Billy Graham, Pastor In Chief

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Graham still was following politics, albeit from a safe distance now. Though he has never met John McCain, the evangelist recalled stopping in Hawaii on his trips to and from South Vietnam and praying on his knees next to McCain's father Admiral John McCain, then commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, for the son who was being held as a prisoner of war. He watched Mitt Romney wrestle with the Mormon question. "It will be somewhat of a problem for him, like Jack Kennedy being a Catholic," Graham predicted, although he believed Romney could overcome it by directly addressing the concerns as Kennedy did. Graham was also keeping a close eye on the progress of Hillary Clinton, whom he knows the best of all the candidates. "I keep up with her," he said of his old friend. "I think a lot of Hillary."

That feeling is mutual: Clinton first met him in person when she was First Lady of Arkansas, but they became close when she was First Lady of the United States. She needed some pastoral care of her own in 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and became the latest public figure to sense Graham's unique attraction to the occupants of the Oval Office. He was, she concluded, a political junkie himself. "He loved elections," she told us, "because he knew that you had to tell a story, you had to connect with people--all the things we talk about in politics." To the Presidents, Graham's fame and charisma made him a virtual peer: "I think there was a recognition there, and a comfort, with dealing with someone who was a public person," Clinton observed, "who had to put up with what's wonderful about being in the public eye and what's kind of a drag."

We see Presidents fight so hard to win the office, but we often forget the price they pay to hold it. If Graham helped raise these men up, he also caught them after they returned to earth. "Every President I think I've ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn't quite get done what they wanted done," Graham said. "And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently."

Graham recalled these friendships with the humility that comes with experience. "As I look back, I feel even more unqualified--to think I sat there and talked to the President of the United States," he said. "I can only explain that God was planning it in some ways, but I didn't understand it." He doesn't expect to make it back to the White House anytime soon, but he watches out for its occupant the best way he knows how. He does daily devotions, and whoever sits in the Oval Office will always have a place in his prayers.

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