Graham Heading Into Twilight of Long, Distinguished Career : Evangelism: ‘America’s Preacher’ led the revival of the movement. But today he is pessimistic about his chances of saving mankind.

Billy Graham no longer thinks he is going to save America.

Armageddon, he believes, is approaching. And even if it is not, his own mortality will prevent him from reviving a nation where good and evil are growing apace: He will be 73 in November, and his doctor at the Mayo Clinic has promised to keep him going only until he is 75.

“I know that my years are running out,” he said.

This month, in the twilight of his remarkable career, Graham returns to New York, the “graveyard of evangelists” he conquered 34 years ago with a 16-week Madison Square Garden run that established him as America’s preacher.

More than three decades ago, the prospect of the dairy farmer’s son from North Carolina taking on the modern Sodom and Gomorrah--and drawing capacity crowds--caught the national fancy. Tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he was the Kirk Douglas of the evangelical movement.

But when he walked through a Manhattan hotel on a recent morning, no heads turned. He walked haltingly, clinging to a handrail, his features furrowed with pain. He was hobbled by a back problem and jet lag from a trip to the Soviet Union.

Promoters of the New York meeting, scheduled to begin Sunday in Central Park, say it might draw Graham’s largest American audience, upward of 250,000. Graham said: “If we have 25,000, it will be a good meeting.”

He approaches this latest crusade with enthusiasm, but also with weariness; the burden of carrying a $100-million-a-year evangelistic empire on his increasingly frail shoulders often wears on him.

Leighton Ford, the brother-in-law who worked for the evangelist for 31 years, said Graham confided to him late one night after a 1985 crusade, “I just wish I could go to heaven.”

What is Billy Graham’s legacy?

“Two or three centuries from now, he will be among a few names that we remember,” said sociologist Jeffrey Hadden of the University of Virginia. “He’s clearly a sterling figure in American religious history.”

He has become “the most important figure in evangelical Christianity in a half-century,” said William Martin, a sociologist at Rice University who spent five years researching a coming biography of Graham.

Billy Sunday was reduced to preaching in small towns at the end of his career. Charles Finney gave up the demanding career of a revivalist to found Oberlin College. Other evangelists’ stars rose and fell more quickly with the changing mood of the country.

But Billy Graham keeps rolling on.

The man who once was an intimate of Dwight D. Eisenhower was the same man George Bush wanted at his side when he announced that the nation was going to war in the Middle East.

The man who in 1956 compared the Soviet Union to a gangster set loose to murder and pillage is the same man who granted much-publicized audiences this summer to both Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin.

In the 1950s, he took on communism and complacency. In the 1960s, he reassured evangelicals who despaired in the Age of Aquarius. In the 1970s, he promoted a new way of thinking about the Soviet Union and arms control. In the 1980s, he settled in as an icon of American religiosity.

Throughout, he has been venerated. He has been listed 32 times in Gallup polls of the world’s 10 most admired men, more than any other person.

Again and again, say Martin and Hadden, secular people who are wary of the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons ask: “Tell me why I like him?”

For one thing, Martin said, Graham is a regular guy who can skinny dip with Lyndon B. Johnson or flip through Playboy at a barber shop without embarrassment.

But he’s also an example of clean living. He avoids even the hint of scandal, keeping his office door open when a woman is alone with him and having aides check hotel rooms for uninvited females before he enters.

Early in his career, Graham established pioneering financial controls for his empire. His ministry is run by an independent Board of Directors. He could make millions from his books, personal appearances and radio, television and film ministries, but he limits himself to a salary of $69,150 a year.

“Graham has rendered evangelical faith legitimate . . . in part by being sort of a good guy,” Hadden said.

Still, Graham has had to endure his share of critics.

Liberals going back to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niehbuhr have criticized Graham’s form of Christianity for relying on emotion and a simplistic view of the Bible, and ignoring social needs in favor of a mass-production approach to gaining converts.

Studies have found that Graham’s rallies largely preach to the converted. Many of those who answer the call at the end of his crusades have been swayed by techniques such as having the ushers come forward to give the impression there is a groundswell of people committing to Christ.

He also has drawn accusations that he is willing to tread carelessly along the line separating religion and politics in exchange for access to the rich and powerful.

In a gushing letter described in Martin’s book, Graham wrote Eisenhower that a brief ride in the presidential limousine was “an unforgettable experience that I shall cherish the rest of my life.” Hadden recalled a 1965 National Prayer Breakfast when Graham reassured a Vietnam-beleaguered Johnson that “God came not to bring peace to the world, but a sword.” He also championed Richard M. Nixon before Watergate.

On the far religious right, Graham has been vilified for his willingness to work in cooperation with mainline Protestants, Catholics and others of suspect faith to fundamentalists.

“In relation to others, I used to think that if a person hadn’t experienced what I had experienced, he wasn’t a believer,” Graham said. “It was my own ignorance. I had not had the opportunity to fellowship with people in other communities before.”

During the 1957 New York crusade, Graham irrevocably broke with fundamentalists by having the Protestant Council, an ecumenical organization representing nearly all Protestant bodies, sponsor the meetings.

Bob Jones, John Rice and other fundamentalists withdrew their support, but Graham won the gamble that he could appeal to a larger audience without them.

More than 2 million people attended the crusade; it was extended from six to 16 weeks, and emboldened Graham to rent time on ABC for national television broadcasts--the birth of the modern electronic ministry that helped rescue evangelicals from the backwaters of American religious life.

In 1957, a church official warned Catholics away from Graham’s crusade.

In 1991, Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York is encouraging his flock to participate.

“The Roman Catholics know that I’m not against them, and in my thinking, rightly or wrongly, I represent all the churches,” Graham says today.

He also blazed trails for evangelical integration--a singular achievement for a man who grew up in the rural South and was converted at a revival led by Mordecai Fowler Ham, a man accused of racism and anti-Semitism.

Disappointed by the lack of blacks attending the 1957 crusade, Graham hired his first black associate evangelist, Howard Jones.

He also publicly endorsed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Having King speak at a meeting during the New York crusade did not place Graham in the civil rights movement’s vanguard, Martin said, but he was “way ahead of his constituency.”

Everywhere he goes, hundreds of churches who rarely had worked together in the past come together to prepare for his crusades. He is the founder of Christianity Today, the leading evangelical magazine, and has been a bulwark of the National Assn. of Evangelicals since its early days.

And it was Graham’s integrity that may have saved the electronic ministry in its darkest hour after the fall of Swaggart and Bakker.

In recent years, he has concentrated on uniting evangelicals internationally. His 1983 and 1986 conferences in Amsterdam drew more than 12,000 evangelists from around the world. During his summer visit to Moscow, he helped lead a training school for evangelists.

“I think Billy Graham’s greatest legacy will not be a university or any institutions, but it will be the tens of thousands of little Billy Grahams, itinerant evangelists, not well-educated, but who will do the simple door-to-door sales work of the evangelist,” Martin said.

When he was riding high in the 1950s, Graham fueled the image of America as a nation with a special religious calling. He no longer is so certain.

“I used to think in my work we could see a great religious revival sweep America and solve all our problems,” he said in a 1988 interview. “That’s still the dream, the vision, but it’s not the reality.”

The reality, as Graham sees it today, is a nation and world moving toward the ultimate battle of good and evil.

To him, the sexual scandals that have brought down other clergymen are no coincidence. “I think we are living in an age when Satan is out to destroy families . . . and I think particularly he is attacking clergy,” Graham said.

Graham also sees evidence of Armageddon in the upheaval in the Middle East, where the final battle is foretold in the Bible. And, in an observation that carries Messianic overtones, he notes the command in Matthew 24:14 that the Gospel must be preached to all the ends of the world before the Second Coming.

That is what Graham has done before more than 110 million people in 88 countries, and it is what he plans to continue doing as long as he is physically and mentally able.

The former Cold Warrior now is negotiating with the Soviets to begin broadcasting there.

“If he ever stopped preaching, probably he would not be happy if he couldn’t do the work,” said Ford, his brother-in-law. “It has been central to him, and his place in history he’s conscious of.”

The evangelist likes to tell the story of how Paramount offered a movie contract after the 1957 crusade. This year, he said, President Bush asked that he alter his crusade schedule to come to Washington during Queen Elizabeth’s visit for “the social event of the season.”

His response, in 1957 and 1991, was the same: No.

‘I’m a preacher. I’ve got to preach,” he said.

He breaks into a smile now, briefly forgetting his physical pain and grueling schedule.

“I’m just going to continue the way I am,” he said, “until God says, ‘That’s it.’ ”