Perhaps you will never experience betrayal. Then again, it’s
one of the more likely experiences ahead, a time when someone
turns on you, opens you to shame and ridicule, or subverts your
labors of love, your relationships and aspirations. How you
respond when it happens can make the difference between con-
tinuing a vigorous leadership or falling as a casualty.
What was the most painful thing Billy Graham experienced
in his long years as a leader? What shook him to his core? It was
not the betrayal by a close colleague.
According to his wife, Ruth, it was his feeling of being
betrayed by Richard Nixon when the Watergate transcripts were
made public. Ruth said it was the hardest thing her husband had
ever gone through.
Billy had been preparing for his long-awaited international
conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Watergate scandal
became the national obsession, and before leaving for Europe,
Billy forced himself to sit down and read the edited transcripts of
the Watergate tapes. The recorded voice was unmistakably
Nixon’s, but Billy did not recognize his good friend. Nixon’s filthy
language and cold calculation shocked him. Billy retreated to the
study at his Montreat home for solitude. The tapes made him
physically and emotionally sick: he wept and vomited. Normally
an astute judge of character, Billy never saw this devastation
coming.
But why such devastation to him personally? He suffered pub-
lic embarrassment because of his friendship with Nixon, but he had
weathered public pain before. How could this sense of having been
so wrong have happened, and why did it affect him so deeply?
■ ■ ■Billy Graham’s history with Richard Nixon went far back, and it
was a surprisingly close relationship. Today, Nixon may be cari-
catured in many people’s minds, but he was very smart, a bril-
liant strategist, and an indefatigable worker. Anyone, for instance,
who reviews the books Nixon wrote after his presidency mustThe Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham