Just as he wasn’t: New Billy Graham biography carefully shades the truth

Given the enormous financial and investigative resources available to Time magazine reporters Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, it shouldn’t be too much to expect historical accuracy in The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House (Center Street, 2007). Then again, Time has been an uncritical cheerleader for Graham’s ministry since the day in 1950 when publisher Henry Luce visited the young minister, then a houseguest at South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond’s mansion, and decided to join William Randolph Hearst’s efforts to “puff Graham.” Time has a substantial investment in Graham’s ministry, having run nearly 600 stories about him over the years.

Unfortunately, historical accuracy isn’t one of the strong points of a book that is otherwise a pleasant enough read. People make mistakes, of course, but when they tend to fall in the same direction, one begins to suspect a hidden agenda. On the other hand, simple sloppiness can’t be ruled out, as when they place Graham at Bob Jones College in Greenville, S. C., for his first year of higher education. When Graham dropped out during his freshman year that school was located in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The subtitle tells you all you need to know about the story between the covers. The book begins with Graham’s rocky relationship with Harry S. Truman and ends with his fatherly embrace of George W. Bush. Those attracted to the preacher will find nothing to dislike, but also little that is new. This is the same generous tale told by Graham’s publicity team in countless books, articles, movies, advertisements, TV appearances and, of course, crusades. According to this account, from Eisenhower forward, all of the presidents have sought Graham’s counsel in varying degrees, and discovered a deep well of comfort and spiritual wisdom. The authors make mock forays into Graham’s political mistakes and spend a long while on his purported close friendship with and later betrayal by Richard Nixon, but the poking is gentle and Graham emerges as an older but wiser hero.

The mistakes and omissions are telling, however. Careful to paint Nixon as the agent of darkness, they write: “The beloved Ike, Nixon charged, was ‘a far more complex and devious man than most people realized.’” Thus they imply that Nixon was even nasty to sweet old Dwight Eisenhower. But this can only be a deliberate misquote. In his book Six Crises Nixon actually concluded the sentence “and in the best sense of those words.” His intention was to praise Eisenhower.

It is important for Nixon to be the sinner because the preacher the authors have chosen to present was supposedly suckered into long-term support for Tricky Dick, and was devastated when he learned that Nixon had deceived him. He had attested to Nixon’s high moral character, repeatedly and publicly for years, assuring voters that Nixon could be trusted. Was he rocked by personal betrayal or the public exposure of his own error? He had turned over mailing lists from his ministries to the Nixon campaigns and used his personal friendship with Lyndon Johnson to undercut Democrat candidates Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. He wasn’t just a friend to a crook, he was complicit. Much to his enduring dismay, his back-room politicking had been tape-recorded and would come back to embarrass him over and over again through ensuing years. Nor have all of Nixon’s notorious tapes yet been released.

There is mention of Graham’s endorsement of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s cause—rooting out alleged communists in the U.S. government—but no mention that Graham was a diehard supporter of the bombastic Senator himself. When the U.S. Senate censured McCarthy for his outragious accusations and outright lies, Graham condemned the Senate, not the Senator, and said the censure lent “disgrace to the dignity of American statesmanship.”

Graham’s support for civil rights is painted as enthusiastic and heartfelt, but his actual record is far from clear. We are treated to Graham’s oft-repeated chestnut about tearing down ropes between black and white seating at a crusade in 1952, without mention of the segregated crusade later that year in Jackson, Mississippi, where he told the press, “We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister.” Nor is there mention of the all-white week-long event in Asheville the following year, an exclusionary policy which he claimed he had no power to change.

The authors repeat Graham’s assertion that Martin Luther King, Jr., endorsed his arms-length approach to integration, without corroborating evidence, and neglect Graham’s reaction to “I Have a Dream” in 1963. Graham conducted a press conference the next morning and said, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” As late as 1991, Graham maintained an active membership in the then-discriminatory Biltmore Forest Country Club which had gone so far as to eject a black child from its pool in 1988, though the little boy was the guest of a member. When confronted by WNC activist Monroe Gilmour, Graham’s office responded that he “didn’t have time to involve himself in local issues.”

Concerning King the authors also claim that he delivered volumes by Gandhi disguised in Billy Graham book jackets to imprisoned Freedom Riders in Mississippi. This is another example of either the authors’ incautious research or eagerness to hitch Graham’s wagon to King’s star. According to Taylor Branch, writing in Pillar of Fire (which the authors cite as their reference), the transporter of disguised books was Rev. Edwin King, a white preacher of no known relation to MLK.

As for Vietnam, Gibbs and Duffy offer us a conflicted Graham trying to play both sides of the aisle. While they mention the “Confidential Missionary Plan for Ending the Vietnam War” which Graham sent to Nixon, they carefully avoid that plan’s deadly advice to bomb dikes in North Vietnam—an act which would likely have killed upward of a million civilians. Bombing of dikes has been deemed a war crime since Nuremberg. Many years later Graham was called to task when the confidential plan became public and he claimed it hadn’t been his idea. But when Nixon ignored the plan, Graham had sent copies to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, again urging action and asking why the war shouldn’t be moved north. Not long afterward, Kissinger ordered carpet-bombing of Cambodia, commanding, “Anything that flies on anything that moves,” a clear blueprint for genocide. Graham had helpfully pre-approved such escalation.

Years later Billy and Ruth Bell Graham spent a few vacation days at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the authors report Billy conducted a Bible session one evening and intrigued young George. George supposedly sought further conversation the next day and was led to Jesus. Somehow the authors missed the story told by other biographers, that the 39-year-old Bush crashed a parental party and drunkenly insulted one of Barbara’s friends whereupon the parents decided serious intervention was necessary. By those accounts, Billy was called in to fix the problem and took the wayward son for a walk on the beach. For the deep background on Dubya’s spiritual life and how he was saved, Gibbs and Duffy turn to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Rove even assured them that Graham’s meeting with and endorsement of Dubya in Florida a couple of days before the 2000 election was a lucky coincidence. Whatever you say Karl.

The authors make much of Graham’s historical uniqueness and state that no other religious leader is likely to have such enduring access to American presidents, repeatedly spinning the tale that the presidents sought him out. That’s always been Graham’s version of the story and the one he offered in his autobiography, Just As I Am. The record shows that it was Graham who initiated every contact save that with John F. Kennedy, whose father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, advised the president-elect to kiss and make up with one of the principal authors of the anti-Catholic movement that nearly cost Kennedy the White House.

Graham worked his carefully accumulated roster of business and political contacts to arrange audiences with heads of state, sent urgent telegrams and fawning letters and made himself readily available to place a holy thumbprint on policy choices whenever a sitting president needed cover. At one time or another he told each of them that they had been chosen by God and informed most of them that he regarded each in turn as the necessary savior of Western Civilization at “this critical time.”

Lest it be overlooked elsewhere as it is in The Preacher and the Presidents, Graham’s nonprofit enterprises have profited nicely from the high profile that presidential palavering has, in no small part, afforded him. While his annual personal income from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association only totalled a bit over $500,000 in recent years, he enjoyed a well-appointed “log cabin” estate in Montreat with high tech communications gear and a swimming pool, a vacation home in the posh country club community of Pauma Valley, California, and controlled tax-exempt properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars in North Carolina alone. Nor do these figures include income from books, recordings and television appearances, and may not include the receipts of the individual LLCs created for each of his crusades. To top it off, he bragged that he “never paid for a suit or a hotel room,” though he seems to have preferred lodging in various mansions, both public and private, to the common discomforts of life in commercial rooms.

The Preacher and the Presidents offers comforting fiction disguised as history. It is, without doubt, a book written for believers.