Graham Crackers

A fitting tribute to the Nation's most famous evangelist and Nixon toady:

But at this moment everyone's attention is on the visitor, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is talking about a memorial "library" that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, headed by Franklin [Graham], is building in Charlotte. Cornwell toured the building site and saw the proposed burial plot. She was asked by Ned [Graham], who opposes Franklin's choice, to come and give his father her impression.

"I was horrified by what I saw," she tells Billy, in the presence of a reporter invited to be there.

The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for the Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she says, but a large barn and silo -- a reminder of Billy Graham's early childhood on a dairy farm near Charlotte. Once it's completed in the spring, visitors will pass through a 40-foot-high glass entry cut in the shape of a cross and be greeted by a mechanical talking cow.

A fitting tribute to a leader in the manufacture of bovine gas, from his even more odious son.