Word: grahams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wondered, too, how all that time in the White House changed Graham. What temptations did he face, what compromises did he have to make to preserve his access to the Oval Office without becoming a serial prisoner of the men he informally served? In our conversations over the course of 13 months, Graham talked candidly about the dangers of power and politics, about how it was a struggle for him for all those years and about what he learned. "I was aware of the risk at all times, political risk," he said. "Politics has always been ugly...
...Billy Graham radiates qualities a president seldom encounters during office hours: innocence, guilelessness, sincerity strong as paint stripper. "I'm not an analyzer," he told us. "I've got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don't analyze people." His critics called him gullible, naive to the point of self-delusion; his defenders, of which there were a great many more, called him trusting, always seeing the best in powerful people and frequently eliciting it as a result...
...when Graham was around, Presidents found themselves at ease, not on edge. They could tell that Graham wasn't there to lobby or confront but to listen and comfort. Because he made it safe to ask the simplest spiritual questions, conversations with Graham had a way of circling around to the eternal, to sin and salvation and to what death really means. Back in 1955, when Dwight Eisenhower had become Graham's first real friend in the White House, he used to press the evangelist on how people can really know if they are going to heaven. "I didn...
Lyndon Johnson was obsessed with his own mortality. "He was always a little bit scared of death," Graham said, and thus wanted a preacher handy--like the time he talked Graham into flying to a convention with him because the weather was so bad, he thought the plane might crash. Having entered office in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination, Johnson was conscious of how a President's death can shatter a country. Long before his Administration collapsed and he announced that he would not seek a second term in 1968, Johnson privately told Graham what he was thinking...
...President even scripted his own exit. One day Johnson took Graham on a walk around his Texas ranch, to a clearing in the trees near where his parents were buried. Johnson wanted to know if he would see them again in heaven. And then another question: Would Billy preach at his funeral? Johnson knew the world listens when a President dies. "Don't use any notes," he said, and no fancy eulogizing either. "I want you to look in those cameras and just tell 'em what Christianity is all about. Tell 'em how they can be sure they...