US evangelist Billy Graham, who
counseled presidents and preached to millions across the world
from his native North Carolina to communist North Korea during
his 70 years on the pulpit, died on Wednesday at the age of 99,
a spokesman said.
Graham died at 8am at his home in
Montreat, North Carolina, according to Jeremy Blume, a spokesman
for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
With his steely features and piercing blue eyes, Graham was
a powerful figure when he preached in his prime, roaming the
stage and hoisting a Bible as he declared Jesus Christ to be the
only solution to humanity's problems.
According to his ministry, he preached to more people than
anyone else in history, reaching hundreds of millions of people
either in person or via TV and satellite links.
Graham became the de facto White House chaplain to several
U.S. presidents, most famously Richard Nixon. He also met with
scores of world leaders and was the first noted evangelist to
take his message behind the Iron Curtain.
"He was probably the dominant religious leader of his era,"
said William Martin, author of "A Prophet With Honor: The Billy
Graham Story." "No more than one or two popes, perhaps one or
two other people, came close to what he achieved."
Graham was no longer a close associate of presidents in his
later years but shortly after the announcement of his death
President Donald Trump said on Twitter: "The GREAT Billy Graham
is dead. There was nobody like him! He will be missed by
Christians and all religions. A very special man."
In a rare trip away from his home in his later years, Graham
had celebrated his 95th birthday on November 7, 2013, at a hotel in
Asheville, North Carolina, where some 800 guests, including
Trump, business magnate Rupert Murdoch and television hostess
Kathie Lee Gifford paid tribute.
The celebration featured a video of a sermon that his son
Franklin said was Graham's last message to the nation. Graham
had been working for a year on the video, which was aired on Fox
News. In it, he said America was "in great need of a spiritual
awakening."
In his prime Graham had a thunderous, quick-burst speaking
style that earned him the nickname "God's Machine Gun." Through
his "Crusades for Christ," Graham sowed fields of devotion
across the American heartland that would become fertile ground
for the growth of the religious right's conservative political
movement.
In this 1954 file photo, Evangelist Billy Graham speaks to over 100,000 Berliners at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany. Picture: AP
His influence was fuelled by an organisation that carefully
planned his religious campaigns, putting on international
conferences and training seminars for evangelical leaders,
Martin said.
Graham's mastery of the media was ground-breaking. In
addition to radio and publishing, he used telephone lines,
television and satellites to deliver his message to homes,
churches and theaters around the world.
Some 77 million saw him preach in person while nearly 215
million more watched his crusades on television or through
satellite link-ups, a Graham spokeswoman said.
Graham started meeting with presidents during the tenure of
Harry Truman. He played golf with Gerald Ford, skinny-dipped in
the White House pool with Lyndon Johnson, vacationed with George
H.W. Bush and spent the night in the White House on Nixon's
first day in office.
George W. Bush gave Graham credit for helping him rediscover
his faith and in 2010, when it was difficult for Graham to
travel, Barack Obama made the trip to the preacher's log cabin
home in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains.
Graham's ties to the White House were mutually beneficial.
His reputation was enhanced as preacher to the presidents, while
the politicians boosted their standing with religiously inclined
voters.
"Their personal lives - some of them - were difficult,"
Graham, a registered Democrat, told Time magazine in 2007 of his
political acquaintances. "But I loved them all. I admired them
all. I knew that they had burdens beyond anything I could ever
know or understand."
Graham's reputation took a hit because of Nixon after the
release of 1972 White House tapes in which the two were heard
making anti-Semitic comments. Graham later said he did not
remember the conversation and apologized.
In the early half of his career, Graham often spoke his mind
on social and political issues of the day, including his strong
anti-communist sentiments. He dismissed Vietnam War protesters
as attention-seekers and, while he eventually refused to hold
segregated revival meetings, he did not take an active role in
the 1960s civil rights movement.
But Graham's politics were not as overt as those of some
religious leaders who came after him, such as Pat Robertson, who
ran for president in 1988, and Jerry Falwell, co-founder of the
Moral Majority, an organization whose purpose was to promote
Christian-oriented politics.
As he grew older, Graham said he felt he had become too
involved in some issues and shifted to a middle-of-the-road
position in order to reach more people. He did, however, dive
into the gay marriage issue in 2012 when he came out in support
of a state amendment to ban same-sex marriages in North
Carolina. He also met with Republican Mitt Romney in October
2012 and told him he supported Romney's run for the presidency.
FROM FARM TO PULPIT
William Franklin Graham was born on Nov. 7, 1918, into a
Presbyterian family and was known as Billy Frank while growing
up on a farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. As a teenager, he
said he was mostly preoccupied with baseball and girls until he
was moved by God after hearing a fiery revivalist in Charlotte.
After attending Bob Jones College, Graham ended up at a
Bible school in Florida, where he would preach at his first
revival, and was ordained in 1939 by a church in the Southern
Baptist Convention. He received a scholarship to Wheaton College
near Chicago, where he met Ruth Bell, whose parents were
missionaries in China. They married in 1943.
Rather than work from a home church, Graham went on the
road, preaching in tents and building a following. His
breakthrough came with a 1949 Los Angeles tent crusade that was
scheduled for three weeks but extended to eight because of the
overflow crowds he attracted.
The success of the Los Angeles campaign and the fame it
brought Graham was attributed to media magnate William Randolph
Hearst, who had liked Graham's style and anti-communist stance
so much that he ordered his newspapers to give Graham a boost.
Graham eventually outgrew tent revivals and would preach at
some of the most famous venues in the world, such as Yankee
Stadium and Madison Square Garden in New York and London's
Wembley Stadium. He delivered sermons around the globe,
including in remote African villages, China, North Korea, the
Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Liberals accused him of giving credibility to abusive
governments while fundamentalist Christians criticized him for
going to godless countries and promoting peaceful relations with
them. Graham said he simply saw the trips as apolitical
opportunities to win souls for Christ.
Graham concluded his career of religious campaigns in June
2005 in New York with a three-day stand that attracted more than
230,000 people, his organization said. He turned over his
evangelical association to his son Franklin, who did not shy
away from politics and frequently praised Trump once he became
president.
Graham's other four children were also evangelists.
REPUTATION
Graham managed to maintain his public integrity even as
other TV star evangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart
were hit in the 1980s by financial and sex scandals. To keep his
reputation pristine, Graham had a policy of never being alone
with any woman other than Ruth.
Graham's closest presidential relationship was with Nixon,
who offered him any government job he wanted - including
ambassador to Israel. It turned out to be a painful relationship
for Graham, who said Nixon and his circle misled him on the
Watergate scandal.
Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman first mentioned Graham's
anti-Semitic remarks in a 1994 book, which Graham strongly
denied. But when audio tapes from the Nixon White House were
released in 2002, Graham could be heard referring to Jews as
pornographers and agreeing with Nixon that the U.S. media was
dominated by liberal Jews and could send the United States "down
the drain."
Graham, who had a long history of supporting Israel,
apologized again after the tapes' release and said he had no
recollection of the conversation.
"If it wasn't on tape, I would not have believed it," Graham
told Newsweek. "I guess I was trying to please. I felt so badly
about myself - I couldn't believe it. I went to a meeting with
Jewish leaders and I told them I would crawl to them to ask
their forgiveness."
The author of more than two dozen books with titles such as
"How to Be Born Again," Graham also ran the weekly "Hour of
Decision" radio program broadcast around the world on Sundays
for more than 50 years.
Graham helped bring religion into the television age. He
first put together a television show, which was eventually
syndicated, in 1951 and began live broadcasts of his revival
meetings in 1957 from New York's Madison Square Garden.
In a 2011 Fox News interview, Graham was asked what he would
do differently in his career.
"I would study more. I would pray more, travel less, take
less speaking engagements," he said. "I took too many of them in
too many places around the world. If I had it to do over again
I'd spend more time in meditation and prayer and just telling
the Lord how much I love him."
In addition to suffering with Parkinson's disease for many
years, Graham's health problems in his later years included a
broken hip, a broken pelvis, prostate cancer and installation of
a shunt in his brain to control excess fluid. He was
hospitalized in 2011, 2012 and 2013 for respiratory problems.
Graham and his wife, Ruth, who died June 14, 2007, had two
sons and three daughters.