COMMENTARY : Billy Graham: Crusader Still a Model at 75

Billy Graham turns 75 this week.

Slowed somewhat by Parkinson’s disease, he’s lost a step in recent years and his preaching lacks some of the fire of his early years, but the presence and the charisma endure.

Graham took an old idiom, the evangelistic sermon, and cloaked it in all the communications media available in the 20th Century: radio, television, print and film. He claims to have preached to more people than anyone else in history, and he represents for many around the world the embodiment of American middle-class values.

Few people fill a room with their presence the way Graham does. He is charming and utterly winsome, but those are the qualities that have led other evangelists to disaster in the 20th Century. Graham, to his eternal credit, has remained free from scandal throughout a career that has spanned nearly half a century.

But that was not left entirely to chance. Early in his career, Graham gathered his associates--”the team,” he calls them--into a hotel room in Modesto, Calif., to discuss how they might avoid some of the pitfalls that had done in other evangelists. What emerged is what Cliff Barrows, Graham’s longtime associate, calls “the Modesto Manifesto.”

Graham and his organization resolved never to exaggerate attendance figures at their meetings and to accept only fixed salaries from their organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn., rather than a percentage of the offerings. The team agreed not to criticize fellow members of the clergy, and they set up elaborate precautions to protect them from sexual temptation or even the appearance of sexual impropriety.

The measures have worked. Throughout his career there has never been a serious charge of malfeasance--financial, sexual or otherwise--leveled against Graham. In an age that has seen other evangelists succumb to all manner of spectacular scandals, Graham’s greatest legacy may be his integrity.

His judgment, however, has not always matched his integrity. Only recently Graham was forced to apologize for a comment suggesting that AIDS was God’s condemnation of homosexuality. He is prone to such missteps, but his elaborate public relations machinery invariably leaps into action to minimize the damage.

Graham’s biggest lapse in judgment remains his uncritical embrace of Richard Nixon. Graham gave Nixon political advice throughout his career, offered Nixon valuable cameo appearances at Graham crusades and endorsed Nixon over George McGovern in 1972, the year of the Watergate break-in.

Graham’s biographer, William Martin, claims that when Graham reviewed the infamous Watergate tapes he professed to be physically ill--not at Nixon’s attempts to subvert the Constitution but at his use of foul language.

The Nixon debacle, however unfortunate, does not negate Graham’s genuine accomplishments. His 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden was a turning point in the history of 20th-Century evangelicalism. Graham cooperated with mainline and liberal churches, much to the chagrin of the more sectarian fundamentalists. To this day some fundamentalists regard Graham as a traitor and, incredibly, as a liberal himself.

Graham led evangelicals back to respectability in the middle decades of the 20th Century. Reeling after the Scopes Trial of 1925, many evangelicals had withdrawn from American society, believing that the wider world was both corrupt and corrupting. Graham helped to lead them back. His very public friendship with presidents and world leaders provided evangelicals a kind of vicarious satisfaction.

Graham, after all, was an evangelical. He was one of us. And if he was welcome at the White House, we evangelicals felt we all had attained at least a measure of acceptance in what we had believed was an alien world.

In all, Graham has had a remarkable career, and there will never be another like him--someone who combined charisma, conviction, integrity and media savvy to become a figure known and respected throughout the world.

Happy birthday, Mr. Graham!