by Billy Graham
One of Kennedy’s accomplishments was the Peace Corps, whose humanitarian services overseas paralleled a part of what Christian missionaries had been doing for generations, minus the spiritual emphasis and the lifetime commitment.
“I think the Peace Corps is important,” he once told me, “not so much to help other countries, though that is important, but to give American young people something to do.”
He was right. Within a few weeks of its launching, hundreds had volunteered for the Peace Corps, indicating that the young and the restless were looking for something meaningful to which to commit: within five years of its founding more than 15,000 were serving in fifty-two countries.
I became good friends with R. Sargent Shriver, head of the Peace Corps, and later we made a documentary film together on the problem of poverty in the Appalachian Mountains. One day he offered to pick me up in Montreat. He showed up with a helicopter and landed in our front yard, which is little more than a shelf on the side of the mountain. The landing was a success, but the rotors blew our lawn furniture down the mountainside.
In one remote area, we landed to get some footage. We went up to a shack where we met a mountain woman. Sarge asked her if she had a $20 bill in her possession. She shook her head. If she did have a $20 bill, he asked, what would she do with it?
She thought for a moment and then said, “I’d look around and find somebody who needed it worse than me, and I’d give it to him.”
I think Sarge got a new appreciation of the character and pride of the people who live in Appalachia. The documentary, by the way, was something of a success; it was shown all over the United States by various agencies, including the National Council of Churches.
The dawn of the 1960s was a terribly difficult time for any world leader. I was encouraged that President Kennedy took the trouble to attend the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast each of his three years in Washington. I was the speaker each of those years. I learned later that Mr. Kennedy had reportedly said I was the only Protestant clergyman with whom he felt comfortable.
At one of those breakfasts, sitting beside me, he asked me what religious group was predominant in settling North Carolina and the South. I told him the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Lutherans, Moravians, Baptists, and Methodists.
“When did the Catholics come?” he wondered.
“Later” was all I could tell him, adding that there were a lot of Catholics in the South now.
When he stood to make his remarks, to my surprise he used that snippet of information as an illustration.
Several times during the Kennedy years I was invited to the White House, though never to a state dinner or to his personal quarters. I remember several occasions in the Oval Office—one visit especially, when he asked me to tell how I talked through an interpreter. Apparently, he had seen me on a TV program talking through an interpreter in Latin America and had liked the style and method, which was sentence by sentence. The only other alternative was to give the speech in its entirety in English and then have an interpreter repeat it in the foreign language.
During the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Secretary of State Dean Rusk accepted a speaking engagement from a Presbyterian group in Montreat. I went to hear him. One of his aides called and said he would like to visit our home, so we invited him up. During the hour or so we enjoyed coffee together, he had to excuse himself to call Washington two or three times. At one point, he filled me in briefly on the tense standoff with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
“Billy, what do you think we ought to do?” he asked.
“I think we’d better stand firm.”
“So do I,” he agreed.
During his shockingly short term, President Kennedy endeared himself to me in several ways. One day in Washington in late 1961 the President invited Grady Wilson and me into his office. We informed him of our upcoming five-week Crusade in Latin America beginning in January.
“I’m going down there before that,” Kennedy said. “I’ll be your John the Baptist.”
“Don’t forget,” Grady said, “that he lost his head!”
That didn’t dissuade the President, who laughed and repeated his offer: “What can I do for you?”
We told him we were having problems getting into Colombia, where some leaders warned of riots if we held large meetings. Our missionary friends there were praying that God would reopen the door. The President turned to an adviser and told him simply, “Take care of that.” What happened behind the scenes I will never know, but we got into Colombia without further problems, and attendance at our meetings (which proceeded without incident) was as high as 20,000. The Catholic President of the United States had indeed made a good John the Baptist.
The last time I was with Kennedy was at the 1963 National Prayer Breakfast. I had the flu.
“Mr. President, I don’t want to give you this bug that I’ve got, so I’m not going to talk right at your face.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “I talk to a lot of people all day long who have got all kinds of bugs.”
After I gave my short talk, and he gave his, we walked out of the hotel to his car together, as was always our custom. At the curb, he turned to me.
“Billy, could you ride back to the White House with me? I’d like to see you for a minute.”
“Mr. President, I’ve got a fever,” I protested. “Not only am I weak, but I don’t want to give you this thing. Couldn’t we wait and talk some other time?”
It was a cold, snowy day, and I was freezing as I stood there without my overcoat.
“Of course,” he said graciously.
His hesitation at the car door, and his request, haunt me still. What was on his mind? Should I have gone with him? It was an irrecoverable moment.
John Connally (a Democrat at the time) invited me to Texas to participate in his inauguration as governor on January 15, 1963. In late fall of that year, when I was back preaching in Houston, the governor came to my hotel room. He confided that he was concerned about President Kennedy’s forthcoming trip to Texas in November. He said that there was much hostility against the President in Texas and he feared a lukewarm, or even a negative, response.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in the 1964 election, and his conservative cause appeared to be developing a large groundswell in Texas. Kennedy planned his visit to build Democratic unity and help shore up the Democratic resistance.
Sometime toward the end of the second week in November, I unaccountably felt such a burden about the presidential visit to Dallas that I decided to phone our mutual friend, Senator Smathers, to tell him I really wanted to talk to the President. His secretary told me Senator Smathers was on the Senate floor and would call me back. Instead, he sent me a telegram that the President would get in touch with me directly. He thought I wanted to talk about the Presi-dent’s invitation to another golf game in Florida that weekend; the game was off, he said, and would have to be rescheduled.
But all I wanted to tell him and the President was one thing: “Don’t go to Texas!”
I had an inner foreboding that something terrible was going to happen. I told this to T.W. and Calvin Thielman, pastor of the Montreat Presbyterian Church, while we were on the golf course one day (and before I put through the call to Smathers). But was such a strange feeling enough to justify the President’s attention?
In the early afternoon of November 22, I was playing golf with T.W., Lee Fisher, and Cliff Barrows at the local course in Black Mountain, North Carolina. We had just teed off for the fifth hole right next to the road when Loren Bridges, manager of WFGW, the Christian radio station we owned there, drove up and shouted that the President had been shot. Just then, the Black Mountain golf pro, Ross Taylor, came running out, shouting the same news.
We rushed to the WFGW studio, where dispatches were clacking over the wires. Loren handed me the latest Associated Press Teletype copy. The report was sketchy; hard information about the Pr
esident’s condition was not available yet.
I asked Calvin Thielman to go on the air with me to pray for Kennedy and his family and to read Scripture. I also asked T.W. to call a friend of ours who was a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hos-pital in Dallas to get the latest word.
As Calvin and I went on the air, T.W. came to the control room window and held a scrap of paper up against the glass. “He’s dead,” it said.
I dared not break such news to western North Carolina until a public announcement was made, which Walter Cronkite did over CBS three or four minutes later. Then, Calvin and I spoke of the President and prayed for his family and for the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
At President Kennedy’s funeral the following Monday in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, I was invited to sit among friends of the Kennedy family. The question on everybody’s mind was, Why did it happen? Like everyone else, I was touched by the sight of the Kennedy children, Caroline and John, Jr. When John and I got acquainted decades later, I was struck by his resemblance to his father, in both personality and ability.
A different thought had haunted me the day before, when I stood in the Capitol Rotunda about thirty feet from Jackie and the family and watched the tearful faces of national and world leaders filing by. My friend Jim Bishop had just written a newspaper column about his last interview with Kennedy. It was hard not to think about his poignant quote from the late President: “There’s so little time and so much to do.”
Harking back to our Palm Beach conversation only three years before, I became very thoughtful as I listened to Cardinal Cushing read the powerful New Testament statement on Christ’s Second Coming from 1 Thessalonians 4:16: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first” (KJV). Leaving the cathedral with Paul Miller—a friend and supporter of our work from Rochester, New York, who was head of the Gannett newspaper chain—I prayed that this would be true for John F. Kennedy.
Some months later, as part of a fund-raising event for the Kennedy Library at Harvard, the University of North Carolina invited me to speak at their stadium. Senator Ted Kennedy came to that event, along with his mother, Rose Kennedy. The clan matriarch was exceptionally gracious. “You know, I often listen to you,” she said. “Even though we are Catholic, I have never heard you say anything we don’t agree with in the Bible.”
I was grateful for her kind words, but they also underlined a truth I had come to realize during the debates a few years before over having a Catholic in the presidency. The only hope for finding common ground among Christians of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints was to focus on the Word of God, the ultimate authority for our faith.
22
Tall Timber from Texas
President Lyndon B. Johnson
“You and Ruth must be here for our library dedication May 22.” That was retired President Lyndon Johnson’s handwritten post-script at the bottom of a typewritten note to me dated February 23, 1971—slightly more than two years after leaving office.
For that occasion in Austin, we were invited by President Nixon to accompany him on Air Force One. I gave the invocation. After the ceremony, LBJ took Ruth and me out to his ranch in the hill country. Over the years, we had enjoyed many good visits with him and Lady Bird on that sprawling land under the vast Texas sky, and we were glad to be back.
He and I walked down to the oak trees edging the Pedernales River, which flanked the family cemetery. Usually effervescent, he struck me as subdued that day. We stood in the shade and watched the water flow by.
“Billy,” he said at last, “one day you’re going to preach at my funeral. You’ll stand right here under this tree. I’ll be buried right there.” He pointed to the spot in the family cemetery. “You’ll read the Bible, of course, and preach the Gospel. I want you to.” He paused for a moment. “But I hope you’ll also tell folks some of the things I tried to do.”
When the time came, I did not find it a hard assignment. Ours was that kind of friendship. At the graveside service on January 25, 1973—less than two years after that conversation—I described him as “history in motion” and “a mountain of a man with a whirlwind for a heart . . . [whose] thirty-eight years of public service kept him at the center of the events that have shaped our destiny.” If anything, those words, as I look at them now, were an understatement.
LBJ was a powerful, gigantic personality whose charisma dominated a room the minute he entered it. The focus of attention and even the balance of power automatically shifted to him. He could be coarse and charming at the same time, and even profanely poignant. Almost every time he swore in my presence, he would quickly turn and say, “Excuse me, Preacher.”
Although many have commented on his complex character, perhaps I saw a side of that complexity that others did not see, for LBJ had a sincere and deeply felt, if simple, spiritual dimension. But while he was serious about it, I could hardly call him pious.
Yet I was beside him many times as he knelt by his bedside, in his pajamas, praying to One mightier than he. I saw strength in that, not weakness. Great men know when to bow.
On Sunday, December 15, less than three weeks after Pres-ident Kennedy’s funeral, the telephone rang just as I was preparing to leave for Annapolis, where I was to speak in the chapel of the United States Naval Academy. “This is Lyndon,” the President’s familiar voice boomed, adding that he wanted me to come by the White House. The next day, we spent several hours together, talking and swimming in the White House pool. The earthshaking events of the last few weeks had clearly sobered him. We prayed together, and I asked God to give him special grace and wisdom in the difficult days ahead. Afterward he invited me to offer a prayer of thanks at a small dinner honoring the executive staff of the New York Herald Tribune.
As the new President in February 1964, he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast: “No man can live where I live, nor work at the desk where I work now, without needing and seeking the strength and support of earnest and frequent prayer.” Those were not the words of a desperate man on a sinking ship. They revealed faith in a Friend who could help.
The spiritual side to his character wasn’t surprising in light of his family heritage. One of his cherished family mementos was a faded, yellowed letter that he displayed on the wall of his White House office. It was from the legendary Texas hero of San Jacinto, General Sam Houston, to Johnson’s great-grandfather, a frontier evangelist who had led the general to personal faith in Jesus Christ. It was after his conversion that Houston assumed political leadership. The President was proud to point it out to visitors and tell them the story behind it.
At his inauguration in 1965, he invited me to preach at an early-morning service in the National City Christian Church. The crowd included the Supreme Court justices, senators, congressional representatives, governors, and mayors of every city with a population over 100,000. I closed my sermon with the Houston letter, and the President gave me the thumbs-up sign.
LBJ’s grandfather had been a professor of Bible at Baylor Uni-versity. His mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, often read the Bible to her young son, and her letters were a stirring testament of faith. Inscriptions on many of the tombstones in the little family graveyard beside the Pedernales confirmed that witness. His forebears were Southern Baptists, but he joined the Christian Church at some point because it was nearest to his home. Lady Bird was Episco-palian. He frequently attended her church or other denominational churches, including Catholic. Being a Texan, he respected the considerable influence of the state Baptist paper, The Baptist Standard, on the thinking of its more than 200,000 subscribers.
LBJ’s practice of churchgoing during his presidency, rain or shine, was an example to many. Though probably the busiest man in America, he sometimes went to services two or three times a week. His faith fortified him when he was facing surgery. I watched him on TV; he was laughing with the nurses and the intern as they wheeled him down
the hospital corridor. And the first thing he did when he recovered from the operation was to go back to church. He might have been motivated partly by sentiment for his family legacy of preachers, Bible teachers, and evangelists; but I had every reason to think it was much more than that.
In November 1965, President and Mrs. Johnson attended the closing service of our Houston Crusade, the first chief executive to attend a Crusade while in office. He was not embarrassed to be counted among believers. Six years later, in 1971, when the Texas legislature passed a resolution inviting us to hold a Crusade in Austin in 1973 while they were in session, he wrote to tell me that he and Lady Bird were planning to be with us, not at the Austin Crusade (which never did take place) but at the Dallas Crusade later that year.
“I want to endorse that Resolution,” he added, “and if you are able to accept you will hear me saying ‘Amen’ from the front row at Memorial Stadium.”
I knew he was not a saint. When I spoke warmly about his spiritual convictions, I was not forgetting his inconsistencies and transgressions. Did he intimidate me? Maybe just the opposite: I think I intimidated him a little. He liked having an old-fashioned Baptist preacher around for personal as well as political reasons, but I did not avoid taking issue with him or probing his soul whenever I thought it necessary.
At a gathering of police chiefs in Kansas City in September 1967, for example, I was present to hear his address. That evening when I spoke at our Crusade meeting in the Municipal Stadium, I said I disagreed with some of the things he had said that morning. I went on to say, “I’m going to tell you what I believe the Bible teaches.” The media picked that up in a hurry. A preacher setting the President straight, and in public at that!
LBJ phoned me the next day.
“What’s the matter with you?” he grumbled. “I thought you were my friend.”