One Soul at a Time by Grant Wacker

Author:Grant Wacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

SCENE 35

Man for All Seasons

In 2006, A. Larry Ross, Graham’s long-term media consultant, told this story in New York. “So Moses turns for advice to his public-relations man as he’s wondering how to cross the Red Sea. . . . And the guy says . . . , ‘Stand at the water’s edge and raise your staff and the sea will part.’ . . . And Moses asks, ‘Is that really going to work?’ And the PR guy says, ‘I don’t know, but if it does, I can guarantee you two pages in the Old Testament.’ ”

This wisp of a story reveals not only Ross’s flair for his job but also Graham’s. Between 1949 and 2013, historian Elesha Coffman writes, “Graham became one of the most recognized, televised, photographed, published, and quoted figures in America—and abroad—owing in large part to his adept engagement with media.” Coffman rightly notes that this skill stretched across his entire career.

***

Graham grasped the power of television to market his “product.” With radio he had jumped on a locomotive set in motion long before. But with television he ranked among the first to seize the opportunity in the 1950s. He could not have known that in the first five years of the decade, television use in American households would grow by 700 percent, but his instincts ran that way.

Like his Catholic counterpart Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, Graham shrewdly understood that television commanded an elusive power to project him into America’s living rooms. Catholic journalist Jon M. Sweeney spoke for many: “For Mr. Graham, intangibles like personal humility and kindness translated across the television screen.”

But television did something else for Graham that it could not do for Charles Fuller, who worked only on radio, or Fulton Sheen, who worked only in a studio. It conveyed the magnitude of the stadium crowds as well as the scale of the lines of inquirers streaming forward at the end. The sheer size of these events, captured on the screen, normalized them, making it harder for critics to dismiss them as the aberrations of the fundamentalist fringe.

Graham used television as no other evangelist had done, not only by mounting his own nationally syndicated broadcast, but also and perhaps more important by regularly appearing on secular talk shows. He filled guest spots on the Woody Allen, William F. Buckley, Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue, David Frost, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, Dinah Shore, and Larry King programs, among others. Indeed, when Graham retired, he may have held the record for the most appearances—at least twenty-five—of any guest on King’s program.

Allen and King were forthright about being secular themselves, but that did not cramp Graham’s style. In one now-classic performance, Graham masterfully countered Allen’s friendly jabs and got in a few of his own. When Allen challenged Graham to name which of the Ten Commandments he liked best, Graham, without missing a beat, shot back that as the father of five children still at home, he was especially fond of the fifth: honor your father and mother.

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