Nixon, Graham Were Close for 44 Years : Friendship: Minister who will officiate at funeral had the former President’s trust.

It was during a game of golf at the Burning Tree Country Club in Washington 44 years ago that the Rev. Billy Graham and Richard Nixon became friends. But Nixon’s daughter Julie has said their friendship was well-rooted.

“It stems from the days when my grandmother first began to follow the ministry of Dr. Graham,” she told John Pollock, author of the evangelist’s authorized biography. “I’m sure that part of my father’s feeling that he can trust Billy Graham as a man of God stems from his knowledge that Nana believed with all her heart in the Graham mission.”

The 75-year-old minister will officiate at Nixon’s funeral today at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

It’s the same setting where, with the Nixon family sitting silently at outdoor funeral services for Pat Nixon last June, Graham eulogized that “few women in public life have suffered as she has suffered and done it with such grace.”

Graham and his wife, Ruth, became close to the Nixons soon after their first meeting, arranged by the late Sen. Clyde Hoey of Graham’s native North Carolina. The two men became golfing friends and confidants. They took long walks together on Florida beaches, where Graham urged Nixon to run for President in 1968. The night Nixon won, he asked Graham to join his family in a prayer before leaving his hotel room to face the media.

Graham gave the invocation at Nixon’s first presidential inauguration in 1969.

Graham also participated in events at Nixon’s second inauguration and presided over White House religious services many times. He gave the eulogy at the funeral of Nixon’s mother, Hannah, and offered a dedicatory prayer at his Yorba Linda library’s opening in 1990.

Nixon often took Graham’s advice. In 1960, for example, it was Graham who urged Nixon to stay away from making an issue of Jack Kennedy being Catholic.

Graham listened to Nixon, too. In 1982, when Graham worried whether to take his gospel to Moscow, Graham biographer William Martin writes, Nixon told him: “Billy, you know I believe in taking big risks. This is a big risk, but I believe that in the long run it will be for the benefit of the gospel you preach.”

Graham’s adoration for Nixon remained firm even in the face of criticism that he should have done more to influence Nixon on Vietnam and should have distanced himself during Watergate. Watergate did become a sore point for Graham, especially after he heard Nixon on the White House tapes.

Graham told biographer Marshal Frady: “I’d had a real love for (Nixon). He’d always been very attentive to his friends, he never forgot a birthday. He seemed to love his country, love his children, love Pat. But then the way it sounded on those tapes--it was all something totally foreign to me in him. He was just suddenly somebody else.”

But Graham stood firmly by Nixon’s side, and they remained close after Nixon was forced to resign. When they would meet, though, Nixon would always apologize for his language on the tapes, Graham says: “It was the first thing he’d mention.”

When Graham spoke at Pat Nixon’s funeral, there was never any doubt that the family would ask him to return when it was time for the solemn occasion of the burial of his friend.

His statement about Nixon’s death: It “marks the end of a remarkable career which touched the lives of people throughout the world. . . . America has lost a great statesman, and I have lost a great personal friend.”