The Most Important City

For the first time in Billy Graham's career, he was conducting a second "crusade" in a major city. The city: Washington, D.C. To his audience at Griffith Stadium, Billy took pains to explain that his return engagement did not mean he considered Washington more sinful than other cities. "I'm back," said Evangelist Graham, "because it's the most important city in the world."

It is also a city full of important people. For breakfast one day, 125 Representatives appeared on the Hill to meet Billy, while 56 Senators turned up for a lunch given by Lyndon Johnson, Everett Dirksen, Frank Carlson and George Smathers. Pat and Dick Nixon attended one of Billy's regular meetings. Said Billy's campaign director, the Rev. Walter Smith: "We religiously--if I may use the term--stay out of politics."

To more than 100,000 listeners in the stadium, plus 7,000 in the Pentagon courtyard, Billy gave full measure of metaphor, religious and otherwise. "We in America," said Billy, "are becoming a nation of towering intellects, Atlas-like bodies and shriveled souls. The American people are fiddling and playing around while the world burns and crumbles down around them . . . Life can be sweet, smooth and sassy, like our modern cars, but if we have lost the key, or if there is no fuel in the tank, we can't go any place . . . Like an aircraft in a storm, we have lost contact with the control tower; we are circling, ever circling, with our moral visibility zero."

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