For Graham, though, the fight against communism needed to be won by might as well as by the spirit. His Cold War bellicosity resided well to the right of the emerging liberal anticommunist consensus and, as such, held complex implications for his stance on racial matters. In 1950, he castigated the reds who “stole China” and predicted that communists would bomb the United States within two or three years—“and not five years.”37 That same year, he personally urged President Truman toward “total mobilization to meet the Communist threat.” South Korea, the evangelist had earlier informed the president by telegram, contained “[m]ore Christians…per capita than any part of world.” The situation, he declared, necessitated a “show down with Communism now.”38 Following Truman's dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur for desiring just such a confrontation, Graham praised the general as “a great man and a great Christian.”39 After the U.S. Senate censured another anticommunist icon, Joseph McCarthy, in December 1955, Graham likened the legislative body to a fiddling Emperor Nero.40
The preoccupation of Graham with the Korean peninsula pointed to his association with an anticommunist right fixated on the reddening of Asia and, indeed, the United States itself. In early 1953, he introduced friendly congressmen to right-wing Australian activist Fred Schwarz, then in the process of creating the influential Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.41 Moreover, Graham possessed a number of social ties with the broader “China Lobby,” which urged an aggressive policy of “roll back” in Asia. His father-in-law, Nelson Bell, had left his missionary post in China on the cusp of the Maoist ascendancy. Early Graham supporters included publishing mogul Henry Luce, who was born in China to missionary parents, and Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, whose background as a medical missionary in China resembled that of Bell. Other conservative anticommunists who admired Graham from a distance included Alfred Kohlberg, the leading spokesperson for the China Lobby, and Albert Wedemeyer, who as a special representative to China had warned President Truman about the impending collapse of the Nationalist regime.42 Bell himself corresponded with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, met with the Formosan ambassador to the United States, and warned throughout the 1950s and 1960s of Americans “in high places who consistently helped the Communists” and who exaggerated “the weakness and shortcomings of the Nationalists and General Chiang Kai-shek.”43 For the most part, to be sure, Graham did not associate with the right's hardest edges. Still, none of the above anticommunists was known for taking moderate positions on either foreign policy or domestic issues—nor was Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, a Graham supporter who declared in Christianity Today that “an America faithful to God will be an America free and strong.”44
As Graham expanded his international outreach, though, his interpretation of the Cold War shifted in a more moderate direction. His image abroad, as he surely recognized, was keenly intertwined with that of the United States itself. The success of his overseas work, which blossomed after his 1954 London crusade, depended in no small part on the degree to which the rest of the world saw the United States as a goodwill ambassador. Graham resembled the many foreign missionaries within his Southern Baptist denomination whose experiences abroad led them to reconsider the domestic racial status quo.45 His early travel to Europe only reinforced his hawkish Cold War senti-ments.46 By the mid-1950s, though, as he began to travel through the non-white majority of the world, Graham came to see his nation's poor reputation in the area of racial relations as a potential propaganda tool for international communism and his numerous critics alike.
Graham thus suggested how the first two decades of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously expanded and limited the national discourse on civil rights. The United States Information Agency and similar governmental outlets sought to advance America's image as the leader of the free world. Such efforts (in the words of one legal historian) made “civil rights reform…in part a product of the Cold War.”47 Southern conservatives, to be sure, eventually launched a “southern red scare” that readily merged rabid domestic anticommunism with opposition to altering the racial status quo.48 Graham, though, increasingly viewed the Cold War through an international lens, even while he remained on friendly terms with many southerners who clearly (or conveniently) viewed civil rights activism as a front for communist subversion. By the latter half of the 1950s, Graham routinely linked anticommunism with a critique of segregation. The nation, he declared in 1957, resided “in a fish bowl with the whole world looking in,” and “our racial tensions are causing some of the people of the world to turn away from us.”49
In keeping with his move toward a more nuanced understanding of the Cold War, Graham gradually cultivated a clear, if adaptable, declaration of racial moderation.50 His status as a religious celebrity who was also a southerner made his decision to address the race issue at some level not entirely surprising. Less predictable was his public position, at a reasonably early date, as a moderate desegregationist. When he occasionally addressed racial matters while speaking in the South during the early years of his ministry, his comments were limited in nature. At a 1950 crusade in Columbia, South Carolina, he flatly declared that “revival will also solve the race question by causing both races to be fair toward each other.”51 Graham team member Grady Wilson explicitly defended the residual nature of this formula. “What's the point of attacking a cause when you're after sinners?” Wilson asked an interviewer that same year. “If a man's a sinner and he's a member of the Ku Klux Klan, we're not going to lose the chance of saving him by attacking the organization he belongs to.”52
Graham began to use somewhat stronger language during his many appearances at ecclesiastical and denominational gatherings throughout the South and the nation. In 1952, he told members of the NAE that the “Church is on the tail end—to our shame!—of progress along racial li[n]es in America today. The Church should be leading instead of following.”53 In an address delivered that same year at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, he advocated opening denominational colleges to academically qualified blacks.54 Some media outlets took notice. For example, the liberal Protestant magazine Christian Century published an editorial titled “Sewanee Says No, Billy Graham Yes,” favorably contrasting his early criticism of segregation (for which “many think he will pay dearly”) with the resistance to desegregation at a leading southern Episcopal seminary.55
By late 1953, Graham had worked out much of the racial reasoning that he would voice in response to countless media questions over the next decade and a half. In October 1953, he wrote a telling letter to Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, who had asked the evangelist to clarify his views on racial segregation after reading an interview Graham had given to the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper. The renowned, future Pulitzer Prize–winning editor was in the midst of his own shift, reflective of the broader swath of southern liberals, from tolerance of separate-but-equal segregation to acceptance of, and eventual support for, its legal demise. As a critic of the role of southern Christianity in abetting racial injustices, McGill surely wrote to Graham with some skepticism. (Within a year, though, the editor would praise Graham in print as an effective evangelist and an asset to anticommunist efforts overseas.) “In my study of the Bible,” Graham replied, “I can find no verses or chapters to support segregation.” He affirmed that “Jesus Christ belongs neither to the colored nor the white races” and repeated a sentiment he had already voiced in Detroit: “In race relations the church has been lagging far behind in certain areas and allowing the sports world and political world to get ahead of it.” Graham's chariot of justice slowed at the Mason-Dixon line, however. The South, he wrote to his fellow southerner McGill,
presents a problem particularly all its own that many times our Northern friends do not understand. It is going to take a long process of education rather than legislation to ultimately bring about better relations between the races. We have extremists in both races who cause 90 percent of the trouble. In many parts of the South it is my observation that the race situation is better than in many parts of the North. For example, the sharp divisions between races, and racial tensions, are very strong here in Detroit.
