I had the unforgettable experience of hearing a little blind fellow stand and sing in English “The Love of God”:

  The love of God is greater far

  Than tongue or pen can ever tell;

  It goes beyond the highest star,

  And reaches to the lowest hell;

  The guilty pair, bowed down with care,

  God gave His Son to win;

  His erring child He reconciled,

  And pardoned from his sin.

  Oh love of God, how rich and pure!

  How measureless and strong!

  It shall forevermore endure

  The saints’ and angels’ song. . . .

  At the Oriental Missionary Society on the outskirts of Pusan, seminary students huddled in frigid, unheated classrooms, studying ten to twelve hours a day, eating and sleeping in the same room they studied in. Prayer was a hallmark of these believers.

  Young and new to the international scene, I wrote more than one unflattering entry in my diary: “I am certain that some of our leaders are going to have to answer to Almighty God for the terrible suffering and death of this land. Every soldier we have lost, every civilian who has died or been murdered is the result of the scandalous decision by the men who sold us down the river in the secret agreements at the peace tables.”

  I had never been so weary. I slept through heavy gunfire nearby, slept on a bumpy, noisy nighttime train passing through ambush territory, and still felt as if I were living on adrenaline all the time. On our way from Pusan to Seoul, we were inside a train car that had an open flatcar ahead and behind it, filled with soldiers. We were told to pile our luggage around us because guerrillas would shoot at anything that moved. Just a few days before, a newspaperman traveling through that area had his fingers shot off as he slept!

  One highlight was preaching to 2,500 a night in the unheated but huge and beautiful Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, pastored by Han Kyung Chik. Many GIs got special leave to come from the front lines. I can never forget the sight of American soldiers alongside Koreans at the front of the church, responding to the Invitation. Korean pastors would grip my hand in their humble, gracious way and in tears thank us for coming to encourage them.

  My first sermon on the front lines saw me on a newly built platform graced by a painting done by a soldier forty miles away. Troops had carried the painting (which depicted Christ watching over an exhausted soldier) to us overnight, and it stood next to me as I preached. I did not use humor or stories to break the ice that night. I dove right into the Gospel, and hundreds responded. I felt the Spirit of God in that meeting. Men of every rank came forward, many in tears—and they were tough, rugged men!—to receive Christ.

  In the evacuation hospitals, we saw more of the horrible effects of war. On the way to one hospital, Grady was in one helicopter and I was in another. General Jenkins, who was escorting us, shot a wild boar from the airship and radioed down to his mess sergeant where to find it so that we could have it for dinner. Before we landed, however, we were assailed by flak from the ground. The copter pilots had to fly low and hide us behind trees and ridges. For some reason, I was not scared and didn’t assume it was the end for me. The more dangerous it was, the more I sometimes felt I was really doing something for the Lord.

  At a base camp, I spoke to the officers. Then, in the moonlight, we rode by jeep two or three miles to another camp. The password that day was “Christmas card,” I later learned. If a guard said “Christmas” to you, you had to respond “card.” These passwords changed every day. When we were stopped by guards on the way, the general with us found that he had forgotten the password! The guards pointed their rifles at him and shone a flashlight in his face, demanding identification. He had to work hard to convince them that he was who he said he was.

  It was thirty degrees below zero, and we were grateful for the clothing that the military had supplied: big gloves, thick boots, military hats with the chaplain’s cross, and even heavy underwear.

  In a field hospital about a mile behind the front lines on Christmas Eve, we went from bed to bed, bringing greetings and trying to encourage the wounded. One young man was so mangled that he lay face down on a canvas-and-steel contraption. A doctor whispered to me, “I doubt he’ll ever walk again.”

  “Mr. Graham, could I see your face?” asked the young man. “We’ve all been praying for you and looking forward to your coming. I won’t be able to be at the service.” So I lay on the floor beneath him and looked up into his hollow eyes, still stunned with his fate. I prayed with him.

  “Sir,” said the young man to General Jenkins, who was escorting me, “I fought for you, but I’ve never seen you. Could I see your face?”

  The general got down on all fours, slid under that bed as best he could, and talked with the young man. I saw a tear fall from the soldier onto the general’s cheek.

  When we walked from the bleeding, broken, dying men of that hospital into the crisp, clean, thirty-below-zero air of Christmas Eve, I felt sadder, older, and more aware of the needs and suffering not only in Asia but also in the entire world.

  At one of our Christmas Day services, I got to meet and have pictures taken with Major John Eisenhower, son of the President-elect. I found him both delightful and appreciative of our visit. His father had just recently been there.

  I wired his father from Korea that I would like to see him on my return. Eisenhower invited me to visit him at the Commodore Hotel in New York City five days before the inauguration. He asked me to bring the pictures of his son to show him.

  We wrapped up our Korean trip on December 25. Soon after our return, I headed for New York for my scheduled meeting with Eisenhower. After I briefed him on the trip, he got to the real reason for our meeting. “I’d like to quote one or two passages from the Bible in my inaugural speech,” he said.

  I suggested several references, among which was the one he chose, 2 Chronicles 7:14 (KJV): “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” He would rest his hand on that passage when he took the oath of office
.

  The General stepped to a window in the Commodore Hotel and looked out across the city as we talked. “I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,” he said. “We need a spiritual renewal.”

  I told him I could not agree more and suggested that he make one of his first official acts the proclamation of a national day of prayer. He said he would. Eisenhower’s own spiritual pilgrimage had moved rapidly. Prior to the inaugural ceremony at the Capitol, he arranged a worship service for his incoming administration.

  I was as astounded as anyone else, though, when at the conclusion of the inaugural address he read a prayer he had written himself for the occasion. It was traditional, of course, to have various clergy give official prayers. But here was the President himself, praying his own prayer.

  Rumor had it that I wrote the prayer for him, or had at least helped. But I did not even know he was considering a prayer, and it bothered me that such reports persisted. Years later I wrote Mamie Eisenhower to recount how I had suggested only some Scripture verses as her husband had requested. In her typically gracious way, she sent me a handwritten note: “Please do not give . . . that newspaper account another thought. Of course I personally saw Ike write his own little prayer, so why worry about what other folks say.”

  As soon as Eisenhower assumed office, he proved that he was as good as his word. He proclaimed a national day of prayer, as promised, and joined the National Presbyterian Church. That church affiliation was no perfunctory ritual. When the President made his intentions known, Pastor Ed Elson told him they must first spend an hour a day together for five days for religious instruction. Eisenhower complied humbly and became grounded in what it means to be a Christian and a Presbyterian before he was baptized into church membership. On the day of his baptism, the congregation sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”; Eisenhower later told Bev Shea that it was his favorite hymn.

  My official interactions with President Eisenhower were always warm and friendly, but they were also mostly formal. I was never invited to the private quarters of the White House, for instance. (Nor, for that matter, was Vice President Nixon.) Our meetings were always in the Oval Office. We did, however, enjoy some golf together.

  One day Grady Wilson and I were playing golf with Richard Nixon at the Burning Tree Country Club near Washington. We were told that the President and his partners were playing ahead of us. When I was in the clubhouse shower afterward, Grady dashed in. “The President wants to see you,” he said.

  I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel. For the next several minutes, I stood there, dripping, chatting with the President of the United States, who was wearing white tie and tails on his way to a state dinner.

  “You’re probably the only preacher in history who’s talked to the President and the Vice President of the United States so informally,” chuckled Nixon as we rode back to the city later.

  Subsequent golf games with Eisenhower himself are happy memories. I can still see the President jumping in glee one day when his partner, who happened to be Grady, sank a fifty-foot putt on the eighteenth hole at Palm Springs, clinching their victory over my partner and me. Golf gave me not only a way to relax but also, when played with well-known people, a chance to exercise my ministry in a relaxed, informal way. Golf games (and other informal encounters) with the President bonded us more closely at the spiritual level. I became more and more impressed with his character and the intensity of his growing faith, which he not only formally confessed but also applied to policies and programs.

  Civil rights, for example. He saw the need for decisive action to end racial discrimination. A crisis flared in Little Rock in September 1957 when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in National Guard troops to bar black children from the public schools. By that time, Eisenhower already had strong convictions based in part on his study of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

  He and I talked and corresponded about the issue. His executive order to eliminate racial segregation in the armed forces left no doubt what side he was on. The whole nation needed healing.

  I expected the clergy to take the lead. Because of stands I had taken against segregated seating in our Crusades from the early days, Eisenhower knew I was active within my own sphere. Before he sent federal troops into Little Rock to enforce the law, he phoned me in New York—where we had been holding the Madison Square Garden Crusade—to ask what I thought.

  “I think you’ve got no alternative,” I said. “The discrimination must be stopped.”

  An hour later, Richard Nixon phoned and asked the same thing. Some might say I was advising the President on a political issue. I did not see it that way, though. He saw fit to ask my opinion, as I was sure he did of many other counselors. I also believed there were important moral and spiritual issues at stake. I hope he was at least encouraged to know that he was in my prayers concerning this fateful decision.

  My deep convictions on racial integration got a direct challenge when I was asked shortly afterward by the Little Rock Ministerial Association to come to help unite the city by preaching in Little Rock’s large War Memorial Stadium. I called my old Christian friend Congressman Brooks Hays from Arkansas and asked his advice.

  “You don’t want to call for the chaplain too early in these things,” he said. “Do it, but wait a year.”

  I took his advice. In September 1959, I went to Little Rock to preach. The previous year, I had preached to an integrated audience in Clinton, Tennessee. Senator Estes Kefauver and columnist Drew Pearson had challenged me to come. I said I would if they would come with me and sit on the platform. The White Citizens’ Council there made some very strong statements against me and the event. It was reported they said that I would never get out of town alive. That convinced me of the rightness of my going.

  In Little Rock, I again insisted on fully integrated seating. It could have been lighting the fuse to a powder keg, but nothing blew up that night. We held the meeting with a capacity crowd of blacks and whites intermingled throughout the stadium. Governor Orval Faubus came and could not find a seat; finally, he sat on the steps leading down into the stadium, way in the back.

  PRESIDENTIAL PRAYER BREAKFASTS

  During Eisenhower’s administration, several of us helped start what was then called the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (now the National Prayer Breakfast). This is how it began.

  In the early 1950s, while we were in Portland, Oregon, I met a remarkable man by the name of Abraham Vereide. He talked to me about having regular prayer groups of businessmen, something he had already started in Seattle. When we arrived in Seattle for our Crusade a year later, Vereide came nightly to the meetings. Before or after each meeting, he would come around to see me, talking about the burden that he had to reach political leaders with the Gospel. He also came to my hotel room several times, talking about starting an annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast.

  My part was to encourage him and also, as his plans became firm, to help him get President Eisenhower to the first prayer breakfast. The President was extremely reluctant. In fact, he turned down a request conveyed by Senator Frank Carlson. When I went to see him, he turned me down also, though he promised to think more about it. He eventually called or wrote to Senator Carlson to say he would come to the first one but would not promise to come to another one; he did not want to set a precedent.

  At my Denver meeting with Eisenhower, he had introduced me to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. That introduction was providential; Hilton was to become a financial sponsor of the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfasts in Washington for several years; after that, Bill Jones paid for the breakfasts. But the driving force was always Abraham Vereide, with (later) Dr. Richard Halverson, the distinguished chaplain to the Senate, and Doug Coe. Out of the first fifteen Prayer Breakfasts, I brought the main address in almost all of them, always using them as an opportunity to preach the Gospel and even giving a clear Invitation to follow Christ.

  Eisenhower’s fa
ith did not go untested. Physical ailments included heart and stroke problems, among other maladies. God saw fit to preserve him, however, and I believe Eisenhower’s faith was deepened through these experiences. Well into his term there were also moments when he pondered his spiritual state. In August 1955, I was awakened in a Washington hotel room late one Sunday night by a call from Sid Richardson in Fort Worth.

  “Billy, I’ve had a terrible time tracking you down,” he said. “The President wants to see you, and the White House couldn’t locate you. I’ll let them know where you are.”

  The next morning I was informed that a car would come by to take me to the President’s farm in Gettysburg. I had hoped to fly to Charlotte later in the day to spend some time with my parents prior to a speaking engagement there that evening. I called them to say my plans had changed, but that I still hoped to keep the speaking commitment. I had no idea what President Eisenhower wanted, but all the way there I prayed that God would help me say the right thing.

  When I arrived, the President opened the car door for me himself. At first it seemed that this would be just a social visit. We had a quiet lunch together and then went upstairs to pray with Mamie, who was sick in bed. Then he asked if I would like to tour the famous Gettysburg battlefield.

  I told him both of my grandfathers had fought there.

  “Do you know which group they were with—North or South Carolina?”

  I called my mother from his home, and she told me the company that her father, Ben Coffey, had been in. So Eisenhower took me to the place he thought that company might have served while part of Pickett’s Charge.

  When we arrived at the battlefield, we switched from the car to a golf cart, with the Secret Service in another cart behind. President Eisenhower narrated as he drove. As a student of the Civil War, and especially of the Battle of Gettysburg, he pointed out things I never knew before.

  Back at the house, in his little den, he paced in front of the fireplace. I sensed that the real reason for my visit would soon be made clear.