The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham

On election night, before appearing victoriously to the press,
Nixon invited Billy to join his family in the hotel. Billy and T. W.
Wilson quickly hopped a cab and headed for Nixon’s room. When
they arrived, Nixon asked them all to join hands so Billy could
offer a prayer.
Such outward manifestations of spirituality impressed Billy.
Their many conversations convinced him of Nixon’s genuine, if
still private, religious belief. Midway through Nixon’s first term,
Billy wrote his old friend a note: “My expectations were high
when you took office nearly two years ago but you have exceeded
[them] in every way! You have given moral and spiritual leader-
ship to the nation at a time when we desperately needed it—in
addition to courageous political leadership! Thank you!”
Years later, when Nixon fell, Billy’s embarrassment stung
because the president had betrayed him publicly as a visible ally
and privately as a close friend. The association with Nixon tar-
nished Billy’s ministry and legacy, and Billy wondered how he
could have been so wrong about him. “Looking back these forty-
five years later,” Billy wrote in his 1997 autobiography Just As I
Am, “considering all that has intervened, I wonder whether I
might have exaggerated his spirituality in my own mind.” He told
a biographer, “I just couldn’t understand it. I still can’t. I thought
he was a man of great integrity. I looked upon him as the possi-
bility of leading this country to its greatest and best days. And all
those people around him, they seemed to me so clean, family
men, so clean-living. Sometimes, when I look back on it all now,
it has the aspects of a nightmare.”

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Talk about being refined in the furnace of leadership! The Nixon

experience for Billy was the “furnace heated seven times.”

He had been disappointed in others before. Early in his career,

disillusioned by a leader he had fully respected, he advised others

to never put people on a pedestal, nor to expect from them what

only God can provide. During his long career, many had failed

The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham