Nearer, Silent Majority, To Thee

Rendering unto the Press: The first of two Billy Graham press conferences I attended took place in February 1970 at the Penn Garden Hotel, across the street from the new Madison Square Garden, and also across the street from a restaurant that has a tank full of live perch in its front window. After coming out of the press conference, I watched the fish for about an hour. There were maybe a dozen of them in the tank. I soon observed that most of them huddled fearfully in one corner, packed together like commuters. They barely moved. Two or three others swam around seignorally in an ill-defined middle ground occupying about one third to one half the tank.

The rest of the water—more than half the space allotted to these perch to live out their lives before being consumed by the perch-loving visitor to New York City—was in the possession of a single, large, powerful and ever-watchful perch with a strikingly pronounced jaw line.

The top perch's jaw line reminded me of Billy Graham's, which I had just spent an hour or so studying. In both cases, it is a singular peninsula, a jutting out, a thrusting forward that attests at once to the owner's power and tenacity and his willingness to use both in defense of his prerogatives. There the resemblance ends, however. The top perch has become deformed and ugly from his perpetual need to defend himself and his territory. His face is repulsive, his eyes are wary and the total effect is one of angry rigidity. Graham, on the other hand, is vigorous and comely. His face is clear. His eyes are not wary but open and receptive to encounter. The total effect is one of virile serenity.

The difference, of course, is that whereas the fish has to spend his every minute asserting himself and expending energy to save himself from all sorts of danger, Graham does not. Billy Graham is in no danger. He has been saved by a Higher Power. He can assert himself, not on his own behalf, but as the agent of an idea, a principle, a system. Consequently, he can relax; he is, in Max Weber's phrase, "an instrument of a god" and has nothing to fear but the horsemen of self-doubt: fear, guilt and shame.

This blessed assurance is precisely the quality he transmitted throughout the press conference. True, he has had years to acclimatize himself in this arena and it is not precisely like the Christians and the lions. But reporters can be relentless and, while they are not allowed to rend the flesh, they can certainly wound the spirit. But Billy Graham is very nearly invulnerable, except for the very few times when he feels the need to be less than perfectly candid. On those occasions, he is notably weakened.

Somebody, for example, asked him whether he didn't think that Spiro Agnew was doing the country less than a service by his caustic attacks on the young. Graham had to pause for an instant, in which a flush crept over his already well-tanned face. His eyes shifted and, for an instant, he seemed oddly indecisive. Then he remembered that he wasn't facing these reporters on his own behalf; he knew what he had been enjoined to render unto whom and if Spiro Agnew wasn't precisely Caesar, so what? Finally, Graham said he wouldn't comment on personalities (though he already had commented on several) and his face cleared and he invited the next question.

When the conference ended, I went up to Graham and introduced myself. He had just concluded a short, lively chat with a pretty, dark-haired girl from Time, conducting himself in a manner I can only describe as sexless flirtation. We chatted a bit and I discovered that Graham in private discourse is friendly, responsive and alert. Everybody goes away from him liking him immensely and so did I. I had learned that Graham always called Mr. Nixon Dick, but now calls him Mr. President; that marijuana is not a hard drug but it lowers the resistance toward hard drugs; that the evangelist's eldest daughter, Gigi, made her decision for Christ at the age of five. That a son of his went to Stony Brook Prep School and never tried grass, whereas, in his youth, Billy Frank smoked a Camel and his dad gave him such a beating, he's never wanted a cigarette since. That Mrs. Ruth Graham, his wife, raised their children similarly, with a Bible in one hand and a hickory stick in the other. That this generation is more disturbed than previous ones, but that he "loves" them, and blames their problems on the older people.

When I indicated that I was interested in joining Graham for the New York crusade, which was scheduled for June 24–28, 1970, he said that would be just fine. He took me over to Bill Brown, the crusade director, and said to me, "Now, whenever you're ready, just contact Bill."

Late in May, I met Brown again and said I was ready. He gave me a copy of the authorized biography to read, a 1966 book, by John Pollock, which, according to the jacket, "meets the need for genuine biographical treatment."

Here I learned that William Franklin Graham, Jr., was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on November 7, 1918. His father was a farmer who had experienced a religious conversion in early manhood. His mother was a distant relative of President James K. Polk. Billy was high-spirited; frequently, "off came his father's belt or out came his mother's long hickory switch." Not surprisingly, Billy recalls "a great sense of burden that I was a sinner before God and had a great fear of hell and judgment." At the age of 16, he attended a revival meeting in town and came under the spell of fiery evangelist Mordecai Ham. He came forward. He decided for Christ.

I found the book genuinely biographically edifying. I also enjoyed a May 26 meeting at Carnegie Hall that Bill Brown invited me to attend, at which Mrs. Graham spoke before a large throng of women in cotton dresses to below the knee. They had almost all arrived by buses chartered far away, in the unknown terminals of the Silent Majority and Righteous Path Coach Lines. Many, many, many of them looked like Pat Nixon. Their faces had an etched quality, as though they had been acted upon year after year without the owner's participation, shaped impersonally by impersonal forces, lacking crucial components of the self. The knowledge that they had been saved (and the subtler knowledge of what they had lost) came out in their faces as a mixture of resignation, resentment and pride.

Several speakers preceded Mrs. Graham, including an earnest young lady named Peggy, who assured everybody that "when you have a need, just say it. All of heaven goes into action." Then Bill Brown introduced the evangelist's wife: "It's just wonderful to see how God is using Ruth Graham."

Mrs. Graham's silver-gray hair was neatly coifed and swept up and sprayed. She had a bony face, with sunken eyes and a large mouth set in a permanent state of semismile, as well as a long, beautiful neck and a very strong jaw line. She presented herself as a typical parochial housewife (which she is) through a series of homely little anecdotes embodying the Message, like a stand-up comic for godliness, her (continued on page 134)Nearer, Silent Majority, to thee(continued from page 120) talk studded with references to "the dear old Negro caretaker" and the "delightful little Jewish businessman" and "one of the most delightful and refreshing little Christians I know today." Her delivery was faltering and pallid and it was clear that she must have worked hard to school herself to these tasks. She received a warm hand. The program ended with Mrs. Fred Esty, whose husband is chairman of the United States Banknote Corporation, delivering a prayer in which she thanked God for His omnipotence and omniscience.

The second press conference took place at the Roosevelt Hotel, on West 45th Street, just prior to the commencement of the crusade. In the meantime, I had talked to my editor at Playboy and asked if he was interested in a piece on Billy Graham. The editor had sent off a letter of assignment to Mr. Gil Stricklin, Graham's press officer, asking for the cooperation of the Graham organization.

Thus, when I entered the Oval Room, where the conference was being held, I first said hello to a girl named Twyla of the Graham press office, who said they had received the letter from Playboy and mailed my credentials to me. (They arrived a month after the crusade ended.) Then, I walked over to Dick Jensen, another member of the Graham press team, and the only one not given to a ready show of warmth. Jensen is not the only suspicious man on the team but he is the only one who makes no attempt to hide it. Upon first meeting me, he had sized me up, made a number of hastily conceived assumptions and said, "Well, like, man, what can we do for you?"

Jensen took me over to Stricklin, a short, thin man with a sympathetic smile and the mixture of brashness and humility appropriate to a little-known Apostle. With a sorrowful crinkle about his eyes, he informed me that Mr. Graham wouldn't be able to give any interviews, he was too busy, and the Graham organization wouldn't be able to cooperate at all.

There must be some mistake, I said dim-wittedly, Bill Brown gave me the authorized biography.

Stricklin said he sympathized with my plight; he truly did. He started to walk away.

Wait a minute. Mr. Graham himself said he would cooperate.

The truth is, Stricklin said, Mr. Graham will not consent to any interview for Playboy, he is against what Playboy stands for. Stricklin said he'd had many conversations with "your Mr. Anson Mount" [Playboy's Public Affairs Manager], and that the conditions had been made plain.

I don't know anything about conditions, I said. Why don't you tell me what they are?

Well, one of them, Stricklin said, is that Playboy take the Playmate centerfold out of the issue in which the Graham interview appears.

As soon as the conference ended, I approached Graham, who was once again talking to the girl from Time. Before I could say a word, Graham smiled warmly and held out his hand, saying, "Hello, good to see you again," and in that same moment Gil Stricklin spotted the encounter and came running. Swift as the vengeance of the Lord, he struck. Darting forward with the information that this was Saul Braun—yes, Graham smiled, I remember him—who had taken an assignment from Playboy and that "we" had told "them" many times, there wouldn't be any interviews. I raised my voice angrily, interrupting, and asked if Stricklin wouldn't mind letting me speak for myself. In the midst of this hubbub, Billy Graham lifted his right arm slowly and magisterially in a sensitive arc, stilling us both instantly. Then he turned to me and smiled.

That smile is a possibly conscious imitation of Christ. It is soft and gentle and comforting, and invites a feeling of reassurance. That this is an ancient smile is attested by the kindly lines framing his mouth and eyes. His eyes arc very blue, very intense, piercing, it is hard not to feel judged, but there is no doubting the genuineness of his warmth. It made me shy and fumbling. I am on balance a doubter, but also a seeker, and something about the way Billy Graham cast his net made it easy for me to be dragged in. He stands for the principle of stern but merciful judgment, embodying it in such a way as to enable you to feel secure in the integrity of the system. For the first time in many years, I felt willing to put myself under the protection of another man's justice and mercy. I reported on my dialog with Stricklin and explained that I hadn't known about the problem with Playboy and would be happy to relinquish the assignment, if that would clear up the problem.

No, he said, I won't have time for any interviews at all. Still smiling. He leaned back with a challenging look on his face lurking just beneath the smile.

I was baffled. Why not? I asked.

He said he wouldn't say.

Is it because of the Playboy assignment?

He said he wouldn't say.

Why won't you say?

Graham leaned forward sharply, his chin suddenly outthrust, a triumphant look on his face, his finger jabbing in the direction of my left hand. Because you have your tape recorder going, he said.

I looked down. The tape recorder was indeed going. I was mortified. There were perhaps half a dozen people around and they were all looking at me. Their eyes upon me shamed me further still. I had done something wrong, something bad. I knew I had done something bad and had been justly punished for it. I hung my head. I felt a burning sensation in my ears and wished only that the earth would open up beneath me.

The tape recorder had been running without pause for more than an hour. It had been on throughout the press conference. I was carrying it about with me reflexively, as I conceive any good reporter would. When I gave myself a moment to reflect on it, I knew for certain that I had not switched it on to trap Graham into some heinous admission of distaste for Playboy, or even thought of it. Then why was I feeling guilt and shame? Where had these feelings come from? By what mysterious alchemy had this relentless doubter, also a seeker, submitted himself for judgment? I was amazed. Searching my heart for malice and finding none, I raised my head with assurance.

Graham, in the meantime, had turned back to the girl from Time and commenced a discussion of the flag and of patriotism, matters I had intended taking up with him. However, I was now filled with self-righteousness and the knowledge that I was on a higher mission than my own petty journalistic ends. I snapped off the recorder with a conspicuous gesture and shoved the microphone into my pocket, fortifying myself with the sacrifice of a few good quotes. I squatted alongside Graham's chair and said, excuse me, but it is very important to me that you know it was never my intention to trap you. I said that it was important to me that Graham believe that, saying that and searching Graham's face carefully, kneeling beside his chair now because I am getting too old to squat for any length of time, one of my arms extended like a mendicant's, resting upon the arm of Graham's chair.

Graham leaned forward and smiled, gripping my forearm and squeezing it gently. "I know," he said.

He knew. I believed that he did know and it was as if a great weight had been lifted from me. I had been right in trusting that all I needed to do was search my heart and report on it honestly and Graham would understand. I was Graham's child. Graham loved me and would care for me.

Then I can have the interview?

No, he said, you cannot.

After a long pause, my cheeks burning, I said, why not?

I'm not going to say.

You're not going to say?

That's right.

(continued on page 195)Nearer, Silent, Majority, to thee(continued from page 134)

Is it because of the Playboy assignment after all?

I'm not going to say, he said, and smiled and that brilliant brutal smile full of grace told me all I needed to know about the Fortress of Heaven. This was my last personal contact with Billy Graham. It reassured me that what Graham knows best is his own lesson, one that I have seen on many a thrifty, righteous merchant's wall: In God we Trust. All others Pay Cash.

• • •

Rendering unto God: "You've come today not to me but to Christ," Billy Graham is telling a vast crowd in Shea Stadium. "Now remember, God loves you. He's interested in every detail of your life. He knows all about your past. Just say, Lord I have sinned. I'm sorry. Forgive me. And then receive Him by faith, receive Christ by faith. Say, Lord I do believe. We know we're saved, not because we always feel it but because ... God's word says it."

The platform upon which Graham stands is decked out with flowers, but resembles more than anything the thrusting prow of a warship. There are a piano and an organ, both used to support a sequence of speakers and singers who witness to their own faith. The guest soloists, drawing cards all, range from faithful, tired old Ethel Waters to vivacious young Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma, who, in 1968, "became the first woman to head Freedom's Foundation, at Valley Forge." Her "favorite type of singing is that in which she can express her personal faith in Jesus Christ," and her "marriage to Bob Green has often been described as being an ideal one." Miss Bryant sings with a large forceful voice and then pleads winningly with the girls in the audience to preserve their virginity for their intended husbands.

Graham, in a recent article in the Render's Digest, offered the Bible ("the world's most reliable textbook on sex") as a guide to the perplexed. He quotes with approval Saint Paul's remonstration to Christians in Corinth, "the sex capital of the ancient world":

"Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body."

Billy Graham's Christian accepts or pretends to accept none but the timid, narrowly prescribed sexuality of the Judaeo-Christian formula for marital sacrament. Fornication is defined in a Billy Graham glossary as "unnatural sex behavior." The Graham Christian seeks protection in the purity of his heart and tongue, yet is able to stand by at the commission of unspeakable obscenities such as My Lai and support the vilest wars. Thus it was, perhaps, inevitable that Graham's crusade in Knoxville, Tennessee, in May, would provide a rare opportunity for Richard Nixon to appear to be unreservedly welcome on a college campus. That particular crusade was on the campus of the University of Tennessee, but it did not take a metaphysician to locate the soul of the audience. The students were elsewhere. Here were the aging sons and daughters of a people who called their crusade Manifest Destiny and swept westward to the Pacific, taking the Indian's land—righteous, fundamentalist border people, strong, hard and unyielding. They loved the Lord, hated the Indian, made war and stole land. It was God's plan for them to do so.

But there were some students there. Demonstrators. They brought a flush to the cheeks of Billy Graham as they combined anti-war slogans with chants like "Fuck Billy Graham." Rejecting innocence along with moral irresponsibility. Rejecting a religion that, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, "throws an aura of sanctity on contemporary public policy, whether morally inferior or outrageously unjust." Under a recently reactivated edict that prohibits interference with religious ceremonies, these demonstrators were swiftly clapped into jail, to the evident pleasure of the crusaders.

Billy Graham's Christian is no threat to Caesar, and never has been. This is a good religion for greedy princes and for anybody who favors passive obedience, who prefers not to confront the reality of his own responsibility for this world and the next and the next and the next: disguising desire as submission.

"I'm not going to be saved because I'm good," Billy says in Shea Stadium, holding a large-print Bible aloft with his left hand. "I'm not going to be saved because I preach to many people. I'm going to be saved the same way you are. Because of Christ. What he did on the cross."

What does a boy do with the awful knowledge of his power when it comes upon him like an avalanche in the overheated spring of his life? Billy was 16. He had a great fear of hell and judgment. A sense of burden. At that Charlotte revival meeting, evangelist Mordecai Ham kept pointing the finger and somehow it kept finding young Billy, who knew himself to be a sinner. Billy kept ducking that finger, until finally the struggle ended with the choir singing Almost Persuaded Now to Believe, with Billy standing up and coming forward to accept Christ, in what he called "this great surrender."

Before long he was lodged deep in Bible study, first at fundamentalist Bob Jones University and then at the Florida Bible Institute in Tampa. He became an ordained minister. Within five years, there were posters out on Billy at the York. Pennsylvania, Gospel Center: Here is youth aflame for God! Evangelist Billy Graham, Charlotte, North Carolina, A great gospel preacher at 21.

The summer of '36, he went on the road for the Fuller Brush Company and the field manager said he beat any salesman he had. Billy could have sold anything at all. But Mrs. Graham remembers that "he wanted to please God more than any man I'd ever met." Billy was burning. Handsome, virile, dynamic, with a boyish enthusiasm, which has never left him. But that "tremendous burden" weighed him down. He often walked alone at night. One evening in the spring of '38, he found himself on a golf course. "The trees were loaded with Spanish moss and in the moonlight it was like a fairyland," and with tears streaming down his cheeks, "I remember getting on my knees and saying, 'O God, if you want me to preach, I will do it.' "

God's will be done.

When he preaches, Billy Graham says, a great power comes over him. He is an instrument of the Lord and he quivers. His long arms gesticulate and pump. Pumped up with passion and the Message. The passion builds and the Message spurts, covering the people with divine refreshment. The power of the Lord speaking through him. In perfect submission is absolute power and presence, without fear, without guilt, without shame. Denying autonomy as a way of avoiding a confrontation with the knowledge of one's mortality. The derivation and the sustenance of the Judaeo-Christian system of values.

"Many times," Graham has told a Newsweek reporter, "I wish the Lord would take me, because I get weighted down with the sins of the world, for which I have a constant revulsion." It is possible to avoid confronting the one ineradicable fact of our existence only by disguising it as a blessing, in which death becomes nothing more than the portal to a better life. One cannot take the body along, but that is all right, the body has value only as "the temple of the Holy Spirit" and is in itself valueless, its multiform sensations and insights to be circumscribed, if not actually suppressed.

"With the devaluation of the body," Herbert Marcuse writes, "the life of the body is no longer the real life, and the negation of this life is the beginning rather than the end." But the relief from anxiety in the Christian way is, in Marcuse's phrase, "a premature cure," which turns all details of life and art in the Western world into their sex-repressing and death-welcoming aspects. And all because nature and man conspired to make the world fearful.

"Time," says Paul Tillich, "runs horn the beginning to the end, but our awareness of time goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end."

Those of us who grew up to be Abraham have, perhaps, forgotten that we also once were Isaac, that we once lay upon the altar with the sun in our eyes and sand on our flesh, thongs binding us, a salty taste in the mouth, knowing death to be near, forever and ever and ever alone, a faceless white-bearded Father haloed by the sun, looming above us, the sun glinting off the knife in his hand.

Billy Graham believes you can hide from that memory, can repress indefinitely the sure knowledge of that awful moment, and that is precisely the certitude he is offering as he issues the call and the chorus of 4000 begins singing Blessed Assurance and the first trickle of people comes forward. "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! / Oh what a foretaste of glory divine!" It is not easy to come forward in Shea Stadium, there are all those ramps to go down. "This is my story, this is my song, / Praising my Savior all the day long." Sweet, tremulous voices, rinsed in goodness. The first few hundred people are reaching the field and following the marked paths into the infield. "Perfect submission, perfect delight, / Visions of rapture now burst on my sight."

Billy Graham has been issuing the call now for almost three decades. In Los Angeles, in 1949, 350,000 people attended the crusade and 3000 came forward. William Randolph Hearst took an interest in him. So did Henry Luce. Since then, he has preached before more than 42,000,000 people and at least 1,200,000 have made a decision for Christ. The 1969 crusade budget was $862,371. "Angels descending, bring from above, / Echoes of mercy, whispers of love." Over the loud-speaker, a voice asks "you that are eleven years of age or under" to wait behind the platform for a counselor. There are special children's counselors, as well as "Latin-speaking counselors" and "counselors with a psychiatric orientation." Now the choir begins singing I Have Decided to Follow Jesus, and the crowd has grown considerably. Here are those who have known danger. Here are those who know themselves to be fragile and mortal. "The world behind me, the cross before me, / No turning back, no turning back."

"Don't be discouraged if you fall and fail a few times," Graham counsels. "Keep going. God understands. He loves you. He'll help you."

Here nobody is in a great rush or a heat of emotion, everybody is ambling toward salvation. The dominant tone is earnestness. Only one man is on his knees. The counselors are talking to the new Christians, males to males and females to females. Out behind the platform, adult counselors are bent at the waist to instruct the children who have decided for Christ. Many of the youngsters are Negroes: uniformly well dressed, spotless in jacket and tie, and either perspiring or blank with fear. A nice white lady is talking to Raymond and saying, "Raymond, if you do all these things, you know what's going to happen? You're going to grow and grow and grow and grow right to Jesus."

Over here the Reverend Kanaley is talking to a little black boy named Norwood, who is all dressed up—olive suit, black, bow tie—five-six years old, his mother and two sisters standing close by. They brought him down here and they are all smiles, because Norwood will be with Jesus, but he is rigid and his eyes are large and round and unblinking. "Norwood, if the Lord says to you, 'Why should I let you into my heaven?' what are you going to say?" But Norwood is too frightened to say. He moves his mouth reflexively, like a ghetto perch in a crowded tank. The Reverend Kanaley is patient with him. "You're going to say, "Because Jesus died for me.' And you know what God will say, Norwood?" Norwood's mouth moves, but no sound comes out. The Reverend Kanaley tells him, "God will say, 'Well, Norwood, come on in.' "

• • •

Rendering unto Caesar: July 3, 1970, in Washington, D.C, the day before Honor America Day, dawns bright and clear and by midafternoon has become hot and muggy. The city is decked with flags, clusters of them mounted on street signs and lampposts, red, white and blue, limp in the heat. Tourists throng the Washington Monument, while down on the Mall, at the end of 17th Street, they are pounding the last few nails into the stage for the Bob Hope show tomorrow evening. The show is being produced by the Walt Disney organization and the Disney-drawn façade of the proscenium presents us with a familiar patriotic emblem: an eagle clutching red-white-and-blue streamers and banners with his talons. He has an olive branch in his beak, but do not mistake him, he is combative, his brow beetling angrily over his beak and there is, oddly, a certain madness in his expression. There is comic lunacy in this Disney eagle. He will fight without necessarily knowing who or why he is fighting. He needs only crossed eyes to be transformed into the loony hero of a Disney strip—Merkin Eagle, who gets tangled in power lines, flies into the sides of barns, defoliates the countryside and so forth, in his endlessly repeated attempts to catch and devour some cute little prey: Oh, I do beweave it's Mewkin Eagew fwying high above me. I better wun.

There is an encampment of young people halfway up the slope toward the Washington Monument, near a shade tree. Hour by hour, the crowd there grows and, by nightfall, the slope is covered with people, sleeping bags and blankets and there is some smoking of the vile weed and assassin of youth, but not much, considering that this is the Marijuana Smoke-In that the sponsors of the Honor America Day festivities have been fearing. The smoke-in was announced several months before Billy Graham and Hobart Lewis, the editor of the Reader's Digest, had the idea of throwing an old-fashioned Fourth of July wingding in the nation's capital, not to support the Administration but only to honor the nation. No politics.

This is mostly a peaceable crowd, with a small boisterous element that goes into fits of obscene cheerleading, like at football games. Gimme an eff. Eff. Gimme a yew. Yew. Gimme a sea. Sea. Gimme a kay. Kay. What does it spell? EFF-YEW-SEA-KAY. (But not exactly like football games: Slaughtera bastids. Hahvd eats it.)

There is clapping and snake dancing and a considerable amount of disarray, but it is relatively peaceful until a skinny, loping kid in a hot sweat, bare-chested, long brown hair flying, a bull's-eye patch and Indian tail tied to his left forearm, screams down the hillside: "Hey listen we need some people up on the hill its the pigs the pigs are stealing a flag up there stealing our flag the pigs," and everybody is off and running. Over the crest of the hill. The cops are walking off with a Woodstock Nation flag.

Hey that's my flag.

Yeah well come around at the park police headquarters tomorrow and pick it up.

Gimme an eff. Mah, mah-ree-wanna. Smooooooke mah-ree-wanna. Off the pigs. Off the pigs. Power to the people!

"They've been drinking," a black cop says. "Alcohol is talking now."

The police are gathered around the monument, four mounties clopping in place, their horses shying and neighing, their nostrils (the mounties', not the horses') flaring. More cops appear. Motorcycles. Long sticks to hit people with. The kids hooting, circling and baiting the beleaguered cops. The thing has gotten out of hand, there will be no peaceful smoke-in here tonight. A cherry bomb comes out of the crowd and explodes beneath a cop's horse. The horse panics, the crowd cheers wildly. The mounties go charging into the crowd; the crowd scatters; some people fall, some scream. The cops have formed a picket line at the reserved seats down by the empty stage and now they are sweeping up the slope toward the shade tree, picking up speed as they go, and it's scary to see. Maybe 40 of them, back-lit by strong searchlights, faceless dragoons, helmeted, meaning business. The entire area is being cleared and nobody is being allowed even to collect his private property and anybody objecting to the dispersal gets a sharp night-stick rap and a muscular shove.

In the darkness, the sound of breaking glass, the sound of anarchy: terrifying. The police are breaking bottles as they go, flailing at the grass. One tear-gas grenade has gone off, the white smoke settling in a hollow for a moment before drifting upslope.

All along, there has been a very large crowd nearby, calmly listening to the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folk Life. Now that ends. A man comes on-stage and says, "There's been a small disturbance in the area. We've been asked to stop the music." The two crowds mingle, they are not really all that much apart from each other in some ways, and now the cops are pushing back this much larger throng and some of them don't seem to understand what's going on here. A young man has his arm around his girl's shoulder, not radical-looking at all, but they want to go over there, toward Constitution Avenue, while the cops want them to move to 14th Street. A sergeant tells them gruffly to keep moving in that direction: "If you don't move now," he says, "you'll be locked up." The boy looks incredulous. "Locked up?" he says. Without another word, the sergeant raps him with his club, then holds it two-handed and shoves the kid about six feet and the kid is now bug-eyed. His girl can't believe her eyes.

This sergeant talks to people nicely, he has a sane and sensible manner with a good simulation of self-control, but he is burning. Every so often he goes ape-shit. I watch him for about 20 minutes. Without exception, he is roughest on guys who have chicks with them. If you didn't have a chick with you, you could even say a word or two to him. Force as a source of power and self-esteem, force as sexual bluster. Later this same policeman was at a squad car, speaking into a loud-speaker: "Those of you who are not associated with the rock or bottle throwers can assist the police by moving toward the Capitol peacefully."

Elsewhere, a cop has been hit on the head by a bottle. He is standing alongside an ambulance, his shirt bloody, his head bandaged. He is grinning and joking with his fellow officers. There are more than 100 cops around by now and only a few diehard demonstrators are left in the park. Several police lunge into a small knot of these and come out with one. One cop holds his arms. With a second cop, they move in the general direction of a paddy wagon. A third cop skips alongside, holding his club aloft and, steadying himself with one hand on a colleague's shoulder, he leans in over them all to give the boy three, four, five angry muscular whacks on the head. It is the sound of something hard going soft, and it makes you sick to your stomach to hear it. When the cops release the boy, he is hunched forward, turning about this way and that, his arms outstretched pleadingly and there is a lot of something bubbling up in his mouth, blood or repentance. He is through for the revolution, softheaded, turning about, looking for somebody to plead his innocence to.

The following morning, at 11 or shortly thereafter, Billy Graham rises to speak to a crowd estimated at anywhere between 10.000 and 25,000. A pulpit has been erected about halfway up the Lincoln Memorial stairs. Just below it, a very large American flag rests on an incline, on a low-legged platform, and from it a red carpet extends through the middle of some reserved seats, which have been put out neatly, row by row, for specially invited guests. Behind the pulpit is a long row of chairs for the dignitaries: Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Colonel Frank Borman, Kate Smith, Pat Boone, Miss Susan Huskisson, who was the runner-up in the 1967 Miss Teenage America Pageant and is now a student at the University of Tennessee, and several others, including a Negro minister and eagle scout Don Pickett, a 17-year-old Pawnee Indian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who has been the recipient of a God and Country Award.

Behind the dignitaries is the band, the United States Army Band and Herald Trumpets, in gaudy braided uniform and, above it, the 500-voice chorus of (he Southern Baptist Convention—theCenturymen, directed by Buryl Red, all neatly attired in marbleized-green tuxedos with black shawl collars over yellow turtlenecks. None of them appears bothered by the heat. Their bluff sober faces reflect their dry contentment at being anonymous and identical, and they sing O God Our Help in Ages Past and Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee with gusto. Altogether, the band and chorus do about a dozen numbers and, except for a couple of Bach pieces, all have words like March, God, National Spirit and Freedom in the title.

All the dignitaries have something to do this day, even the Negro pastor, who introduces Don Pickett and Susan Huskisson. Pickett pledges allegiance to the flag. Miss Huskisson delivers a prize-winning essay titled, "I Speak for Democracy."

Her ancestors, Susan reminds us, left their blood at Lexington. Valley Forge, Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, in the Argonne Forest, at Salerno and Normandy and Okinawa, "and in the bare, bleak hills called Pork Chop and Old Baldy and Heartbreak Ridge," but not, apparently, in Vietnam, which is not being mentioned today. All the earlier wars are heroic and glorious, but Vietnam is political. In any case, America's wars are fought so that the rest of us might take pleasure "in the laughter of a small boy as he watches the antics of a circus clown, in the delicious coldness of the first bite of peppermint ice cream on the Fourth of July, in the little tenseness of a baseball crowd as the umpire calls 'Batter up!' and in the high school band's rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever in the Memorial Day parade."

"America," Miss Huskisson attests, has "offered freedom and opportunity such as no land before her has ever known," and is now a land where 200,000,000 people are "all glad, terribly glad, to be what they are," because they "have more roast beef and mashed potatoes, the yield of American labor and land, more telephones and Orion sweaters, the fruits of American initiative and enterprise, more public schools and life-insurance policies, symbols of American security and faith in the future, more laughter and song than any other people on earth." Miss Huskisson ends with a pert show of determination, which expresses a fixed and unshakable belief in the preeminence of Americans: "Show me a people more energetic, creative, progressive, bigger-hearted and happier than our people," she demands. "Not until then will I consider your way of life."

It is not immediately clear whose way of life Miss Huskisson is rejecting. The audience applauds her sentiments vigorously, however, and in that moment a number of people have slipped into the reflecting pool between the Memorial and the Washington Monument, all young, mostly boys, almost all white, carrying a large banner reading Hour of decision: God or country, and one would almost think they had materialized in response to Miss Huskisson's call, except that they have been here all weekend, being very energetic and creative and progressive and big-hearted, if not terribly happy. Miss Huskisson would not like to think of them as real Americans, but that is what they are, the sons and daughters of our other Manifest Destiny.

"Well, they're finally getting the bath they needed," says an onlooker. Other comments, not all equally churlish, attest to a gulf that no amount of Orlon sweaters and mashed potatoes and life-insurance policies can bridge, for these half-naked children are pale witnesses for an America in which telephones do not properly communicate what it is that must pass between people and, for that matter, neither do the public schools. The hippie-Yippie-crazies wade toward the ceremonial gathering slowly and quietly.

Now the nation's unofficial chaplain rises to speak. He strides briskly to the podium and shakes his cuffs and leans forward with energy. There is power in him as he starts his speech, which is Caesar-rendering without apologies. There is no shilly-shallying here, no false starts, no funny stories or embarrassments, as he quotes another of those fine-print clauses in the Christian contract:

"The Bible says in 1 Peter, 2:17, 'Honor all men. Fear God. Honor the king.' The king referred to was the Roman emperor. Since our nation is a republic and not a monarchy," Graham reasons shrewdly, "this Scripture could read, 'Honor the nation.' "

Graham doesn't want to be associated in our mind with only this Administration and this is not a political gathering here, this is strictly nonpartisan. The evangelist had access to Eisenhower; he had access to Kennedy, whom he visited in Palm Beach; and Johnson even attended one of his crusades, though he didn't actually speak, as Nixon did in May at the East Tennessee Crusade. But Graham is often asked that question and he answers that he and Nixon have been friends for a very long time, he conducts services in the White House, and Life columnist Hugh Sidey says he "has certainly been assigned the care of the President's soul." Last year's skit of the Gridiron Club saw Graham this way:

There's a church in the East Roomof the While House,

A lovely Establishment shrine.

I give briefings Sunday at the WhiteHouse.

They're on policy matters divine.

Oh come, come, come, come,

Come to the church in the WhiteHouse.

Come help us purge national sin.

No matter who's head of the WhileHouse,

I'm the preacher who always is "in."

He doesn't want to be considered any sort of ally of Nixon's, despite being a personal friend, and as far as the Vietnam war is concerned, he is against all war. But he won't speak out against Vietnam, because if he did so, he would be placed in the uncomfortable position of having to speak out against all wars.

Dick Cavett tells a story: Just after Cambodia-Kent, his people called the White House and asked a press aide there for "a high Administration official" to come on the show. The White House called back later and said that Billy Graham would be available.

In that same week. Bob Hope appeared on the Johnny Carson show. The Carson press people say that it is understood now that whenever Hope makes himself available, that means he is going to speak pro-Administration, so they always book somebody to balance him, and this time they had Gore Vidal. Hope spoke of 40.000 lives lost in Vietnam for an idea and Vidal said, "I wish Hope had gone on. I'd love to have heard what that idea was."

Now they are here this weekend to express that idea, superstars Billy and Bob teamed once again on behalf of the view that all men of good will can now rally to patriotism and love of the flag on this July 4, 1970, in a nonpolitical way.

The sun beats down hotly, the children squirm in their seats and their parents glare at them as Billy Graham speaks on: "Lately our institutions have been under attack, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Presidency, the flag, the home, the educational system and even the church—but we are here to say with loud voices that in spite of their faults and failures, we believe in these institutions.

"Why." Graham asks, "should I, as a citizen of heaven and a Christian minister, join in honoring any secular state?" Because, Graham explains, "Jesus said, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' The Apostle Paul proudly boasted that, he was a Roman citizen. The Bible says, 'Honor the nation.' "

I remember that as "Honor the king," but never mind. A weird sound in my ears turns my attention out beyond the thousands applauding vigorously for Billy Graham, each at his own speed, in personal testament, to an artificial version of the same sound, groupclap, ominous one, two. three, four, here comes Conspiracy, we don't want your fucking war, standing up neither for Jesus nor for Caesar.

Half-naked, tie bands around their temples, clapping in unison, beginning to ululate, the sound whipping around in the thorax, nothing less than an Indian war cry. Scorning the logic, not agreeing that America "has always stood for liberty, protection and opportunity." Through it all, 17-year-old-eagle-scout-with-a-chestful-of-merit-badges-Pawnee-Indian Don Pickett does not move a muscle. He is expressionless.

But what do they know about it, these Indians in the reflecting pool, they are not Indians, they are the sons and daughters of our public schools and each and every one is under the protection of somebody's life-insurance policy. They are approaching the front rim of the reflecting pool now, shouting obscenities and anti-war chants, and waiting for them are half a dozen mounted police, looking stern and knowing their duty. Some may even be observed to relish it. "Thirdly," Graham continues, "we honor America because she has never hidden her problems and faults." The demonstrators are beginning to climb out of the pool now, dripping wet, chanting, and the mounties go toward them. The television cameras swivel away from the podium to catch this commotion, but a number of men and boys lunge forward and wave American flags in front of the cameras, preventing them from taking the picture. The mounties are pressing the Indians back, along the grassy banks, into the pool. One of the bystanders, William Sampol, president of the National Silent Majority, is exultant. "These people are Commies," he says. An aide says, "Rephrase that." "OK," Sampol says. "Most of us here have gathered to honor the nation. The others came here to cause fighting, hoping the media would pick it up, but we prevented that. I guess today we proved these people are just a loud minority."

"Fifthly," Graham goes on, "we honor America because she has never sought to use her tremendous power to take over other nations."

There are almost no blacks here today, and no wonder. This is strictly a family affair and the members of the family hate one another. The blacks have nothing to do with it; they are neither properly among those who own the land nor among those too guilty to want to take title. The Americans who are here shout back and forth at each other, skinny kids starving themselves and red-faced middle-aged men, one of whom lunges forward, in a frenzy, picks up a pair of shoes belonging to a Yippie and throws them into the pool. A short plump girl, in a tie-dyed T-shirt with her body wriggling around mysteriously inside it, struggles with a police sergeant who is carrying a crumpled-up Viet Cong flag in his clenched fist.

That's my flag.

You can get it back at park police headquarters.

Fuck you, you bastard.

What's your name?

Mary Americong.

This encounter over the flag; strictly a family affair. Larry Epstein and Terry Cross are not with the demonstrators but they are bare-chested and have medium-length hair. They are with Up With People, they go around singing with them. By no means radicals. They are passing through. Patrolman R. L. Ginn gestures to Epstein. "C'mere," he says. "C'mere, boy." Epstein walks over. Ginn spits on him.

The stern wardens and the savages. These children are their parents' suppressed desires in visible form, like pale phantoms in the Christian's night of terror. Graham's portfolio is particularly susceptible to the demonstration of the crazies, who embody total rejection of restraint, self-control and deferral of pleasure. Later in the day. a number of them, including several girls, will strip and swim naked in the reflecting pool, exhibitionistic nudity that doesn't necessarily exalt the body's beauty. Shouting. "I've got nothing to hide," pretending to be natural man, they enact a memory of the family past, when the savage was the American Christian's only enemy because he had a claim of his own to God's love, which had somehow to be invalidated and, after all, it was his land to begin with. "It was a clash," Frederick W. Turner III writes, in an introduction to Geronimo's autobiography, "between a culture that had a fear of nature until it could subdue it and a contempt for it once it had been subdued, and cultures that thought of themselves as participating with the natural world in a huge cycle of life."

"The new permissiveness," Graham assures us. "is nothing more than the old immorality brought up to date." So now, here they are, the savages, updating the old immorality with marijuana and nudity, and here are these stern wardens, muscular and righteous in the sunshine on muscular horses snorting and rearing in the heat, crossed moral purposes, and what lies between them is anarchy, because the truth is that they hate one another, a cruel and smug culture confronting a dissent that is its mirror at every point.

I played a small role in the unfolding psychodrama. I was sitting on the steps along with maybe two dozen other reporters, enjoying Billy Graham's platform manner up dose. A police lieutenant came along and said gruffly, "Get up on your feet."

About to comply reflexively, my muscles already beginning to function, I suddenly realized for the first time that long, hot day how much I wished I were in the reflecting pool. I surprised myself. Instead of rising, I said, "Why?"

The lieutenant drew back in disbelief, "I said get on your feet."

"I said Why?"

He looked at me as though I were mad. Here was no hippie-Yippie-crazy but a middle-aged journalist strung out weirdly between the cultures. "We were told to clear you off the stairs completely; the least you can do is go along with us." But I was not about to give up so quickly. "The least you can do is talk to people decently," I said.

The lieutenant was beginning to find the exchange unbearable. "You want me to go on my knees?" he exploded. Ostentatiously, he leaned forward and wrote down my number, 695, eagle and stars, Press Honor America Day, and I leaned forward ostentatiously and took down his name.

He went away and came back a moment later with a Very Important Man, who said, "Let me see your credentials." When I showed them to him, the Very Important Man looked disappointed. "Well," he said, "the officers are having a hard day."

"Let me put it this way," the lieutenant said, evading my eyes. "If I treated you discourteously, I apologize."

I didn't think fast enough and this had the sound of victory to it. so I said, "OK, fine," feeling pretty good, actually, and it was only many hours later that I realized what I had done. The cop hadn't apologized because he was wrong or because he was sorry he had been discourteous, but only because I had the proper credentials. I had proved to be stronger than him. I had the credentials and that meant I was part of the greater institution of power to which he gave his obedience. He went on his knee to me, and I could imagine how he felt about that. I shuddered to think what he would have done to me if I'd left my credentials home. And, knowing that, I also knew how much of myself I had sacrificed for the protection of those credentials, and I felt ashamed.

"Our youth are perishing in an orgy of quest." Graham was saying, "a quest for meaning and purpose in a world in which their elders have not always given them answers to the ultimate questions of life. They are seeking reality; but apart from God, the only reality they experience is life without meaning, isolation, loneliness, frustration, alienation and a terrible burden of guilt. Our youth sense the hypocrisy in the older generation. They cry for us to tell it like it is and not to try to cover up."

All the educators and leaders and social scientists are warning us that the young think we are "hypocrites" and we should change our ways. They think there is some way we can "heed" these warnings before it is too late and win our children back by relinquishing our hypocrisy. But the sad truth is that everything we have, we owe to that hypocrisy. Our culture is founded on it and thrives on it. We are products of a culture that has been devoted to lies and obfuscations about two things that concern us most deeply: sex and death. "Our way of life," wrote Camus, "is a grand tour dc force whose main purpose is to avoid responsibility and maintain at least the appearance of innocence." That is, sexual and moral innocence. Graham would not pass judgment on the Vietnam war, but he was quick to see the report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (later repudiated by Nixon) as "one of the worst, most diabolical reports ever made by a Presidential Commission."

The three most admired men in the nation, according to a Gallup poll, are Richard Nixon, Billy Graham and Spiro Agnew, in that order. Father and son and holy spirit, the three most admired men in America, the Big Three, a Fabulous Trinity embodying the highest dreams and aspirations of the Christian West. No wonder the young are bemused. It is offensive to be accused of being immature, as they so often are accused, but to be accused of it by the aged carrying immaturity to the grave with them as a standard to rally round is nothing less than absurd.

"What our forefathers began, we must work to fulfill," Graham is saying. "Their goal must be our goal and we must pursue it. Their vision must be our vision and we must pursue it. It is the vision of one nation under God, where men can live as brothers in peace and freedom. I'm asking all Americans today, especially our young people, to pursue this vision under God, to work for peace and freedom, to labor relentlessly, to love passionately, to serve selflessly, to pray earnestly and to die nobly, if need be."

This is stirring stuff, entirely unobjectionable no matter in what national capital it is delivered, a politician's speech. That is, the sort of speech one can expect from a cynic or from the well-intentioned but simple-minded. I guess Billy Graham has to be the latter and he is simple-minded not because of any inherent mental deficiency but out of choice. He is like some fixated teenager—boyish, enthusiastic, unquestioning—who has come to the decision that his dad is really OK. That his dad's business is neat. That he will work his way up to the vice-presidency of the firm. Well, Billy Graham has no doubts, his future is assured. He has had no doubts since 1949, when he was troubled by severe headaches, a "terrific pain at the base of my skull." The doctors were puzzled. But since then he has had no doubts, no doubts at all, though he did tell Dick Cavett, one night, that he knew very well what was buried inside his subconscious and he hoped and prayed never to have to confront himself down there. For all the exploration and conquest that has marked Western (Christian) culture, there has been—and continues to be—a reluctance to know the self that bursts into striking relief in this statement of Graham's. He is able, without any self-consciousness, to describe himself as a "citizen of heaven" and, without any discernible sense of loss, to describe his exile-unto-death from his own true native land, his self. This is futile game-playing under the blind eye of an indifferent universe.

The previous evening, one of the more patient cops was giving some boys a mild shove to get them out of the area. "Come on, come on," he said, with exasperation. "We're not playing any games here." And one of the boys said, "I thought this was America."

The special significance of this weekend is that there is no particular issue involved. It is the whole thing being played out, the whole combat joined, old culture versus new, those who all their lives have been playing games and telling themselves they are mature, serious-minded people, and those who were told "this" was "America," and then went out and discovered otherwise.

Nobody is playing any games here, either. Among the monuments, in the shadow of majesty and power, under God's blue sky, we all know ourselves to be "in America" and we all know in our bones that the dissent we have seen here today is not the work of a few noisy madmen but the parable of a changing world. This same day that Billy Graham drew 10,000 or 25,000, there were more than 250,000 young people down at Byron, Georgia, listening to music, swimming nude, tripping, balling, goofing, and Lester Maddox called it "one of the worst blights that has ever struck our state." However, there it is. Historian Richard Hofstadter says of the young, "They feel they're living in a completely different world. And they are." Political and social dissent of this sort implies theend of any currently useful definitions of law and order, and the end of the culture that values the methods we have employed to achieve it.

And that is why Billy Graham is such a credible symbol of the dying culture. He is dedicated to it unremittingly and without the slightest trace of doubt or reserve, and the passion for the policeman in his bosom is so luscious that he brings us to our feet with it as he ends his patriotic sermon:

"I say to you today, pursue the vision, reach toward the goal, fulfill the dream—and as you move to do it, never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never!"

Thousands cheering, waving flags, gasping in awe when the thunder of fireworks comes, God's artillery from behind the Lincoln Memorial, a battery of mortars shaking the very earth beneath our feet. Some of the shells burst into patterns of red, white and blue, pin-wheel fragments exploding and burning themselves out, spouts and fountains, the earth shaking mightily from the weight of this metaphor for power. And some of the shells burst open and American flags come down by parachute. The sky, full of American flags.

You could almost believe there hadn't been any Indians there that day at all.