by Billy Graham
“I am,” I replied, “but I can’t always agree with everything you say.”
He changed the subject and didn’t bring it up again.
I remember one particular weekend that I spent with him. LBJ had given me his assurance that my visit would not get publicity, because he knew I did not want to appear to be involved in the upcoming presidential campaign. That short visit was an eye-opener to me about modern political campaigning. One morning, as we were having a short discussion in his bedroom after having had prayer together, someone came in and handed him a note.
“Read that,” he said, passing it on to me.
I glanced at it briefly. It was an intelligence report for the day before on his opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. It contained almost every move Goldwater had made, from breakfast to bedtime. His blood pressure. Whom he had talked to, and what about. It was unbelievable—and unsettling—to realize what goes on behind the scenes in politics.
The Sunday afternoon before election Tuesday, I flew from Washington to Charlotte and then started the drive home. I turned the car radio on. When I heard our daughter Anne quoted as having endorsed Goldwater, I was so shocked that I stopped in Shelby and called Ruth from a pay phone.
“Ruth, what’s this about Anne? We’re for Johnson.”
“Well, Anne’s not,” she replied.
Oh, no, I thought, with a sinking feeling. We were deep in politics, whether we liked it or not!
When I arrived home, Ruth told me that Anne, our sixteen-year-old high school student, had gone the night before with friends to a Republican rally in Greenville, South Carolina. Someone must have identified her there, and CBS shoved a microphone in front of her.
“Here’s Billy Graham’s daughter. What do you say?”
“Yeah, Goldwater! All the way with Barry!”
Monday afternoon our phone rang. It was President Johnson, wanting to speak to Anne Graham. She was not home.
“I’ll speak to Billy then,” he said.
What now? I wondered.
“Billy, you congratulate Anne,” he said. “I’m glad to see young people getting involved in politics. I’m glad she’s independent, got a mind of her own. I’ve got an independent daughter too. She’s getting ready to join the Catholic Church.”
Father to father, we clicked. Later Luci talked with me about the reasons for her decision, which were largely, it seemed to me, related to her plans to marry a Catholic.
LBJ was impulsive and unpredictable. His speech could be as overbearing as his behavior. From my reading about past presidents, I would say he was in the same mold as Andrew Jackson—rough and brilliant, with plenty of natural ability. In an earlier generation, he would have qualified as one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
As with the other presidents, I tried to stop calling him by his first name when he took office. When I occasionally slipped up, he gave me a funny look, which prompted me instantly to correct myself. I wanted to be careful because of what had allegedly happened when he was pulled over for speeding in Texas. The instant the officer recognized Johnson, or so the story goes, he exclaimed, “My God!”
“And don’t you forget it!” the President reportedly barked back.
Once T.W. and I flew with him on the presidential plane from Washington to Atlantic City, where he was to speak to a national gathering of 30,000 schoolteachers and administrators.
“Now, the reason I brought Billy Graham with me,” the Presi-dent explained to the assembly, “is because the ceiling was so low at the airport. When I heard it was almost zero-zero, I thought I’d better have Billy with me.”
We had landed safely with a 100-foot ceiling, and 150-foot visibility. It was not to my credit, though. We all prayed—and prayed hard.
I used to do that also when LBJ took the steering wheel of his car to drive me around his ranch. He seemed to think his vehicle had only one speed: high. It seemed as if all four wheels were never on the road at the same time. Hills, canyons, rocks, scrub brush, riverbeds—it was all like interstate to him. Rough terrain never slowed him down.
On the many occasions when I saw him fill a station wagon with the children of ranch hands or neighbors, hand out jelly beans, and drive out to track the deer running across his property, laughing and joking with the kids all the time, perhaps he was a little more restrained.
Once he lost his temper with Grady Wilson when we were out riding in his Lincoln convertible on just such a deer hunt. Grady was yelling—whether with the exhilaration of the chase or with panic at the President’s driving, I don’t know—when suddenly LBJ slammed on the brakes. “Grady, just shut up!” he said. “You make me sick! If you make one more sound, you can go back and ride with Jack Valenti or the Secret Service in the other car!”
In reality, LBJ liked Grady and much appreciated his gift for telling funny stories nonstop. Once when we were swimming with the President in the White House pool, Grady spun a yarn that made LBJ laugh out loud. “Write that down,” he said to special assistant Bill Moyers, who was standing nearby. “I want to remember that one.”
One night Grady and I were sleeping in the same room on the Johnson ranch. In the middle of the night, I heard snoring so loud it shook the frame building. I threw a pillow at Grady and whispered as loud as I could, “Shut up and turn over!” But Grady was already awake. It was not he who was snoring; it was the President in the bedroom under us.
One time when Ruth and I were visiting the ranch, LBJ took Lady Bird and us for a boat ride. It seemed he went the same speed on the water as in a car. As he careened around water-skiers—his wife shouting, “Lyndon, slow down!”—I thought he was going to capsize and kill us all.
By the time we got back it was dark, but he had another suggestion: “While they’re getting dinner ready, let me take you for a ride in a car I’ve got out here.” I was still a little shaky from the boat ride, but Ruth and I climbed into the vehicle, and he took off at full throttle. We sped along the riverbank. Without warning, he swerved right into the Pedernales. For a second, I believed he was suicidal. But the engine kept going, and so did we. The car turned out to be an amphibious vehicle that carried us along on the current like a boat.
“Most people jump out when we hit the water,” Johnson complained, as Ruth remembered it.
“You’re the President,” she said to him. “I figured you knew what you were doing!”
Johnson loved to catch people off-guard or throw them off-balance, and not only while driving on the ranch. He pointed to a mutual friend of ours one day and said, in mock horror, “I went to a party for White House staff at this churchgoing Baptist’s home the other day, and he never served one drop of alcohol. Can you imagine bringing the cabinet and the staff all the way out to his house and giving them nothing to drink?”
That friend was Marvin Watson, a Texas business executive who served as special assistant to President Johnson before being appointed postmaster general. He would eventually serve on the board of BGEA while president of Dallas Baptist University.
I was the President’s guest at the White House around federal budget time one year. As he excused himself to attend an evening cabinet meeting, he said, “Billy, I don’t know how long I’ll be in there. You take these pencils and see if you can trim a few billion off this budget while I’m gone.”
I opened the thick notebook and reviewed the American government budget. By the time he returned, I had actually inflated it a little, thinking he needed to spend a little more here and a little more there. He roared. “You’d have made a good congressman!” he said.
He could also be kind and generous, very solicitous when it came to our comfort and well-being. If he found out I was staying at a hotel in Washington, he would call to say, “There’ll be a car there in fifteen minutes. Your hotel is over here.”
One Saturday evening when we were visiting, the Johnsons had to go out. That left Ruth and me alone at the White House. Nobody else was there (it seemed), and most of the lights were out. Rut
h and I walked all over the place, turning lights on wherever we could find a switch. That was as much power as I ever exercised in the White House.
In 1964 the Scripps Howard newspapers came out with a front-page story announcing that I was giving serious consideration to running for president. Some Republicans phoned me to say they had enough support to nominate me. I did not think they knew what a good friend of Lyndon Johnson’s I was, or they would have thought twice before talking to me.
My father-in-law, Dr. Bell, got in touch with me in a hurry. “It’s on all the newscasts,” he said. “You’ve got to call a press conference and stop it. It must be T.W.’s fault. He talked you into considering this.”
So much for family support. When Ruth called me later, she echoed her father’s message.
T.W. had nothing to do with it, of course. I had been urged by a few friends to think about it, but how it leaked out, I would never know. First thing the next morning, I convened a press conference.
“Under no circumstances am I going to run for president,” I said. “A number of groups have promised support if I would run, but no amount of pressure can make me yield at any point. I’ve never hinted to anybody that I would run for president. Like General Sherman, if nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve. God called me to preach.”
Ruth and I were having lunch with the President and Lady Bird at the White House when the 1964 Democratic convention was starting in Atlantic City. He handed me a list of fourteen names. “Now who would you choose as a running mate?” he asked.
I started to answer, but then winced in pain. Instead of taking the hint, I asked Ruth why she had kicked me.
“Yes, Ruth, why?” asked the President.
She turned to me. “You should limit yourself to moral and spiritual advice, not political advice.”
“Ruth,” said the President, “that’s exactly right.”
When Ruth and Lady Bird left the room after lunch, Johnson closed the door behind them. “All right,” he said, “now what do you really think?”
I smiled and pointed to one name on his list, more guessing than advising. He nodded. The Hubert Humphrey decision had already been made.
At the first Presidential Prayer Breakfast during the Johnson presidency, I told LBJ that Calvin Thielman, pastor of the Montreat Presbyterian Church, was in the audience. “He worked for you as a seventeen-year-old student in Texas as your campaign manager in Lamar County when you were first elected to the Senate,” I explained. (Johnson had won by a scant eighty-seven votes, earning him the nickname “Landslide Johnson.”)
“Really? I’d like to meet him,” said the President.
I made the introductions. Before they parted, LBJ said to him, “I remember hearing there was a young fellow who worked hard for me in Lamar County. Come by the White House while you’re here.”
That was the beginning of a good, strange, and at times humorous relationship between Johnson and Thielman. At Johnson’s request, Calvin even made three trips to Vietnam as an observer; while there, he preached and also visited missionaries and volunteer agencies.
As for my preacher relationship to Johnson, it became very direct at times. At his ranch one evening, he and I sat in his convertible, watching a glorious sunset.
“Mr. President, have you ever personally, definitely received Jesus Christ as your Savior?”
He gazed out across the landscape. “Well, Billy, I think I have.”
I waited quietly for more.
“I did as a boy at a revival meeting.” He paused. “I did reading one of the sermons in my great-grandfather’s book of evangelistic sermons.” Another pause. “I guess I’ve done it several times.”
“When someone says that, Mr. President,” I said carefully, “I don’t feel too sure of it.”
He looked at me with a puzzled expression.
“It’s a once-for-all transaction,” I said. “You receive Christ and He saves you. His Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you’re a child of God.”
He nodded. I did not feel that this was the time to say more, but I knew he would be thinking about what I had said.
Hardly ever did I leave him without his saying, “Preacher, pray for me.” Then he would get down on his knees, whether we were in the ranch house or the White House.
Johnson’s dream was the Great Society, of course, much of it made up of the programs Kennedy had not been able to get through Congress. I am convinced that LBJ genuinely loved the minorities and the poor. He wanted to correct injustice, to see everybody in America housed and fed. “That’s what I think Jesus would do,” was an expression I heard from him more than once. He thought the best expression of his faith was to help humankind.
I was heartsick to read in later biographies of his apparent moral failures. Whatever he might have been guilty of, I was sure he loved Lady Bird and his daughters, Lynda and Luci. His wife in turn was loving and loyal to a larger-than-life husband. He knew he could depend on her because she had tremendous strength of her own. Lady Bird was one of the most remarkable First Ladies ever.
Some years later, when I was in Austin, I phoned her to say hello. She and Luci then drove to the airport in person to pick me up and take me to their home. Lady Bird had a strength and dignity that were never adequately portrayed to the American people. And she could be direct with her husband too. Once when we happened to be with them for dinner, he informed her of a staff appointment he had made, and I saw her drop her fork. “Lyndon, no! You’re asking for trouble.” It’s been my experience that all the First Ladies have had more influence on their husbands than most people have realized.
Powerful and savvy as LBJ was, no doubt he sometimes sacrificed principle for expediency, cutting corners on ethics. After thirty-eight years in public service, he was worn down, despite his gusto and bravado. Stacks of briefs piled high around him every day, demanding to be read before the next morning’s endless conferences and calls. I watched Johnson struggle with all that.
And the daily speeches. I observed him one day walking down the little colonnade alongside the White House Rose Garden, where so many ceremonies take place. Someone handed him a fistful of cards containing the remarks he was to make in five minutes. He reviewed and edited them while he walked.
Working with speechwriters consumed a lot of his time. I was in his bedroom one morning when there were several writers clustered around him. He was really letting them have it: “You guys are trying to get me to say things I don’t believe. This is my speech, not yours! You’re trying to make a liberal of me! I don’t believe all that junk! Now go back and rewrite the thing!” Every word could have been heard down to the end of the corridor.
And then there were the omnipresent media representatives. I read somewhere that when McKinley was President, there were only two White House reporters. Franklin Roosevelt could fit the White House press corps into the Oval Office. At a presidential press conference today, the man at the podium is the target of scores of reporters.
Across the years, some people have urged me to run for the Senate or for governor of North Carolina. President Johnson asked me if I would like to be appointed ambassador somewhere or take a job in his administration. One day, when I was swimming with President Johnson and columnist Marianne Means at Camp David (John Chancellor and Ruth had gone bowling), LBJ spoke pointedly about the forthcoming presidential elections. “Billy, I want you to run for president,” he said. “I’ll put my whole organization behind you.”
I am sure he was joking, but there was a certain seriousness in his expression and tone, and he pressed me on the issue.
“I appreciate it,” I replied, “but God has called me to preach, and I’ll never do anything else as long as I live.”
I admit I was flattered by such suggestions. I confess I even entertained a split-second What if? But God kept me convinced that His calling was superior to any earthly appointment. For some Christians I admired and respected, His call unquestionably was to public service
through elective office. More power to them. The ultimate issue is obedience to God’s plan for each of us.
I tried to be a spiritual counselor to Lyndon Johnson, but I was not his confessor. He said to me that he had done a lot of things of which he was ashamed, although he refused to go into detail. He was, however, able to express his belief: “I believe I am saved and that I will spend eternity in Heaven.” Nothing I knew personally about him contradicted that. Christ came to save sinners, not the righteous, as He Himself said (see Luke 5:32).
One thing the President did confide in me, though, a full year before his term ended, was his decision not to run again. Protests against the Vietnam War—a war he had inherited—had taken their toll on his morale. But that was not the chief factor. Nor was the candidacy of Robert Kennedy. LBJ was not afraid of any competitor except one: death.
Like Winston Churchill, LBJ often received visitors while in bed. He would read, keep his eyes on three TVs, and have a private conversation, all at the same time.
“Billy,” he said one morning in his bedroom, “most all my relatives and ancestors died in their sixties of heart trouble. I’ve already had one heart attack, and I have chest pains now that I don’t tell my doctor about.” I listened with growing anxiety. “I’m not going to run next time because it wouldn’t be fair to the American people. It wouldn’t be fair to my family. It wouldn’t be fair to me.”
Needless to say, I kept that confidential.
President Johnson and I often talked about the Vietnam War, but never about the military strategy involved. He felt we had to get out of it, and he asked me, along with everyone else he knew, just how such a thing could be accomplished.
“Every time I see a casualty list,” he once said to me about the servicemen, “I feel for their fathers and mothers, and sometimes I call them on the phone just to talk to them personally.”
I made two trips to Vietnam to preach to the troops with a few members of my Team during LBJ’s presidency, in 1966 and again in 1968, both during the Christmas season. When I arrived in Vietnam during one of our trips, reporters climbed all over me, trying to learn whether or not I supported the President’s policy. My answer was always the same: “My only desire is to minister to our troops by my prayers and spiritual help wherever I can.”