DATE: Sunday, May 18, 1997                  TAG: 9705160075

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E17  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY APRIL WITT, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE 

                                            LENGTH:  123 lines

GRAHAM'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS NO ORDINARY SUCCESS STORY

A YOUNG Billy Graham, well on his way to becoming America's best-known preacher, was in Los Angeles, preparing to fill yet another revival tent with thousands of fans and seekers, when he noticed a relative cradling an infant and asked, ``Whose baby is this?''

It was Graham's. He had been so busy trying to win America to Christ that he hadn't been home in months, and didn't recognize one of his own children.

``I have failed many times, and I would do many things differently,'' Graham says now from the vantage point of age 78. ``Were all those engagements necessary? Was I as discerning as I might have been about which ones to take and which to turn down? I doubt it. Every day I was absent from my family is gone forever.''

``What is the greatest surprise you have found about life?'' a university student once asked Graham.

``The brevity of it,'' he replied without hesitation.

Graham's 24th book, ``Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham'' (Harper Collins, $28.50), recently arrived in bookstores, and was so anticipated that some Christian booksellers started sign-up sheets months ago for customers who wanted to buy initial copies.

``I can't think of anybody who doesn't respect Billy Graham,'' said Brian Cline, manager of Baptist Bookstore in Davie, Fla. ``He's done nothing but good throughout his life.''

Despite that perception, Graham's autobiography reveals his personal regrets - he wishes, for example, he'd steered clearer of politics - as well as details his widely known triumphs. And in a recent interview, Graham confesses that he still has trouble acting on some of the lessons learned in life.

Despite being treated for Parkinson's, a progressive neurological disease, he won't retire. He delegates many responsibilities to his son, William Franklin Graham III, but still heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

He would be happy to turn the organization over to his son ``today, if I knew how to do it,'' he told the Associated Press earlier this month.

``At my age, I would like to just sit in a study somewhere and preach through this new electronic equipment they have now,'' such as the Internet, Graham said. ``You can touch the world from just one place.''

Despite that claim, Graham, a Southern Baptist, is scheduled to preach several evangelistic crusades this year. And next.

``Just As I Am'' - named for the hymn that brought thousands of repentant sinners to the altar at the close of Graham's worship services - is the extraordinary and lengthy (735 pages) account of how the son of a North Carolina dairy farmer became one of the most influential religious leaders of the 20th century.

He filled stadiums the world over with his preaching, was one of the first evangelists to exploit radio and television to spread the Gospel, insisted early in his career on preaching to racially integrated crowds, and personally evangelized powerful people from mobsters to world leaders.

He has known every president since Harry Truman. He has had such extraordinary access to some (including Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) that he gave advice even while the president was in bed clad in pajamas.

A few months before his death, an ailing Eisenhower called Graham to his bedside and asked how to be sure his sins were forgiven and he would go to heaven.

But Graham was most closely associated with Richard Nixon, with whom he played golf and prayed, and for whom he did political favors like dictating a report to the president on his meeting with Indira Gandhi. He writes about his shock at the Watergate scandal and the White House tapes in which a foul-mouthed Nixon ordered the cover-up of Watergate crimes.

``The thing that surprised me and shook me most was the vulgar language used,'' Graham writes. ``Never in all the time I have been with him did he use language even close to that. I felt physically sick and went into the seclusion of my study at the back of the house. Inwardly I felt torn apart.''

Getting involved in partisan politics is one of his greatest regrets in life, Graham says now.

``When a president of the United States, for example, wept in my presence, or knelt with me to pray, or privately unburdened his concerns about his family, I was not thinking about his political philosophy or his personality but about his need for God's help,'' Graham writes.

``And yet there have been times when I undoubtedly stepped over the line between politics and my calling as an evangelist. An evangelist is called to do one thing, and one thing only: to proclaim the Gospel. Becoming involved in strictly political issues or partisan politics inevitably dilutes the evangelist's impact and compromises his message. It is a lesson I wish I had learned earlier.''

Graham writes, comically at times, of politicians' efforts to use him to their advantage.

When presidential candidate John F. Kennedy wanted Graham to make a statement relieving Protestant fears of a Catholic president, Graham demurred. But after Kennedy was elected, he essentially tricked Graham into doing so. He invited the evangelist to play golf, then dropped by a hotel where Kennedy introduced Graham - to Graham's surprise - to a large group of reporters there to question him.

Later, when President Johnson asked Graham during a private lunch to help pick his vice presidential running mate, Graham's wife, Ruth, kicked the evangelist under the table and warned him to advise on spiritual or moral matters only. Johnson assured Ruth she was absolutely right in her thinking.

``All right,'' Johnson said when Ruth left the room after lunch, ``now what do you really think?''

Graham has spent decades in the public eye without being tarnished by the kind of scandals that have exposed some other evangelists as world-class sinners. He writes that he was humiliated early on when a newspaper ran a photograph of ushers carrying bags filled with cash, a ``love offering'' collected for him after one worship service.

He and his closest associates vowed then to avoid scandal by taking reasonable salaries and never spending time alone with any woman other than their wives. Graham adhered so strictly to the latter rule, he says, that he told Hillary Rodham Clinton he couldn't have a private lunch with her.

Graham's theology has been criticized, he notes, by liberal Christians who said his message was too simplistic and by fundamentalists who distrusted his ecumenism and willingness to preach in secular settings. Hurt but undeterred, he writes, he just kept on preaching to whomever would listen.

Graham, who still can't stop preaching, closes his autobiography with a plea for readers who have not done so to turn to God.

``I will not go to Heaven because I have preached to great crowds,'' he writes. ``I will go to Heaven for one reason: Jesus Christ died for me, and I am trusting Him alone for my salvation.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Rev. Billy Graham hugs his wife Ruth after a 1994 speech at the

Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Graham's autobiography is now in

bookstores.

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