The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in
the White House
By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy
(Center Street Books, 352 pages, $26.99)
The Preacher and the Presidents is what the title
advertises, a look into the Reverend Billy Graham’s relationships
with every U.S. president since Truman. Time reporters
Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy show how the most famous
English-speaking evangelist of the Twentieth Century helped our
chief executives and, more troublingly, how he enabled them.
Graham was a friend and confidant to most of the presidents in
the Post World War II Era. He enjoyed with them White House
weekends, vacations, and trips to Camp David. At times, he even
acted as a back-channel ambassador to break the ice with
particularly nettlesome world leaders. President Clinton used
Graham to get a message to Kim Il Sung, requesting that the North
Korean strongman allow UN nuclear weapons inspectors into his
country.
The reverend served as a presidential counselor in times of
crisis, such as to Eisenhower during the integration of Southern
schools, and to both Johnson and Nixon during the Vietnam War.
Through these interactions, readers get some sense of the spiritual
curiosity of our presidents. Eisenhower asked Graham, “How do I
know if I’m going to heaven?” Johnson wondered whether he would
ever see his parents again.
Gibbs and Duffy intend their work as a tribute to Graham, but it
also offers inspiration for iconoclasts. The careful reader can’t
help but feel that Graham’s ministry to presidents has been in some
ways shallow, even self-serving. The book gives little indication
that he had much of a positive impact on these leaders — as
individuals or on their policies.
Truth be told, Graham comes off less as a strong spiritual guide
than as someone who was blinded by his friendships with men of
great power. He allowed himself to be used to promote the agendas
of politicians aspiring to the presidency, as well as by those who
had already climbed to the top the greasy pole.
This tendency is particularly evident in the many photo-ops that
were arranged to show Graham in the company of candidates and
presidents, often staged during his evangelistic crusades. The many
photographs reproduced in this book suggest much about how the
minister and the politicians used each other.
Graham’s emotional involvement with the presidents doesn’t seem
to have allowed for moral evaluation or given him pause to consider
the ethics of their policies. For all appearances, he largely
supported them in whatever they wanted to do. This was the case
with Johnson’s Vietnam policy, with Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, and
even with Clinton’s position on abortion.
Johnson and Nixon especially — devout parishioners of the
church of Realpolitik — understood the value of religious
identification in advancing their careers and policies. Graham was
no match for them, to the country’s detriment as well as his
own.
The evangelist paid dearly for his blindness during the
Watergate crisis. He was forced to publicly confess that he felt
chastened by his ignorance of Nixon’s “dark side.”
THAT DIDN’T STOP GRAHAM from nurturing relationships with Ronald
Reagan, Georges H.W and W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, or from
practically endorsing Hillary Clinton during his 2005 crusade in
Queens, New York.
At the Queens event, Graham greeted the Clintons as his
wonderful friends of many years, remarking, “When he [Bill Clinton]
left the presidency, he should have become an evangelist, because
he had all the gifts. And he could leave his wife to run the
country.” Such encouragement of Hillary’s candidacy not only showed
indiscretion on the part of a church figure, it underscored
Graham’s need to attach himself to a political star.
Not all of the presidents warmed to Graham. Truman was too
prickly. There never was much of a Ford-Graham friendship. Graham
was wary because he’d just been burned by Watergate, and Ford was a
bit standoffish himself, perhaps because he wanted to distance his
administration from Nixon’s.
One might expect that Carter, the self-declared “born-again
Christian,” would have been closest to Graham, but he kept his
distance. The authors attribute Carter’s reticence to a strong
sense of separation between Church and state. But it may well have
been that Carter did not enjoy all the attention from his fellow
Southern Baptist, which he likely saw as self-promotion.
When read with a sense of detachment from Graham’s charisma —
which isn’t easy, since that charisma has been a powerful presence
on the American religious scene for a long time — this book offers
an important lesson: It is dangerous for religious leaders to
identify themselves too closely with politics and political
figures.
High-profile friendships between pastors and politicians can be
enormously beneficial to office seekers and office holders. But
they can be woefully compromising to those who minister, and often
do great harm to the cause of religion in general. The current
political season has already given us an example of that problem in
Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, a candidate whose
social-policy positions are inimical to Robertson’s agenda.
The role of a religious leader should be to enunciate moral
standards that will enable people in positions of power to form
proper consciences. Politicians should privately consult their own
pastors for spiritual guidance and rely on a variety of religious
leaders for advice on complex ethical issues.
Gibbs and Duffy do a fine job showing Billy Graham’s historical
significance in American politics. The book reveals how even the
best of religious figures, fallible human beings that they are, can
be drawn to, and exploited by, worldly power. Pastors are as
susceptible as anyone to egoism and the lure of political glamour,
and politicians have learned how to use that weakness to their
benefit.
Here, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are so relevant:
“For the children of the world are wiser in their generation than
the children of light.”
Billy Graham’s talent and charm and clean living brought him
deserved fame, and that fame brought him influence. But for all
that, this book shows the limits of his effectiveness in bringing
the Gospel to the White House.
