THE BIG TENT.(Billy Graham)(Biography)

Billy Graham's final crusade had reached the midway point, on a sweltering evening last June in Flushing Meadows, when things took an unexpected turn. Graham, now eighty-six and using a walker, had slowly made his way to the pulpit, aided by his oldest son, Franklin. As the crowd of eighty thousand, seated on folding chairs, awaited his sermon (on the subject of making bad choices), Graham glanced across the platform and acknowledged his special guests, Bill and Hillary Clinton. " They're a great couple," Graham told the crowd. He then recalled a remark he'd once made about the Clintons when they were in the White House. "I felt when he left the Presidency he should be an evangelist, because he has all the gifts--and he'd leave his wife to run the country." At this, Hillary turned to her husband and slapped him a high five.

Bill Clinton joined Graham at the pulpit, and, taking his hand, he said, "What an honor it is to be here as a person of faith with a man I love and whom I have followed. He is about the only person I know who I've never seen fail to live his faith."

Clinton then told a story from his childhood, about attending a Graham crusade with his Sunday-school class in Little Rock. It was during a time of racial disharmony, and Graham had refused the suggestion by some city leaders to segregate his revivals. "I was just a little boy," Clinton said, "and I never forgot it, and I've loved him ever since."

There was, certainly, an element of politics to the moment. Evangelicals are not a known component of the Clinton base, and a blessing from Graham before eighty thousand worshippers has value, but Clinton is convincing on the subject of Billy Graham. We had talked a few days earlier, and the former President recollected that Graham's long-ago stand on race had occurred at a moment when young Clinton, a Southern Baptist, was questioning his own faith. "When he gave the call--amid all the civil-rights trouble, to see blacks and whites coming down the aisle together at the football stadium, which is the scene, of course, of our great football rivalries and all that meant to people in Arkansas--it was an amazing, amazing thing," he said. "If you weren't there, and if you're not a Southerner, and if you didn't live through it, it's hard to explain. It made an enormous impression on me. I was at that age where kids question everything, you know? And all of a sudden I said, 'This guy has got to be real, because he did this when he didn't have to.' " Over the years, Clinton formed a bond with Graham--friend of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes--and when Clinton's personal troubles emerged Graham publicly counselled forgiveness. "He took sin seriously," Clinton told me. "But he took redemption seriously. And it was incredibly powerful, the way he did it."

For Franklin Graham, sitting next to Hillary on that hot evening in Flushing Meadows, hearing his father and the former President exchanging praise must have stirred some discomfort. He had unreservedly condemned Clinton's liaison with Monica Lewinsky, summoning the Old Testament example of David's carrying on with Bathsheba, and the wrath of God it had produced. "Mr. Clinton's months-long extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family," Franklin wrote in a 1998 opinion article published by the Wall Street Journal. "If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?"

In addition to the family religious enterprise, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which has some five hundred employees worldwide, a hundred-million-dollar operating budget, and a fifteen-hundred-acre training center in North Carolina, Franklin Graham has inherited his father's chiselled features and his deep Carolina timbre, but politically and theologically the son wields a much sharper sword. Billy Graham has steadfastly avoided pronouncing judgments as he nears his own end (writing that "sincere Christians may differ on whether or not abortion is ever justified," and telling Larry King that God loves even Satan), but Franklin is quite willing to voice what he deems harsh truths. Just that morning, he had told me that the United Nations will fail, because it is a godless enterprise. Abortion is murder, he said, and homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. After the attacks of September 11th, Franklin declared that as a religion Islam was "wicked, violent, and not of the same God"--an assertion from which he has hardly retreated.

Predictably, Billy Graham's praise of Bill Clinton and his apparent endorsement of Hillary Clinton's political aspirations excited dismay among evangelicals. Several days later, when the Graham organization issued a "clarification," it was in the name of Franklin Graham. His father had only been joking about Bill Clinton becoming an evangelist, Franklin said. "President Clinton has the charisma, personality, and communication skills, but an evangelist has to have the call of God, which President Clinton obviously does not have, and my father understands that." As for Hillary Clinton, Graham continued, his father "certainly did not intend for his comments to be an endorsement for Senator Hillary Clinton."