The Preacher and the Presidents Quotes

“The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.”
― Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Acknowledgments: ... From the start, we also benefitted from the support of Time Inc. editors”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“there were places he could not go without the power of the presidency behind him to open doors. That was the practical benefit of these friendships, and its impact was felt literally all around the world.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“The immense boom cameras swept over the heads of the crowd like some skeletal dinosaurs ... They alone could capture the scale of the crowd.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“She held my hand the whole time in our private time,' Graham recalled. 'And she was just so sweet. She is different from the Hillary you see in the media. There is a warm side to her”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“He would say, 'I have a strong wife, you know, people don't realize how strong Ruth is.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Oh, I would just love to talk to you sometime, maybe we could have lunch,' she recalled. But Graham politely declined, explaining to the governor's wife that he did not dine alone with women - be they single or married. 'Oh, well, I'm sorry,' Hillary said. 'Maybe we could have a lot of people there.' Graham replied that he would think about it. ... And so five people sat down at a found table in Little Rock's ornate Capital Hotel that fall.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Clinton was, Graham told King [Larry] 'one of the most charismatic people I've ever met.' - p. 315”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“The Graham family's roots to North Korea were considerable: Ruth had lived in Pyongyang as a teenager”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“You know, I'm still on somebody's list somewhere for giving him next to no money,' Clinton joked later, ' but it was a pretty good chunk of what I had.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“In September 1959, Graham was about to begin a crusade in Little Rock. ... 'A lot of business people in Little Rock were worried about some sort of great encounter," Clinton recalled later, 'because racial tensions were very high. And they asked Billy Graham to agree to give this crusade to a segregated audience. And he said if they insisted on that he would not come, that they were all children of God, he wanted to lead everyone to Christ. He would not do it.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“I loved those two people.

- Graham on the Clintons”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“When the invitation came for Graham to return to the Soviet Union two years later in 1984, he would get the chance to lead a crusade through four cities and give twenty-three sermons in twelve days. By then, he knew how to order his steps.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“And, in a larger sense, Graham was soon vindicated. Within just a few months, he received invitations to preach in the nations that were then known as Czechoslovakia and East Germany - trips that would turn out to be genuine crusades in countries desperate for Christian ministry. It had not been easy to watch, but Graham had wedged his foot in the door. And he would help kick it wide open over the next few years. p. 275”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Two days after the Grahams departed, on November 4, students in Tehran took sixty-six American diplomats hostage and showed no sign of giving them up. The Iranian government, such as it was, was either unable or unwilling to step in. It was, Rosalynn wrote later, 'the beginning of the end'.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“he would never, whatever his political bent, turn down any president who needed his help or asked him to dinner”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“I just didn't hang around the White House any more after Nixon ... Watergate changed me a little bit along that line." - Billy Graham”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“he made his declaration two weeks before Easter in the most public fashion possible for the age: on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. 'I'm in favor of disarmament and I'm in favor of trust,' he [Billy Graham] said. 'I'm in favor of having agreements not only to reduce but to eliminate. Why should any nation have atomic bombs?”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“here was Carter, a devout Christian, a southerner who attended church every week; a deacon in his local Baptist church; a man who had led Bible study in the torpedo room of his nuclear submarine; who had at one time offered himself as a stand-in preacher around Georgia; who could hold forth about the meaning and the lessons of all sorts of passages in both testaments; who had organized one Graham crusade and been honorary chairman of a second; and to whom prayer was, as he said, 'almost like breathing'.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Jimmy Carter did not present himself as perfect or pious ... Neither did he compromise his understanding of the Gospel by verbal dodging or double talk. He took a political risk by being so forthright about his faith; in the end though, I believe his candor worked in his favor.' - Billy Graham”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“The relationship between Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham is the most contradictory of all those profiled in this book. No president was closer to Graham theologically or spiritually; but no president save Kennedy was as distant personally from him, either. Carter alone among the presidents studied here taught the Bible throughout his life, wrote books of religious meditations, and needed no help with scripture or its challenges ... And yet Jimmy Carter uniquely did not need Billy Graham - and for most of his time in the Oval Office, he more or less ignored him.”
― Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“In his last conversations with Doris Kearns Goodwin, before he died in January 1973, Johnson talked about the odds that history would remember him kindly - or at all.”
― Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Most awkwardly, in the middle of all this [the Vietnam War], TIME reported that a group secretly financed by the CIA had funded Graham's Latin American crusade, which came as a complete surprise to Graham and prompted a repudiation: "I would never accept funds from any government agency," he declared, "especially the CIA.”
― Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.”
― Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“(Billy) Graham went through passages of hypochondria and his closest friends had to assure him that he was not about to die.”
― Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House

“His manner somehow friendly and courtly at the same time.”
― Nancy Gibbs, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House