Author: Billy Graham

Graham preached in person to more people than anyone in recorded history, something like two hundred million across nearly two hundred countries, and his Los Angeles tent meeting in 1949 ran for eight weeks after William Randolph Hearst instructed his papers to promote him. He advised every American president from Truman to Obama and was closest to Nixon. In 1953 he pulled down the ropes segregating a crusade audience himself and refused to preach to a divided hall again, and he invited Martin Luther King to lead prayer at his New York meetings in 1957, while also urging patience over direct action, which King's circle held against him. When the Nixon tapes were released in 2002 they carried him agreeing with the president about Jewish control of the media; he said he had no memory of saying it and apologised. He founded Christianity Today and died in 2018 at ninety-nine.