How George Bush really found Jesus

The story Bush tells about how Billy Graham converted him is a fable, concocted during the 2000 presidential campaign. Here's the truth.

Editor's note: This is Part 2 of an excerpt from "The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future." Part 1 ran on Nov. 7; Part 3 will follow on Nov. 9. For more information on the book, visit craigunger.com

By Craig Unger

Read more: George W. Bush, Books, Christian Right, Karen Hughes, Books Features, Craig Unger

Nov. 8, 2007 | Conventional wisdom has it that George W. Bush became a "born-again" Christian in the summer of 1985, after extended private talks with Reverend Billy Graham. As recounted by Bush himself in "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House," a ghostwritten autobiography prepared for the 2000 presidential campaign, one evening at Walker's Point, the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, Graham, spiritual confidant to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and a close friend of the Bush family, sat down by the fireplace and gave a talk. "I don't remember the exact words," Bush wrote. "It was more the power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and loving demeanor."

The next morning, Bush and Graham went for a walk along the rugged Maine shore, past the Boony Wild Pool where Bush had skinny-dipped as a child. "I knew I was in the presence of a great man ..." Bush wrote. "He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different. He didn't lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern. Billy Graham didn't make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved."

"Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year," he continued. "He led me to the path, and I began walking."

There's just one problem with Bush's account of his conversion experience: it's not true. For one thing, when Billy Graham was asked about the episode by NBC's Brian Williams, he declined to corroborate Bush's account. "I've heard others say that [I converted Bush], and people have written it, but I cannot say that," Graham said. "I was with him and I used to teach the Bible at Kennebunkport to the Bush family when he was a younger man, but I never feel that I in any way turned his life around."

Even if one doesn't accept Graham's candid response, there's another good reason to believe that the account in Bush's book is fiction. Mickey Herskowitz, a sportswriter for the Houston Chronicle who became close friends with the Bush family and was originally contracted to ghostwrite "A Charge to Keep," recalled interviewing Bush about it when he was doing research for the book. "I remember asking him about the famous meeting at Kennebunkport with the Reverend Billy Graham...." Herskowitz said. "And you know what? He couldn't remember a single word that passed between them."

Herskowitz was so stunned by Bush's memory lapse that he began prompting him. "It was so unlikely he wouldn't remember anything Billy Graham said, especially because that was a defining moment in his life. So I asked, 'Well, Governor, would he have said something like, "Have you gotten right with God?'"

According to Herskowitz, Bush was visibly taken aback and bristled at the suggestion. "No," Bush replied. "Billy Graham isn't going to ask you a question like that."

Herskowitz met with Bush about twenty times for the project and submitted about ten chapters before Bush's staff, working under director of communications Karen Hughes, took control of it. But when Herskowitz finally read "A Charge to Keep" he was stunned by its contents. "Anyone who is writing a memoir of George Bush for campaign purposes knew you had to have some glimpse of what passed between Bush and Billy Graham," he said. But Hughes and her team had changed a key part. "It had Graham asking Bush, 'George, are you right with God?'"

In other words, Herskowitz's question to Bush was now coming out of Billy Graham's mouth. "Karen Hughes picked it off the tape," said Herskowitz.

There is yet another reason why the episode in Maine could not possibly have been the first time George Bush gave his soul to Christ. That's because Bush had already been born again more than a year earlier, in April 1984 -- thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessitt.

Whereas Billy Graham was a distinguished public figure whose fame grew out of frequent visits to the Oval Office over several decades, Arthur Blessitt had a very different background. His evangelicalism was rooted in the Jesus movement of the sixties counterculture. To the extent he was famous it was because he had preached at concerts with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, and had run a "Jesus coffeehouse" called His Place on Hollywood's Sunset Strip during that turbulent decade. His flock consisted of bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men. The most celebrated ritual at Blessitt's coffeehouse was the "toilet baptism," a rite in which hippies announced they were giving up pot and LSD for Jesus, flushed the controlled substances down the toilet, and proclaimed they were "high on the Lord."

In 1969, however, Blessitt was evicted from his coffeehouse and, in protest, chained himself to a cross in Hollywood and fasted for the next twenty-eight days. Over the next fifteen years, "The Minister of Sunset Strip," as he was known, transformed himself into "The Man who Carried the Cross Around the World" by lugging a twelve-foot-long cross for Jesus through sixty countries all over the world, on what would become, according to the "Guinness Book of World Records," the longest walk in human history. Blessitt delivered countless lost souls to Jesus. He went to Jerusalem. He prayed on Mount Sinai. He crossed the Iron Curtain. Finally, in 1984, he came to Midland, Texas, to preach for six nights at the Chaparral Center before thousands of Texans night after night on a "Mission of Love and Joy." He did not know it, but he was about to bring George W. Bush to Jesus.

Thirty-seven years old when Blessitt came to Midland, Bush had yet to make much of a name for himself and still struggled with the giant shadow cast by his father. The pattern had begun early, when Bush was playing sports in school. "His father had been the captain of the baseball team and star first baseman at Yale," said Mickey Herskowitz. "He had met Babe Ruth at home plate at the stadium at Yale to accept the manuscript of the Babe's autobiography. Dad was a star, a scholar, the leader of the team and the captain. And George never got much beyond Little League. He wanted to be a catcher, but one of his coaches said he had an unfortunate flaw -- he blinked every time the guy swung the bat." Whatever he did, his meager achievements were dwarfed by his father's spectacular résumé.

When he was in his twenties, his alcohol-fueled clashes with his father disturbed his parents so much that they asked friends to rein in their unruly son. In the spring of 1972, the elder Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, called Jimmy Allison, an old friend from Midland, Texas, who was a political consultant and the owner of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, to ask if George W. could work on a Senate campaign Allison was running in Alabama for Winton "Red" Blount. "Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told Salon's Mary Jacoby. "[The Bushes] wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him."

When the younger Bush got to Alabama, however, he continued drinking, according to Allison, often ambling into work at midday, boasting about how much he'd drunk the night before. One night at a party, she saw George W. urinating on a car in the parking lot. He reportedly shouted obscenities at police officers, and trashed a home he rented, leaving behind broken furniture he refused to pay for. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's possessions," a member of the family who rented the house told the Birmingham News.

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