Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

  “It’s not easy to get [Ruth] to talk about herself,” Mrs. Johnson observed. “The conversation around Billy is always very substantive and exciting. And I like to hear him talk too about the places he has been and all these crusades he has conducted and his feelings about a country, its culture, its economy, its stability. And pretty soon I’ve lost the thread about her childhood and I’ve found we’re listening to these other things.”

  Ruth was accustomed to being her husband’s second priority. His ministry came first and she wanted it that way, even if she didn’t always like it. Sometimes she came in third, for if a world leader needed her husband, Billy felt it was his patriotic duty to be there. Johnson certainly saw the logic of this reasoning and demonstrated as much on August 13, 1972, the Grahams’ twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, when Billy and Grady Wilson were on the ranch with him. That night Billy telephoned Ruth to wish her a happy anniversary and Johnson picked up another extension.

  “I sure do want to thank you for letting us have Billy today,” he told her. “But I needed him more than you did. We’ve been having a time riding around. Grady’s here doing a good job keeping the dogs in the backseat, but he’s a damn poor substitute for you.”

  On Monday, January 22, 1973, two days after Nixon’s second inauguration and the day before a cease-fire was announced in Vietnam, Johnson, alone in his bedroom, suffered a fatal heart attack. For years he had expressed his wish that Billy would preach at the funeral. The last time the evangelist was with him on the Johnson ranch, the former president had taken him to the family cemetery, about a mile from the house. He showed Billy the spot where he wanted to be buried, and gave specific instructions about the service.

  “Don’t use any notes,” Johnson told him. “The wind will blow them away. And I don’t want a lot of fancy eulogizing, but be sure to mention my name.”

  On January 24, a raw, overcast Wednesday, Johnson’s body was flown to Washington in Air Force One. The next day the flag-draped casket moved slowly up the steps of the Capitol, where Billy led the prayer. The Grahams flew to San Antonio and waited in a private lounge for the presidential jet to arrive with the body, and for a while Ruth talked with one of Johnson’s sisters.

  Air Force One arrived and the Grahams and others waiting moved from the lounge to take their positions outside. Anonymous onlookers lined the fence around the runway, hunched in the cold. The jet taxied into place near a waiting hearse. Friends, officials, military officers lined up behind Billy as he stood bareheaded in the icy rain, a black robe over his winter coat. An elevator platform was rolled into place at the plane’s rear exit and the casket was lifted. Billy stepped forward to meet the Johnson family as they deplaned from the front and stood together, somberly facing the crowd while a band played hymns and white-gloved hands smoothly slid the casket inside the hearse.

  People dispersed to private cars or limousines to make the hour’s drive to the ranch. Protocol directed that Billy was to ride alone behind the hearse, but Mrs. Johnson requested that he stay with her family. Ruth rode with John Connally’s family. People lined the road on both sides for miles, and traffic stopped, cars pulling off the road to let the procession pass. Each small town and farm along the way had its own cluster of spectators, some of them holding signs that read, “We love you, Mr. President” and “Forgive us, Mr. President.”

  The small cemetery was surrounded by a low stone wall and shaded by massive oaks, and it was filled this hour with generations of family, living and dead. Thousands had gathered outside it, standing in the rain and mud. Ruth was to follow the Connallys through a barrier of Secret Service agents and stand inside. Instead, she lingered just beyond the gate while her husband read John 14:1-3 and briefly eulogized Johnson. He pronounced the benediction and the honor guard folded the American flag, then presented it to Mrs. Johnson. She kissed it.

  Hundreds of friends had been invited to the ranch afterward for coffee. Mrs. Johnson had asked the Grahams to spend the night, “but we felt the kindest thing we could do was to leave as quickly as possible,” Ruth wrote at the time. Inside, the carpeting had been covered with heavy plastic and the furniture had been pushed back. Yuki was curled up on the couch.

  “I wanted so much to say something to let Mrs. Johnson know how we loved and admired her, how our hearts went out to her,” Ruth recorded. “Instead she hugged me and said something about reading everything I wrote or that had been written about me. And we hugged again and I slipped away. I, who had come to love, had been loved. I, who had come to give, had been given to. Such is the stuff of which she is made. Nor was I the exception. There was a word, a hug, a cordial greeting, or a warm smile for each.” Ruth wrote of the occasion:

  Of this historic moment

  two things I kept:

  that earth was gray

  and cold, and heaven wept.1

  The Grahams, T. W. Wilson, Grady Wilson, and Calvin Thielman left the ranch late that afternoon by car, heading for San Antonio as the setting sun broke through the black clouds, splashing red and gold over wet pavement. The next morning, when no cameras or microphones were there to record events, the small group sat in the San Antonio airport eating breakfast. A woman across the room eyed Billy for several minutes, her face bleak as though the wretchedness of all the world were held in her heart. Finally, she mustered enough courage to approach him.

  “May I talk to you for just a minute?” she asked shakily.

  Billy nodded for Calvin to move aside. Billy listened to her, then prayed with her. When she left, tears in her eyes, Calvin apologized to Billy for not shielding him so he could finish his breakfast before his eggs got cold.

  “No,” Billy said. “You did the right thing. Her mother is dying from cancer and her heart is very heavy. She wanted me to pray for her.”

  President Richard Nixon moved into the White House in January of 1969, and right away established church services in the East Room.

  “In those years President Nixon, whether rightly or wrongly, thought that church was so important that you should emphasize it by having it in the White House,” recalled Barbara Bush as she sipped coffee in a sitting room of the vice-presidential mansion on a raw morning in February of 1982. “And of course it also, in all honesty, kept an awful lot of people from going to an awful lot of trouble. If you had church at the White House you didn’t have to have the church sniffed and security all checked, and eighty people have to do all of that when the president moves. So he had church at the White House for security reasons. And then he asked leaders in the church to come and preach Jewish, Catholic, whatever.”

  Billy Graham was one of the leaders Nixon occasionally invited to preach, and Ruth often went along. The couple had a deep affection and admiration for Nixon. In the same way that Nixon admired Billy’s Christian integrity and fortitude, Billy, who had always been interested in world affairs, admired Nixon’s genius. Though Ruth never became close to Nixon, she was later grateful for his breakthrough in China, believing his skill at foreign policy to be unmatched.

  She did strike up a warm friendship with Julie Nixon and, in fact, had a significant influence on her. One early Sunday morning before Billy was to speak at the White House, Julie asked Ruth about her faith, about prayer, and if God really listened. Together they talked until church time, with Julie asking questions in her high-strung, perceptive manner and Ruth calmly replying, her leather-bound King James Bible open in her lap.

  “She’s been an inspiration to me,” Julie said later. “She’s so real. She’s one of the few persons I’ve known who really live their faith.”

  Ruth inspired Julie enough to become the subject of a chapter in Julie’s book Special People.2 She shares page space with Prince Charles, Golda Meir, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, among other notables.

  Nixon had first heard about Billy in the forties when his mother, Hannah Nixon, had attended a Billy Graham crusade in Southern California and had written her son about how impressed she was. Senator Clyde Hoey introduced t
he two men in 1950 and, through Billy’s friendship with President Eisenhower, they became well acquainted.

  By the late sixties, the days of Ruth’s kicking her husband under the table for discussing politics were long gone. “Bill was supposed to limit his advice to spiritual and moral matters,” she said.

  Knowing Bill, knowing myself and how prone we are to give free advice even when unasked for, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if when he was with the president, if the president asked his opinions, he would tell him what he thought, and give him advice that wasn’t limited to spiritual, moral things.

  He wouldn’t say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, that’s out of my field.” And frankly, I don’t see what’s wrong in asking the advice of a clergyman if he’s got a good clear head on him. The media’s taking exception to what they are afraid Bill might be saying doesn’t make sense to me. I would think they would be happy to have as many good, decent men as Bill as possible at the White House…. Christianity is above ideology. It’s for Democrats and Republicans alike. It’s for sinners and I think the press would be the first to admit there are sinners in politics.

  William F. Buckley Jr. summarized it rather well: “It seems to me plain that presidents should have access to religious figures. Plain also that there will be attempted abuses, in both directions, in many cases.”

  “Whatever Nixon’s intentions towards Billy Graham,” Ruth said in retrospect, “the president impressed the Grahams as being a religious man who did not wear his religion on his sleeve.”

  “Nixon,” said Billy during an interview in Montreat on a raw, blustery November afternoon in 1982, “is a very serious person and a very deep person and a very intellectual person.” He added that Nixon was surprisingly sensitive and thoughtful. For example, he would never forget a birthday.

  “I was playing golf in France,” Billy recalled, “and I had an old set of clubs that I had rented. And I played one of the best games I’ve ever played and I wanted to buy those clubs. The golf pro would not sell them to me. So when I got home and was playing golf with Mr. Nixon in California one day, I told him about this and I didn’t think anything more of it. And did you know I got those golf clubs for Christmas? He had sent over there and gotten them. He was just always kind, courteous, and thoughtful. I never felt he was using me—ever”

  It is hard to imagine Billy ever feeling used, really. For those who knew him well, he was not as naive as innocent, and, remarkably, his willingness to assign decent motives to all never really changed. Even when he was in his late seventies and halting with Parkinson’s, he did not turn away strangers who approached him in hotel lobbies or during his dinner. Were Ruth not present and in a position to shield him, he would give his time to anyone, often kissing and patting hands, while his own trembled with exhaustion or, later, from disease.

  He would never seem to know the meaning of suspicion or guardedness or his right to privacy, any more than his wife knew fear. She did not share his distilled view of motivation or the entitlement of another when it came to his availability. Ruth knew exploitation, agendas, and wickedness when she saw it, and she knew when her husband was dangerously wearing himself thin. But she could not always shield him, and neither Billy nor those around him always listened.

  In May of 1970, Nixon appeared on the platform at Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee during the Knoxville crusade. It was the first time in history that a president had spoken on an evangelist’s platform, and the first time Nixon had appeared on a university campus since he’d ordered troops into Cambodia the month before.3

  Seventy-five thousand people crowded the stadium and another twenty-five thousand spilled into the parking lot and the grassy area around it. Three hundred antiwar demonstrators pooled toward the rear, unfurling banners and flags. Members of the University of Tennessee football team wanted to force the protesters back outside, but Secret Service agents shook their heads. It was wise, they said in agreement with Billy, “to avoid a confrontation.”

  The president and his wife, Pat, waited with the Grahams until all the platform guests had been seated. Then Nixon and Billy, followed by Mrs. Nixon and Ruth, filed up the platform steps to deafening applause and a standing ovation. The obscenities and boos of the dissenters, for a moment, were barely discernible.

  “The rudeness, immaturity, and stupidity of the demonstrators was unbelievable,” Ruth wrote at the time. “Whatever they think of Mr. Nixon they should respect the office of the presidency. During Nixon’s speech the protesters stood time and time again, shouting and waving their banners. It was a strange mixture of feelings I had, mounting anger that the President of the United States cannot speak at a religious rally without being shouted down, pride in Mr. Nixon’s dignity and graciousness… and profound gratification that the vast majority were solidly behind him and let him know it.”

  After Nixon’s brief speech, Ethel Waters, the black singer and former actress who had been a frequent guest at Billy Graham crusades, was helped to the pulpit to sing.

  “I’ve known my precious boy Dickie President Nixon and his precious Pat for many years,” she said. “I expect the next time we meet, Mr. President,” she added, turning toward him, “will be in heaven.”

  She turned her attention to the protesters and said, “If you knew them you’d really like them. They’re just nice, fine people. And now, you precious children, I love you but if I could get close enough, I’d smack you!”

  After the service Nixon asked the Grahams to ride out to Air Force One with him and Pat in the long, black, bulletproof limousine. For miles the road was lined with people. Dozens of reporters waited near the presidential jet, and Nixon, obviously in a good mood, quipped that he’d had to borrow money from Billy for the offering and that he would repay him later with golf balls. The reporters attempted to interview the evangelist, but their questions were swallowed up in the roar of the jet’s engines as a silver door shut behind the president.

  The Grahams discovered that Nixon had left orders for the limousine to drive them back through Knoxville to their hotel. Flanked by motorcycles with flashing blue lights, they cruised slowly through town, “feeling ridiculous,” as Ruth remembered it.

  The event was disturbing to Dan Rather, who was there with a press pool. Rather, an admirer of Billy’s, could understand an evangelist’s desire “for the opportunity to talk to and perhaps influence the country’s leadership and world leadership.” But, he recalled, “the Knoxville scene was personally troubling to me. I remember walking into the stadium and saying to myself, ‘You know, this is just really not right. I mean, Billy Graham shouldn’t be doing this,’ or someone in Reverend Graham’s position shouldn’t be doing this, President Nixon shouldn’t be doing this. I would think both of them would have a little embarrassment about that scene today. It had the appearance at least of being a little too calculated on both sides and a little too blatant on both sides using one another to each’s advantage.

  “There was a tremendous crowd and it was a little piece of Americana, great football crowd, all that big U.T. stuff hanging around the stadium and Reverend Graham running a crusade and Richard Nixon running his own crusade. Two crusaders meet—it was a bit much.”

  Ruth had her own private ambivalence about Nixon’s appearance on her husband’s platform. She was disappointed that Nixon had not given a spiritual message to the people. “I think to have [presidents] come and sit in the audience is one thing,” she remarked in later years. “To have them speak from the platform is another.”

  In the spring of 1971 Nixon, with the argument of “national security,” demanded that his campaign aides step up their political intelligence. In June a year later, five men were arrested in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Three days later Nixon and his top aide, H. R. Haldeman, met to discuss the arrests. The scandals collectively known as Watergate were beginning to escalate, but in the public eye Nixon was untainted.

  On October 15, a year be
fore the presidential election, Nixon paid Billy an unusual tribute by appearing on the platform with him for Billy Graham Day in Charlotte. The prominent media executive and president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce Charles Crutchfield conceived the idea of having the city publicly honor its most celebrated son. When Crutchfield telephoned Billy about it, Billy refused, saying he’d been honored enough by the people of his birthplace.4

  Crutchfield wouldn’t take no for an answer. After Nixon had appeared with Billy in Knoxville, Crutchfield decided both that Billy Graham Day was a grand idea and that what would really make it spectacular, indeed historic, would be the appearance of Richard Nixon in Charlotte to honor his evangelist friend. Crutchfield contacted the White House. Next, Nixon telephoned Billy. He wanted Billy to accept the honor, he said, and Nixon wanted to be there with him to honor their years of friendship.

  “If that is your wish, Mr. President,” Billy replied, “then of course I’ll accept.”5

  October 15 was designated a holiday in Charlotte. The children had a holiday from school. Tremendous crowds of cheering citizens lined East Independence Boulevard as such dignitaries as North Carolina Senators Sam Ervin6 and B. Everett Jordan, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and John Connally and his wife rumbled past in a motorcade. There was a public rally at the Coliseum, during which Billy spoke, followed by Nixon, who used no notes. He made comments such as “What I know about the law I owe to this state; and Greece, Rome, Ancient Persia, their civilizations died… because as they became wealthy, they became soft, as they became educated without principle they became weak…. It is the character of a nation that determines whether it survives.