Preachers, Politics And Temptation

By DAVID AIKMAN and Billy Graham

Q. Many Americans have thought of you as something of an unofficial chaplain to the White House for the past several Presidents. Has that proximity ever made you uncomfortable?

A. Yes, it has. Each one of them I have known before he ever got into the White House. Some of them I was very close friends with before they ever got there, like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and George Bush.

I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became President. I remember he had wanted me to come and see the lights at the White House at Christmas. It was the year that Watergate was just beginning. I put my arm around him, and I said, "Mr. President, let us have a prayer." He said, "Billy, I would like to say something first. We have been here now four years. I thought by this time some of my enemies would have had me by now." He added, "You know, I am a hated man, going back to the Alger Hiss case, and Helen Gahagan Douglas and all that."

We had a prayer. And when I finished praying, I looked up at him and tears were coming down both sides of his cheeks. I will never forget that night.

I see him now maybe two or three times a year. The last six months of his presidency, we could not get to him. I went through every angle I knew. And he knew I was trying to get to him. But as Bill Safire says in his book, he gave orders not to allow me near him because he did not want me tarred with Watergate.

Then he went to San Clemente ((Calif.)), and he was so terribly sick, he nearly died. He came close to death. My wife Ruth hired a one-motor plane to pull a sign back and forth in front of the hospital, saying GOD LOVES YOU AND SO DO WE. And nobody knew it was Ruth.

At San Clemente he took me upstairs really just to talk in depth about his feelings and all the things that had happened, about Watergate. He was a very emotional man. People do not realize how easily he was touched by things. And he is, I think, a true believer.

Q. Did he express any regret about Watergate?

A. Oh, he apologized to me about the language. He said, "There are many words that I used that I never knew before."

Q. Is there a privately spiritual President Bush whom we do not know about in public?

A. Bush is easy to talk to about spiritual things, easier than other Presidents I have met. He says straight out that he has received Christ as his Saviour, that he is a born-again believer and that he reads the Bible daily. He has the highest moral standards of almost anybody whom I have known. He and his wife have such a relationship, it is just unbelievable. If you are with them in private, you know, they are just like lovers. When I would go and spend the night, as I did many times when he was Vice President, the room that I stayed in was right across the hall from theirs, and they always kept the door open. And there they were, you know, in bed, holding hands or reading a newspaper or reading a book.

Q. Is it true that many Presidents have offered you jobs?

A. Nixon offered me any job I wanted. I said, "Dick, I do not want any job. God called me to preach." Johnson offered me the ambassadorship to Israel. Later on, sitting beside Golda Meir at a dinner at the White House, I said, "I am not the man. God called me to preach." And Golda Meir reached and grabbed my hand. She was so thrilled. I told Johnson, "The Middle East would blow up if I went over there."

Q. What kept you from throwing in your hat with the Christian right, the Moral Majority?

A. I knew the great dangers that being a political partisan has for an evangelist or a preacher of the gospel. People say, "Well, you have been friends with all these Republican Presidents." But I have been friends with Democrats too. I am a registered Democrat. So I was determined to be just as neutral as I could be in those things. I also remember Jerry Falwell flew down here to Montreat to see me about the Moral Majority. He said, "Billy, I want to tell you, you stay out of Moral Majority. You have too big a ministry to get bogged down in politics."

Q. You have met the Pope twice. Do you share his views of spiritual revival in Eastern Europe and elsewhere?

; A. I would say that there are a great many parallels. I remember the first time I was with him in 1981. He reached his hand out, and he grabbed my thumb, like this ((grabs his left thumb with his right hand)). And he said, "We are brothers."

Now I have spent considerable time with the people around him. I could sense they recognize that they have an affinity with Evangelicals. They have suddenly realized that these are the people who are closest to them theologically.

Q. Some of your brethren in the Southern Baptist Convention have expressed outrage at your meeting with prominent Roman Catholics.

A. There used to be big problems. But now I have reconciled in my mind that God has his people in all kinds of places and all kinds of churches and groups. I have found many people in the Roman Catholic Church, both clergy and laity, who I believe are born-again Christians. They may hold different theological views than I hold, but I believe they are in the body of Christ. So I consider them brothers and sisters in Christ. And, as my wife has often said, we have never received an ugly letter from a Roman Catholic.

Q. Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are nationally known Christian leaders who have fallen from their pedestals. I know you have no desire to judge them, but what accounts for their fall?

A. I do not think there is a single element. If you would name one word, you would say sin and the temptations of the evil one, Satan. Because we are all tempted. I think if they had realized what was happening and turned to the Lord in the deepest part of their lives, they would not have fallen. Of course, when a person becomes what they were on television and becomes a celebrity, he faces a special kind of temptation, a special time of vulnerability because you become a target for anybody who is jealous or anybody who is disloyal in the organization.

That is the reason I wrote a book, about four years before all this happened, warning of this. I went into all these things we read in the press about the sex, money and pride. Those are the three areas I think Satan attacks God's servants on. I was told that many years ago by an old clergyman, and I never forgot it. And I learned from that moment on that I would be tempted in those areas. So I never rode in a car with a woman alone. I never have eaten a meal with my secretary alone or ridden in a car with her alone. If we sit in here and I dictate something to her, the door is open. And just little things like that, that people would think are so silly, but it was ingrained in me in those early years.

Q. Did you foresee the scandals in the television ministries or ever try to warn the people involved against them?

A. I did that at the National Religious Broadcasters ((convention in Washington)) about four or five years ago, in a major address I gave them. I do not know whether Jimmy Swaggart was there, but Jim Bakker was there.

Q. You have spent half a century preaching in America and around the world against sin. Do you think there is more sin around than when you started, or less?

A. More, but only because there are more people. As far as an outward act that we call sin is concerned, like murder or adultery, and all these things, it is certainly more apparent in the sense that it is in the media. I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us. And we have too much violence, too much open sex on television. What it is going to do to the next generation I do not know.

But there is also a new word coming back, the need for moral values, because we cannot build a strong society without them.

Q. Like all Evangelicals, you believe in the Second Coming of Christ, to be preceded by unprecedented worldwide warfare, famine and cruelty. But doesn't the waning of the cold war make such an apocalypse more remote today than, say, ten years ago?

A. I could not answer that because I think the Lord taught us not to speculate on the time of his return. Even in the Middle Ages they expected Christ to come at any time after the great plague in Europe, where 1 out of 3 people died. I personally think things are now converging for the first time in history, fulfilling the prophecies that he himself made about his coming. I had a German scientist say to me the other day that from a scientific point of view, man is almost at the end now. He was not talking about religion. I would say that people seem to sense that we cannot go on forever.

Q. A recent editorial in the Door, a Christian satirical magazine, suggested that you should "retire gracefully" and hand over the assets of your organization to the poor. What do you think of that idea?

A. We do not have any assets, but I would say that they have a strong point because I am faced with the thought that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association should shut down. I do not have the authority to shut it down. I have let that authority go into a board of directors for some years now. And I do not think they would hear of it.

But I will never retire from preaching. I do not see anybody in the Bible who retires from preaching.