Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham.

The Autobiography of Billy Graham 

The life of Billy Graham has been told and retold many times - by biographers official and unofficial, by countless journalists and, now, by Graham himself. Ten years in the making, this autobiography is obviously the work of many editorial hands. It is Billy as he would like to be remembered: the latter-day Apostle Paul, the American evangelist who has preached in person to more people (he estimates 200 million around the world) than any other Christian in history. But it is, unfortunately, not Billy just as he was. Too much has been left out, too little explained.

Graham's most revealing recollections concern his youth and education. His studied avoidance of denominational traditions and theological differences as an evangelist was incubated at home: His mother was a pious Scottish Presbyterian, his father an indifferent Methodist. Billy himself was baptized three times - the last a full immersion at the age of nineteen, which he underwent so that he might take a part-time preaching assignment at a Southern Baptist church. He gives no other reason for identifying as a Southern Baptist. What mattered was that he had been "born again" during a revival at the age of sixteen. That was enough, he tells us, to assure his place in heaven, and it was all he has ever asked of those he sought to convert. His is generic Christianity's most popular brand name.

The best pages in this long account of self are those of youth remembered. Shortly after a failed adolescent romance, Graham felt the call to be a preacher. But in retrospect he had been heading for the pulpit all along. At the interdenominational Bible Institute in Florida where he was a student, preaching was what everyone was supposed to do, and evangelism was all they talked about. For the young evangelist, preaching became a kind of priestly performance, an often exhausting pulpit ritual in which the Savior became verbally available through the preacher's rousing, Spirit-inspired words. When Billy edits tapes of his crusades, he once told me, he does not see himself but someone through whom God is speaking, someone who makes God present. It is an oral-aural sacrament: the flesh made word.

Perhaps because of this overwhelming reliance on oral performance, the later Billy Graham naively took too many politicians at their own word. The bulk of Graham's autobiography is divided into two kinds of chapters: those recounting his more than 500 evangelistic crusades, beginning in 1947, and those telling of his relationships with nine presidents of the United States, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower. What he doesn't tell us is how his evangelistic career brought him early into the confidence of men of power. Less then 200 pages into his life story, for example, Graham reveals that Sid Richardson, a crusty and immensely rich Texas oilman, dispatched him to Europe in order to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Graham was only thirty-four at the time, and although he was already a budding celebrity - thanks to the power of the Hearst newspapers and the Luce magazines - he was no George Stephanopoulos. How had a farmboy from North Carolina developed such wealthy patrons as Richardson? And why would a general of the U.S. Army listen to a headstrong fundamentalist (as he was then) preacher? There are answers to be found in first-rate biographies by William Martin and Marshall Frady. But the odd thing is that Graham never seems to have asked himself these questions.

The truth is that in the fifties Graham was a fiercely outspoken anti-Communist - a stance which he now finds difficult to recall. He was also an evangelist with an enormous personal following, which he here remembers very well indeed. For both reasons, Graham was a man worthy of cultivation by wealthy conservative businessmen, whose financial contributions he rarely acknowledges, and by politicians, who used him every bit as much as Billy used them. Billy's presidential stories contain a few surprises. Lyndon Johnson, he says, told him privately a year before the fact that he would not seek a second term. Johnson also promised to back him if Billy decided to run for president himself. Nixon was his closest White House friend, and even now, Graham writes, he cannot believe that the profanity recorded on the Nixon tapes "was part of [Nixon's] essential character." It never occurs to Graham that the politicians he claimed as friends never really opened themselves up to him, as sinners are supposed to do.

Throughout the book, Graham is less than candid about his own deep involvement with national politics. What readers would never guess, unless they had read the Martin and Frady biographies, is just how often Graham peppered the White House with memos and phone calls, offering advice on all sorts of subjects unconnected to the state of the occupants' souls. Astonishingly, Graham is silent on the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition; indeed, notables like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker are not mentioned at all. Graham always tried to distinguish his cause from those he felt were tarnishing the preacher's calling, and here he pretends that these others simply do not exist. They are not part of his story, though they are certainly part of his life and times. On the other hand, the index reads like a celebrity who's who of the last half century: It includes everyone from Frank Sinatra to Winston Churchill (who in one incredible scene bares his soul to Billy) to Henry Kissinger, who, Graham tells us (with equal incredibility), showed up more than once in 1957 during Billy's marathon sixteen-week crusade in New York City. In both cases, it is hard not to feel that Graham has been joshed.

It may be that Billy, now seventy-eight and ailing, waited too long to tell his story. But it may also be that he did not learn much from his experiences. After all, when you are the world's foremost "ambassador of Christ's Kingdom," as he calls himself, when your calling is to change others, what need is there to change yourself? Numbers don't lie, he might say. In fact, he does say: After almost every crusade he describes, Graham allows himself to note that he set a record for attendance.

And yet, having covered Graham for more than thirty years, I think he did change a bit. Not early on when, for example, he traveled to India to preach and (as he recalls here) was told by his advance man that Indians "have no conception of God." In fact, they have a very rich conception of many gods, but Billy never learned to appreciate other religions, even if it might have made him a more effective evangelist. But I think he was genuinely transformed in the eighties by his discovery of just how profoundly religious persecuted Christians were in Eastern Europe. I know he greatly admires John Paul II: Graham was among the first to recognize, early in this pope's reign, that John Paul is essentially an evangelist himself. Still, I have the feeling that he has never quite understood Catholics or Catholicism, though he once told me (a sentiment not mentioned here) that "I feel most at home in the Evangelical wing of the Anglican church."

In retrospect, Graham was never one to tell all he knows. And he is just too much of the Southern gentleman, certainly too palsy with too many people of power, too much the living icon, to level an honest assessment that might hurt another person. In any case, most of what he really knows and did know lies in the archives of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Illinois. Historians will retell his story. Billy'd rather the reader heed his closing words. Not surprisingly, they are an invitation to give one's life to Christ.

Kenneth L. Woodward, senior writer and religion reporter for Newsweek, is working on a book about miracle stories in world religions.