THE TWO-HOUR PBS documentary Billy Graham ran as part of the “American Experience” series, but it could have been subtitled “An American Tragedy.”
The story Billy Graham tells is mostly one of triumph. A boy grows up on a North Carolina dairy farm, becomes the top Fuller Brush salesman in a two-state territory, then answers a call to preach. His crusades attract more than 200 million people and change hundreds of thousands of lives. However, like all the tragic heroes before him, Billy Graham had a flaw. It was neither lust nor greed, the nemeses of so many evangelists. Instead, as one of the commentators in the documentary tells us, Graham was drawn to power “like a moth to a flame.”
In the 1940s Graham led a movement that dragged evangelical Christianity out of the cultural backwoods and into the mainstream of postwar American life. Graham’s early years provide a road map of that movement as he went from ultra-sectarian Bob Jones University to Florida Bible Institute to Wheaton College. He worked as a staff preacher with Youth for Christ, then began a series of independent evangelistic crusades that started in a tent off Hollywood Boulevard in 1949 and culminated, in 1957, with a 16-week run at Madison Square Garden.
In 1950, convinced that a public relationship with the U.S. president would let him reach even broader audiences, Graham inveigled his way into an Oval Office meeting with a skeptical President Harry Truman, who reluctantly allowed Graham to pray over him. Undeterred by Truman’s later feelings that he was a showman and “one of those counterfeits,” in 1952 Graham became an off-the-record campaign adviser to Republicans, a role he would reprise for Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968.
And that’s where the shadows creep in. Graham believed that in Nixon he had found a kindred spirit, a fellow believer even, who would set a new spiritual tone for the nation. He persisted in that belief almost to the bitter end, when the first White House tapes revealed his buddy to be profane, power-mad, fundamentally dishonest, and probably guilty of several felonies.
At this point, to his credit, Graham did not double down on his loyalty to Nixon. Instead, he retreated from overt politics and began a long, penitent third act. In the years that followed, he took his crusades around the world, even behind the Cold War Iron Curtain, and his exposure to a bigger world broadened his faith and his ministry.
In 1979, Graham gave an interview to this magazine in which the man who supported Nixon’s Vietnam policies said, “I believe that the Christian especially has a responsibility to work for peace in our world,” and admitted, “There have been times in the past when I have, I suppose, confused the kingdom of God with the American way of life.”
The documentary ends with Graham, white-haired and weakened in 2005, doing what he always did best—giving an altar call, in New York’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park, while thousands of every class and color streamed forward to let Jesus change their lives.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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