US evangelist Billy Graham dies at 99

In this 1994 file photo, evangelist Billy Graham begins his sermon in Atlanta's Georgia Dome. Picture: John Bazemore/AP

In this 1994 file photo, evangelist Billy Graham begins his sermon in Atlanta's Georgia Dome. Picture: John Bazemore/AP

Published Feb 21, 2018

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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.

Reuters

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