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The Sunday Forum: December 2, 2007
Lloyd: Welcome everyone to the Sunday Forum today. This is our regular weekly exploration of the interrelationships between faith and public life with the liveliest minds we can stir up in Washington and beyond. Today we have not one but two very lively minds with us. We have two Time magazine journalists, widely published, widely celebrated, who have written a new and fascinating book, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. Welcome today. The new book is called The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham and the White House. It has been a best-selling book. It’s gotten a great deal of attention. It both tells us a lot about an unexplored piece of recent American history, but raises a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between faith and public life. It invites us to learn a great deal more about Billy Graham himself, one of the more extraordinary people in American life in the last half-century or so. So I want to begin, Nancy and Michael, either of you who would like, with a little bit of “why?” What caught your imagination about Billy Graham and why this book, and why now? Gibbs: After the last presidential election, which both Michael and I covered for Time, we were literally sitting down at lunch exactly this time, December three years ago, talking about the way religion had been discussed during that campaign—and thinking, maybe, you know, many of us as journalists in covering it had misunderstood or misinterpreted it, or forgotten our history, or somehow not gotten our arms around the role that religion was playing in our politics and playing in our elections. And wished that we could find some way of telling the story of how we got here, and how this relationship has played out through history, and a sort of window onto the world that faith plays in the White House specifically, not just in our politics, but in the life of the president. And at the point at which we realized that Billy Graham—uniquely among any figure in any field, any fund raiser or foreign policy advisor or image-maker or wise man—had been welcomed into the White House by eleven consecutive presidents going back to Harry Truman. And we don’t count Truman because they didn’t actually get along too well. So, start with Eisenhower, who was actually the first to reach out very warmly and eagerly to a young sawdust trail preacher half his age, and embrace him and his mission for a revival in America. And then have everyone who followed him also find some reason to reach out to this one man. We thought, well, no one has had a window into the sanctum sanctorum at the White House like that, and that there could be no better way to explore the intersection than seeing if we could talk him into talking about it with us. Lloyd: And Michael, you jumped right in? Duffy: Well, we were a little surprised by how quickly he agreed to do it because he didn’t know either of us. But I think he’d reached a point in his life at 88 then—87, I guess—where he was looking for some projects to do at the end of his life. Though this was a small part of his life’s work, it was an important part to him, this particular little ministry to the presidents and the first families. He talked about it in pieces, but never really concentrated that way. He had been somewhat self-critical, but not again never really been asked a lot of questions about it. And so we thought, again, if we could get him to talk, and we could get the presidents to talk about it, we’d have a whale of a tale. And we were able to get both of them. He was a little bit like a skeleton key, Mr. Graham. Once he agreed to speak with us, they all agreed to speak with us. And there aren’t many people who can get them to talk about anything. So it seemed like a good deal. Lloyd: And so Billy Graham himself was up for this project? He was interested in exploring it with you? Duffy: He was, and you know, when we went finally to his office in Montreat, North Carolina, before we went to his house, he has in his office just a few magazine covers, and two of them are from Time. Time was important when his ministry began. Henry Luce met him in 1950. Lloyd: Say a little about how he got going in this relationship with the White House. He was just a sawdust preacher, wasn’t he? Gibbs: He was. He had preached for Christ all around the country right after the end of World War II and around in Europe, but at that time the age of big stadium revivals had passed. The days of Billy Sunday were over, and serious ministers were saying we’re much too serious and scientific to have that kind of, you know, emotional revivalism going on in our stadiums. But he had a crusade in Los Angeles in 1949, which began a week after the Soviets exploded their nuclear device. And so Los Angeles, like much of the country, found itself suddenly feeling uneasy in whole new ways. And in the course of that crusade, William Randolph Hearst came incognito to hear him, having a good eye for a great performer, came to hear him. And went back to his offices and sent out a famous telegram to all of the Hearst correspondents and papers, two words: “Puff Graham.” That was a good thing. So the Hearst papers began covering him, and very soon after that, Henry Luce went down to hear him and told Time magazine, told Life magazine, told all of his properties—and now these are the two most important publishers in the country who have instructed their news organizations to cover seriously an evangelist, which was unusual at that time. And Graham himself said those two men, more than anyone else, were responsible for my being taken seriously by the mainline, the mainstream, for breaking out of the niche he would otherwise have been in. So by the time a few months later, he starts a radio show, it becomes the biggest religious show on radio within two weeks. It was an explosive debut. Lloyd: But why “puff Graham”? This is a born-again preacher who talks about personal conversion, literal reading of the Bible. Why would these cultural magnates, those two, decide that this is something to put on the American agenda? Gibbs: It’s a very interesting question. I think that there had been a rise in interest in religion in the years following World War II. You had increases in Bible sales. You had increases in church attendance; there was something already simmering, you could say. And I think both men, besides being interested in religion personally, were interested in what their audience was interested in, and had a sense that there would be an appetite to know more about him, that he had tremendous gifts, not so much as a preacher in homiletic gifts, but he had a gift of reaching people where they were. He had a very acute sense, I think, of the nation’s mood and fears at that time, at a time when, again, just a few years after this great triumph of the war, all of a sudden you have China falling to the Communists, you had the Soviet Union rising, you have a Soviet nuclear device. There was—you know, the rise of McCarthyism was part of this. What has gone wrong? So there was a kind of spiritual hunger for someone who could explain and address this, and both men saw that Graham had an ability to speak to those fears in people and thought that—you could say it’s a cynical thing that it would sell newspapers and magazines, but that they recognized a kind of star when they saw one. Duffy: But they were skeptical too, all through the 1950s. As he’s beginning to make friends with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower, meet Johnson and meet Kennedy, mainline churches are trying to take his measure in various ways. Even Henry Luce, and we were able to go back and look at all the memos he would write to his editors through the 1950s about how to treat and cover Graham, his comfort with Graham grows slowly. First he’s very skeptical, then he can’t believe this guy is for real, he begins to attend some of the crusades, and warms, but very slowly. And another group of mainline New York churches actually essentially hire a Reader’s Digest religion editor to go out and spend a couple of years looking at Graham. Maybe it was just a year, but it took two years to write the book, and determine if he was for real, that is to say, was he a true, you know, preacher of the Gospel? And he writes a book in the year ’55? ’56? And concludes, “yes, I think so.” It’s hedged, but “I think so.” So it took awhile for this, especially on the coasts, to make sure that this sawdust preacher from North Carolina was someone who they could trust. Lloyd: So something was going on in the whole American culture, this angst and unsettledness and worry about Communism and the powers in the world threatening the U.S. And so they turned to this fundamentalist preacher who’s able to put his finger onto something about America at that time. What did they hope he would do for America? It sounds like Christianity was becoming a tool for strengthening America? And in your book you talk some about how, in the Eisenhower years, that seems to be something of what Eisenhower had in mind? Gibbs: The Eisenhower relationship is so interesting. In a way you couldn’t imagine two more different figures. Eisenhower, who was raised in a very religiously conservative family. His parents were actually Jehovah Witnesses, and so, as Eisenhower’s military career unfolds, he doesn’t get to church very much. He sort of drifted. He’s been raised in a very Scriptural home, knew his Bible well. But it was a little ironic that the mother of the leader of the Western Alliance in World War II is a devout pacifist. So by the time he is running for president, he realizes that this could be a little bit of a problem for him. That he doesn’t go to church. He doesn’t belong to a church. And so he was curious to meet this hot young preacher, and the two men talked. He tried to hire Billy Graham as a speechwriter for his 1952 campaign. Now, Graham was wise enough to know that maybe that was not his particular calling, but he offered some advice about Scripture to quote. And the two men spent some time together talking about how to work religious themes into that campaign. And the Eisenhower billboards would be, his campaign was referred to as “The Great Crusade.” The language he was using was very consciously spiritual. It would be easy to dismiss this as a kind of window dressing. And Graham did tell him what church to join, and he was the first president to be baptized in office. But there was more to it than that. The Eisenhower diaries and letters are very interesting on this, that he thought that religious revival was an important part of fighting Communism, that this was a battle that was going to go on for generations, and it was not going to be won militarily, that it required a kind of national sacrifice and responsibility that would be enhanced by spiritual values being embraced. And so when, he talked about the need to confront godless Communism, that identifying the United States as a different kind of country with a different spiritual orientation, there was a strategic reason to do this. It was not just about, you know, his own need to appear to be pious because Americans want their presidents to be people of faith. Lloyd: Michael, do you think that he came to this…who led the way? Was it Eisenhower and his aides figuring it out, or was it Billy Graham leading them toward this? Duffy: One of things we saw with Graham and the presidents, all the way through, is that sometimes their agendas would simply dovetail. Mr. Graham clearly had a broad desire, from the very beginning, with Truman and all the way through to the current President—and who knows, beyond?—to bring faith into the Oval Office. He wanted to preach the Gospel to the presidents. He thought if he could get the message in the right place, then good things would happen. And he believed particularly, and preached openly in his crusades in the 1950s, that presidents had to do more in that way of talking about faith. And I believe Eisenhower, when he was inaugurated, opened his inaugural speech with a prayer that surprised even some of his closest aides. And Graham thought that was a tremendous step. And all through this period, the whole sixty years, one of Graham’s clear agendas was to simply bring the word of God into the Oval Office. There were other reasons he thought it was good to do that: it was good for the country, it was good for foreign policy, as Nancy talked about. But his primary motivation was to do that for the president. What presidents’ aides would see all the way through, with Nixon right on through to the current president, would have additional agendas that sometimes had nothing to do with Mr. Graham’s. It was a symbiotic relationship from the very start. Lloyd: Each was looking for something out of it. But the plot starts thickening toward the end of the Eisenhower years, because Graham isn’t simply trying to be a pastor to the person in the Oval Office, but he starts having preferences about who should occupy that office. A new friendship gets started with Vice President Nixon, the complexities of John Kennedy as a Catholic running for office, and we begin to find Graham starting to take some sides there. So it gets more complicated pretty quickly, doesn’t it? Duffy: It became very personal. Very quickly. He meets Richard Nixon early on in the 1950s; they go golfing together at Burning Tree. They spend the day together. And by 1956 Graham is counseling Nixon how to stay on the ticket with Eisenhower. Who he should see in order to do that. What groups he should meet with— Lloyd: So, oops! We’ve left behind the spiritual counsel into political strategy, it sounds like. Duffy: Absolutely. These letters from the ’50s read like Karl Rove or James Carvill could have written them. They’re very tactical. They’re very political. They are perfect prisms of the political mood, which makes it fascinating again, while the mainline churches are trying to figure out if he’s real, he’s having fairly detailed and sophisticated political conversations with the men who are and would be president. We realized half way through the book that we could have—we thought that this was a fairly simple project when we conceived it—we could have written a book just about Nixon and Graham and probably written 400 pages just about that. Turns out we had a few other presidents to take care of. But the Nixon relationship is its own story with great Shakespearean overtones from start to finish. Lloyd: Say a little more about the Nixon story as it unfolds, the trickiness of that election against Kennedy, but then he comes back into office after the Johnson years and again Billy Graham gets deeply involved at that point. Gibbs: Nixon was really his first friend in Washington. They were, here Eisenhower was much older, but Billy Graham and Richard Nixon were basically peers. And Billy Graham genuinely loved him, admired him, thought he was shrewd and wise and understood the world and had strength, and genuinely had faith in him. I think you could say he probably brought out the best in Richard Nixon. I think you could say Nixon brought out the worst in Billy Graham. And so, during that 1960 election, there literally are letters in which Billy Graham is giving advice about the pros and cons of different running mates and where he ought to be spending his TV money, that end with a postscript, “I’d appreciate it if you would hold this letter in confidence and destroy it after you read it,” which fortunately for us Nixon didn’t do. But, on the other hand, an election that, more than any we had seen to that point, really was fought on religious terms. Billy Graham refused to come out and take sides on the religious issue in 1960, or talk about—as other Protestant leaders were quite willing to do—about their fears of having a Catholic in the White House. And he wrote to Kennedy that summer of the campaign and said quite explicitly, “Richard Nixon is a friend of mine. I’m supporting him. I’m going to vote for him, but I want you to know it has nothing to do with religion. It’s because I think he has the experience to be the president we need at this time. But should you win, I want you to know that you will have my full support and I will do anything I can to help you succeed in your presidency.” Well, Kennedy very quickly took him up on that. And four days before his inauguration in January 1961, he invited Billy Graham down for a round of golf that was much photographed and a press conference at which Billy Graham said exactly what Kennedy needed to have said, which was “I think the result of this election shows that there’s much less religious prejudice in this country than we thought.” And essentially said all will be well, not to worry. And then proceeded in the Johnson presidency to be extremely close, almost closer pastorally to Johnson, a Democrat, than he was to any of the eleven presidents we studied. Lloyd: Why do you think that’s so? Gibbs: One, because Johnson wanted and needed it. His advisers and his daughters were very eloquent about how the whole climate in the White House would change when Billy Graham came. Johnson, I think, was a seeker. He was wrestling with his own spiritual life. Mr. Graham told us, “You know, I think he knew what it meant to be born again, but he wasn’t sure that he had been.” And so he would go sometimes to two or three church services on a Sunday. He would invite Graham to come for the weekend, and they would literally be reading the Bible together in the middle of the night, on their knees in prayer. It was a very intense, pastoral relationship. It was probably somewhat less political partly because Graham’s politics were not as aligned with Johnson’s. On the other hand, after Selma and with the eruption of civil rights conflicts, Johnson called him up and said, “I need you to go down and preach in Alabama. I know you’re supposed to be leaving for a tour in Europe. I need you to cancel it and go down and see what you can do.” Which Graham proceeded to do. So there was some sort of public, political, policy aspects of this, but by and large it was a very intense, personal, pastoral relationship. But then, as you said, when Richard Nixon comes back and thinks it would be a great idea to have Sunday services in the White House, Billy Graham hears this and thinks, what could be a better way of setting a religious example for the country? And President Nixon and his men think, what could be a better way than to reward friends and punish enemies and twist arms and raise money? And that, from there, you have a really remarkable story of, I think, a well-meaning and terribly naive man seeing the best in his good friend… Lloyd:…passing the plate at those church services too, and he did it in a serious way. Duffy: It raises another point that I think is worth making, and again why we did the project, is that I think we came out of it…It goes back a little bit in time, but we came out of the 2004 campaign wondering if this all was a recent phenomenon, the mixture of faith and politics, and whether a president who said that his most important personal philosopher was Jesus Christ was something new. And of course we discovered that Jimmy Carter had said something identical in 1976, and Richard Nixon had said something identical in 1968. And whatever theocracy the current administration is accused of believing or sometimes referring to now, hardly compares to religious services in the East Room in the first two years of the Nixon administration. And there were a hundred or so of them, weren’t there? It went on for several years. Gibbs: It was to the point that, after the Kent State shootings, where the country is in tremendous turmoil and the campuses across America particularly are shut down, the first public appearance that Nixon makes is at the University of Tennessee at a Billy Graham Crusade. Mr. Graham provided him a safe place to come out— Duffy: Sanctuary is the word of the week. Gibbs: —at the point at which, of course, by 1973 and 1974 there is no avoiding what was actually happening in that White House; it was a devastating blow to a man who saw his friend of now some twenty years behaving in a way that he never would have imagined possible, talking in a way on the tapes. He says, “It’s a man I had never seen before.” And this was just crushing. It made him physically sick. Lloyd: And that was the moment when Billy Graham himself on tape was recorded as having been drawn into some of the Nixonian darkness, the slurs against Jews for example. Duffy: It’s a little hard to square the shock at Nixon’s character on tape with the conversation in 1972 where he engages in anti-Semitic—and not just drawn in, I mean, that’s a polite way of putting it. He moved the conversation to a higher level, Mr. Graham did, at one point, about the roles of Jews in American media. Of course I found it ironic he was talking specifically about Time magazine at this point, which at least began as a bastion of Presbyterianism. But the conversation, which did not come out until 2002, thirty-five years old, he will be apologizing, he just feels horrible about, and I suspect will be in every obituary that’s written about him because it’s just at odds with the rest of his life. Lloyd: We need to go to the audience for questions, but let me ask you this question first. You were describing a trajectory where Billy Graham became first introduced into the White House and then quickly it became a very symbiotic relationship, each one needing the other, and bringing something to the other. And then Mr. Graham moves into this political strategy phase, as well, that seems to continue on. In your interviews with him, what does he say about—I’m thinking about the line between being a pastor and being a politician—what does he say about the ways, pretty regularly then, he became a political strategist for the present person in the White House he wanted to support. Duffy: I think one of the reasons he wanted to do this, to talk to us about this, is that he felt he had lessons to pass on, lessons that he had learned the hard way, about getting too close. By 1980, as the rise of the Moral Majority takes place and he is watching the religious right take massive shape in America, he is preaching from time to time about the dangers, about the lessons he’s learned about getting too close to one side or the other. Lloyd: What did he think about the Moral Majority? Duffy: Well, he was not part of its creation, although you can make the case that he in many ways paved the way for it by becoming so close to so many political leaders. And not just presidents, though this book is just about presidents. He became close to governors and all kinds of political leaders. The country is littered with people who knew him well. And politicians who knew him well. But by 1980 he is warning in public that they are making a mistake, and they are going to, as he says, “You can’t preach to the left wing or the right wing; you have to have the whole bird.” And he says, “I know, I’ve made this mistake.” In fact he’s doing it by 1975. The arc of the story of Graham and the presidency is the Nixon, I mean the thing peaks at Nixon, and he realizes that his ministry has been really jeopardized, maybe even endangered. And he pulls back. He doesn’t stop seeing presidents. He doesn’t stop getting involved in elections, but he pulls back in public, and he’s much more careful about who he is seen with and what he says. And he begins to say in public, “This is a bad piece of road, folks; don’t go down it; it’s just not going to turn out well.” And he would go so far as to warn Jerry Falwell privately and publicly that he is making a big mistake and can’t be associated with one side or the other. Of course that isn’t how it turns out, but again I think his lessons learned are pretty clear. Another piece of this, and then I’ll stop. I think when we asked him specifically, this is what you’re getting at, “Why did you—you mostly kept your balance here, but why did you slip and get too close to one side or the other?” He said he was not someone who was ever tempted by money or tempted by women, but he was tempted by power. That was the temptation in his life. That was the pull, the tug, that he couldn’t really fight off. And he said he wrestled with it all of his life. It was something that fascinated him. It was something that interested him. He said, “I think if I hadn’t been a preacher I might have been a politician.” He obviously had the skills and the judgment for […]. Hillary Clinton told us that he loved talking about politics because he knew it involved stories, and he knew that they involved myth, and you had to create a narrative just like we have to create a narrative in politics. And he understood that. And he still follows it closely. He’s still a very close watcher of these things. So I think he thought this was a tug, a pull, a temptation that was his challenge. Lloyd: Let’s go to the questions. Q: Thank you. This will be very quick. I’m not a fanatic in anything, I don’t think. I had a career as a diplomatic historian in the State Department. But the time I remember so well, and this Forum reminded me of it this morning, was when I stood at the foot of the Crows Nest in Austria where Hitler had his summer home. It was called the Redoubt, you know. You all remember because he used to go there and his friends would amuse themselves by being together, having cocktails and food and so forth. When I went there, there was a great rumble in the back of the auditorium, back of the audience, waiting to go up the Crow’s Nest into the Alps and see where it was that Hitler spent his time, spare time with his friends. And suddenly down came all these tall men, all of them well above six feet tall, and they were guarding Eisenhower, General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, a very lovely diplomatic, careful, sensible, logical man. But, what—I’m going to stop right now—the question is why do we so oversimplify in our discussions the question how do we keep church and state absolutely apart? It’s nonsense. Lloyd: Let’s hear from them. What’s your thought? Church and state? Gibbs: Well, church and state are institutions, and the Constitution was pretty clear about the need to keep the institutions apart, but keeping religion and politics apart is a very different challenge. We’ve really never done that from the beginning, and so I doubt that anyone would have much luck starting now. So what we have been wrestling with for more than two hundred years is much less the institutional relationship of whether taxpayer money should be establishing churches or not, or whether government should be favoring one religious institution over another. I think we’re pretty clear on the institutional issues, compared to how we should talk about the role that religious values and beliefs should play in public life, in our campaigns, in our policy debates, right now, but this has been true with every generation when we were debating religion and abolition. It was true when we were debating child labor and prison reform. It was true during the Civil Rights movement, that people of faith whether from the left or from the right, sometimes alternating, sometimes together, have argued about how to express their values in public life. And I think maybe it was Barbara Jordan, bless her heart, who gave the wisest advice when she counseled young politicians who asked for how these two should relate. She said, “Well by all means, pursue your values with vigor. Just remember that you are acting as God’s servants, not his spokesmen.” Lloyd: Michael, do you want to add anything to that? Duffy: I know when I can’t be topped. Q: You refer to the relationship or lack thereof with President Truman. Could you elaborate on that? And also could you talk about the relationship of Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham? Gibbs: Truman is fun. Truman is another Southern Baptist, learned to read in the large print family Bible as a little boy, very devout. He would slip across the street and sit in the back pew of the church. And he would talk about he didn’t know how he was getting through some days. And he said, “God guides me, I think.” But there were a bunch of other Democrats who had registered that there was this rising young preacher who was drawing these enormous crowds, and maybe it would be a good idea for Truman to meet him, who arranged somehow to get a 31-year-old Billy Graham into the White House in the summer of 1950. Graham arrives, dressed in his pistachio green suit and his hand-painted tie and his white bucks, and the look on Truman’s face, he think it’s like a vaudeville team that has come to see him. And the two have a perfectly cordial conversation. They talk about Korea. They talk about the world situation. But then Graham does what he does with every president, which is really get in his face about his personal faith. You know, “Are you saved? Do you read the Bible regularly? Are you right with Jesus?” And Truman says, “Well, I try to follow the Golden Rule.” And Billy Graham says, “Well, that’s not good enough, Mr. President.” He’s very much evangelizing. They pray together. And I think it would have all still been fine and a footnote in history except for the fact that, when Mr. Graham left and the White House photographers descended, he told them everything that had been said, and allowed his picture to be taken kneeling in prayer on the White House lawn. Which, when Truman saw it on the front page of every paper the next day, the evangelist praying for our poor heathen president—that was the end of that relationship. He said, “I think he’s just a publicity hound. I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” And what’s remarkable about that is two things. One is it taught Billy Graham such an important lesson. He realized he had made a huge mistake and that, if he ever got to meet another president—which at that point looked very unlikely—he would never talk about it, never violate the privacy again. But also, two years later, when Graham brings his crusade to Washington, and it’s a huge event, and members of Congress are on the platform every night, the Supreme Court, I mean it’s a huge event. And the White House is all trying to get Truman to go, saying, “You need this,” he wouldn’t go—to his credit, because he felt it would be an exploitative kind of public relation’s thing. So I think Truman was one of the most important relationships, because it taught Billy Graham what not to do. And the two men made up and had a very cordial visit. Graham apologized officially and Truman forgave him officially years later. But I think had that first encounter not gone the way it did, the other ones would likely have not unfolded the way they did. Carter is the other least successful relationship. Duffy: Just briefly, Carter was interestingly enough, led a Graham Crusade in Southwest Georgia in 1960. Obviously he had gone to the Baptist Church all his life, taught Sunday school in submarines when he was in summers in the Naval Academy. He didn’t need anybody’s help around the New or the Old Testament. I think really difficult for any Democrat running in the mid-70s to have snuggled up to Billy Graham who was seen as Richard Nixon’s pastor. Carter told us a great story that the first time that he actually was ever in the White House as tourist or politician was in 1971—the first time. He’d come to a prayer breakfast in Washington, and Nixon invited all the governors and politicians afterwards for coffee. He goes into the White House for the first time in his life. He would be president in five years, and at first he walks into the East Room. He says he recognized no one. Probably an exaggeration. And someone whistles to him, “Governor Carter!” And over the corner is standing Billy Graham, who had always wanted to meet Carter since 1966, and he whistles Carter over. Carter has a big smile on his face even telling the story now, forty years later, and Graham is standing with Richard Nixon. And I just think it was one of those moments where he couldn’t ever really get close. Carter also didn’t really need anybody. I think that was one of his weaknesses as a leader and a president. It was difficult even for his closest aides. They never became as close as the others. Carter would reach out to him, however, at the end of his presidency for help when he found himself against Reagan, and Graham kept his distance. Lloyd: Before we go too much further back to the audience… say a little word about the Clinton White House. That would have been a very complicated time for him… Duffy: You know, any preacher who can forgive Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton really is worldly. Bill Clinton says to this day that the first time that he really knew what it meant to put faith and work together was when he was thirteen years old and was taken by his Sunday school teacher from Hope to Little Rock to see Billy Graham preach a two-day crusade in War Memorial Stadium. And I don’t know about you, but this is the first time Clinton is in a stadium of 43,000 people. Now my own experience, the first time I went to Ohio State and saw 86,000 people, it was almost a religious experience for me! So you can imagine what it was like for young Bill Clinton, who had been raised by grandparents essentially who were integrationists, to hear Billy Graham come to Little Rock and say to the white Citizens’ Council of Little Rock, “I won’t come unless you let blacks and whites hear me together. I just won’t come.” And the white Citizens’ Council backed down. Ten years later, Clinton would take his then-girlfriend, Hillary Rodman—it was a very hot date—in Oakland to see Billy Graham when they both were in law school. And that was the first time Hillary had seen him in public. And then they would both invite him to Little Rock in ’89. By the time we get to the annus horribilis of 1998, we learn and report in this book for the first time that it was Hillary Clinton who reached out to Billy Graham to help them at that moment in their marriage when, as she said, “Everyone else was telling me to dump him. Billy Graham virtually alone told me to do something harder, told me I had to actually forgive him.” And she talked about that with us, I think in frank and very raw terms. I’m mindful of the fact that she told us this in January in 2007, knowing the book was coming out in August 2007. All these, we have to take, as we would with George W. Bush’s very extensive Billy Graham narrative, Hillary Clinton has one too. Q: I am third cousin to Edith Foley Wilson, second wife of Woodrow Wilson. Thomas Jefferson gave us the statute of religious freedom, the separation of church and state. My great-grandmother was Jewish. Barbara Streisand is sending me emails to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Will the Dalai Lama be left out of the White House? Will the Hindus be allowed in Congress? Will the Hindus be allowed in the White House? How much longer do we have to have a narrow interpretation of the Constitution? Gibbs: Actually, you point to something that is very interesting that is happening right now in the role that religion is playing in the campaign that we’re watching unfold now, and the way the conversation is going. And in fact it was Mrs. Clinton to really put this on the table first for us. And we asked her, “How do you see anything changing in the way religion is used or abused or exploited?” And she said, “I think we have gotten to the point now that we may all just be able to be just who we are. And if you are a person of faith, you can talk about it and not have to hide it. If you’re not a person of faith, you don’t have to fake it. That everyone can just be who they are, and that maybe some of the divisions and dissentions in the debates that we have seen in recent years is draining away because that is not, I think, part of our tradition. And the importance of pluralism in a country that sees so many people searching down so many roads, that there’s a newfound appreciation of the importance of that. Duffy: I was struck this week by the Republican YouTube debate, which was without doubt the most interesting and strange debate yet in the 2008 campaign—sometimes those go together—where the Republicans candidates in one of the final videos, someone held up a Bible to the screen and said, […] “Do you believe in this book? The literal word of this book?” And he held up the Bible to the screen. And it was an easy question for Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist, to answer, and essentially, with the exception of Rudy Guiliani and I think John McCain, said yes. And I sort of wished at that moment two things: I wished, I hope they ask that question to Democrats because I’d like to see them answer it. It’s a tough question to answer. I also wondered how people who are Islam or Hindu or any other faith that exists in this country feel about that question being asked of the people who lead our country. It’s was a very interesting moment, and a lot of people criticized them for asking that question. But I think it was essentially, I just hope it gets asked of the Democrats because I think it’s troubling in a whole bunch of ways. Lloyd: Question from the website: What are Billy Graham’s personal attributes? What was it about him that gave him access to the president? Gibbs: That’s a great question. Duffy: Nancy put her finger on it a minute ago. He learned discretion at an early age, so he knew what not to say about his private conversations. I think he was humble. He’s very easy to talk to when you go to see him. He’s extremely gentle and everyone notices this about him. He’s easy to speak to. He’s unbelievably forgiving from the minute you meet him, you kind of just want to talk with him. So you can imagine that all these presidents who really could trust no one, or very few people, found a rare safe place where they could let it out. And that is rare. He was that forgiving. And he worked hard at it. The other piece of this is that he really hard to get to know these folks and their families. It wasn’t just that they had just sought him out. He worked hard at seeking them out. He put his mind to it. So I think those three things: he was discreet, he was forgiving, and his put his mind to this ministry. Gibbs: I would add one more, which is that they—he was, in a very rare way for a president, he was a peer. Not in their universe, but a politician is going to respect someone who can bring 100,000 people out to hear him night after night after night after night. They recognized that he was immensely powerful and had gifts that they envied. Every single one of them asked him at one time or another, “How do you get all these people to come to hear you?” And of course he would say, “It’s not me they’re coming to hear. It’s God who is doing this.” Politicians understand, well, there are a lot of preachers out there, why you? There must some trick to this. And this was a constant area of curiosity. So they knew that he therefore understood what it is like to have no privacy, what it is like to live in the spotlight, what it is like to have a kind of celebrity that is global and can be crushing, what that does to your family. That in very important ways, he was a peer and yet he did not have an agenda. And a number of presidential advisors said, “You know, the number of people who walk into the Oval Office, who you can’t do anything for them, there’s nothing they want from you, is very small. And so that too put him in a unique position once they were in office. But the important thing to realize was, we went into this project thinking that anyone who’s elected president kind of inherited Billy Graham, kind of came with the office. There he is on Inauguration Day giving the invocation. Little did we know, until we started digging further and further back, that he was personal friends with the Reagans, the Nixons, the Johnsons, the Eisenhowers, the Bushes in the 1950s. He was doing Bible studies with Dorothy Walker Bush. In 1955. In Hopestown, Florida, at her invitation. There was a rumor that ran through Hollywood in the summer of 1952 that maybe one of the studios would make a movie about this hot young evangelist named Billy Graham, staring Ronald Reagan! So the fact these were actual personal and family friendships years, sometimes decades, before these families wound up here in the Oval Office, meant that it was a very different kind of relationship than we had thought. We knew the public history. What we didn’t know was the private history and how far back it went. So, you know, by the time the Bushes are in the White House, there had been many, many summer weekends at Kennebunkport, there had been trips to Acapulco. So that too defines the dynamic that therefore could occur once these men became president. Lloyd: Last question. What’s been the impact of this on you both? An intense couple of years with one of the spiritual leaders in our country? But talking to presidents about their own spiritual lives? What have you both taken away from that? Duffy: First of all, two things I might mention. One is more than I would have guessed as your basic political reporter, the men we looked at are more religious than I had certainly given them credit for. They came from deeper religious traditions. They had mothers who were much more in church life than I think we all in my group tend to give them credit for. We tend to think religion is almost something you might have picked up late in your primary campaign, you know, sudden revelation along with you know what to do to get ahead in Iowa! But it turns out when you look at it they are much more deeply steeped in it. Ronald Reagan’s mother was an evangelical. I had not given them the credit. Personally, because I am by trade a political reporter, I am naturally supposed to be oblivious to any doctrine or faith of any kind. But it’s difficult not to be in Mr. Graham’s presence without feeling the power of his, you know, it’s quite, it’s just kind of there. It’s quite something to see. It’s been an amazing experience. So I hear things differently. I see things differently, I think. I certainly listen differently. Gibbs: He gave us, I think, an opportunity to look at the Presidents as human beings who have fears and doubts. I mean I was amazed, again and again, that they were asking him the same questions that we all ask, the really basic ones. Eisenhower wanted to know how he could be certain he was going to heaven. Johnson wanted to know if he would see his parents there. The Bush family wanted to know why bad things happen to good people. I mean, the really basic questions which you can wrestle with as a child, and you can wrestle with as a president, and may or may not become any clearer. And certainly because this was the generation of presidents that had the power to make this happen, they wanted to know the world was going to end. So it forced me, who had watched and written about presidents for years, to constantly remember that these are people and that they are not just the figurehead that we see. And to grapple with that and the implications of that and how they work in office and why it is that one man was able to speak to them in the way that this one man was. Lloyd: Final word, Michael? Duffy: I think when we especially go into a political season, we come to think of people we elect as they act like they have no doubts, and we sometimes don’t want them to have doubts. They are supposed to be full of certainty and resolve and doubtlessness. And it’s quite easy, as we dive into these letters and these communications between this one man and these eleven guys, that they’re full of doubts and full of uncertainties, and they don’t have a lot of places to unload them and talk about them, a safe place to talk about them. And of course they’re just like the rest of us. They have the same questions, what Nancy’s talking about. So that was a piece we hadn’t gone looking for when we started at all. And yet we stumbled on over and over again. And that’s a good thing to keep in mind especially now. Lloyd: This has been a great great conversation. I hope you’ll join us next week when we explore leadership and the future of the church in the 21st century with Bishop William Willimon, United Methodist bishop, author of sixty books, one of the major leaders in Protestantism today. Please join us now for coffee at the west end of the Cathedral. Our guests will linger for a cup of coffee as well. The service begins here at 11:15. We’d love for all of you all to join us for that too. Now join me in thanking our two wonderful guests today. |