Praying with Presidents

By Richard Stengel / Managing Editor

In the spring of 1950, Henry Luce's friend Bernard Baruch was staying at his vacation home at Hobcaw Barony, S.C., and following the revival meetings in nearby Columbia of a young and lanky preacher named Billy Graham. "There's a young fellow down here that's not only preaching some good religion," Baruch wrote Luce, "but he's giving some good common sense." Luce, TIME's co-founder, decided to go see for himself.

After attending one of the crusades, Luce met up with Graham at a dinner that evening. The publisher and the preacher talked late into the night. "I think he was trying to pull me out," Graham later said, "to see if I was genuine or honest."

Luce concluded that Graham was both. In 1954, TIME put Graham on the cover for the first time, calling him "the best-known, most talked-about Christian leader in the world today, barring the Pope." Luce believed that Graham had increased "interest" in religion in America. "I say 'interest,'" Luce wrote to a colleague, "because 'interest' is all a journalist can judge: journalists can hardly, if at all, judge of the quality of true religion." I say amen to that.

For decades, TIME has documented the unique role that Graham has played in American life. He has preached to more people in more places than anyone else who ever lived. At the same time, his private ministry to Presidents, going back to Harry Truman, offers profound insight into the forces that have shaped both politics and religion in America--and the costs and benefits of marrying the two.

Fifty years later, when TIME editors Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy visited Graham, they saw that the man who has been on countless magazine covers had only three hung on his office wall: the TIME cover from 1954, a 1992 TIME cover called A CHRISTIAN IN WINTER, and THE PRODIGAL SON, our last Graham cover, with his son Franklin, from 1996. Nancy and Michael's book, The Preacher and the Presidents, was conceived after they covered the 2004 election. It is the inspiration for a one-hour ABC documentary on Graham, hosted by Charles Gibson, airing Friday, Aug. 10. Gibbs, who wrote one of the covers on Graham's wall, says, "It seems that we've been trying to figure out the proper role of faith in politics for about 230 years, and we're still confused about where to draw the lines." Says Duffy: "We knew about Graham's huge public profile. But until we started talking to the Presidents, their families and their aides, we had no idea about the much more private role he played."

Gibbs and Duffy interviewed Graham four times at his mountaintop home in western North Carolina. Last week they asked him if he'd be willing to share some thoughts about life since Ruth, his beloved wife of nearly 64 years, died in June. His moving reflections, which combine both aching sadness and his continuing sense of mission, are included in this week's cover stories.

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR