Billy Graham, Pastor In Chief

A new book reveals what Graham learned — and what he regretted — in his 50-year ministry to U.S. Presidents

Diana Walker for TIME

Billy Graham answering a question at his home during the TIME magazine interview.

You have to climb a steep and narrow road, past the moonshiners' shacks and dense rhododendrons and through the iron gates to get to the house on the mountaintop that Ruth Graham built after her husband Billy became too famous to live anywhere else. By 1954, after she caught her children charging tourists a nickel to take a picture of their old house and noticed Billy crawling across the floor of his study to keep people outside from catching a glimpse of him, she knew it was time to move.

So up the mountain they went, and now, decades later, the...

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