Interview with Billy Graham

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The New York Times
June 12, 2005
Spirit Willing, One More Trip Down Mountain for Graham
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

MONTREAT, N.C., June 8 - After more than five decades spent preaching to 210 million people in 185 lands, the Rev. Billy Graham is marooned in his log house on a mountaintop ridge.

The evangelist shuffles with a walker down a small ramp into his living room. He has prostate cancer, hydrocephalus and the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, and last year broke a hip and his pelvis. He says he leaves the mountain only three or four times a year, and cannot even remember his last time down.

"When you get to be 86 years of age as I am, all of the world is passing you by," he said, sitting on his front porch for a rare interview.

Nevertheless, Mr. Graham is now preparing to venture down the mountain to travel to New York City for another evangelistic crusade - a three-day outdoor revival meeting beginning June 24 in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.

"Maybe this will be the last crusade I'll ever hold," he said in a conversation on his porch of more than an hour, during which he reflected on his own mortality, his close attention to the funeral of Pope John Paul II, his son Franklin's comments that Islam is an "evil and wicked" religion ("Let's say, I didn't say it") and his regrets, including anti-Jewish comments he made 30 years ago to President Richard M. Nixon that were tape-recorded.

For the last half century, Mr. Graham has been the central figure behind the dramatic postwar resurgence of evangelical Christianity in America. His crusades delivered new believers to churches nationwide; his embrace of mass media paved the way for a generation of evangelists; and his magazines, training programs and the retreat center he founded helped to shape many of today's most prominent Christian leaders.

Now, at a time when other evangelical leaders plunge into political issues, Mr. Graham subtly set himself apart, steadfastly refusing to talk about politics, the evangelical movement or any of the issues important to evangelical conservatives, from abortion to homosexuality to stem cell research.

"I feel I have only a short time to go, and I have to leave that to the younger people," he said.

"I'm just going to preach the gospel and am not going to get off on all these hot-button issues," he said when politics was broached again later. "If I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience on an issue that is not the issue I'm promoting. I'm just promoting the gospel. And after they come to Christ, they hopefully come to a church where they will learn more about their responsibility in society."

Mr. Graham himself always courted politicians and powerful people, befriending every American president, Republican and Democrat alike, from Harry S. Truman on. The hallway leading to his bedroom is a gallery of the Grahams in younger days posing with Queen Elizabeth, with Richard Nixon and even President Kim Il Sung of North Korea.

The evangelist was particularly close with the Bush family. President Bush has said it was a talk with Mr. Graham that prompted him at age 40 to stop drinking and get serious about his Christian faith.

But Mr. Graham said that while he counted many politicians among his friends, "I never endorsed but one politician that I know of, and that was the governor of Texas many years ago," he said, referring to John B. Connally, a close friend. "And I regret that, even though he got elected."

Mr. Graham also said he deeply regretted remarks he made that emerged three years ago, when 500 hours of audio tapes recorded surreptitiously in the Nixon White House were finally released by the National Archives. On a tape recorded in 1972, Mr. Graham agreed with Mr. Nixon's assertion that liberal Jews dominate the media. "They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Mr. Graham said on the tape, and added further:

"A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."

When the tape was made public in 2002, Mr. Graham issued a written apology and met with Jewish leaders. In the interview, he said, "I apologized to them, I said, I need to come to you on hands and knees. Because I didn't remember it, I still don't remember it, but it was there. I guess I was sort of caught up in the conversation somehow."

He added that Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel had given him a Bible inscribed "To Billy Graham, a great friend of Israel," and that Yitzhak Rabin had been a "close friend." He said that while in New York, he plans to meet with Jewish leaders. "Everywhere I've gone since that episode, I've been welcomed extra-warm" by Jewish leaders, he said, "and I appreciate them forgiving me."

Although Mr. Graham moved and spoke slowly, his blue eyes were sharp. He wore a bright blue blazer that matched his eyes, and pressed blue jeans. He said that every day from about 11 a.m. on, he goes numb over most of his body and especially in his face. "I don't feel normal. It's a neurological thing," he said. "If I tell my hand to reach up it's a delayed action between my brain and what happens."

His son Ned, who runs a missionary organization based in Sumner, Wash., now stays with his parents and helps care for them. Several assistants and nurses make the trek each day up the steep winding road, through two security gates to the top of the mountain. Recently a storm swept through, cutting down trees and leaving them without electricity for several days. A backhoe was still digging out the damage, and a wall of dirt blocked the view from the front porch.

In 1995 Mr. Graham named another son, William Franklin Graham III, as president and C.E.O. of his organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In 2002, Franklin Graham set off an international furor when he called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion."

Asked about his son's remarks, Billy Graham answered, "We had an understanding a long time ago, he speaks for himself." Pressed further, he responded, "Let's say, I didn't say it." Then he recounted how, while on a crusade in Fresno, Calif., soon after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, he asked to be taken directly from the airport to the local mosque to show support for the Muslims there.

Asked whether he agreed with those who anticipate a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, he quickly said, "I think the big conflict is with hunger and starvation and poverty."

Much of Mr. Graham's declining energy these days is devoted to preparing for the New York event. He chose New York in response to a request several years ago from more than a dozen New York City pastors who came to his home and made a case that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, New Yorkers were in need of a spiritual revival. He added that he was also drawn to New York by "nostalgia" because of his fond memories of his crusade there in 1957 at Madison Square Garden, which catapulted his ministry to national prominence.

Mr. Graham said he recently wrote to Bill and Hillary Clinton to invite them to attend the crusade, but had not yet heard whether they will come. In preparation for the crusade, he subscribed to New York newspapers, combing them for anecdotes he can use when he preaches.

His voice is weak, but he rehearses it daily "like an opera singer," he said, demonstrating with a booming: "Yes, yes, YES LORD." His wife, Ruth, bedridden but sharp as a tack, likes to joke by responding from her recliner in the bedroom, "No, no, no."

Mr. Graham's last crusade was in Los Angeles in November. He speaks now from a podium designed to allow him to sit down while speaking. He has been invited to do another crusade in London, but said he will not decide until he could assesses how it went in New York.

Mortality is on his mind. Of the pope's funeral, he said, "I watched every bit of it." Asked why, he said: "He was teaching us how to suffer, and he taught us how to die. I didn't agree with him on everything theologically, but as a person and as a man, he set a great example and he was a wonderful personal friend to me."

Mr. Graham said that with each health setback, "I've rejoiced in all of it." The Lord, he said, was making it possible for him to relate to other suffering people.

The other night he said he caught an old clip of himself being interviewed on "Larry King Live." "I looked at myself, it was only six or seven years ago, but I looked so vigorous," he said. "And I thought to myself, how different things were to me then than they are now."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company