A Prophet with Honor Read online

  Also by William Martin

  These Were God’s People, 1966

  Christians in Conflict, 1972

  My Prostate and Me, 1994

  With God on Our Side, 2005

  ZONDERVAN

  A Prophet with Honor

  Copyright © 1991, 2018 by William C. Martin

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  ISBN 978-0-310-35330-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-310-35392-8 (international trade paper edition)

  ISBN 978-0-310-35333-1 (audio)

  ISBN 978-0-310-35332-4 (ebook)

  Epub Edition January 2018 9780310353324

  Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of the book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover design: Matthew P. Van Kirk

  Cover image: © Bettmann / Corbis

  Back cover images: Russ Busby

  Interior design: Michelle Espinoza

  First printing January 2018 / Printed in the United States of America

  Information about External Hyperlinks in this eBook

  Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

  To Patricia

  Contents

  Preface to This Edition

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Part 1: Genesis

  1. Mr. Graham Goes to Washington

  2. A Great Cloud of Witnesses

  Part 2: America’s Sensational Young Evangelist (1918 – 1949)

  3. Billy Frank

  4. The Boy Preacher

  5. Ruth

  6. “Geared to the Times, Anchored to the Rock”

  7. The Canvas Cathedral

  Part 3: “From Vict’ry Unto Vict’ry” (1950 – 1960)

  8. Evangelism Incorporated

  9. Principalities and Powers

  10. Trust and Obey

  11. Harringay

  12. Fields White Unto Harvest

  13. New Evangelicals, Old Fundamentalists

  14. God in the Garden

  15. Reaping the Whirlwind

  16. Unto the Uttermost Parts of the Earth

  Part 4: The Kingdoms of the World and Their Glory (1960 – 1974)

  17. Election and Free Will

  18. The Kennedy Years

  19. Billy and Lyndon

  20. Second Comings

  21. Dreams and Wars

  22. Nixon Revived

  23. The Power and the Glory

  24. “Billy, You Stay Out of Politics”

  25. A Ministry of Reconciliation

  26. Vietnam and Watergate

  Part 5: Keeping the Faith (1974 – 1990)

  27. Lausanne

  28. Higher Ground

  29. A Crack in the Curtain

  30. The Preacher and the Bear

  31. Tribulation and Triumph

  32. Amsterdam

  33. The Constituted Means

  34. Decently and in Order

  35. The Bible [Still] Says

  36. What Manner of Man?

  37. “To the Ends of the Earth”

  Part 6: Finishing the Course (The Final Years)

  38. The Work of an Evangelist

  39. “Guard What Has Been Entrusted to You”

  40. “Having Faithful Children”

  41. The Last Days

  Notes

  Index

  Photos

  Preface to This Edition

  Life is unpredictable. As explained in the preface to the original edition of this book, an unexpected invitation from Billy Graham in 1985 led to five years of near total immersion in the life of the famed evangelist and the people who held up his arms during more than five decades of public ministry. And then, with the completion of the research and publication of the book, immersion dwindled to a sprinkling. I continued to receive Decision and monthly letters and press releases and exchanged the occasional letter or telephone call with Billy Graham. I wrote articles for magazines and newspapers and talked to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of reporters whenever Billy Graham was scheduled to hold a crusade in their cities or suffered an illness and as he passed the torch, in stages, to his son Franklin. But personal contact with people who had filled my life was largely absent—and missed. Then, to my delight, Zondervan—now, like my original publisher William Morrow, under the HarperCollins tent—asked me to bring the 1991 edition up to date. For the most part, I happily relied on many of the same people who had been so helpful to me in preparing the first edition. Particularly helpful were John Akers, David Bruce, Russ Busby, Roger Flessing, Rick Marshall, Tex Reardon, Larry Ross, Maury Scobee, Norman Sanders, Tedd Smith, Stephanie Wills, and various staff members at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the DeMoss Group, which handles much of the public relations activities of BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse. I also cherished the opportunity to have a good visit with each of the Graham progeny: GiGi, Anne, Franklin, Ruth (formerly Bunny) and Ned. Their valuable contributions to the new chapters will be quite clear to readers. I also deeply appreciate the wise professional counsel and encouragement I received from Zondervan, particularly from Stan Gundry and Jim Ruark, who shepherded this edition to completion.

  As with the first edition, I have tried to tell the story of Billy Graham as accurately as I am able. I do not doubt that additional information about Mr. Graham will surface from time to time after the publication of this book. I suspect, with good reason, that some of the Graham offspring will publish memoirs that will add to our understanding of their father and mother. If I am granted sufficient additional years, I may participate in some widening and deepening of the story. But whatever the future, I feel enormous gratitude for the opportunity I have been given and satisfaction that the work already published has been well received. I trust that this expanded version will also make a contribution to understanding the life and work of a truly remarkable man and the movement he led for much of the twentieth century.

  WILLIAM MARTIN

  March 2018

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  I can scarcely remember a time when revivals and revivalists did not fascinate me. As a small boy in Devine, Texas, in the late 1940s, I relished having the visiting evangelist over to our house for dinner during the annual “gospel meeting.” When the Baptists held a revival down the street, I often dropped in for a sermon or two, and numerous times I stood at the edge of a Pentecostal tent wondering what might be going on inside the minds and bodies of folk being whipped into a holy-rolling frenzy by the sweating, shouting, shirt-sleeved man striding back and forth on the flimsy little stage.

  I didn’t hold any revivals myself until I was fourteen, but they were authentic for their time and place—held in the open air, illuminated by yellow bulbs, with the crowd seated on wooden-slatted church pews and singing from tattered softback songbooks. Not all of my outings were a success. One dismal, week-long revival seldom brought more than a dozen people out to sit in the oppressive August heat, and it was hard to be confident I had the full attention even of that faithful remnant, since the bare, unfrosted fl
oodlight directly over my head not only drew hundreds of night bugs but, with the intense glow of its high wattage, fairly baked my crew-cut scalp and forced my auditors to look off to one side to avoid permanent damage to their stricken eyes.

  Still, I was a pretty good speaker, and my sermons were of sufficient quality to have merited previous publication—one of my favorites featured a stinging attack on the Bolsheviks—and when kindly church ladies said, “I’d sure love to hear you preach twenty years from now,” I never doubted they would have the chance. As it happens, I don’t preach much anymore—haven’t for over twenty years—but I am still intrigued by those who do and are really good at it. Thus, when the opportunity came to chronicle and assess the life and ministry of the world’s best-known and, arguably, most successful preacher, I saw it immediately as the remarkable pleasure and privilege it has turned out to be. Some explanation of how this happened and what followed seems in order.

  Throughout the 1970s, after joining the sociology department at Rice University in Houston, I wrote a series of magazine articles about popular religion, my primary academic specialty. Several of these appeared in Texas Monthly. In 1978 William Broyles, Jr., then editor of that excellent magazine, asked me to consider writing a profile of Billy Graham, whose Texas connections were numerous and strong. I already knew a fair amount about Graham and had even spent several days interviewing members of his staff and meeting briefly with him during a crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, so the assignment was a relatively easy one. The article, which appeared in the March 1978 issue of Texas Monthly, was generally favorable toward the evangelist, but it was by no means a puff piece, and because I had liked and been treated graciously by every member of Graham’s staff whom I met, I had some apprehensions about how it would be received. When the time comes to write, I have no conscious hesitation about trying to say exactly what I believe and feel about people and organizations I have studied, but I do not enjoy hurting people’s feelings, and because I consider it of paramount importance to be fair in what I write, I like to be perceived as fair. On occasion, I have written things that ruptured or forever precluded the possibility of friendship. I will doubtless do so again. I can live with that, but it brings me scant satisfaction. I do not write as a means of venting repressed anger. When Graham and his chief lieutenant, T. W. Wilson, both wrote notes expressing appreciation for the article, and particularly for its fairness, I was pleased. Still, I knew enough about the evangelist’s legendary graciousness toward the press not to imagine that the article had actually made any lasting impression on him. And I expected that my study of Billy Graham had ended.

  Three years later Graham held a crusade in the football stadium at Rice University. I urged my students to attend and attended several services myself but made no attempt to make contact with Graham or any of the staff members I had met several years earlier. I was quite surprised, therefore, to receive a letter from him several weeks after the crusade stating that one of the biggest disappointments of his stay in Houston was not getting to see me and expressing a hope that we might be able to sit down together for lunch sometime. I responded, letting him know that I felt sure I could work him into my schedule, but, quite frankly, I assumed that his staff had prepared a list of people he might meet while in Houston, and that he was dispatching brief courtesy notes to those he had missed lest someone be unnecessarily offended.

  Thus, despite these expressions of appreciation for my acumen and literary style, I was somewhat astonished when in November 1985 I received a letter from Mr. Graham in which he asked if I would be interested in writing “a book concerning my life, ministry, and any niche in history our work may have.” Several scholars and journalists had approached him about such a book, he said, but he had decided not to offer his cooperation to anyone else until checking with me about my interest and availability. As it happened, I was due for a sabbatical the following academic year and had not yet fully decided on a primary project. To be sure, I was interested, but I was also uncertain as to what Graham would expect of me and whether I would feel comfortable under conditions he might set. I let him know that I continued to think well of him but would feel obliged to tell the story as accurately as I could, whatever that might entail. A few weeks later, we met for several hours in a New York hotel room. I thought it possible he might ask me to produce an in-house, “authorized” account of his ministry, one guaranteed to view him favorably. I would have regretted turning down the chance to look at him and his organization carefully, but I was prepared to do so if those were the conditions. I also wondered, though I considered it less likely, if he might expect me to pledge some portion of whatever income I derived from the book to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. To my pleasant but perplexed surprise, we talked about our children and our wives, about what directions his ministry had taken lately and where he thought it might go in the future, and about why it would be simpler just to order sandwiches from room service than to go into a restaurant where people would almost certainly interrupt our conversation. Finally, when I knew we had to start talking about the ostensible reason for our visit, he asked, “Well, do you want to do the book?” I told him of course I did but would need to find out what the conditions might be. He said, “There are no conditions. It’s your book. I don’t even have to read it. I want you to be critical. There are some things that need criticizing.” He asked if I had an agent. I told him I did, and he correctly suggested that I should find a publisher. “We don’t want any part of the income from the book,” he said, “but you’ll have a lot of expenses. How do you think that ought to be handled?” He indicated that friends of his organization could provide expense money if that were necessary, but he clearly had reservations, even about an arms-length arrangement. I told him I thought it would be best if I took care of my own expenses. He readily agreed. “That’s great,” he said. “If we gave you money, I think you would know there were no strings attached, but others might not believe it, and I don’t want anyone to think this is a ‘kept’ book.” He then gave me the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of people who held the keys to various treasure-houses of information, assured me he would tell them I’d be in touch, and invited me to attend his upcoming crusade in Washington, D.C. Shortly afterward, he gave me a letter to present to publishers confirming his willingness to cooperate with me and assuring them that neither he nor any person associated with him reserved any right of approval or editorial control over anything I might write.

  Mr. Graham proved true to his word. Over the next five years—two or three longer than either of us had imagined at the outset—I enjoyed cooperation of the sort that scholars and journalists dream about but seldom experience. Long interviews with Graham himself had to be scheduled during down times between crusades and major conferences, but he was always generous with his time on those occasions, spending most of several days with me at his home or office in Montreat, North Carolina, over three years, and making himself available for long telephone conversations on other occasions. In addition, he sent word up and down the line of his organization that his friends and colleagues should feel free to speak openly with me, which more than a hundred did. At the several crusades I attended (Washington, D.C.; Paris; Denver, Colorado; and Columbia, South Carolina), at the mammoth International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists, held in Amsterdam in 1986 (See Chapter 32), and at a Team and Staff Conference at the Homestead in 1987, I was given the opportunity to visit with scores of key personnel and access to any aspect of the operation I had sense enough to inquire about. On rare occasion Graham chose not to respond to a question, usually indicating that he had pledged not to discuss the topic (for example, private conversations with presidents or other world leaders), that he preferred not to discuss the topic while other parties to an incident were still alive, or that he did not wish to cause undue pain to some person. In most cases, he was willing to answer the same or a similar question a year or two later. The few instances in which I felt he was less t
han fully forthcoming are noted in the text. This same generally open atmosphere prevailed at Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) offices in Minneapolis, London, and Montreat, where I received warm and extremely helpful assistance virtually every time I requested it. Also of inestimable value was the assistance I received from Dr. Lois Ferm, who serves as BGEA’s liaison with the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College. Certain materials in the archives, particularly oral histories, were donated with the understanding that they would be sealed until a certain date. Others were available only with express permission from Dr. Ferm. The wish of donors was always correctly observed, of course, but in no case was I ever denied permission to examine any archival file over which BGEA held sole control. Dr. Ferm expressed her conviction that early acquisitions by the archives had been placed under unnecessary restrictions; later additions have seldom been subject to such stringent regulations. As the person who conducted virtually all the oral-history interviews, Dr. Ferm assured me that those still closed to inspection held no dark secrets. Given my experience with several dozen such interviews whose time limitations ran out during the course of my research, I have no reason to doubt her word. Finally, various personnel at Walter Bennett Communications, BGEA’s media representative and public relations agency, as well as people holding similar positions within BGEA itself, have repeatedly furnished me with books, magazines, videotapes, transcripts, photocopies, and incidental bits of information that have proved invaluable in my research.

  As agreed in my early discussions with Billy Graham, I attempted to pay virtually all of the considerable expenses involved in preparing this book. On two occasions, when BGEA’s large-scale dealings with its travel agent made it sensible and economical for the organization to furnish me with tickets for last-minute flights to major conferences, I accepted the tickets and soon afterward made contributions to the association in excess of what I believe the actual costs to have been. On numerous occasions I was able to take advantage of special hotel rates negotiated by BGEA on behalf of its members. And though I always offered to pick up the check, some members of the Graham “team” paid for various meals during my visits to crusades or BGEA offices. In similar fashion, I have tried to make contributions to BGEA or Samaritan’s Purse (an Evangelical social service organization headed by Graham’s eldest son, Franklin) in excess of any financial expense directly incurred by BGEA on my behalf.