Just As I Am
Graham, Billy
Just As 1Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham Billy Graham HarperSanFrancisco /76o pages / $28.5o REVIEWED BY David Aikman I f congressional investigators into White House sleep-overs ever...
...This unfeigned quality of innocence more than anything else conveyed to both the mighty and the lowly that Graham really did care about them...
...presidents that has both fascinated and at times annoyed Americans...
...Beginning with Dwight Eisenhower, U.S...
...He has appeared thirty-seven times in the top ten of Gallup's annual list of admired Americans, finishing as high as number two no less than six times...
...Yet it was surely Graham's astonishing determination to see the best in absolutely everybody that continued to give him entry for decades into not just the White House but presidential and monarchical drawing-rooms around the world...
...moment when LBJ promises in 1968 to back Graham if he will run for president...
...Innocence, however, as Graham Greene reminded us, has its price...
...But his well-intentioned remarks upset not just critics in the West...
...We will never know if Kim Il-sung converted before he died...
...Do you have any real hope...
...nonetheless Graham seems to have been crushed by the Nixon tapes, which revealed his friend as a profane, take-no-prisoners infighter...
...Graham has a split-second "what if...
...It was not until the famous 1949 Los Angeles Coliseum crusade, which went on for eight weeks, that Graham became a national superstar...
...The best news, though, is that this "farm-boy from North Carolina," as Graham calls himself in his long-awaited autobiography, didn't have to pay a cent to be admitted...
...Graham avoided sexual scandal, despite painfully long absences from his wife, by simply refusing under any circumstances ever to be alone with another woman...
...At one level, he knew Nixon as a friend more closely than he knew any of the other presidents...
...Even before his autobiography, the tales of the evangelist's encounters with commanders-in-chief were legion: golfing with JFK before the 1961 inauguration, barreling across the Pedernales in LBJ's station wagon, conduct-ing Bible studies for George Bush's Mediterranean-sized family at Kennebunkport, golfing (what else...
...By 1997 he had preached in person to more than zio million people, according to statistics lovingly compiled by his organization's headquarters in Minneapolis...
...Republicans were annoyed that Graham, such a pal to their kind in the Eisenhower '50's, should spend so many hours with Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's...
...The essential bond between us was not political or intellectual," he writes...
...presidents have fallen over themselves to play host to the preacher, occasionally summoning him from Washington hotels late at night when he was already in his pajamas...
...He also admired Nixon as a statesman almost without reservation...
...For all the schtick, Graham was no cultural flash in the pan...
...with Jerry Ford, encouraging Eisenhower to send troops into Little Rock...
...During the drawn-out agonies of Watergate Nixon kept Graham at arm's length to protect him from guilt by association...
...Through the early 195o's Graham and his support team were known for their hand-painted ties, pastel-colored suits and brash approaches to publicity...
...Even Solzhenitsyn took issue with him about the trip...
...the fire-and-brimstone traveling evangelist who evoked this response, Mordecai Ham, had seen more dramatic signs of repentance by wayward sinners...
...rich, the famous, and occasionally the notorious...
...Others, though, will probably take a different view...
...In Graham's case it was something close to naïveté about the ability of the Gospel, at least in his mouth, to disarm adversaries under almost all circumstances...
...Yet for all that, he insists it was not primarily political sympathy that drew him to Nixon...
...Just As 1Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham Billy Graham HarperSanFrancisco /76o pages / $28.5o REVIEWED BY David Aikman I f congressional investigators into White House sleep-overs ever really want to hear from an expert witness, they'll need look no further than Billy Graham...
...His crusade organizers All the Presidents' Man The American Spectator • September 1997 75 worked with any group that would accept the basic Graham message, notwithstanding differences on lesser theological issues...
...Looking back these forty-five years later, considering all that has intervened," he writes almost despondently, "I wonder whether I might have exaggerated his spirituality in my own mind...
...F ar more bizarre were Graham's two trips to the lunatic Communist fastness of Kim Il-sung's North Korea in 1992 and 1994...
...Graham, after all, has been an overwhelming national presence for nearly five decades...
...Their criticisms hurt immensely," he writes...
...He learned, corrected himself, and matured in a refreshingly open-handed way...
...It's no wonder that at least eight presidents, whatever their politics or spiritual leanings before moving to the White House, have repeatedly called upon him for solace and counsel...
...Graham's early years of preaching involved sometimes harrowing travels by air and road across the country to speak for Youth for Christ, an organization founded in 1946 to address the spiritual needs of returning servicemen...
...But nothing upset Americans, especially Democrats, so much as Graham's coziness with Richard Nixon, the perennial demon-figure of the American left...
...There are definitely rich moments and insights: Winston Churchill, still prime minister in 1954, tells the 35-year-old evangelist inside Downing Street, "I am a man without hope...
...Instead, he would focus entirely on the work of evangelism, that is, preaching the Gospel to people who did not necessarily believe it...
...Faithful to the confidences entrusted to him by presidents and princes, Graham by his own admission deliberately omits from his account "juicy tidbits of inside gossip," precisely the material you long for from a man of such extraordinarily rich life-long friendships and acquaintanceships...
...Who knows if it did or did not...
...But that it didn't overwhelm this man is of course why Billy Graham is Billy Graham...
...In fact, Graham has been rejected only by a relentless if tiny core of hardline Protestant fundamentalists, fearful that cooperation with nonfundamentalists will actually bring harm to the kingdom of God...
...Above all, it is Graham's closeness to U.S...
...Graham says he saw Nixon "as a modest and moral man with spiritual sensitivity...
...The temptation to tell all must at times have been overwhelming...
...Undoubtedly he did...
...The outlines of Billy Graham's life are by now so widely known as to be almost taken for granted...
...His surprisingly simple lifestyle, supported by fixed salary rather than "love offerings," also provided reassurance in a landscape littered with the conspicuous consumption of other supposed men of God...
...Arguably no other human being has overnighted there more frequently...
...The interesting question, perhaps not answerable until the North Korean archives are opened, is whether Graham, ever so slightly, dissuaded Pyongyang from war at a time when it was not an implausible outcome of tensions on the Korean peninsula...
...Journalists, historians, and lovers of "juicy tidbits" will certainly come away disappointed that Graham is not more astringent in his recollections...
...Of Nixon Graham says that he had "a quality of attentiveness I have also noted in royalty...
...It was only in the mid-194o's, at war's end, that he discovered his phenomenal power to draw people out of everyday torpor into a conviction that they needed salvation, and in a surprising number of cases, to induce conversions that would actually stick...
...By the age of zo, however, while attending a Bible school in Florida, Graham had an overwhelming sense that his calling in life was not to be a typical Southern Baptist pastor...
...Since the 1950's he has been not just an American icon but one of the extremely few public figures with a seemingly limitless capacity to be empathetic to —and maintain confidence with—the powerful, the DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time correspondent...
...Yet it was undoubtedly the core of character in the man himself, not his simple prominence, that caused Graham's evolution from merely a successful preacher to a man entrusted by a succession of presidents and foreign leaders with intimate and sometimes burdensome details of their lives...
...Seven years in the making, this long, somewhat committee-driven account—there are lengthy sub-sections on helpers and organizational off-shoots — reveals a man who to the very end has kept his confidences as pastor to the presidents...
...Though his evangelistic message didn't change, Graham softened the political edges and took special pains never to criticize other Christian groups, including Roman Catholics, long the devil-figures of choice among American evangelical Protestants...
...Americans, skeptical at first of a possible electronic-age Elmer Gantry in their midst, warmed to Graham and then came to love him...
...Graham's sincerity and energy, along with an almost naive appreciation of virtually all foreigners, transformed the evangelist from a purely American phenomenon into one of the first global personalities of the twentieth century...
...Graham, of course, knew there was: he had simply become convinced that his own version of quiet diplomacy might alleviate it...
...He remains defensive about the harsh criticisms he received for his trip to the Soviet Union in 1982, when he not only blessed by hispresence the charade of a Soviet ecclesiastical "peace" conference, but appeared at times to agree with Soviet propaganda that there was no persecution of religion in the workers' paradise...
...As a genuine Southern farmboy whose childhood by today's standards might be considered almost idyllic (parents who loved each other as well as him, who disciplined him and made him work), his initial conversion at age 16 to evangelical Christianity was not especially emotional at all...
...Rather, it was personal and spiritual...
...If Graham at times would still say things that sounded foolish, he would apologize, or try to explain, then move on...
...Politically, Graham was also a strident anti-Communist, often painting frightening word pictures of end-of-the-world mayhem unless America straightened up and accepted the Gospel...
...Graham's own account of his complex friendship with Nixon is frustrating...
...04 76 September 1997 The American Spectator...
...The legendary order of William Randolph Hearst to his editors to "puff Graham," as well as dramatic photo reporting in Life magazine, ensured that Americans, for one, would henceforth recognize Graham as a preacher with a flair for getting attention...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
