When we went back for a final conversation in January 2007, it was clear that the pressure on Bush was also weighing on Graham. He said he did not want to “take sides on this Iraq thing,” but he kept returning to the war in our conversation, without mentioning that his grandson was an Army Ranger serving there. “I’m getting a little depressed about Iraq,” Graham admitted at one point. “Think of what it is doing to Bush. There doesn’t seem to be any way out.” The President, he said, had reached out in recent months on different subjects, trying to arrange a White House lunch or visit. “We’ve postponed it three times now. I’ve not been able to do it because of my wife. I felt badly.”
Graham still was following politics, albeit from a safe distance now. Though he has never met John McCain, the evangelist recalled stopping in Hawaii on his trips to and from South Vietnam and praying on his knees next to McCain’s father Admiral John McCain, then commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, for the son who was being held as a prisoner of war. He watched Mitt Romney wrestle with the Mormon question. “It will be somewhat of a problem for him, like Jack Kennedy being a Catholic,” Graham predicted, although he believed Romney could overcome it by directly addressing the concerns as Kennedy did. Graham was also keeping a close eye on the progress of Hillary Clinton, whom he knows the best of all the candidates. “I keep up with her,” he said of his old friend. “I think a lot of Hillary.”
That feeling is mutual: Clinton first met him in person when she was First Lady of Arkansas, but they became close when she was First Lady of the United States. She needed some pastoral care of her own in 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and became the latest public figure to sense Graham’s unique attraction to the occupants of the Oval Office. He was, she concluded, a political junkie himself. “He loved elections,” she told us, “because he knew that you had to tell a story, you had to connect with people–all the things we talk about in politics.” To the Presidents, Graham’s fame and charisma made him a virtual peer: “I think there was a recognition there, and a comfort, with dealing with someone who was a public person,” Clinton observed, “who had to put up with what’s wonderful about being in the public eye and what’s kind of a drag.”
We see Presidents fight so hard to win the office, but we often forget the price they pay to hold it. If Graham helped raise these men up, he also caught them after they returned to earth. “Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done,” Graham said. “And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.”
Read it all.
Time Magazine: Billy Graham, Pastor In Chief
When we went back for a final conversation in January 2007, it was clear that the pressure on Bush was also weighing on Graham. He said he did not want to “take sides on this Iraq thing,” but he kept returning to the war in our conversation, without mentioning that his grandson was an Army Ranger serving there. “I’m getting a little depressed about Iraq,” Graham admitted at one point. “Think of what it is doing to Bush. There doesn’t seem to be any way out.” The President, he said, had reached out in recent months on different subjects, trying to arrange a White House lunch or visit. “We’ve postponed it three times now. I’ve not been able to do it because of my wife. I felt badly.”
Graham still was following politics, albeit from a safe distance now. Though he has never met John McCain, the evangelist recalled stopping in Hawaii on his trips to and from South Vietnam and praying on his knees next to McCain’s father Admiral John McCain, then commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, for the son who was being held as a prisoner of war. He watched Mitt Romney wrestle with the Mormon question. “It will be somewhat of a problem for him, like Jack Kennedy being a Catholic,” Graham predicted, although he believed Romney could overcome it by directly addressing the concerns as Kennedy did. Graham was also keeping a close eye on the progress of Hillary Clinton, whom he knows the best of all the candidates. “I keep up with her,” he said of his old friend. “I think a lot of Hillary.”
That feeling is mutual: Clinton first met him in person when she was First Lady of Arkansas, but they became close when she was First Lady of the United States. She needed some pastoral care of her own in 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and became the latest public figure to sense Graham’s unique attraction to the occupants of the Oval Office. He was, she concluded, a political junkie himself. “He loved elections,” she told us, “because he knew that you had to tell a story, you had to connect with people–all the things we talk about in politics.” To the Presidents, Graham’s fame and charisma made him a virtual peer: “I think there was a recognition there, and a comfort, with dealing with someone who was a public person,” Clinton observed, “who had to put up with what’s wonderful about being in the public eye and what’s kind of a drag.”
We see Presidents fight so hard to win the office, but we often forget the price they pay to hold it. If Graham helped raise these men up, he also caught them after they returned to earth. “Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done,” Graham said. “And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.”
Read it all.