I've always been a fan of the "thief in the night" scriptures... many people hear the word "near" and like the disciples, hear "in my lifetime." What's your take on the "end times" and the calendar?
I ceased a long time ago trying to figure all that out. The schematic that I follow, what I believe, is very similar to what Billy Graham's is. As far as I see the book of Revelations for instance. I interpret it in a futurist way, as he did. These are things that are yet to come. People who believe in the literal return of Christ, as do I, believe in the imminence of His return. Some have been mistaken — they believed in the first century that He was coming. And His coming was "near" or "nigh," but they misunderstood. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be right now. God's timetable is far different. Also, in those passages, what some of those things mean, is that there are certain things that start. Once those things start, other things are near, but they have to be triggered by it — things that haven't happened yet.
Your thoughts on Billy Graham.
The genuine article — the real deal. A man who has spent his entire life without his integrity being questioned. He has stayed "on message." I think he's the twentieth century's greatest living evangelist.
Are you planning another book?
Yeah, I'm writing a book right now based on the 1952 speech by Richard Nixon called "The Checkers Speech." It was a big media event and I do some writing for the Nixon Foundation. What I'm going to do with this book is similar to Apparent Danger, tell it in a narrative style, as a story. It was the beginning of the television age in politics and the first modern feeding frenzy [by the media]. We saw it with Dan Quayle, we saw it with Palin, and Thomas Eagleton in 1972. The press goes after someone like that for good or for ill. Nixon's speech was really the first time that happened in the modern age of politics. They bought more time on radio than television, because radio was still the big thing then. That was the moment when things began to shift from radio to TV. This was probably the most watched event in history for about ten years at least. So it was a watershed moment. I'm telling the story not as a dry history, but in a narrative page-turning kind of way. My agent is working on it now.
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