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Billy Graham: Hillary's Solace
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Candidate
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| Contributor | particleman |
| Last Edited | particleman Aug 08, 2007 11:51pm |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Thursday, August 9, 2007 05:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | At the last of his 417 crusades, the one held in New York City in June 2005, evangelist Billy Graham made an unscripted proposal.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton were sitting with him on stage in Flushing Meadows when Graham greeted them as his "wonderful friends of many years." "I told him," Graham said of President Clinton, "when he left the presidency, he should become an evangelist, because he had all the gifts." Graham paused, and added with a smile, "And he could [let] his wife run the country." That remark caused such a furor in some quarters that Graham's evangelist son Franklin had to explain that it was meant as a joke.
But Graham had praised and defended both Clintons before. And in a new interview, Hillary Clinton reports that the evangelist fulfilled a pastoral role during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and helped the First Lady endure the ordeal. At that time, Clinton says, Graham was "incredibly supportive to me personally. And he was very strong in saying, 'I really understand what you're doing and I support you.' He was just very personally there for me." She added: "The entire world was judging my decisions and my actions and there weren't very many people who, frankly, were understanding, and he was. He said, 'You know, forgiveness is the hardest thing that we're called upon to do. And we all face it at some point in our lives and I'm just really proud of you for taking it on."
Details of the Clinton-Graham conversations are reported for the first time in The Preacher and the Presidents, Billy Graham In the White House, which is being published this week. An excerpt will appear in TIME magazine this Friday.
The book makes clear that Clinton is not the first candidate to have a relationship with Graham amid the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign.
[snip]
And yet Hillary Clinton's relationship with Graham goes back nearly as far as the current President's. |
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