SIMPLE GIFTS

BILL GRAHAM RECOUNTS HIS LIFE OF FAITH AND POWER

Author: By James L. Franklin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 24, 1997

Page: N13

Section: Books

Graham's letter gave cover to conservative Republicans who wanted to follow House Speaker Newt Gingrich in approving the decision, even though these congressmen owed a political debt to evangelical and so-called ``pro-family'' groups who deplore China's record on religious freedom and its one-child-per-family policy.

``I believe it is far better for us to keep China as a friend than to treat it as an adversary,'' Graham told Representative David Dreier, the California Republican who entered the letter into the Congressional Record.

The action was pure Graham. The most successful, best-liked emissary of Protestant evangelicalism is also a hard-headed pragmatist who would rather open doors for his religious message than denounce potential adversaries.

In his long-awaited autobiography, Graham offers an apologia for his long engagement with public life and politicians. ``Jesus and Paul were also respectful of civil authority,'' he writes, after describing the compromise by which he agreed to avoid public proselytizing and thus won permission to hold meetings in Israel in 1960. ``Neither of them forced a confrontation with the Roman government on religious grounds, godless and decadent as it was, nor is that my calling as an evangelist.''

Graham has produced a memoir of considerable detail, including a chaplain's-eye view of political events from the Cuban missile crisis to President Johnson's decision not to run again to President Ford's decision to pardon former President Nixon to President Reagan's naming an ambassador to the Vatican (surprising his Baptist friends, Graham supported the idea).

He acknowledges the help of several writers in a project that he first began in the 1960s, and he credits the reminiscences of co-workers and his wife's journal for some of the details. But at age 79, Graham has delivered a book that rings with his own voice. It's written in an almost conversational tone, and anyone who has listened to him preach, on TV or in a football stadium, will recognize the deceptively simple homilies he devises to put across his message.

And readers will recognize also that most of the ingredients of his success were present from the start. His first chapter relates his first visit to the White House, in 1950, along with three other members of his preaching team. They were all dressed in the same pastel suits they'd worn to a summer Bible conference the day before, in the new white buck shoes they bought because they'd seen the president wear them. The young Rev. Graham was brash, unpolished, indiscreet enough to tell reporters just what he had talked to President Truman about, and naive enough to kneel and pray on the White House lawn when prompted by photographers.

Graham relates the subsequent embarrassment as an act of humility. Never again, he insists, did he make the mistake of betraying the confidence of the celebrities he would talk to. And they were many: presidents and kings, movie stars and business leaders, even mobsters.

The visit to Truman -- surely the least successful of his many pastoral calls on the presidents -- was arranged by Representative John W. McCormack. It was the result of Graham's successful preaching stand in Boston, where he won approval both from then-Archbishop Richard J. Cushing and from the Rev. Harold John Ockenga of Park Street Church, organizer of the National Association of Evangelicals.

The newspapers gave little enough attention at first, but Graham's presentation of the Gospel, his emphasis on the simplicity of the message and the importance of personal experience, of personal conviction of salvation by faith in Jesus alone, struck fire in Boston and the country at large.

He seemed to be simple enough, a farm boy from North Carolina, educated at a Bible school and Wheaton College in Illinois. In a world in which the most respected pastors were called ``Doctor,'' he had a bachelor's degree and ordination from a little country church.

But he grew up just outside the city of Charlotte, and while he would always make the North Carolina countryside his home, he almost always found his ministry in the city. His beginnings were ecumenical: He found himself in Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches almost from the start. His first Bible school, run by the Rev. Bob Jones, was too austere, too fundamentalist, and the painfully thin young man needed the nurture of the Florida Bible Institute -- part resort, part seminary -- where he was mentored as a preacher and warmed by the flow of distinguished preachers and pious business people who stayed at the school where students helped pay their way by waiting on tables or making up rooms.

At Wheaton he found a wife in Ruth Bell, daughter of a medical missionary driven out of China by the war and zealous to return. But Billy felt called, almost from the first, to be an evangelist, one who announced the Gospel for the first time.

Eventually he would fulfill Ruth's dreams by taking his crusades abroad, to Europe and Africa, China and Korea, and he always knew enough of realpolitik to deal with the politicians and commissars. The message was never political, always scriptural as he saw it, and doors opened to him that were closed to most other religious leaders.

For all his unwillingness to take overt political stands, he did refuse to hold a crusade in South Africa until the meetings could be held without racial segregation. And in the United States, he insisted on integrated seating even when zealous church leaders objected. He was a man of the South, with its own bad conscience on racial matters, but he had the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at one of his rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1957, and he sought King's advice on how to move the public on the race issue. Stay in the stadiums, because you can move the white establishment there, Graham says King told him. ``If a leader gets too far out in front of his people, they will lose sight of him and not follow him any more.''

Never too far out in front of his people, but out in front nevertheless, Graham from his base of piety did help move his followers along. By the 1980s, he saw war and peace as the issue of the day and even risked his reputation in the Reagan era by attending a Moscow-controlled peace conference.

As he saw it, his duty also lay partly in becoming pastor to presidents, and aside from his error with Truman, he kept his mouth shut and his lines open to Democrats and Republicans, Protestants and Catholics. Senator John F. Kennedy sought Graham's approval when trying to put to rest anti-Catholic suspicions during the 1960 campaign; Richard Nixon likewise tried to use him to put to rest the questions about his own honesty.

But Graham, ever the genial pastor to a nation, never met a president he didn't like. He would witness to them, stand beside them in the midst of national crisis, whether the Cuban missile crisis or the Gulf War, and comfort their families in time of loss. Even when the disclosure of Nixon's profanity on the Watergate tapes embarrassed him and the details of the break-in and cover-up repelled him, Graham remained a friend, even a supporter. His biggest regret seems to be that Nixon was not quicker to disclose his private piety to the American public, which Graham even now seems to think would have answered Nixon's critics.

In all, his is a life of piety and simple loyalty. He seemed to ask little of anyone but good intentions and a willingness to hear his message. Both the presidents and the public at large have loved him for it.