by Marshall Frady ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 1979
A massive, brooding, open-minded (finally!) study of the ""Indestructible American Innocent."" Frady, author of a perceptive biography of George Wallace (1968), was ideally suited to rescue Graham from both his awestruck followers and his cynical detractors. A Southerner (currently living in Atlanta) and son of a Southern Baptist minister, he also happens to like Graham personally, so in the best sense he knows the territory. On the other hand, unlike the hagiographers who have surrounded Graham since he burst on the national scene at a 1949 Los Angeles revival, Frady is acutely aware of the moral ambiguities of a 30-year romance between the Evangelist and the Establishment. Graham's career began with a boost from William Randolph Hearst (""Puff Graham,"" ran the famous memo that splashed his name all over the headlines) and climaxed with his years as unofficial chaplain to Richard Nixon. The sordid revelations of Watergate jolted him terribly, but never led him to question his own role in the Nixon (and Johnson) program of domestic piety and international mayhem. After his exhaustive survey of Graham's naive complicities, Frady seems drawn to the view that there are two Billy Grahams: the private man, warm, lovable, guileless, generous, intensely anxious to please; and the pulpit personality, rigid, dogmatic, a worshipper of authority. This prophet with a divided soul might have called the country--and its leaders--to repentance, but instead he wound up reassuring it (despite his apocalyptic rhetoric) that America was on God's side, and vice versa. Graham's transparent goodness and earnest, hearty Christianity aimed at awakening the nation's conscience, and ended by putting it to sleep. Frady, it will be noticed, is as much a preacher as Graham, and this book, for all its journalistic detail, is basically an anguished liberal sermon. In true Southern fashion Frady reads history as a dark, tremendous tragedy, and Graham himself as an archetypal, self-deluded tragic hero, Frady's style has echoes of Faulkner and, much more, of Graham's fellow-North-Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe: it's furiously eloquent and distressingly full of solecisms. But at long last somebody has given the Graham phenomenon the intelligent attention it deserves.
Pub Date: May 29, 1979
ISBN: 0743291433
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979
Categories: NONFICTION
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