In 2007, Time magazine veterans Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy coauthored The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House. The best-selling book chronicled Graham's influence on American presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush.
On April 25, 2010, Graham hosted Barack Obama at the Graham family home in Montreat, North Carolina, making Obama the 12th chief executive to interact with Graham, something no other religious leader has done. The two of them prayed for each other during their 35-minute meeting, according to reports. (Donald Trump attended Graham’s 95th birthday party in 2013.)
Graham's relationships with different presidents varied widely. He skinny-dipped in the White House pool with Lyndon Johnson, played golf with John F. Kennedy, and counseled the Clintons after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But Graham acknowledged that his relationship with Richard Nixon, tainted by partisan politics, was the one most harmful to the evangelist's gospel mission. Timothy C. Morgan, director of Wheaton College’s journalism program, interviewed Gibbs before Graham's death.
As journalists, Michael Duffy and you had rare opportunities to interact one on one with Billy Graham. How would you describe him in personal terms?
One description I love is the writer who, looking at Billy Graham's long arms and long legs, said that it looked as though God had designed him to be seen from a distance.
This figure could fill a stadium with 50,000 or 100,000 people, night after night after night. We imagined this huge public personality. What was most surprising to us the first day we went to Montreat was how completely disarming he was. We were struck by his humility, the gentleness, the quiet, confident grace.
BGEAHe seemed perhaps the most unguarded man I've ever interviewed. He was not spinning, not looking to airbrush his history. The thing he was most worried about was that he might make a mistake or forget to give someone credit for something. The charisma was compelling—what an epic figure.
Any clues on how he got to be that way?
Of course, every president wanted to know that. Presidents very much want to get 50,000 people to come out and hear them. They were deeply curious how this one man was able to do that. As you might well expect, Graham's answer was, “Well, I didn't do it. God's doing it.”
To which the presidents would say, “Well, okay. But there are a lot of preachers out there preaching the gospel who are not filling Yankee stadium night after night, so there must be something in particular about you.”
Graham had a great gift for keeping things simple. He was a very smart, thoughtful man. He never felt like he needed or wanted to stray from the core gospel message of God's saving grace.
He made it possible for people to let down their own guard. We did go to his last crusade in New York. It was quite extraordinary watching 100,000 people listen to his preaching and just let go of whatever it was they had brought with them that day. He created a safe space, where you could let go of your pride, let go of your self-consciousness, let go of everything, and just focus on what he was saying.
He created that one on one and he created it one on 100,000.
When you were interviewing Graham for your book, it seemed like he crossed the boundary between a journalist and an interview subject. Did he pray with you?
He did pray with us. It was natural as breathing. That was absolutely just the most natural thing in the world for him. He is someone who made a deep impression on everyone he encountered. We were not looking to trick him. We were looking to see if he could help us understand what his experience was like in his interactions with every modern president, starting with Harry Truman.
What part of Billy Graham's personality do you think American presidents came to value the most?
We were struck by the fact of how many of them got to know him long before they were presidents. His friendships with these men dated back decades before. He met Ronald Reagan in the early 1950s. He knew the Bush family in the early 1950s. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, these were all people that he had encountered, in many cases, not only long before they were president, but long before they were in politics at all.
All of them would have, not what we thought was a public relationship, but in fact a private relationship with the same man. Despite all their different theological backgrounds, political backgrounds, and personal histories, they all had a relationship with the same preacher.
How do you explain that? I've heard Billy Graham described as a “triple A” personality. That tends to be true as well of men who become president—people who have energy, intensity, and curiosity. It's as though they are made out of some alloy that is different from the rest of us. They are boundlessly curious and boundlessly energetic. There aren't many people like this. They can spot each other at a distance.
When Graham looked at a president, did he see someone who was cut from the same cloth as himself?
There is the shared experience they had. Very few people understand what the presidency does to you. John F. Kennedy said, “There's nothing that prepares you for the office.”
Graham was part of a very small circle—his privacy was every bit as hard to maintain as theirs was, his family life was as challenged, the demands on him, the burdens on him—he was if anything an even bigger global celebrity than they were.
There are not many people who are bigger global celebrities than the President of the United States. Arguably he was. Look at Gallup's most admired list over the years. It's always a toss-up whether he comes out one step ahead or one step behind whoever is in the Oval Office at the time.
The very nature of being president is that you only get to make hard decisions. Any easy decisions don't make it to your desk. They are made further down the chain of command.
If you make a hard decision, the reason it's hard is because there are good arguments for going either way. You are continually in need of forgiveness.
In what sense is there a need for forgiveness?
Because if you decide A, there was a really good case for B. Even if the decision turns out to be “the right one,” the decisions leave a mark on you. There's a need to have someone sitting across from you, as Graham would do, and offer to pray with you and say to you, “God loves you and he wants to help you and he is walking right next to you, step by step.”
The comfort that he gave them, and the assurance of pardon that he gave them, and the sense of being loved that he gave them, was enormously valuable.
Quietly and privately, they would ask him the most simple questions. “How do I know I'm going to go to heaven?” “What happens after we die?” “Am I going to see my parents again?”
Many of the presidents we looked at had come from devout families, often extremely devout mothers. Sitting with Billy Graham allowed them to reattach themselves to the faith of their childhood, the faith of their families. He brought them home.
We know, of course, Graham never ran for political office. But would he have made a great president?
I don't think so. He was fascinated by politics. He freely admitted that. But in some ways, the Oval Office is a dangerous place for a guileless man. You can see in what happened between Graham and Richard Nixon how that played out. What too close an association with politics could mean and could do. A president needs to be many things, and I don't think guileless is one of them.
“America got lucky with Billy Graham, given how much power he had. He had an agenda when he walked into the Oval Office. It just wasn't a political one. It was a spiritual one.” ~Nancy Gibbs
Why do you think so much of Graham's involvement across these different presidencies focused on foreign policy or war and peace issues?
Foreign policy or war and peace issues are the realm in which presidents have the most power. It tends to be where the stakes are the highest. The decisions are hardest. The moral imperatives are often greatest. This is where you really wrestle.
When you listen to the presidents talk about what it felt like when they were about to commit troops to a battle, and what that responsibility felt like, it is searing to listen to them. How they would literally wake up in the middle of the night, unable to move, being so tense and so locked down that they had trouble moving in bed.
The other thing is that Graham came to be an extremely well-traveled man who had access to foreign leaders almost as unique as his access to American leaders. He was welcomed all over the world and was a very useful off-the-books ambassador for the president, who could send him with a message to deliver or to get the lay of the land someplace, to sound out a foreign leader over their views about something. It would be backchannel.
Is it such a good idea in terms of American governance to have a figure like Billy Graham fill this historic role decade after decade?
Americans have typically said that they want their president to be a person of faith. They are not nearly as determined as to what that faith needs to be. If there is a feeling among people that they want their president to be a person of faith, then presumably they want a president to have access to some sort of spiritual guidance and interaction.
Every president has come to discover how disruptive his presence can be in a church service. It is a fascinating question, “What kind of person are people comfortable with as a spiritual counselor and sounding board?”
America got lucky with Billy Graham, given how much power he had. He had an agenda when he walked into the Oval Office. It just wasn't a political one—it was a spiritual one.
He would not confront the presidents typically. His obligation was to witness for the gospel. He would be criticized for failing to speak truth to power: “Why are you not making a moral witness about these moral issues?”
His response would be, “I am speaking truth. It's the truth that I think I'm called to speak.” That was always the tension in the role that he played.
Looking across these presidential administrations, on which presidents did Graham exercise the most significant influence?
He was personally probably closest to George Herbert Walker Bush, politically closest to Richard Nixon, and theologically closest or pastorally closest to Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson would invite him to the White House, to the ranch, all the time. He would want him to sit by his bed, read Scripture with him, pray together. Lucy Johnson would talk about how when Billy Graham came to the White House, it was like the entire temperature came down a few degrees. Everyone breathed more easily.
With Richard Nixon, it was a much more political transaction. This was where Graham got to indulge his hidden fascination with political strategy and was a very shrewd reader of the electorate and political tactics. There was a political closeness that was very damaging to his reputation and his ministry. With the Bush family, there is just a true, deep personal friendship between the Grahams and the Bushes. The two men just had an enormous appreciation of each other. There was more distance between Graham and Jimmy Carter.
What would you say to a pastor today if he received an invitation to meet personally with the president?
They should heed the very hard lesson that Billy Graham learned the first time he was invited, which was to see Harry Truman. It wasn't that the visit went badly. It was perfectly what one might expect and they talked and prayed together.
But the problem was that when Graham left and confronted the great sea of cameras and reporters outside the White House and proceeded to tell them everything that had been said, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. There was temptation to talk about what you said to a president or what the president said to you. He learned that that is a temptation that must be avoided at all costs.
The Oval Office is a place that knocks the air out of you. Even aides who have known the president for a long time will walk in, intending to give him a piece of their mind, and then just say, “Hey, nice tie, Mr. President.” It is a real challenge to speak truth to power. Make sure you have your wits about you and your feet firmly on the ground.
What do you think Graham could have done differently in retrospect in his relationship with Nixon?
I'm not sure anything could have been different. Richard Nixon did not love many people, but he loved Billy Graham. And Billy Graham loved and trusted Richard Nixon, and saw the best in him. Graham was predisposed to see the best in people. He often brought out the best in people.
You could say he was naïve to the point of blind trust, but it was his nature to trust people. He came away really seared by the experience and recognizing the danger of being so close. Just at the point you had other evangelical leaders moving into the public space, you had Graham pulling out of it saying, "It is our job to preach the gospel, and that is what we need to do—not get drawn into these other controversies and activities."
Wasn't it also a passage, an inevitable thing for him to experience? Yet he moved past it and still found a new sense of direction.
Over the 50 years that we write about, it came right in the middle. It saved the second half of his ministry. It allowed for a course correction that made it possible for him to continue to play an enormously important role. It was a very painful passage for him.
In the now-famous 1973 Nixon White House tape recording in which Graham makes disparaging comments about the Jews (for which he apologized in 2002), what was at work?
We asked him about that. When those tapes came out, it was so shocking to him that he had trouble believing that was his voice. It was so not what he believed. He was horrified to hear himself and felt so badly about it. He said, “I think it was like locker room talk. I was just trying to go along and ingratiate myself.”
What was so damaging was a fear that he was too willing to ingratiate himself, that he cared too much about remaining in the good graces of whatever president and would go along with whatever was being said. This was a very painful thing for him to hear.
On the other hand, there was an occasion in the same timeframe when Graham does confront [Nixon], saying, “You need to come out and admit that you've made mistakes,” and he does not pull his punches. That, more than anything, highlighted the problems of being caught up in extraordinary temptations.
This is a story of temptation, ultimately. How does anyone resist it? No one resists it perfectly.
