Learning from Failure by Harold Myra and Marshall Shelley

"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." (Winston Churchill)

As a middle manager was receiving a promotion, his vice president cryptically said, "You know what being promoted means, don't you? It means your bad decisions do more damage."

Our having positions of influence means more opportunity to do good. But it also means that the costs are higher for failure. No one likes to fail, especially leaders, whose failures produce magnified consequences. Our errors of judgment, and our failures of nerve or vision, affect not just ourselves but also our followers and our cause. Clearly, failure is nothing to take lightly.

Yet as ski instructors frequently tell their novice students, "If you don't fall now and then, you're probably not pushing yourself enough."

Failure is the inevitable companion of a large vision. No one can take on a significant and difficult challenge without stumbling a few times. The important thing is how we respond. The goal is not a fail-safe record but a pattern of increasing effectiveness.

David Aikman, analyzing great individuals who shaped the twentieth century, said it well: "Virtue, after all, often consists not so much in the absence of fault altogether as in the speed and grace with which fault is recognized and corrected."

One of Billy's early failures, an embarrassing gaffe following a meeting with President Truman, showed him to be one who recognized and corrected his mistakes with speed and grace. This humiliating moment, interestingly, is the incident Billy uses to begin his autobiography, Just As I Am. This failure prepared him for a lifetime of significant encounters with world leaders.

It happened in 1950, when Billy was thirty-one years old and still emerging as a national figure.

After two successful campaigns in Los Angeles and Boston, Billy thought it was time to make contact with the highest levels of political power. He hoped to gain the president's support for his evangelistic efforts, especially one he dreamed of bringing to West Berlin. He wrote the White House to request a visit with President Truman. When his initial request was rebuffed, he persisted, writing the president's secretary to ask that Mr. Truman be assured that "over 1,100 students at these Northwestern Schools [where Billy was then serving as president] are praying daily that God will give him wisdom and guidance" and that "we believe our President to be a man of God. We believe him to be God's choice for this great office."

A bit later, after Communist forces invaded South Korea, Billy sent a telegram to the president: "Millions of Christians praying God give you wisdom in this crisis. Strongly urge showdown with communism now. More Christians in southern Korea per capita than in any part of the world. We cannot let them down. Evangelist Billy Graham."

Then, working through Massachusetts Congressman John McCormack, Billy renewed his efforts to visit Truman, and he finally got an invitation for a twenty-minute appointment for July 14, 1950.

Billy pressed for more, asking that he be able to bring three colleagues along-Grady Wilson, Cliff Barrows, and Jerry Beavan. Somewhat surprisingly, permission was granted.

"We four young men were so excited," Grady remembered, that we were jumping up and down." Their thoughts turned to what they should wear to make a good impression on the president. Grady pointed out that Mr. Truman was photographed in white buck shoes while on vacation in Key West, and maybe their delegation should meet him in white bucks of their own. Billy loved the idea and commissioned Grady to find identical shoes for the whole delegation.

On the day of the appointment, the team donned what they had been wearing at their most recent Bible conference at Winona Lake, Indiana-flamboyant cream-colored suits, hand-painted ties, and the unmistakable white bucks. "People probably thought we were a barbershop quartet," Billy later said with a smile. President Truman greeted them cordially, saying that he'd heard some good things about their meetings.

Billy told him about Los Angeles the previous fall, where an unprecedented 350,000 had attended the fifty days of meetings, and about the New England meetings, including the 50,000 who had gathered in Boston Common to hear him speak. Billy reported that he had told the gathering that because of the recent news that the Soviet Union was building a nuclear arsenal, he had publicly called on the president to proclaim a day of national repentance and prayer for peace.

Mr. Truman nodded but said nothing.

Then Billy reaffirmed his support for swift reaction to North Korea's invasion of South Korea, even though the recent news from the battlefields was not encouraging.

"Our allotted time was quickly running out," Billy reported later, "and what I really wanted to talk to him about was faith." "Mr. President," Billy said, casting about for an opening, "tell me about your religious background and leanings."

"Well," the president replied, "I try to live by the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule."

"It takes more than that, Mr. President," the evangelist said, now on familiar ground. "It's faith in Christ and his death on the Cross that you need."

The president then stood up, the visit apparently over. Billy and the others stood up too, and Billy asked, "Mr. President, could we have prayer?"

The president, not known for his spiritual side, said, "I don't suppose it could do any harm." So Billy put his arm around the shoulders of the president of the United States of America and prayed, while Grady and Cliff chimed in with "do it, Lord," and hearty "amens."

"When we left the Oval Office," Billy said much later, "I looked at the clock; my prayer had taken another five minutes." Upon emerging from the White House, the press corps descended on them: "What did you tell the president, and what did he say?" Billy, not knowing he was violating diplomatic protocol, told them everything he could remember.

Photographers asked them to recreate the pose they had struck with the president for the prayer. Billy replied that he considered it improper to simulate prayer, but wanting to please the press, he said: "My team and I were planning to thank God for our visit with the president, and now is as good a time as any. I suppose you could take a picture of that."

So the next day, newspapers across the country ran stories of the meeting, accompanied by photos of four men in white suits, down on one knee with heads bowed, who had prayed with the president.

"It began to dawn on me a few days later how we had abused the privilege of seeing the president," said Billy.

"The president was offended that I had quoted him without authorization."

Billy tried to make amends. But Truman had informed his aides that "when, as, and if a request comes for Billy Graham to be received at the White House, the president requests that it be turned down."

By January 1952, as plans were being finalized for the Washington, D.C., crusade, Billy invited the president to bring words of greeting to the crusade. But a White House memo reported that "the president said very decisively that he did not wish to endorse Billy Graham's Washington revival, and particularly, he said, he did not want to receive him at the White House. You remember what a show of himself Billy Graham made the last time he was here. The president does not want it repeated."

Only many years later, while in retirement at his home in Independence, Missouri, did Truman agree to see Billy. "I recalled the incident and apologized profusely for our ignorance and naivete," Billy said.

"Don't worry about it," Truman said graciously. "I realized you hadn't been properly briefed."

Billy vowed that it would never happen again if he was given access to a person of influence. And true to his vow, after the embarrassment with Truman, Billy was circumspect regarding his conversations with prominent persons.

During the London meetings in 1954, for instance, Billy met privately with Winston Churchill for forty minutes. What did they talk about? Journalist George Burnham, who traveled with the Graham team, reported that the question was still unanswered a year later. All Billy would reveal during Churchill's lifetime was that it was Bible-centered.

When he was invited to preach at a private chapel service attended by Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret, he was queried by reporters about what he said. Billy revealed only that he had spoken for about twenty-five minutes and used Acts 27:25 as the text for his sermon.

He eventually became a confidant of popes and presidents and prime ministers because he had learned to keep conversations in confidence. Further confirmation that he had learned something from his failure in 1950 was revealed more than thirty years later.

In 1981, he visited for half an hour with Pope John Paul II. Afterward he would speak only in general terms of their conversation, saying that they talked about "inter-church relations, the emergence of Evangelicalism, evangelization, and Christian responsibility toward modern moral issues." His assessment was homey but guarded: "We had a spiritual time. He is so down-toearth and human, I almost forgot he was the pope."

Only after almost twenty years did Billy feel free to reveal a more personal aspect of their conversation, by then knowing it wouldn't prove an awkward revelation for either the pope or for Billy. The pope had grabbed him by the thumb and pulled him close to whisper intensely, "We are brothers."

He had made an error of judgment in revealing the content of his conversation with President Truman. He would not make that mistake again.

That's not to say he didn't make other mistakes. During his otherwise wildly successful visit to South Africa in 1973, with an unguarded comment he shot himself in the foot, or, as William Martin described the episode, it was "a shot that hit his foot and ricocheted around the world."

Since the United States Supreme Court had recently handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, upholding the legality of abortion, a reporter asked Billy if he considered abortion the taking of human life. Billy said yes, he did, but that such a procedure might be justified in certain situations, such as pregnancy caused by rape.

Billy's unfortunate tendency to allow a key word or image to send his mind down a "rabbit trail" then led him to make an unprompted comment about a newspaper article he had read the day before about the gang-rape of a twelve-year-old girl. He said he advocated strict punishment for rape, and then added, "I think when a person is found guilty of rape, he should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick."

Billy immediately knew that he had gone too far. "It was an offhand, hasty, spontaneous remark that I regretted almost as soon as I said it."

South African papers paid it little attention, but in America it created an uproar. The comment was considered both barbaric and racist. Despite the fact that Billy had insisted his South Africa meetings be integrated, a first for South Africa at the time, the comment was considered evidence of Billy's being a racist, because in America a disproportionate number of convicted rapists were black.

American readers were surprised at how quickly Billy put out this media fire by admitting he had spoken unwisely. "I unfortunately used a word which, in our sex-saturated culture, was emotionally charged and did not clarify my true thoughts." He explained he had been deeply moved by the victim's situationdoctors were saying she'd been so traumatized that she would be a psychological invalid for the rest of her life. He also pointed out that he realized any penalty "should be administered fairly, objectively, equally and swiftly to all, without regard to race or wealth."

But again, Billy didn't break a confidence that could have shed even more light on the statement. Only thirty years after the event did one of Billy's staff reveal where the unguarded thought originated.

"You know how that happened?" said one staffer who had traveled to South Africa with Billy. "He had ridden from the hotel to the press conference in a car with a black Anglican minister, and the conversation turned to how they could handle the problems of crime and punishment, and the minister said, 'Well, I believe in castration.' So that vivid conversation was on Billy's mind, and when the question in the press conference led to the mention of rape, he just blurted out what they'd talked about in the car. Now Billy could have blamed someone else for suggesting the idea, but he didn't. He took the heat for it."

In the sweaty arena of leadership, failures and gaffes are inevitable. A slip of the tongue, the wrong person hired for a key position, a regrettable decision - Billy experienced all of these and more. He knew how to take the heat and admit mistakes.

He was a fast learner, and he learned especially quickly from failures.

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Harold Myra is president and CEO of Christianity Today International. Marshall Shelley is vice president of Christianity Today, Inc. and executive editor of Leadership Journal.

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Excerpted from The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham by Harold Myra and Marshall Shelley (Zondervan, 2005). Used by permission.