Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  I could see value in a president’s having some trusted friends without a personal agenda who could function unofficially and informally as a sounding board for his ideas. This seemed to be his plan for me. In one of his first weeks in the White House, I told him that if he ever wanted to talk to someone who would never quote him without authorization, I would be glad to be such a person. The presidency was a lonely spot.

  As he settled into his new role, Nixon—whom I no longer addressed as Dick but as Mr. President—took me up on my offer. In the interest of confidentiality, I stopped keeping written notes of our conversations. But, unknown to me, he did keep a record, not only of our conversations but also of staffers’ suggestions that might involve me. He might have taped some of our conversations as well, again without my knowledge or consent. I could wish it otherwise. Some of these exchanges—whether including me directly or involving me peripherally—are on public record in the media or open for inspection in libraries. Some of them appear in Nixon’s own books.

  For example, several of Nixon’s memos to H. R. Haldeman alluding to my activities have been published: encouraging him to invite my friend Johnny Cash to perform country music at the White House, commenting on media coverage of demonstrations, and so on. Nixon also made it clear to Haldeman that he wanted to nurture whatever influence I might have with certain religious leaders. Needless to say, this was not discussed with me at the time.

  It was naive of me, I suppose, to think that such a close relationship with a president would never be used to serve his political ends. But searching my soul now, I honestly believe my intentions were uncomplicated by personal aims or ambitions.

  But occasionally I felt concern about some of Nixon’s staff. Haldeman knew that I was somewhat concerned about the fact that he and John Ehrlichman were Christian Scientists; as such, they did not believe in the reality of sin or human depravity. Perhaps that caused Haldeman, later in his published diary, to give a negative slant to some of the comments he claimed I made, many of which I never did.

  Elsewhere Nixon recounted our being together at his mother’s funeral, our walking on the beach at Key Biscayne, my saying I thought it was his destiny to be President, his receiving a mild rebuke from me about his overblown words when he welcomed back our first moon-walkers, my making a videotape at his request in support of voluntary integration at public schools in the South, even my suggesting casually—and in vain—that he use a TelePrompTer for his speeches.

  Advice-giving, however, was a two-way street between us. He told me in all three of his bids for the presidency not to endorse him or any other candidate. “Don’t let politics divert you from what you’re doing,” he said to me in 1960 as we waited at the tee at the Riviera Country Club. “Your ministry is more important than my election.”

  Once he warned me not to identify myself with the Moral Majority because of the political baggage accompanying that movement. He felt very strongly, as he wrote later, that needed changes in government could come about only through changing people—and that was religion’s bailiwick. Nevertheless, he seemed to have concern about the mixing of religion and politics in movements like the Moral Majority, and I understood his concern.

  One day, while visiting the President, I told him that I was going back to the Far East for some meetings.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “While you’re there, maybe you could meet with all those missionaries that live and work there, and get their ideas as to how we could end this war.” He was almost obsessed with the idea of ending it as quickly as possible. I thought he was right in that goal and agreed to listen for ideas while overseas.

  When I arrived in the Far East in March 1969, I asked some of the missionaries to meet me in Bangkok, which was neutral territory. We convened there for three days, during which they expressed their viewpoints. We prayed a good deal too, of course.

  They were old Vietnamese hands, many of them, having been in the country for decades. Some seemed to feel that the only way to end the war was to “Vietnamize” it—that is, to let the south invade the north from the sea, with American air-power coverage, and to take Haiphong and then Hanoi. Others—those of a more pacifist frame of mind—thought the United States should just pull out.

  One thing was certain: businesses were making millions on the war, and the South Vietnamese, receiving many millions of Amer-ican dollars in aid, were becoming afflicted with such American moral evils as fraud, materialism, and graft.

  “We don’t know how to fight this kind of war,” said a military man to me as we flew in a helicopter over the edge of Cambodia, where I could see smoke rising all around.

  When I returned home, I composed a thirteen-page confidential report to the President. I noted that most of the missionaries were a hawkish bunch, pro-American and pro-Nixon. They feared the outcome of the Paris peace talks. They lamented that American troops, many of them, were hooked on some form of narcotics. They loathed the American businesses that generated corruption among the Vietnamese. And they saw the importation of American consumer goods as destroying Vietnamese culture. What use—if any—he made of the report I never learned.

  I was a kind of listening post for Nixon on many occasions, but one time at least I turned the tables on him. I initiated a discussion with the President and Henry Kissinger with a group of distinguished black clergymen, conservative and liberal. Other than that, I never made it a practice to attend Washington briefings myself, although I was often invited.

  Some nights Nixon would call at our house in Montreat just to talk. Once, about one o’clock in the morning, he asked me to put Ruth on the extension phone. He was depressed about the Cambo-dian crisis, and he told us things about his personal faith that moved us deeply.

  The essential bond between us was not political or intellectual; rather, it was personal and spiritual. Less than two weeks before the election in 1968, I was in New York when he came off the campaign trail to spend a day of rest in his Fifth Avenue apartment. I called and invited him to go with me to Calvary Baptist Church on West Fifty-seventh Street. There we heard Pastor Stephen Olford, whose spiritual insights often blessed me, preach a powerful evangelistic sermon on “The Gospel in a Revolutionary Age.” It was a plea for national as well as personal repentance and conversion. Nixon said afterward, “The press go with me everywhere, and that was a great message for them to hear!”

  Nixon showed his friendliness to me in many personal ways. He came to our home on the mountain. He often referred to the pineapple tea my mother served him when he visited her at home in Charlotte; and he couldn’t forget the fried chicken and apple pie served at our home by our longtime resident housekeeper and friend, Beatrice Long.

  In our games of golf together, he was always willing to coach me. “Now, Billy, your first shot ought to be here,” he might advise, “so that you’ll have a clear shot into the green for your second shot.” When he gave up the game in order to have more time to read and study, my interest in golf tapered off also, and for much the same reason.

  One last golf story. One day I was playing with him while he was Vice President. “Dick,” I remarked casually, “I used a certain set of golf clubs in France when we were there last year, and I hit the ball better than I ever have in my life. I tried to buy them, since they were used clubs, but the pro wouldn’t sell them to me.” At Christ-mas that year, those very clubs were Dick’s gift to me. He had sent to southern France for them.

  And he remembered birthdays. Often, when there was something about me or the family in the papers, he would thoughtfully call on the phone. After he saw our picture in the paper with newborn Ned, he wrote to Ruth that our baby was “a very captivating young man.” When something big was at stake, like my trip to China in 1988 (years after he had left the White House), he helped set it up through the crucial contacts he had there in government circles.

  Nixon’s manner in conversation was very instructive to me. For one thing, he had a quality of attentiveness I have noticed a
lso in royalty. When he talked with someone, he often looked them right in the eye, listened intently to what they said, and made them feel they were the only person in the world. He was very good at drawing people out with questions. “What do you think?” he asked me times without number. “Do you agree with that?” “Let’s sit and talk a bit.” “I want to throw a few ideas at you and see what you think.” Rarely did he reveal his own convictions.

  One time, before Nixon became President, Ruth and I were invited to Jack Paar’s home in New York with the Nixons. At the end of a rather long evening we returned to the Nixons’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. We spent a few minutes together, but it was getting late and we had to leave. Dick saw us to the elevator—why the freight elevator, I can’t remember, but it was hung with quilted padding—and we pressed the button. As I recall, on its way down the elevator stalled between floors and refused to budge, so I rang and rang the emergency bell. Dick finally heard it and immediately summoned the doorman, who came and helped Ruth and me climb out. There is no dignified way to crawl out of a stalled elevator, but Dick by that time was in his pajamas and a bathrobe, so I suppose we were all glad no one was there with a camera!

  And there was Watergate, which some people thought rubbed off on my reputation. When my name did come up slightly in the proceedings, I called my North Carolina neighbor, Senator Sam Ervin.

  “Senator Sam,” I said, “why did you allow my name to come up in the Watergate hearings? You know what they said about me wasn’t true.”

  “I’ll correct it,” he responded.

  And he did that, in no uncertain terms.

  The Watergate break-in, an undeniable personal and national tragedy, should never have happened in the first place. And it should have been laid to rest long before now. If the Lord were as unforgiving to us sinful and disobedient humans as we are to each other, even the best among us wouldn’t stand a chance at the Great Judgment. It may not be in the Bible, but there is God’s own truth in Alexander Pope’s proverb, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

  The whole library of literature that has been written detailing the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up has not explained for me what came over President Richard Nixon at that time. I deliberately chose the words came over because I cannot accept in my heart that his conduct and conversation during that crisis sprang from the deep wells of his character. The evidence on the tapes and the testimony of many associates leave no doubt that he was culpable. I did not absolve him—but neither did I judge him.

  To me, the Watergate affair seemed to be a brief parenthesis in a good man’s lengthy political career—a parenthesis that I couldn’t understand. Nixon held such noble standards of ethics and morality for the nation. “The hope of America,” he once said to me, “is the working people.” Furthermore, he held a high view of the presidency as a public trust. The tarnishing of that office by Watergate probably caused him more pain than what happened to his own reputation.

  At Nixon’s second inauguration in 1973, Bill Marriott, founder and head of the Marriott hotel and restaurant chain, was chair of the gala affair, as he had been in 1969. He had become one of my closest friends and had appointed me honorary chair of the inauguration symphony concert at the Kennedy Center. For that event, Ruth and I dressed up in our best. We arrived early, for a small preconcert reception, and sat with the Agnews and the Charlton Hestons for a while.

  Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller were at the small reception too. I had known Nelson since my early days with Youth for Christ; Bob Van Kampen was a good friend of his and had introduced us over lunch. Nelson’s second wife, “Happy,” motioned for me to come to her table. As I stood there, all of a sudden she thrust a glass of champagne in my hand. Seeing the photographers moving into position, I immediately passed the glass to Ruth, thanked Mrs. Rockefeller, and said I did not take champagne on such occasions.

  “You’re as clever as I’ve heard,” she said with a laugh.

  When President and Mrs. Nixon arrived, Ruth and I went to greet them officially. Later I told Ruth that I did not think Nixon looked at all well; he did not look himself. His eyes betrayed that something was wrong. I had no clue at that time, however, that Watergate was beginning to burden him.

  He and Pat sat directly in front of Ruth and me at the concert. When I reached over his shoulder and handed him a program, he shoved it aside, letting it fall to the floor. Pat leaned over and whispered something in his ear. He turned around and profusely apologized to me.

  In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1). Most of us fail to read what He said next: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (verse 2).

  On the day the contents of the White House tapes were made public and I heard the President’s words, I was deeply distressed. The thing that surprised and shook me most was the vulgar language he used. Never, in all the times I was with him, did he use language even close to that. I felt physically sick and went into the seclusion of my study at the back of the house. Inwardly, I felt torn apart.

  I did not shrink from commenting publicly on Watergate. I wrote two op-ed pieces on it at the request of the New York Times, gave a long interview to Christianity Today, and spoke about it freely on The Hour of Decision radio broadcasts and appearances on such television programs as the Today show. I called the whole affair sordid, describing it as a symptom of a deeper moral crisis that affected other nations besides our own.

  Lots of people did not like what I said. One minister in Arizona wrote to me in December 1973 to tell me that my remarks—I had said that cheating, lying, and betrayal of trust were “mistakes”—were “insipid.” I thought they were sins in God’s sight, of course, not just mistakes, but at that date a lot of people were being damned by rumors, judged before all the evidence was in.

  I did not have to distance myself from Watergate; I wasn’t close to it in the first place. The President had not confided in me about his mounting troubles, and after the full story eventually broke, he all but blocked my access to him during the rest of his presidency. As I have said, I wanted to believe the best about him for as long as I could. When the worst came out, it was nearly unbearable for me.

  He and I discussed Watergate only once, at his home in San Clemente about two or three months after his resignation. He told me nothing, however, that had not already been said publicly.

  The problem with Watergate was not so much the break-in as the cover-up. Nixon was trying to protect the men who had worked with him faithfully and for a long time. He tried to use his office, prestige, and power to save them; but in so doing, a cancer began to develop in the President and on the presidency itself.

  During most of the hearings and other Watergate matters in 1973, we were in Korea, South Africa, England, and Switzerland. One journalist suggested that I had fled America because of Water-gate and gone into hiding in Europe! That was not true at all; those events had been planned years in advance.

  While in Lausanne, I received a letter from Pat Nixon asking if I would bring the 1973 Christmas message at the White House service in December. I accepted. Most of the President’s inner circle were present at that service. I preached on repentance and made my message as strong as I possibly could, although I mentioned no names.

  In a Christianity Today interview published on January 4, 1974, I answered a number of questions on the subject of Watergate. At that point, I did not know all the allegations against the White House. Nor, indeed, did the public. I could not pass judgment on any of the alleged culprits without knowing more facts, but I readily admitted that a misguided obsession to change the world might have driven Nixon partisans to wrong actions. Younger men heady with power and privilege would be especially vulnerable to such action.

  One thing I did keep urging upon Nixon privately was to be more forthright in his expression of spiritual conviction. That came through in a reproving l
etter I wrote to him after he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 1974; Nixon later reprinted that letter in his book From: The President. “While I know you have a personal and private commitment, yet at some point many are hoping and praying that you will state it publicly. . . . In taking such a stand you would find the deepest personal satisfaction in your own life.”

  I had some misgivings about Nixon’s religious understanding, based on what glimpses I got, but then he was a layman in such matters, not a biblical scholar. I’ve never doubted the reality of his spiritual concern, though, or the sincerity of his identification with the evangelical position toward the authority of the Bible and the person of Christ. He told me, “I believe the Bible from cover to cover.”

  Shortly before the 1968 election, I welcomed the Nixons and Mark Hatfield’s wife, Antoinette, to the Crusade in Pittsburgh. Then, on May 28, 1970, he came as President to give a word of greeting at our Crusade in Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His remarks were not as forthright a witness for Christ as I had wished for, but I rationalized that he was extremely tired from carrying many burdens. In our pluralistic society, he also probably felt he had to be very careful not to alienate people of other faiths at that delicate point in history.

  In the crowd of 75,000 that night were 300 antiwar protesters sitting together. When Nixon began speaking, they stood up as a group and chanted, “Peace now! Peace now!” When he paused, they quieted down, only to start up again the instant he did. He outlasted them after a few minutes of this and finished his remarks.

  Then our beloved Ethel Waters got up to sing. She wagged her finger at that group and spoke to them with a humility and authority uniquely her own. “You chillun there, you hush now!” she shouted. “If I was sittin’ by you,” she said, bringing her hands together with a loud slap, “I’d give you a smack!” The audience was stunned. “Then I would hug you and tell you that I loved you,” she added.