Evangelist Billy Graham leaves the White House
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While such promotion is being readied, counselors are trained in regular classes and graded on-a point system. About a dozen usually flunk and are tactfully asked to resign; marginal cases (especially those who dress sloppily) are held on "reserve," and the best students become "front-row" counselors (wearing red tabs in their badges).
Like a Cadillac. A couple of days before the opening meeting, Graham arrives with the rest of his team—a cluster of smoothly dressed young men with religious backgrounds and comely wives. In both matter and manner, Billy Graham has come a long way from the Los Angeles days when he billed himself as "America's Sensational Young Evangelist" in a "Mammoth Tent Crusade" with "Glorious Music, Dazzling Array of Gospel Talent, 22 Tremendous Nights." Today's ads consist mainly of the words "Hear Billy Graham," plus a picture. Says Jerry Beavan ("pronounced like heaven"), Graham's 31-year-old public-relations man: "When you see an advertisement for a Cadillac, it just says Cadillac and shows you a picture. Billy is like a Cadillac. We don't have to explain."
Graham's meetings, like his neckties, are less noisy than they used to be. Sounding brass and tinkling cymbal have been replaced by straight choir singing, with a simple organ and piano accompaniment. As the audience arrives (babies may be left in special nurseries known to the Graham staff as "bawl rooms"), Choir Leader Cliff Barrows is warming up the singers. Song books are passed around to the crowd; then Barrows invites the audience to sing, swinging a glittering trombone; Bass-Baritone Bev Shea goes into action with a few oldtime-religion songs, and the collection and an invocation by a local cleric follow. Meanwhile Billy Graham sits on the rostrum, head in hand, meditating.
Before he begins his sermon, he asks the audience to join him in a short prayer. Then he plunges right into his text. During the sermon, he picks up the Bible again and again, swinging it, slamming it. almost literally hurling it at the Devil. Graham has abandoned his early hyperbole in favor of a strictly scriptural message, brought down to earth in everyday language. He has also weeded out the kind of literalness that once led him to deliver drawing-board specifications for heaven, which, he assured his audience (apparently relying on Revelations 21:16), "is 1,600 miles long, 1,600 miles wide and 1,600 miles high." Under the bright lights, he paces his rubber-matted platform, crouching, pointing, swooping upon his acres of audience from one angle, then another. His long-fingered hands are almost constantly in motion, thrusting, carving space, evocatively touching his breast, head, eyes, mouth or ears. His plangent voice hammers the audience with hardly a change of pace: