Word: preacher
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...Graham was hardly the first preacher to have a White House pass; but he was the first to have one in 11 consecutive administrations, Democratic and Republican, led by men very different from each other who all somehow felt the need to have him by their side. You could almost feel the rest of them hovering protectively over the proceedings in Charlotte: Eisenhower, who asked Graham on his deathbed how you can know if you're going to heaven; Johnson, who invited Graham to the White House within weeks of taking office for an encounter that included both prayer...
...Carter, also 83, praised Graham as a boundary-breaking preacher who had the greatest influence on his own spiritual life. Graham was the "first evangelist of any stature" who penetrated the Iron Curtain, starting with a crusade in Hungary in 1977 and eventually preaching four times in the Soviet Union. Concluded Carter, "I'm just one of tens of millions of people whose spiritual life has been shaped by Billy Graham...
...Falwell came along and said, 'Politics is important now. You can't stay apart.' That was no small thing. Whether one agrees with Falwell or not, to mobilize millions of people who had heretofore been apolitical - and apolitical for theological reasons - was quite a shift for a Southern fundamentalist preacher...
...remained a controversial figure - and a go-to source for politicians and reporters seeking to know how the nation's growing tide of values voters would respond to various issues. Many other leaders did not care for his intensely partisan pulpiteering and kept their distance from him. The Lynchburg preacher was downright hostile to Bill Clinton, boasting to his flock in the first week after Clinton's inauguration in 1993 that he had a sex tape of the new President, but was too appalled by it to share it in public. Falwell came out early for Bush...
...young sons (his daughter died 10 days after her birth in 2002) and a sparky wife who seems adept at summoning his lighter side. Still, it's difficult to imagine him indulging in frivolous pursuits. It comes as no surprise that he's the son of a Scottish preacher, a background that imparted what he calls "a sense of a moral compass," as well as a frugal lifestyle and an urge to evangelize that has long since been sublimated into a focus on such causes as tackling poverty and preventable disease in Africa...