by Billy Graham
“I shall miss the children during the next few weeks,” I wrote in the diary I was keeping at the time. “I have come to love this mountain top and would like nothing better than for the Lord to say that I should stay here the rest of my life. I do not naturally like to go out to the wars. It is so peaceful and restful here. But duty calls. I must put on the whole armor of God and go forth to meet the foe.”
Much of my time was spent in spiritual preparation—praying, reading the Scriptures, and talking with Ruth and members of our Team and board (as well as with some others) about the task before us. We knew that millions of Christians around the world were already praying for the meetings in New York, and this gave me a deep sense of peace in spite of the uncertainties we faced.
“There are many of my friends who have predicted that the New York Crusade could end in failure,” I wrote in my diary. “From the human viewpoint and by human evaluation it may be a flop. However, I am convinced in answer to the prayers of millions that in the sight of God and by Heaven’s evaluation it will be no failure. God will have His way.” Then I added, “I have prayed more over this assignment and wept more over the city of New York than any other city we have ever been to. Now it is in God’s hands.”
The time to leave for New York was rapidly approaching. Dorothy Kilgallen, a nationally syndicated gossip columnist and television personality, had been asking for some time to interview Ruth and me. Some thought she would be nice to us in person and then do a hatchet job on us on paper, but we invited her to Montreat anyway. She spent several days in our home, interviewing us. Her series of articles surprised everyone. They were some of the kindest and most supportive we had ever received. The Hearst papers carried her columns on us for five days in a row. “To Billy Graham,” she wrote in the second one, “Heaven is a definite place, like Chicago. He can’t point it out on the map, but he knows it has pearly gates and streets of gold, and he is headed there as surely as if the one-way ticket were crackling in his pocket.”
The result of these and other articles was that our press buildup in New York was growing even before we left home.
Before leaving—we would both be going to New York, though leaving separately—Ruth and I took our last stroll to see our four sheep and to lie on the grass, talking, quoting Scripture, and praying together. What a wonderful companion she has always been, so full of Scripture for every occasion and event!
By the time I left on the train for New York on May 9, I felt in the best physical and spiritual shape I had been in for a long time.
On the way to New York, we stopped in Washington for a meeting with President Eisenhower. As Grady and I sat waiting in a reception room, a reporter from Newsweek came over to tell us the magazine had originally planned to have a cover story he had written that week on presidential aide Sherman Adams, but—he noted with a wry smile—the editors were setting it aside for a cover story on us and the New York Crusade.
President Eisenhower greeted me with, “Hello there, my friend,” and listened intently for half an hour to my summary of the plans for the meetings in Madison Square Garden. He said it would be a wonderful thing if people all over the world could learn to love each other. I agreed, stating my conviction that people had a capacity to love in the fullest sense only when they opened their lives to Christ’s love and transforming power. He heartily agreed. As I was leaving, he called me back to have our photograph taken together; that was, I think, one way he felt he could indirectly endorse what we were doing. I also chatted briefly with Vice President Nixon, who also indicated his support for the meetings.
At four-thirty the next morning, Paul Maddox, Grady, and I got up. Ruth was scheduled to be on the early train from Asheville, and we were going to join her at Union Station. Her train was delayed, however. By the time it arrived, Ruth had been awake since two, reading her Bible and praying. We both fell sound asleep until Paul Maddox brought some toast and coffee to our compartment on the train. It tasted wonderful—a bit of calm before the storm.
We arrived at New York’s Pennsylvania Station forty minutes late. Roger Hull and other members of our committee and staff, as well as about twenty-five photographers, spotted us. I recalled President Truman’s remark that photographers were the only people in the world who could order him around.
As we made our way through the station, many people waved. One man shouted, “God bless you, Billy!” Another man grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “We sure need you!” Still another said, “I’m a Catholic, but we’re backing you.” These greetings all encouraged me, especially in light of New York’s reputation (undeserved, we decided by Crusade’s end) as a cold, unfriendly city.
When we finally arrived at the New Yorker hotel, where I would stay for the whole Crusade, we found a score of reporters patiently waiting for us. “There is a notable difference in the press from what it used to be,” Ruth wrote in her diary. “They are more respectful, friendlier. It may not last or it may—but thank God for it, while it does.”
That evening I went to be interviewed by Walter Cronkite for his CBS television news show, recorded for broadcast the following night. He was an amiable host, and we had a great time, sitting together in a room overlooking Times Square. He asked the kind of leading questions I love to answer, about our work, our objectives, the message we preached, and what we had to offer New York.
The news staff then screened some film clips that they had taken around Times Square and Broadway, and Walter asked me to comment on them. I observed that thousands of frustrated and bewildered people there who were searching for reality, could find it if they would give their lives to Christ.
On the way back to the hotel afterward, we were joined by David Zing, a writer for Look magazine, and his photographer. We had a hot dog together in a little place along Times Square.
I saw every media setup as a welcome chance to get out the Gospel, but we certainly could not engineer those opportunities ourselves. We had no advance agents or press corps in our organization. Betty Lowry single-handedly ran the Crusade “press room,” if it could be called that, and provided coffee for all visitors. In New York, I stayed on my knees about the media more than about any other single thing, including my sermons. Far more people would read the newspaper and magazine stories than would hear me preach in person. My prayer was that the Holy Spirit would guard our statements to the press and use the coverage to glorify Christ.
First thing I did the next morning, Sunday, after Ruth and I had breakfast, was to make two radio broadcasts: one was a tape to be flown out to a group of ministers in Los Angeles for their Tuesday meeting, describing to them the New York Crusade pros-pects; the other, an interview for a network of about 250 stations in the Midwest. After the taping, Lorne Sanny, Mel Dibble, Ruth, and I went to church at Calvary Baptist on West Fifty-seventh Street, across from Carnegie Hall, to hear John Wimbish preach.
That night, with some hesitancy, I went to appear on The Steve Allen Show. Did I have any business appearing on an entertainment variety program? Well, 40 million people might be watching on NBC-TV. I went on with the other guests: singer Pearl Bailey, actor Dean Jones, and actress Tallulah Bankhead.
Miss Bankhead startled me when she grabbed my hand. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time,” she said. She was extremely warm and cordial, urging Ruth and me to come over to her apartment for tea. She planned to attend as many of the meetings as possible, she said—and definitely on “opening night.” That term made it sound as if we were one of the theatrical attractions in town.
Pearl Bailey said the same thing when she shook hands, mentioning that her father was a minister, that God was her agent, and that she believed in prayer and the Bible. As I talked, I sensed that many of these people were looking for some deeper meaning in life.
Then, amid all the celebrities, someone squeezed my arm. “God bless you,” said an anonymous floor director. “I’m a Christian too. See you Wednesday night.”
As on the previous ni
ght, we were joined after the show by a couple of men from Life magazine—writer Dick Billings and photographer Cornell Capa, who talked about taking his now-famous photographs a year earlier in Ecuador following the martyrdom of five American missionaries by Stone Age tribesmen. They took me for a walk, this time along Times Square, and we enjoyed some more hot dogs.
The next two days were almost nonstop media appearances. First was the Bill Leonard show, Eye on New York, for which we made five programs in succession to use each day that week. At eleven that morning, I was on ABC-TV with John Cameron Swayze. At two that afternoon, it was interview time with New York Mirror columnist Sidney Fields. Even when the Crusade executive committee met at four-thirty in the afternoon, photographers from Look, Life, and Ebony magazines were snapping pictures.
Tuesday matched Monday, starting with a forty-five-minute radio show with Martha Deane, sponsored by the New York Times on station WOR. At noon Ruth and I arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to be interviewed by Tex and Jinx McCrary on their coast-to-coast NBC television show; they actually allowed me to preach a short message at the end.
One of the people we faced in our first days in the city was a beautiful Indian woman journalist who asked Ruth why I didn’t stay in the South and straighten out the race problem. Assuring her the problem was universal, Ruth had to bite her tongue to keep from asking what the journalist was doing about the caste system in her homeland.
The media attention was hard for Ruth, since she is such a private person. All the focus in New York, she said, made her feel like a beetle under a stone as the stone was removed. “And behind it all,” she wrote, “lurking in the background, is that fear that somewhere in this avalanche of publicity we will stumble and disgrace Him.” Even five months before the Crusade, she wrote of the stress: “It’s silly to bewail this publicity. It may be a cross. It may be an opportunity. It may be both. Our hearts’ deepest desire is that in it all, He may be glorified and accomplish His purpose.”
Nevertheless, we both realized the importance of the media and had learned to live with it. In my diary I wrote, “It is strange how one has gotten used to publicity. I used to so terribly resent the invasion of our privacy; now we have learned to live with it and have dedicated it many times to the Lord. I realize that the same press that has made us known could ruin us overnight.”
On Tuesday night, after a dedication service for the Team and Crusade workers at the Garden, I intended to visit as many of the all-night prayer meetings as possible, but because I was so fatigued, I decided to go back to the hotel. In came Billings and Capa again, wanting more pictures for the next week’s Life magazine story. So out we went, and they snapped pictures while I walked up Broadway in the rain. Twenty-four blocks later, we were at Calvary Baptist Church again. There, among other journalists, was a photographer from Match magazine who had flown over from Paris to cover the Crusade. There were also reporters from Sweden, Holland, and Australia. I described the walk in my diary that night: “I never dreamed that the day would come when a preacher could walk, in non-clerical clothes, down any street in New York and be recognized. This can only be of God. The responsibility is so overwhelming that I can hardly relax. My heart is in agony continually lest I make one false step that would bring any disrepute to Christ.”
Wednesday, with our scheduled opening of the Crusade that evening, offered no letup. After Ruth and I had breakfast and devotions together in our room, George Wilson came by to get me to NBC-TV for an appearance with Dave Garroway. When I walked into the studio, another guest met me—actress Gloria Swanson. We had about a half-hour of intense discussion, and she promised to come to the meetings. When it was time for the taping, my old friend Dave Garroway asked clear questions that led to the Gospel. Outside the studios, I made another television program for NBC.
When we went down the steps into the old Madison Square Garden arena, news photographers’ flashbulbs were popping all around us. My heart kept saying, over and over, “O God, let it be to Thy glory. Let there be no self.”
That first meeting will always remain in my memory as one of the highlights of our ministry. As nearly as I could see against the spotlights, the 19,500-seat arena was filled. Cliff had done a splendid job of training the 1,500-voice choir, and Bev was in top form, singing one of our favorite hymns, “How Great Thou Art”; he later calculated that he sang it ninety-nine times during the Crusade. Bev was halfway through another song to the crowd jammed into Madison Square Garden when he suddenly realized it was perhaps a bit inappropriate for the setting; he was singing, “I Come to the Garden Alone.”
“We have not come to put on a show or an entertainment,” I said as I greeted the audience. “We believe that there are many people here tonight who have hungry hearts. All your life you’ve been searching for peace and joy, happiness, forgiveness. I want to tell you, before you leave Madison Square Garden this night of May 15, you can find everything that you have been searching for, in Christ. He can bring that inward, deepest peace to your soul. He can forgive every sin you’ve ever committed. . . . Forget me as the speaker. Listen only to the message that God would have you to retain from what is to be said tonight.”
I then spoke on God’s call to repentance and faith as recorded in the first chapter of Isaiah. At the Invitation, 704 people came forward.
The first man was Jack Lewis, whom Jerry and I had met on board a ship returning from the Orient to Honolulu a year before. Jack was a prominent businessman from a Jewish background whose exuberance over his newfound faith delighted the whole Team in the following weeks. With him that night was a young German-born scholar named Henry Kissinger, who returned several times to the meetings over the course of the summer.
As I sat in our room late that night, after a glorious first meeting at the Garden, I barely had the energy to write in my diary. I penned just a brief entry: “When have we seen such opportunities in our generation? It should cause all Christians to rejoice. It has greatly humbled me. The press today has been remarkable. Almost every paper with front-page stories of the plans and programs for tonight.”
My adrenaline was flowing overtime, but I was fatigued. Ruth could see that. “I don’t know when I’ve seen him so tired,” she wrote in her diary after the first meeting. “He has had too tight a schedule.”
When I entered the Garden that first night, almost the first thing I saw was 300 members of the press and several newsreel cameras in operation. I knew that the message I was about to give would be carried to the world.
The next morning, the New York Times devoted three pages to the opening service, reprinting my sermon word for word. Most of the other five daily papers gave extensive coverage as well, and most of their columnists wrote about the meeting. Dr. Bonnell said he had never seen anything like it during his twenty-three years in New York City.
The Journal-American ran a cartoon on its editorial page depicting a boxing ring at the Garden (which was indeed a perennial venue for world-championship bouts). The cartoon had the Devil seated in one corner—beaten, disheveled, and discouraged. To rouse him, his handlers were giving him a bottle of whiskey labeled “Old Nick.” Me they represented as a big, strong, muscular prizefighter—what a stretch of the imagination that was!—having won the first round. The accompanying column on the front page said, “And tonight he waits for Satan’s backlash.”
Momentum continued to build during the next few days. Attendance dipped the second night to around 14,000; it almost invariably did in any Crusade, but this was higher by several thousand than the second night in London. We were encouraged by this. By the end of the week, however, the arena was jammed nightly, and hundreds were being turned away. As crowds grew, in addition to the main service inside I began to preach to the crowds that waited patiently outside on Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue, which became a common occurrence during the course of the Crusade. Some nights as many as 8,000 gathered outside, so we had a small platform built from which Bev could sing and I could preach. Newsp
aper coverage likewise continued to be favorable; extended news reports and excerpts from the sermons were carried by most papers and wire services throughout the city and abroad. The New York Herald Tribune allowed me space on the front page every day to write anything I wanted.
The Associated Press had planned to send out two stories a day during the entire Crusade. George Cornell, along with an assistant, had been assigned to cover it. One night he put his pen down and came forward himself. His executive editor then told him he was making a change in Cornell’s assignment. “You’ve become too close to it and can’t write objectively,” the editor claimed.
I wrote to some editor friends of mine, saying I was sure that if they got people to request coverage, the Associated Press would provide it. And that’s exactly what happened.
Normally, we did not hold Crusade meetings on Sundays, but in New York we made an exception; one reason was that very few churches had Sunday evening services. After some weeks with a Crusade meeting each night, we had to give our Team members some rest. We decided not to have services on Mondays from then on.
The first Sunday evening—the fifth day of the Crusade—an estimated 21,000 people jammed the huge arena (1,500 more than the stated capacity); that encouraged us greatly. That afternoon Mayor Robert Wagner had put Erling Olsen (of the Crusade committee) and me into a convertible and driven us to Brooklyn for the annual Norwegian Independence Day festival, where we found people of Norwegian descent wearing their colorful national costumes. Some 40,000 filled Leif Eriksson Square as I spoke to them, with hundreds raising their hands to indicate their desire to commit their lives to Jesus Christ. This was the first of several mass rallies we held around the city; that included one noontime meeting with an estimated 30,000 on Wall Street (a meeting that completely blocked traffic) and several open-air services in Harlem that attracted many thousands.