Billy Graham

A Parable of American Righteousness

Marshall Frady

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416543442
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Marshall Frady's epic biography of Billy Graham, the world's best-known Christian evangelist and America's pastor. With unparalleled access to Billy Graham and his family and associates, Frady presents an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the man, from his childhood upbringing in the midlands of North Carolina to his ascent to national recognition.Frady's narrative encompasses the popular religious leader, his spiritual mission, and his political involvements and bears witness to the preeminent position Graham has held in American life for decades. "Billy Graham is our nation's least studied national institution…Frady has finally given him the kind of attention he deserves" ( The New York Times ).

Notes

The peculiar problem one encounters with the literature on Graham that has collected over the years is that it has remained, for all its expansiveness, largely parochial, repetitive, and thin. It somewhat calls to mind Chesterton’s remark about H. G. Wells’s immense body of work—to the effect that it reminded him of some vast stretch of sea that was only two inches deep. A certain prevailing interest of advocacy in all considerations of Graham, as mentioned in the author’s note, has probably much accounted for this. For some reason, no writer with larger, disinterested curiosities and instincts has ever seemed able to muster the spirit or appetite for anything more than an occasional magazine run at him.

Whatever, in the magazine journalism, by far the richest and most alive is Noel Houston’s two-part series in 1958 for Holiday, “Billy Graham”—it strongly suggests that Houston, who died in 1958, six months after his story’s appearance, could well have produced the definitive, fully felt and fully thought biography of the man and the phenomenon. Also notable are John Corry’s 1969 Harper’s piece, “God, Country, and Billy Graham,” and Harold Martin’s 1963 profile for the Saturday Evening Post, “Billy Graham.” For consistently discerning appreciations of Graham and his meaning, though, nothing approaches Ken Woodward’s exercises in Newsweek since the sixties.

As for newspaper coverage, none has been so exhaustively detailed and varied and alert as that of the two, and uncommonly excellent, newspapers of Graham’s hometown, Charlotte—the Observer and the News. In those files, particularly instructive and astute is a 1958 series by John Borchert of the News, the intermittent coverage by Kays Gary of the Observer, and a 1977 series by the Observer’s Mary Bishop.

Among the biographies, John Pollock’s 1966 authorized account, Billy Graham, is however unrelentingly promotional, perhaps the most ambitiously thorough as sheer circumstantial record, and Stanley High’s 1965 study, Billy Graham, even though also a long commendation, is not without a special perceptiveness. The most effective and impressively researched of the critical biographies is, without question, William G. McLoughlin, Jr.’s, 1960 Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age.

It should be kept in mind, though, that the following log of references is more a sample selection of supportive sources—simply to offer the reader some further substantiation of authenticity—and is by no means a complete tabulation of all sources, often multiple on an item, which have backgrounded the writing of this story. Such a total listing would range ponderously beyond the practicable or useful. I have elected to cite on a given specific most frequently the references to it by Graham’s admiring biographers—Pollock, High—precisely because of their sympathetic bias. But in particular, the citations of quotes (which are denoted in a shorthand version) are seldom, it should be stressed, the sole source or support for their use—in many cases, they are cited as supplementary to primary sources, and some of them, in turn, were later expanded on and supplemented in the course of the interviews. But when not mentioned in the following compendium, remarks and particulars can be assumed to have come directly from those interviews and the author’s own reportage.

Telegrams offering eyes: “Billy Graham’s Journey,” Newsweek (Feb. 16, 1959).

Letters asking for kidney stone: Dr. L. Nelson Bell, “Billy Graham, My Son-in-Law,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Aug., 1958).

Notes slipped into collection plates: from in-house BGEA report compiled in 1977 and provided to author.

“Better off playing with lightning”: Letters column, the Charlotte Observer (June 24, 1974).

Graham’s explanation of his sense of Jesus: John Corry, “God, Country, and Billy Graham,” Harper’s (Feb., 1969); Billy Graham, “The Man Called Jesus,” the Reader’s Digest (July, 1972); John Pollock, Billy Graham (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

“Young people are searching”: John Borchert, the Charlotte News (Sept. 24, 1958).

Barefoot, living on stolen provender: Borchert, Charlotte News (Sept. 9, 1958).

“I never hated anyone”: Ibid.

Trudged, heavily pregnant, to gather butterbeans: Warren Barnard, Charlotte News (Jan. 27, 1973).

“Committed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Marshall Frady
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Marshall Frady: A Son of the South
• Billy Graham
• Prologue
• OVER THE HORIZONS of Charlotte now, blank geometries. . .
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• FIRST THERE WAS only the blind drifting of Indians back and forth. . .
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• HIS BEGUILEMENT over the years with the sirens singing in. . .
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• Notes
• Index