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Yet Franklin's candidacy did not strike all as an ideal solution. Notes an insider: "If someone had asked me several years ago if Franklin was the man to take over, honestly I would have said, 'Good luck!'" Says William Martin, Billy's biographer: "I think there was some question as to whether someone without much crusade experience was going to be able to just step in as the embodiment of the organization that for close to 50 years had the No. 1 crusade evangelist."
Another cause of the executive committee's reluctance to anoint Franklin may have been his run-in with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a self-policing organization his father helped found. In 1992 the council suspended Samaritan's Purse while it looked into Franklin's compensation and use of the company plane. Word leaked to the National Enquirer, which purported to quote Billy saying Franklin was "going to destroy what I've worked for years to build." Franklin pulled out of the council, calling its members "crummy little evangelical busybodies" who were "jealous of me." Two years later, he rejoined, more punctilious about his accounting, but bad feelings lingered.
Additional bones of contention were the $40 million of B.G.E.A. money that Franklin, as a board committee chairman, directed toward the Cove, a beautifully appointed Bible-study center in Montreat that is the only brick-and-mortar institution Billy built to outlast him; and Franklin's insistence that the B.G.E.A. must stay in revivals rather than becoming just another religious foundation. But most likely what put off Franklin's opponents was simple culture clash. "You're dealing with people who have been in this organization a long time and remember the day I was born and might still view me as a kid compared to them," he says. His preferred wardrobe--cowboy boots, jeans, black snap-button shirt and leather jacket--could be seen as a provocation. Even after forswearing wine in 1989, he maintains that "alcohol can be good if it is used in moderation," an unusual stance in the strictly teetotal world of his father's generation of Evangelicals. And then there was that incident with the neighbor's tree, about which his only known explanation was that he hadn't realized it would require so many rounds. Martin describes the conflict as "the Rotarians dealing with the gunslinger."
Exactly how deeply the Rotarians felt became clear last June, when Franklin received an urgent phone call from Toronto. Despite his Parkinson's and other ailments, Billy had rarely missed a crusade. But on the day before he was scheduled to address 50,000 people in the Toronto SkyDome, he collapsed with a bleeding colon. From his hospital bed, Billy had an aide call Franklin with a plea to take over, and the son jumped on a plane, flew to Toronto and began frenzied preparation. Only the following morning did he learn that the crusade's local organizers, reportedly after consulting with Billy's staff, had decided to use another of the organization's preachers. Months later, still furious, Franklin explicitly connected the incident to the politics of succession. "Listen, people will shoot you for $20; for $90 million, who knows?" he told Business North Carolina. "I wouldn't touch B.G.E.A. leadership with a 10-foot pole." Although, he added, if his father asked him personally he would give it "prayerful consideration."