It doesn't take long to make a list of religious leaders who've made personal connections with each of the last 11 U.S. presidents. There's really just one name: Billy Graham.
The evangelist who has spent the last six decades preaching the gospel around the world also served as a chaplain and confidant to American presidents. While some relationships were rosier than others, Graham met with all 11 in the White House on at least one occasion and learned lessons from carefully — or not so carefully — walking the treacherous line between religion and politics.
Even in his retirement years, Graham was able to accomplish a feat usually reserved for more somber occasions. At the opening of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., last spring, three former presidents — Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — all took turns at the podium to praise the preacher.
A 20/20 special that aired Aug. 10 on ABC pictured Graham and the ex-presidents chatting together at the time of the library dedication.
“I don't think anyone's ever done that,” said Nancy Gibbs, co-author of the new book The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House, which she wrote with her Time magazine colleague Michael Duffy.
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Bill Graham is flanked by Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Gov. Spiro T. Agnew, the vice-presidential choice, as he delivers the benediction at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.
“It takes Billy Graham to make that happen. Three former presidents together around a table talking and it's not a funeral.”
Graham said meeting with all of them at once “overwhelmed” him.
“Each one I've known long before they ever became president and been in their homes many times,” he said on the 20/20 program. “Always called them by their first name — until they became president.”
Many of those relationships began far from Washington. Clinton attended Graham's integrated Arkansas crusade as a teen in 1959. Carter recalled that 613 people came to Christ at a Graham evangelistic outreach in Georgia he chaired in 1966, before he was elected governor.
The evangelist met Ronald Reagan, when he was known as an actor, not a president, in 1953.
In some cases, they shared a similar faith commitment. In other cases, either the president or the preacher saw advantages that could help him in his line of work. And in all cases, Graham knew the challenges of celebrity that these powerful men faced each day — your every move watched and chronicled, the accompanying toll on your family, and few people with whom you could confide your private thoughts.
“We saw him with [President George W.] Bush on Sept. 11,” Gibbs said. “We saw him with Clinton after Oklahoma City. We would see him praying on Inauguration Day. What we were surprised by was the extent to which … there was a real private, pastoral relationship with almost all of those presidents.”
A key exception was the first of the 11 presidents, Harry Truman.
Graham has acknowledged that he didn't handle their White House meeting well, telling Truman his goals of living according to the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule were not sufficient and he needed faith in Christ. Graham then went out on the White House lawn, knelt and prayed with his colleagues to demonstrate how he had prayed for Truman inside.
Though Graham told Gibbs and Duffy “I prayed, a real prayer,” the whole episode left him embarrassed and Truman angry. Never again invited to the Truman White House, Graham vowed not to treat another person of influence in that manner and wrote in his autobiography, Just As I Am, that he “apologized profusely” to Truman years later.
The evangelist acknowledged lessons learned from another president, Richard Nixon, with whom he had become close friends — so close that he defended him even as the Watergate scandal grew. Graham said he “felt physically sick” when he learned of the harsh language Nixon used when the White House tapes became public.
“I really do think that Graham only saw the one side of him and was therefore, I think, heartbroken when he had to confront the truth of the other side,” Gibbs said. “And, of course, chastened by it.”
Years later, when a tape of Graham revealed him speaking disparagingly with Nixon of Jews, Graham again apologized profusely.
As Graham offered pastoral aid to the presidents, his connections to them helped him gain international access to spread the gospel. And his role as a diplomat extended to this country, when he was able to act as a liaison between administrations, ensuring, for example, that Nixon's family would welcome the Clintons at his funeral.
In the private relationships between Graham and presidents, a word surfaced that is seldom used in political circles: love. Gibbs and Duffy noted Graham's words to Nixon in 1962, for example: “There are few men whom I have loved as I love you.”
Former President Lyndon Johnson said in 1971, “Not many people in this country love me, but that preacher there loves me,” noted Patricia Cornwell, biographer of Graham's wife, Ruth, who died in June.
Said Gibbs: “This is a man who is incapable of an insincere expression. He is really guileless. … I think there is an innocent quality about him that makes it very easy to like him and very easy to trust him that tends to put you at ease and not on edge.”
In his writings, Graham expressed a unique understanding of the demands of the Oval Office. In Just As I Am, he concluded in a chapter about Nixon: “The presidency was a lonely spot.”
And, ending a new chapter of his updated autobiography that was released Aug. 1, the evangelist asked others to adopt his practice of following the Apostle Paul's urging to pray for “all those in authority.”
“In an increasingly complex and dangerous world, our president and other world leaders need our prayers more than ever,” Graham wrote. “I am convinced our world would be a far better place if more of us followed this mandate.”