Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  The success of mass evangelism, Niebuhr said, “depends upon oversimplifying every issue of life.” Billy Graham’s preaching, he added, “promised new life, not through painful religious experience but merely by signing a decision card. Thus, a miracle of regeneration is promised at a painless price by an obviously sincere evangelist. It is a bargain.”

  Niebuhr’s first point was perhaps relevant; his next one was questionable. Though Billy Graham said his “present crusade is aimed at New York City,” Niebuhr wrote, “relatively few New Yorkers attend the Graham meetings. The bulk of his nightly audience comes from out of town.”5 Had his assertion been correct—and it was not—one wonders if it really mattered whether the people flowing into Madison Square Garden were from New York City, Yonkers, or New Jersey. During the services following the July 1 article, members of the audience were asked to raise their hands if they lived in New York City. At least eighty percent of the people did.

  Attacks also came from extreme liberals of various denominations who claimed that Billy’s crusade was a sort of religious circus where the evangelist instead of the Holy Spirit was the ringmaster. Criticism came from the extreme Fundamentalists who condemned Billy for cooperating with “Christ deniers, radicals, and liberals,” referring to the high-powered businessmen and clergy who made up the crusade’s Executive Committee. The attacks upset Ruth. She ventilated her anger in a journal, then tore out the pages and burned them because “God would give me no peace of heart. We must leave them to Him. These men are, after all, God’s anointed. May we like David refuse to lift our hand (or tongue) against them.”

  One of the most noted developments in Billy himself, one that was largely responsible for his losing some supporters and winning others, was his growing ecumenism. His father-in-law was partly responsible for this change. Billy later claimed that he “never took a major step without asking [Nelson Bell’s] counsel and advice.” Bell’s influence, along with Billy’s own experience as a minister, had given him a respect and understanding for different denominations. “Even though I was a Southern Baptist,” Billy recalled, “I still had an independent streak in me that came from my days at the Florida Bible Institute. Dr. Bell showed me that the strength of my future ministry would be in the church. He actually taught me to be a churchman.”

  Ironically, Billy’s toleration for other denominations stopped just outside his front door. If someone else chose to be a Presbyterian or a Methodist, that was fine with him, as long as that someone wasn’t his wife. For fourteen years he had listened to the badgering of his Baptist friends who thought it was mighty sorry if a man’s wife wouldn’t join his church. He tended to agree and had tried to tug Ruth away from the Presbyterian Church more than once. But pulling her away from that tradition was like uprooting kudzu. No matter how much or how hard he yanked, it was always there, hearty and happy come rain or sun.

  The attacks were tenacious and clever, and not all of them were made by Billy. Once a Baptist friend appeared for breakfast and spent the morning proselytizing. After each battle, Ruth remained steadfast and smiling like Mona Lisa. Finally realizing what he was up against, Billy jokingly announced that he would give a hundred dollars to whoever could make a Baptist out of her. Though the reward would forever go uncollected, more than a few Baptists offered to split the money with her if she would allow them to immerse her.

  Not everyone appreciated the role Nelson Bell and his daughter Ruth were playing in Billy’s life. In 1954, Dr. Bell and Billy had worked together to found the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. The magazine had a rather unusual beginning. One morning in 1954, after a sleepless night spent at his desk, Billy came downstairs and made an abrupt announcement to Ruth.

  “God has given me a vision,” he said, “the plans for a new magazine which I am to call Christianity Today.

  “The magazine is necessary, for there is not an intellectually respected magazine for evangelicals” in existence at the time. He immediately shared his idea with Dr. Bell and found to his amazement that his father-in-law had been thinking about the same thing. Working side by side, the two men turned their dream into a reality. As Ruth recalled, “I watched and listened as my husband and my father talked and planned, marveling at the vision and wisdom God had given them, each one respecting the other, each one so beautifully balancing the other.” With Dr. Bell as its executive editor, the magazine’s first issues had begun circulating less than a year before the New York crusade.

  To some observers, the organization was a dynasty, not a business. It was built of old, trusted friends who had banded together over the years. “The BGEA wasn’t formed,” Ruth often asserted, “it simply evolved much as a family evolves.” Over the years, she would develop warm friendships with the wives of Billy’s associates. “Though scattered around the world,” Ruth noted, “we share a sense of family love and fellowship. There is mutual support, and any of us facing some difficulty is backed by the others’ prayers. If one of our children strays, the prayers of not one but dozens of mothers will follow that child.”

  Jerry Beavan, who helped plan the early crusades and who would resign from the BGEA in 1963, recalled that he resented Billy’s treating Ruth and her father as his chief advisers. To him, it was rather like Jimmy Carter’s asking Amy for advice. “It’s no secret,” Beavan said, “that I, in all my years, didn’t agree always with their advice and didn’t always feel they were the best people to advise him on anything.” Ruth, he said, had grown up in China, then retreated to the sheltered world of Wheaton College, and had finally “retired” to the mountaintop in Montreat. Dr. Bell, meanwhile, had spent most of his life in China, “which is not exactly in the mainstream of the world’s affairs. So I felt that those two were not the best ones to advise Billy on how to conduct his life, his ministry, his gradually growing world influence. I felt [theirs] was a very narrow view. There were times my advice didn’t concur with theirs and Billy almost always took theirs. And if you’re very pragmatic and look at success, it must have worked. He’s done pretty well.”

  On Saturday, June 15, Ruth returned to Montreat for several days and was greeted with the chilling news that her four children and a friend had plunged over the mountain in the jeep. There were no serious injuries, just cuts, scratches, bruises, and one fractured arm. The jeep was virtually demolished. The same day, however, there was a photograph in the local newspaper of a Thunderbird and a twenty-ton tractor-trailer that had collided in nearby O’teen. The car’s three occupants had been killed. She couldn’t help feeling as though her own family had been spared. “I had cold chills to think what might have happened,” she wrote. “My heart was speechless with gratitude.”

  That same day, she found a note on her pillow telling her to telephone Darlene Tolliver: Joe Tolliver was dead. He had died alone, a hand groping toward the telephone as though he were trying to cry for help.

  On Sunday, Ruth drove to the Tolliver home to pay her respects to his family. The living room was small but well kept. The casket was heavy and lustrous, and she stood looking at it, thinking about a day many years ago when Billy had knelt on the floor beside Tolliver’s bed, praying for him, leading him to Christ. Tolliver had won the war then, and lost every skirmish leading up to what he knew was to be his reward. It was a glory without honor.

  At the small hillside cemetery, Bud Lominac lurched up the hill toward the church, his body twitching uncomfortably in his Sunday suit. Ruth headed toward him up the grassy slope and took his big, rough hand. As in the case of the Thunderbird and her jeep, she was again confronted with a fatality and a close call. Lominac had not changed his hard-drinking ways, and yet he had been spared Tolliver’s fate. His turn might be next.

  “God loves you wherever you are, Mr. Lominac,” she told him with feeling. “Whatever happens to you, remember God loves you.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miz Graham,” he muttered, staring blankly past her. “How’s Franklin?”

  1. “Dedicated Deciders in Billy Graham Crusade,
” Life, July 1, 1957, 92.

  2. Curtis Mitchell, God in the Garden (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 32.

  3. Ibid., 36-37.

  4. Dorothy Kilgallen, “D. Kilgallen Goes behind the Scenes to Tell Life Story,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 20, 1957.

  5. “Dedicated Deciders in Billy Graham Crusade,” Life, July 1, 1957, 52.

  13

  CHAPTER

  House on the Mountain

  RING AROUND THE ROSIE

  When God asks someone to do something for Him entailing sacrifice, He makes up for it in surprising ways. God has not let me down. Though He had led Bill all over the world to preach the gospel, He had not forgotten the little family in the mountains of North Carolina. I have watched with gratitude as God has guided each child.

  —Ruth Bell Graham

  Beside the bedroom fireplace bordered in old blue and white Dutch tiles, the empty antique cradle waited. The wedding veil had disappeared long ago. On January 12, 1958, Ruth’s fifth and last child was born. She named him Nelson Edman, or Ned, after her father and Dr. V. Raymond Edman, former president of Wheaton College. In an eerie fulfillment of her dream of being a “pioneer missionary alone,” she found she was virtually on her own in the large responsibility of raising a family. She would have to be both mother and father.

  Ruth was no longer the young bride whose feelings were easily hurt. She had learned to laugh at most things, including Billy’s chronic preoccupation. One day the Grahams were expecting guests for dinner and she asked him, “What would you like to have on the menu?”

  “Uh-huh,” came the reply.

  “I thought we’d start off with tadpole soup,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And there’s some lovely poison ivy growing in the next cove which would make a delightful salad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For the main dish, I could try roasting some of those wharf rats we’ve been seeing around the smokehouse lately, and serve them with boiled crabgrass and baked birdseed.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And for dessert we could have mud soufflé and …”

  His eyes finally focused. “What were you saying about wharf rats?” he asked.1

  She still had her opinions, and Billy remained unaccustomed to a woman countering him. One day, the two of them were arguing over something his aide T. W. Wilson had suggested. Finally, in frustration, Billy blurted, “I spend more time with him than I do with you!”

  “And you haven’t had five children with him” was her rejoinder.

  Ruth began modeling her home after the familiar, the nest she had known in her childhood in China. She attempted to revisit her own childhood, playing many of the same games with her children and emphasizing the same values. There were interesting parallels. The Bells were less than two miles away, and Ruth saw them daily when she wasn’t traveling. To the children Nelson Bell was an attentive, caring grandfather who advised and sometimes disciplined them while Billy was away.

  Montreat, like Ruth’s childhood compound, was a Presbyterian oasis populated largely of retired and furloughed missionaries, clergymen, and people who simply wished to live in a secure, peaceful environment. With the exception of some of the students at Montreat-Anderson, the small junior college clustered around Lake Susan, most Montreaters were genteel Southern Presbyterians. The town had a zero crime rate, according to North Carolina annual crime statistics. There was only one town drunk, as best anybody knew.

  In the beginning Ruth would rely on the childrearing principles of her missionary parents, and she assumed the results would be the same. But soon enough she discovered that the differences between the environments were considerable. In China, much that wasn’t Christian was blatantly evil and unattractive. In the world of Ruth’s children, sin wasn’t always easily recognizable. Often, it was attractive. Ruth could not completely shield her family from the world beyond the Montreat gate, and there were times when she felt the bite of frustration.

  With the exception of the usual childish spats, her childhood home in Qingjiang had been a happy, peaceful one, as she recalled. Her new home sometimes seemed unmanageable and unsettled. The children bickered and pecked at each other. “We can lick this evil,” she confided in her journal in 1959. “With His help we will. A happy, well-disciplined, well-ordered, loving home is our spiritual right.” In fact, there were no rats or scorpions to battle, no bandits shooting guns or Japanese bombers droning over the roof day and night. As it was, the flying squirrels and hoot owls offered little diversion for restless young minds.

  During Ruth’s early childhood, she rarely went a day without seeing both parents. The dangers and hardships common to the China mission field served to bring people closer. But now, Father’s long and frequent absences and his fame threatened to fragment the family. His often neglected and overloaded wife might easily have become resentful and demanding, evolving into a selfish, brittle woman whose love was conditional. Ruth’s own childrearing philosophy began to evolve, and it was rather simple. She did her best to make each child feel special. She respected their individual rights and considered herself their guardian, not their owner. “Each child had to be dealt with differently,” she recalled telling herself.

  In her journals she often reminded herself of George MacDonald’s warning that the quickest way to make someone bad is to try to make him good. She could, she later discovered, change only herself. She wanted to be an example, not a judge, and the focus of her personal life became the old rolltop desk in her bedroom. Cluttering it were numerous translations of the Bible and concordances, devotional books, notepads, and her poetry and sentiments written in her distinctive hand. It was here that Ruth came from time to time throughout each day, with a cup of coffee. She would sit and study and remind herself of her “reference point,” as she would say.

  Prior to the mid-fifties Ruth had been able to help Billy by traveling with him whenever possible, leaving the children with the Bells. After the 1954 Harringay crusade, she realized she could not afford to stay away from the children for long stretches. When she returned from London in the late spring of 1954 she found a resentful Franklin and an even more insecure and unmanageable GiGi.

  Monday, June 14, of that year was typical. Ruth loaded GiGi, Anne, and Bunny into the jeep and drove them up to the cabin below the then-unfinished house. They sat in the sun and read, picked cherries, and hunted turtles. Hanging a blue and white bedspread from the loft for a curtain, GiGi and Anne performed skits based on nursery rhymes. Ruth and Bunny were the audience. When Anne performed “Little Miss Muffet,” GiGi climbed a ladder to act out the “spider beside her” and hurled a lump of manure.

  “It’s the only thing I could find that was brown and we could pretend was a spider,” GiGi explained as her mother scrubbed a teary Anne.

  One naughty scene led to another, and Mother ended GiGi’s escapades with a spanking. After a supper of hot dogs roasted over the fire, she read the children a Bible story and GiGi began asking questions.

  “Mommy,” she asked, “if I die, will I go to heaven?”

  “You tell me,” Ruth replied.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Want me to tell you how you can know?”

  “I don’t think you can know for sure.”

  “I do,” Ruth said.

  “OK, how?”

  “First, you know you are a sinner, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I know that.” GiGi was quite sure of this.

  “Then you confess your sins to Him.”

  “I do that. You know when I got so mad at you this afternoon I told Him I was sorry three times just to make sure, in case He didn’t hear me the first time.”

  “He heard you the first time,” Ruth said. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

  “Are you sure He heard me?”

  “I know He did,” Ruth said.

  “But it doesn’t say GiGi.�
�

  “It says whosoever.”

  GiGi said nothing and her mother continued. “Now you have done the first two. You have become a child of God. You are born into God’s family, just as eight years ago you were born into our family. Your body was born then, your soul is born again now.”

  “But I still am not sure,” GiGi said.

  “GiGi, would you call God a liar?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But you are. He said if you confess He will forgive. If you believe, you have eternal life. You have done both, but you don’t think He will keep his promise. That is the same as calling Him a liar.” Ruth held up a piece of paper and said, “Whoever wants it can have it.”

  GiGi snatched it from her fingers.

  “What makes you think I said you?” Ruth demanded.

  “You said whoever,” GiGi let her know.

  “Exactly.”

  At bedtime they knelt and prayed, and GiGi exclaimed, “I feel like a new person.”

  The next day, GiGi the new person skipped down Assembly Drive to the Montreat gate and uprooted a dozen water lilies that had been planted in time for the arrival of the season’s first tourists and conferees. Ruth escorted her to the town manager’s office, the evidence wilting in a tight little fist. GiGi’s face was pale as she worried aloud that she was going to be thrown into jail. Her mother said nothing to dispel the fear. GiGi confessed and apologized, and as she was tucked into bed that night, she plaintively asked, “Mommy, have I been good enough today to go to heaven?”

  “Now how much,” Ruth wrote at the time, “should I impress on her Salvation by Grace when really for a child of her disposition one could be tempted to think salvation by works would be more effective on her behavior?”

  The training of the Graham children began early in more ways than one. Days started with a Bible lesson and devotions at the breakfast table. Education was a priority, and when GiGi turned twelve she was sent to a boarding school in Florida. The results were mixed. Going away at such a young age added to GiGi’s insecurity, ironically repeating her mother’s own homesickness when she had been sent to Japan. GiGi was frightened. She missed her family terribly. It all served to prepare her for marrying and moving to Switzerland at the age of seventeen, just as Ruth’s separations in her own early life steeled her for what lay ahead.