A letter in this week’s Mountain Xpress reminded me of an essay that was aired on WNCW and in print nationally about 15 years ago (and updated in 2002 to reflect the bee catastrophe then unfolding). (Thanks to Kristen MacLeod for her lovely tribute to the Mourning Cloak.)

On a wing and a prayer
by Cecil Bothwell

Last August we had out-of-state visitors on our mountain. They were impressed with the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains and enjoyed the relative cool above 3000 feet. But the highest praise and loudest exclamations were reserved for the insects.
“So many butterflies!” they exclaimed.
Fair enough. We do enjoy a great diversity of beautiful butterflies. If that were the only comment you might think that we just happen to have more members of the order Lepidoptera here than they do back in flatland. But listen to the next line.
“I haven’t seen so many since I was a child!” said one. “We don’t have butterflies like these anymore,” lamented another.
Do you hear the drumbeat of death in those words? No? Well, you should. There is a slow change moving across the land and it is at minimum profound and disturbing. It may be a catastrophe.
Pollinator populations are collapsing in many places around the world. That is, the insects, birds and mammals that fertilize flowers by transferring pollen from one to the next, are in sharp decline. Last year the disappearance of honey bees in the mid-west and Carolinas made the news, but honeybees are only the most familiar of the pollinator species.
Without pollination we and the rest of the animals on earth would lose our lunches. And our breakfasts and dinners. Most flowering plants need help with fertilization of their seeds, and the animal forms that have co-evolved with them do the job perfectly. There are butterflies and moths with long probosci that can reach deep into tubular flowers, and hummingbirds with a similar long reach. Many varieties of bats pollinate night blooming flowers while they feed on nectar. And thousands of species of bees, from tiny bright colored sweat bees to the huge dark carpenter sort, move pollen grains from anthers to stigmas on weeds and trees and orchids and peas. There are beetles and ants and even mosquitos who each have an important role to play.
In many cases flowers and the critters that fertilize them are very tightly entwined, one-on-one, so that neither can survive without the other. Others depend on just a few species of plants or animals. In every case they are part of the great chain of life which created and maintains the living world we inhabit.
But, back to the butterflies. Why did my guests react so strongly? They live in Ohio in a residential area between a city and surrounding farms. Because of pesticide sprays on lawns and fields, wild insects and flowers have disappeared. Many of the plants that sustain butterflies and moths are considered weeds and are subject to eradication programs.
On top of the chemical assault, habitats are fragmented by cleared fields and lawns that replace native vegetation with imported monocultures. If a butterfly, or a hummingbird or bat for that matter, cannot find a high enough concentration of food in an area, it will move on, or starve to death.
The problem would be merely aesthetic if we lost life forms that we find beautiful and appealing. But our understanding of the web of life is still very rudimentary. We have only a sketchy appreciation of the intricacy of plant and animal interactions that maintain soil fertility, atmospheric oxygen levels, water purity and other chemical systems that are the foundation of life. We know that humans cannot live alone without any other species, but we have no clue which species those might be. Pollination is the crucial juncture for all flowering plants, and the disappearance of pollinator animals will impact our lives in ways we cannot foresee. Yet we continue to abet an extinction spasm that will take hundreds or thousands of critters and plants out of the loop forever.
You can help. Encourage weeds and wildflowers. Let part of your lawn go wild. Learn to live with wasps and bees and beetles and ants and even mosquitos. Repel insects with screens, long sleeves or incense instead of killing them. If you garden choose organic controls. In silviculture avoid herbicides and allow space for mixed stands. Oppose clearcuts. Remind others of the vital services living systems provide us, and the urgent need to protect whole natural communities. Learn more by contacting the Forgotten Pollinator Project. Email .
If you marvel that a fragile Monarch butterfly migrates thousands of miles, or that a delicate swallowtail survives a tornado, remember this: those tissue paper wings very likely carry our own future as well.

(This essay is included in Gorillas in the Myth: A Duck Soup Reader, Brave Ulysses Books, Second edition 2008)

I’m releasing the latest update of my city guide, Finding your way in Asheville, at Malaprop’s, this Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. But I’ll also be reading from my about-to-be-released short story collection, Can we have archaic and idiot? Here’s one of those quirky tales, written in 1998:

Hard Cases Make Bad Law

• Copts and Robert
It wasn’t that Bob particularly minded the three Egyptians. He had had roommates before, in college. He wasn’t racist. He rather liked the smell of exotic foods being prepared, and the excited chatter of foreign tongues: Arabic, he believed, though it might as well have been Swahili or Greek. If their coffee was a little strong, so be it. He had offered them organic Kona, they preferred French Roast Arabica.
Go figure.
It wasn’t that he even particularly minded knowing that deep inside, practicing or delinquent, devout or agnostic, they held to the One Nature business as a cultural norm—their Savior’s humanness hopelessly lost in the divine as a wine drop in the sea.
Hey, you’re brought up in a culture, it is going to affect you. It affected him. It affects everybody. There isn’t an end run around it.
He wouldn’t call them “monophysite” to their faces, but, you know (and I know), they were. Insofar as they didn’t appear to understand a word of English, it wouldn’t make a small hill of weeny beans what he called them, if he were so impolite. He was not. They, too, were polite in their alien way: nodding, even bowing a little, and smiling broadly.
They didn’t carry on late or wake him early. Didn’t leave dishes in the sink or a ring in the tub. No clothes draped over chairs. No magazines or papers lying around. No unpleasant organic odors. Smoked outside and never parked in his slot.
Even (and yes, this is a BIGGY!) even left a check for three quarters of the rent on the kitchen table on the first of the month—though how on earth they knew the correct rent amount was entirely beyond him. How did they even grasp the concept that it was the first of the month? Isn’t the Egyptian calendar different? Ten day weeks and all that?
But (and here we arrive plunk on the Nub) but coming home to find strangers living in his apartment had been sort of a shock. Clear up until the morning of the twenty-third of March he had lived alone. That evening he had three roomies.
When he stepped across the threshold he heard strange voices. (Am I being robbed?) As he closed the door behind him he smelled the exotic food. (Am I being practically joked? surprisingly partied?) Stepping into the kitchen he had found the threesome sharing a lively conversation, which halted abruptly with his appearance—for nods and smiles and a gesture to the fourth place-setting and the steaming dishes of extrinsic food—and then resumed.
“Excuse me,” he had interjected. “Were you fellows aware that this apartment is occupied?”
They have not answered.

• Copse and Robergé
If he had cut down that tree once, he had cut it down a hundred times. (This, clearly, is an exaggeration. But you know the French. And, heaven help us!, this one was a golfer. A French golfeur!) He had had it. Kaput!
“Mont Blanc!” he had cried aloud. “Mon Niblick!”
(I didn’t say I knew “French.” I know the French.)
But I do know trees. And this one was a maple, a red maple. Acer rubrum. It had stood for nearly a century in the middle of what passed for a lawn, in the tiny yard that sloped steeply to Kennebunk Street, before the neat Cape, which had once belonged to a morbid and properly depressed poet of minor repute. Robergé had purchased the place at auction after the poet’s compulsory suicide. (A triple axle, as it happens, under a train car. Was it followed by free skating? Poets who aspire to the Olympian must follow the rules.), Our protagonist moved in, lugging an insatiable hunger for green grass. “Le putting green—vert de mise.”
Never mind that the topography of the place precluded “Le put.” A rolling ball before the Cape would go straight to K-street, where, if same had been lately swept and sucked by the dutiful Public Works crew, it would continue it’s dimpled spin unencumbered clear to the Shell station on Main. Eight blocks downhill.
And so, a chain saw. His first. And he no woodsman. Took down the power lines with the tree and had to do some fast explaining. (Not hampered in the least by frequent resort to his native tongue.) “Mon dieu!” he moaned. “Monet!”
And then the suckers soared. Where there had been one tree there were eight. After a month-long late winter vacation on the links in coastal Carolina, he returned to find three foot tall sprouts. “Le ruff!” The stump precluded mowing. “Le gran ruff!” So, out with the chain saw which promptly threw it’s linky blade when he hit a rock.
“Mon Day!”
He dropped it off at the repair shop. Tuesday it snowed.
By late spring our maple murderer had found time to consider. To plan. An early thaw. A rented back-hoe on the twenty-third of March. His first, and he no excavator. Around and around. A ten foot circular pit. (“Le cup?”) And finally the massive root ball was lifted and balanced on the melting verge.
Robergé turned off the machine and sidled down the walk to admire his work. The maple (seeking revenge? “Mon Odrama!”) rolled.
Kaput!
They found him later. Too late. The stump had cut down the man.
After the auction, the topsoil, the tamping, the toil, the seeding, the liming, the wine and the oil (You, like all the rest, may have forgotten that poor, misunderstood poet. I cannot.), a sapling emerged. No, not planted by the new owners (photographers, not silviculturists), but lurching skyward from a piece of root Robergé had missed, and now, frabjous day!, he/she was permitted to grow. To resume an interrupted life.
“Mon Oecious!”

• Clops and Robyn
Most of us have very little trouble coping with one-eyed neighbors.
Robyn was different.
Perhaps he wanted therapy. A chance to work it all out in Group. A little dab of Prozac. A Freudian explanation of repression and lust. A Transactional goose to the noodle. Electroshock.
Maybe he just didn’t know how to get along. A splintery square peg in the smooth round hole of life. A dodecahedron in an urgently icosohedral world.
Could it be he simply needed a slap in the face? Or a bucket of ice cold mountain spring water over his sleepy head in the middle of the night? An audit?
The fellow next door was every inch the solid citizen. Many inches, to be sure, standing as he did nearly ten feet to his singular bushy brow. But he pruned the hedges, mowed the grass, scraped and painted, cleaned the gutters, picked up litter along the curb, washed and waxed his car at appropriate intervals, applied tasteful seasonal ornaments to the front door and bought candy from fundraising high school band members and Boy Scouts.
Is it normal to fret about how many eyes One brings to One’s world view as long as that One is keeping up appearances? (Albeit from a somewhat unusual height?)
And if that One now and again eats a pollster or a census worker or a Jehovah’s Witness? What then? Is it a singular sin to speed souls along to heaven or hell if those souls earnestly seek same? (Or back to heaven or hell if such be their point of origin?)
Did anyone actually miss those (tasty) missing few?
The question answers itself. But Robyn could not abide.
“Do something!” he demanded of the helpful woman at 911. “That guy eats people!” he complained to the local constable. “My neighbor is a Cyclops!” he declaimed to the city attorney.
Authorities huddled. No one missing in the city. No one missing in the county. No one missing in the entire state! They rattled excitedly over the statistical improbability of the revelation—and the electoral implications. (!)
“Re-elect Governor Dwink! He didn’t lose track of anyone in his first term!”
But, for Robyn, this meant no enchilada. If something were to be done, it were to be done by him.
Not surprisingly, he didn’t have a wrinkled clue where to start. To be sure, there was the time honored method of yore —i.e.: round up a boatload of Argonauts and set off on a quest. But “argonaut” does not appear in the Yellow Pages. (Not even the Real Yellow Pages, which says worlds, don’t you think?) And although Robyn liked spanakopita okay, basically he was not Greek hero material. More in the way of a whipped, stuffed, brocolli’n’cheese baker with a side of onion rings couch cushion.
So, he tried the Internet. He dropped in on the “Snuffing an enormous neighborhood Cyclops” chat room, but it was all loose talk. (Mostly hot and bothered masturbatory twenty-somethings faking one-eyed orgasms, at that.) He found car bomb recipes, and mail-order automatic weapons, and free-lance terrorists for hire, and lists of super killer put-downs and scathing asides—all sorts of uplifting and effective solutions for the blizzards of interpersonal brouhaha we each face every single day. (This is—let me underline, bold face, capitalize and italicize that last—THIS IS the information age, by Jing!)
But nothing that really suited. Robyn seethed.
And then it happened. Not on the Net. Not even on the TV. It happened on the good old fashioned radio: that instrument of fireside chats, and Orson Welles, and declarations of war and rock and roll and Prairie Home Companion and insufferable, chubby, right-wing air-heads with porcupinegiac egos. The hot medium that is oh so cool. Ah, the radio.
Robyn heard news of a West Coast Forensic Pathology Department that had been caught nabbing corneas from stiffs without consent. It smacked of steaming seaminess. It evoked the dizzying whiff of ethical lapse. But, Lo!, it was completely legal. (!) (I don’t make this stuff up. You can’t make this stuff up.)
More exciting still (and one must understand that Robyn was already spinning into a double-whipped broccoli’n’cheese lather at this point) was the news that corneas fetch a couple of big bills at the eyeball bank. Serious Big Bills, not those Canadian looking Big Bens the Feds try to pawn off as cash. Real money.
Robyn’d been around the block. He knew the score. Anytime you have a commodity that goes legit for two Gs, there’s a smooth dude in a Beemer doing some sort of black market commodity spec’ who will slip you a C-note for the goods.
And he was right.
On March 23 he met a guy we’ll call “Jason” in a one hour lens shop out on West Circa. The size of the cornea even impressed the hardened street dealer. “Just one?” “Just one.” “Too bad.” Problem solved.
When the house was sold at auction the new owners found several bundled stacks of Watchtower and Census Bureau forms in a locked closet.

Most of us have very little trouble coping with Zen Buddhist neighbors.
Robyn was different.
Perhaps he wanted therapy. A chance to work it all out in Group. A little dab of Prozac. A Freudian explanation of repression and lust. A Transactional goose to the noodle. Electroshock.

(excerpted from Can we have archaic and idiot?, by Cecil Bothwell, Brave Ulysses Books, 2009)

I’ve just released a second edition of my first book, “revisited and revised a smidgeon.” Here’s a timely excerpt, written more than ten years ago.

The crystal plummets

Raving tree huggers, myself included, sometimes claim we may be destroying planet Earth. Pie-eyed techno-idiots insist that everything will be peachy if we just dump environmental regulations and the Endangered Species Act, and let the free market rock and roll. Who is right? Is there any prayer that we can find common ground?

When I voice concern about the environment, I tend to believe that I support Life. But the truth is, my concern is for life like us. Bacteria are really neat little goobers, and we couldn’t survive without them, but they did just fine without us for about ninety percent of the time since things began to wiggle on this planet.

The urgency I feel about toxic waste or global warming involves preserving the current population of the planet. I have a fondness for oxygen-breathing, carbon-based life forms like dolphins and cats and gorillas and bats, hummingbirds and butterflies, tuna, termites, lizards—and people. Well, some people, anyway.

When I factor people into the equation, it looks as though I might be speaking the same language as the movement that has adopted “wise use” as its slogan. The wise-users are the folks who want to permit mining, grazing and hunting in national parks, and who insist that old-growth forests are a renewable resource. They claim that global warming is an illusion, that there are no foreseeable limits to the human population of our planet, and that science will solve all of our problems by some time next week. They say the only useful measure of any policy is whether it is good for people, and they’re fond of trotting out a few scientists to bolster their claims.

OK, let’s go with that.

What? Me, a raving tree hugger, ready to accept the bottom line defined by earth rapers like Rush and Chainsaw Charlie? [former Rep. Charles Taylor, R-NC] Have I been drinking to excess?

My single caveat would be that we all must be willing to rely on real science, instead of rhetoric, to settle policy disputes. I am ready to concede any environmental debate on that basis. And by “real science,” I mean the consensus of the majority of knowledgeable researchers in a given field. Why do I say consensus? Shouldn’t we demand scientific proof?

Nice idea, but science doesn’t work that way. Outside of mathematics, where everything either adds up or it doesn’t, proof is impossible.

For example, if you release a crystal goblet ten feet above a brick patio, it will probably fall and shatter. Scientifically speaking, there is actually a tiny chance that it will bounce and land safely—and a much tinier chance that it won’t even fall. But, based on our experience of gravity and bricks, most of us would agree that the crystal is history.

In the same way, if the overwhelming majority of scientists agree about a particular issue, and one or a few disagree, the odds are very strong that the majority is correct.

Ready to be blinded by science? In 1992, nearly sixteen hundred of the world’s senior scientists, including more than half the living Nobel laureates—women and men from every discipline and every continent—signed The World’s Scientists Warning to Humanity. More have signed it in the years since then. In 1993, fifty-six of the world’s scientific academies met for the first-ever world Science Summit and issued a collaborative statement.

Most of the world’s scientists agree that, if the human race is to survive, we must reach zero population growth within the present generation. We must act now to shift from fossil fuels and nonrenewable resources to sustainable technologies. We must act now to reduce introduction of toxins and pollutants into the biosphere. We must act now to protect the biodiversity upon which all life depends.

Translation: The crystal goblet is headed toward the bricks.

There is nothing wrong with using human benefit as the measure of our policies, but short-term profit is a bad gage of success if it threatens long-term survival. If you are intent on amassing a fortune to leave to your heirs, you will also need some heirs to leave it to.

Are our current environmental-protection laws necessary? Sorry, Charlie: We have barely begun.

Coming soon to Amazon.com

Nadia Shamsedin interviewed me on MLK Day on her Republic Broadcasting show, Escape from Freedom. We discussed my recent book, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. Because of the holiday, there was particular attention on Graham’s adversarial relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (essentially addressed to Graham), Graham’s disparaging remarks following “I Have a Dream” and so forth.

You can download a podcast or stream it here.

(You’ll need to scroll down to January 21, and if you find this post after January, you may need to first select the month.)

In this month’s newsletter I dropped a date. Silly me. People may already be camped out in Brevard. (Thanks for the correction, Majo.)

Brevard, Jan. 19, 1 p.m. I will join Transylvanians For Peace members for lunch after their weekly vigil at the courthouse. At 3 p.m. I’ll head over to Highland Books, 480 North Broad Street.

Enka, Jan. 7, 6 p.m., Citizens for Change monthly meeting, Shoney’s restaurant, Hwy 19-23. I will address bias in the media, speaking from my experience as an investigative reporter, editor and biographer.

Mountain Xpress has published a dual review by Duke University teacher Seth Howland. Howland took a look at my book side-by-side with The Preacher and the Presidents, a new offering from Time magazine writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. (Read my review of their book here.)

While Howland, an evangelical Christian, gives predictable credit to Graham’s putative “good works,” and has strong disagreements with my take on Graham’s later career, I think the review is largely a fair one. The only specific complaint I would offer is his use of the word “specious” to describe some of my sources. Wrong. I may or may not have overlooked exculpatory evidence, but my sources are all academically solid.

An example of our different takes: Howland sees Graham’s entry into the Soviet Union over Ronald Reagan’s objections as an example of the minister taking the moral high ground. I see it as opening a new market. In essence, all of the good ascribed to Graham comes down to belief that his beliefs are valid. To my way of thinking he has profited enormously from selling an untestable hypothesis.

But I am, notwithstanding specific quibbles, humbled by the seriousness with which my work is being considered now that it is out in the world. As Howland fairly concludes:
“Even so, The Preacher and the Presidents and The Prince of War render a valuable service. By providing conflicting accounts of a life lived in the public eye, these two books reveal the fundamental difficulty of biography. If the authors have failed to offer perspective on every aspect of Graham’s career, they nonetheless move conversations about his legacy forward.”

Who could ask for anything more?

Okay, so I’m tooting my own horn—but that’s what blogs boil down to anyway.
CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn’s and Jeffrey St. Clair’s most excellent online newsletter, beat all the others to the punch with the first review of my forthcoming book. I couldn’t be happier with the review or the source. The publishing world sometimes looks like a walled fortress. Getting any attention for a book from an independent publishing house is really tough. Ingram, the principal book distributor for bookstores in the U.S, won’t even handle a title by a publisher with less than 10 titles per year. The major reviewers are disinclined to look at indy publications for that reason alone. (Though I am typing with crossed fingers.)

Here ’tis:

Rev. Billy Graham: A Prince of War Exposed
by William Hughes

“The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.”
– Stendhal

The propaganda machine of the Evangelical Christian Right will soon be in counter attack mode. One of its darling preachers is about to take it on the proverbial chin. The Rev. Billy Graham, who has created a multimillion dollar media empire, that a Rupert Murdock would envy, is the subject of a shocking expose’ due out on Nov. 15, 2007. It’s entitled, “The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire.” The author is Cecil Bothwell. He hails from Asheville, North Carolina and is an award winning investigative reporter. Bothwell’s unflattering portrait of Rev. Graham shows him as a wily warmonger and a lackey for the Establishment. He describes Rev. Graham as a public figure who: “Undermined the Founders’ skeptical Deism and sought to rebrand the U.S. as a Christian nation, [and] its armies [as] the rightful instruments of [a] Christian crusade and empire.”

For the rest of the review, click here.

Available here

The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire
by Cecil Bothwell
Brave Ulysses Books, 2007

***
For an independent review of the book, click here.
***

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.”
—Eric Hoffer

Introduction

I first became curious about Billy Graham in March, 2002. Like anyone else in our culture, I had been aware of his fame, his frequent appearances with presidents and his well-attended crusades, but an Associated Press story caught my eye. It said that recently released transcripts of taped conversations in the Nixon White House included an exchange between the preacher and the President, in 1972, about the malevolent influence of Jews in the United States. As reported in newspapers across the country, the conversation appeared to have been brief, a few sentences on either side which included the suggestion from Graham that something might be done about the problem after Nixon’s reelection.

Graham’s public relations firm issued an apology in which the preacher disavowed his anti-Semitic comments and a rapprochement was reached with a national association of rabbis. Graham was forgiven.

Considering Nixon’s reputation for meanness and paranoia, the public impression was that Graham, a polite and agreeable sort, had been pulled into a bit of unpleasantness with a close friend—something that can happen to anyone. Do we automatically knock down a buddy who tells a dumb blonde joke, a Polish joke, an immigrant tale? We should, but do we? Not always. Graham is human too. And, after all, this wasn’t just any old friend. He was the President of the United States of America.

But I was curious. As an investigative reporter with, then, fifteen years of experience under my belt, I was well aware that news stories rarely contain all the facts, if for no other reason than the limitations of space. I wondered about the context of the conversation, where it began and where it ended. So I obtained the transcript.

I learned that the conversation had lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from denunciation of Jews and had been led by Graham. That astonished me. Moreover, twenty minutes of conversation had been redacted before release. What, I wondered, had been suppressed?

Beyond that, I mulled Graham’s career more broadly. I knew he had been more or less close to every president since Eisenhower. Later I would learn about his relationship with Truman. I knew he led prayer breakfasts and attended other official functions that splashed through the media from time to time. But what of his conversations behind closed doors? Was the Jew conversation typical or an aberration?

That was the beginning of the present volume.

The past several decades may well rank as the most fearful time in human history—given that tangible threats to human life grew far beyond ancient phantasms of myth or the unfathomable mysteries posited by ignorance. What’s more, electronic media have spread bad news everywhere, live and in color, while modern print techniques erupted in the form of glossy news magazines employing photographers who fanned out across the globe.

It is no surprise that a ministry that preached fear and promised salvation could prosper in such times and Billy Graham proved expert at brandishing both stick and carrot in tents and stadia around the planet.

Graham understood early and well that a successful ministry would require professional salesmanship and he carefully cultivated contacts in the major media with an eye to presenting his work in the best possible light. At the same time, he founded his own media conglomerate of magazine, radio, television and film production which was the precursor of Focus on the Family, the 700 Club, PTL and the widely influential Left Behind series.

Graham’s enthusiastic supporters in big media have consistently portrayed him as apolitical. As recently as February 2005, Time magazine reported, “He has had the ear of Presidents for five decades, but except for his public disavowal of racial segregation, Billy Graham, 86, has stuck to soul saving and left the political proselytizing to others. He explained his self-imposed separation of church and state in the language of a Gospel preacher: ‘It’s not what I was called to do.’”

However, notwithstanding his professed calling, it is apparent that Graham worked the corridors of Congress as well as the private rooms of the White House, sometimes overtly, sometimes quietly, in secret letters and private phone calls. And, quite contrary to Time’s assertion, it seems that Graham did more to abet segregation than to end it, actively opposing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s use of civil disobedience while endorsing aggressive police tactics and punitive laws.

Like many another political figure, Graham has sealed most of the personal documents connected to his life and work until after—in some cases many years after—his death. Nor did he consent to be interviewed for this work. But the published and unpublished documentary record speaks volumes. It reveals a Billy Graham who has been an unabashed nationalist, capitalist, militarist and advocate for American empire. The picture that emerges is decidedly not that of a disinterested man of the cloth. Rather, Graham often appears as a well connected covert political operative. To the extent that this seems surprising, it stems from the public’s willful naiveté concerning a self-professed holy man coupled with intentionally biased reporting from the major media at the behest of ideologues including, most prominently, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce.

Perhaps we should pay heed to what Graham has actually said instead of accepting his own and others’ later versions of the facts. This tale is told in Graham’s words and those of the biographers, historians, public figures and Presidents who knew him well.

You may be as surprised as I was at the picture that emerges in these pages. It is not the story of a man of peace.

– Coming soon from Brave Ulysses Books