31. Billy Graham Earnings Go Up To $25 Million
Ordained as a Southern Baptist minister William Franklin “Billy” Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis in 1950 and later moved to Charlotte, North Carolina reaching mostly a middle-class moderately conservative protestant audience. For several years American evangelist hosted the radio show Hour of Decision, the annual Billy Graham Crusades, and operated a variety of media and publishing outlets. Graham was also a spiritual adviser to American presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. In 1989, a secret, thirteen page letter was written by Graham in 1969 to U.S. President Richard Nixon was released to the public by National Archives and Records Administration, in the letter he encouraged Nixon to utilize a military campaign to bomb dikes across North Vietnam should the Paris Peace Talks fail to reach a negotiated settlement of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. One of Graham’s most controversial statements defined the role of wife, mother, and homemaker as the destiny of “real womanhood”, and affirmed that feminism was “an echo of our overall philosophy of permissiveness”, and that women did not want to be “competitive juggernauts pitted against male chauvinists.”
