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Moral authorities have come and gone, but Graham has endured, his honor intact despite his proximity to the shattering temptations of power. From the start, Graham presented to skeptics and believers alike a raucous, muscular Christianity, full of fire and free of doubt. Through it all, his message has been essentially the same. Each person is sinful before God, a predicament that can turn to redemption through faith in Jesus Christ and his death on the Cross. And Graham is the master marketer of that faith.
The act of preaching it, however, has always taken its toll, especially these days. "There have been times . . . I've come down from the platform absolutely exhausted," he says. "I feel like I've been wrestling with the devil, who has been doing everything in his power to keep those people from getting a clear message of the Gospel." At the moment he gives the invitation, he explains, "some sort of physical energy goes out of me and I feel terribly weak. I'm depleted." After a crusade he returns to relax with his wife Ruth in the rambling log home that she designed years ago as their sanctuary. It sits up in the Blue Ridge Mountains above Montreat, North Carolina, a retreat from the demands that press upon him continually.
The need to rest, of course, falls prey to the call to minister. In a 12-day stretch last June, he visited John Connally in a Texas hospital, escaped to a quiet hotel in southern France to find the time and space to work on his memoirs, immediately returned to Texas to preach at Connally's funeral, flew back to France, then to California to conduct Pat Nixon's funeral, then returned to France once again, too tired to get much work done. "I found that this Parkinson's does slow you down," he says, "whether you want to slow down or not." Mayo Clinic doctors tell him he can stand and preach for, at most, five more years.
That does not leave him much time. Graham's legacy will be measured not only in the lives he has changed but in the cause he has championed. If modern evangelicalism is in many ways Graham's passionate creation, it could suffer grievously once he is gone. A war over either the social agenda of the religious right or the theological assertions of the Fundamentalists could rend the movement that he held together almost against its fractious nature.
There are those who say he will never retire, including Graham himself. Yet back in 1952, three years after he had arrived as a national spiritual leader at the age of 30, he was so exhausted that he wasn't sure he could continue much longer. "I've always thought my life would be a short one," he told a group of churchmen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "I don't think my ministry will be long. I think God allowed me to come for a moment and it will be over soon."
Four decades later, it's not over yet. William Franklin Graham Jr. grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm, the son of pious parents who believed in spankings and Bible readings and persistent instruction in clean living. In 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed, his father made Billy and his sister Catherine drink beer until they vomited, an early exercise in aversion therapy that lasted a lifetime.