The Many Lives Of Lindsey Graham

When then-Rep. Lindsey O. Graham first ran for the Senate in 2002, it was the end of an era. Graham was seeking to replace the soon-to-be-100 Sen. Strom Thurmond, and South Carolina’s junior senator, Fritz Hollings, was eyeing retirement two years later. It was the dawn of the 21st century, and South Carolina had been represented in the Senate by Thurmond since 1955 and Hollings since 1967. The question was self-evident: Could anyone fill those shoes and be as consequential as those two legendary lawmakers?

In nearly a quarter-century of service, Graham, who died Saturday at 71, answered the question with an emphatic yes.

In South Carolina, Washington and especially overseas, he wielded enormous influence over federal spending, the courts and national security. No other Republican in the last decade did more to nudge President Donald Trump toward projecting American force while retaining traditional alliances than the orphaned son of rural South Carolina who learned politics in a pool hall.

And I’m not sure there was a more deft, pure politician in the Senate in this era than Graham. What other Republican could defy his party on immigration, the environment and much else — yet skate through primaries in South Carolina three times since 2014?

Graham happily explained his gift earlier this year when, as ever, he was fulfilling his self-assigned role as ambassador without portfolio. At the time, he was trying to simultaneously pacify Trump and NATO over the president’s designs on Greenland. “I’m bilingual,” he said with his signature chuckle that even over the phone doubled as a wink. Discussing all the characters he had to navigate in his parents’ joint, the Sanitary Café, Graham said: “I speak European and Trump.”

But that access to the corridors of power came with a price. Graham, as much as any GOP lawmaker, embodied the bargain Republicans made after Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. The choice was to adapt or leave, and that was no choice at all for Graham, who was first elected to Congress in 1994.

Politics was his life, his love, even his oxygen. As with 20th-century giants of the Capitol such as Richard B. Russell, Graham was a lifelong bachelor, married only to the work.

And nobody I’ve covered got more joy from serving in office nor more deeply craved the influence it conferred. He’d always laugh about speculation that he’d join the cabinet — as if Graham would ever willingly leave the Senate.

So, yes, if that meant horrifying so many of his Democratic friends and traditionalist Republican allies by cultivating Trump, so be it. That’s what he did.

The last of the “Three Amigos” to serve in the Senate took off his “Country over Party” hat and tossed on a red MAGA lid. It wasn’t complicated, Graham explained openly; that’s what was necessary to keep him in the room where it happens — to sustain those trans-Atlantic conversations doing iPhone diplomacy between Brussels and Washington.

And, of course, the two of them got along famously, Graham and Trump. There was their shared love for golf, the South Carolinian’s only other real passion besides his sister, Darline, and her family. Yet there was something deeper between the Southern pol and the New York celebrity, a sort of mutual rogue’s recognition that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, but it doesn’t mean you won’t try.

When my colleague and co-author Alex Burns and I were at Mar-a-Lago in 2021 interviewing Trump for our book, This Will Not Pass, the then-former president took a call from Graham and almost immediately put it on speaker so Alex and I could hear both ends of the conversation. Don’t share this news with anybody, Graham stressed, but Republicans had landed a coveted Senate recruit: Herschel Walker would run in Georgia.

After a few minutes, Trump mercifully revealed to Graham that two journalists were there and listening. Graham, not missing a beat, shifted on a dime to testify to the two skills Trump possessed that he was most proud of: his full control of the GOP and his low handicap.

Of course, Graham wanted us to know he was in on the joke. So when Alex and I telephoned him later during the drive to the airport, the senator asked, “Is he gone?” Graham then told us we had learned a valuable lesson: “Trump is a great conversationalist — when the topic is about Trump.”

It was cynical, his capitulation. Make no mistake. It’s easy to say Graham chose relevance over principle; I just did. And he’d probably concede to a slightly more finessed accounting.

The question — was it worth it? — may never be answered, or perhaps will be up to Trump's behavior his final two-and-a-half years in office.

Yet while alive, Graham used his choice to battle for the deeper principles he never abandoned and cared most about — internationalism and America’s vital role as the world’s leader.

Does anybody doubt that Trump would have been more apt to abandon Ukraine were Graham not in his ear nearly every day? The president’s relationships with NATO chief Mark Rutte and Finnish President Alexander Stubb didn’t just materialize — they were forged in part by an elfin interlocutor who was ostensibly just South Carolina’s senior senator.

“There’s nobody that can do what he does,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me Sunday, still using the present tense, about how relentlessly Graham lobbied Trump to stay on the Reaganite path. As Cramer put it, with a candor his late colleague would admire, Graham was only “flexible on the things that don’t matter.”

The culmination of — it’s no exaggeration to say — his life’s work was convincing Trump to bomb Iran and take out the Ayatollah earlier this year. Trump, in Graham’s eyes, should have gone further, and he was panicked that the president would walk away from the mission.

Later than most of his colleagues, Graham realized the power of social media and came to love the impact he could have, especially with Trump, on X, formerly known as Twitter. Close students of Lindseyese would recognize a pattern: When Graham was alarmed about any potential negotiated peace, he’d post that Congress would have to review any deal, and when he was really furious, he’d invoke JD Vance, as if to say the vice-president would own this.

As the line went, Graham, an Air Force veteran, never met a war he didn’t like.

Some senators “go Washington.” Yet it wasn’t the Potomac that was intoxicating to Graham — it was the jet fumes of a CODEL.

Here he was a senator in full. The longtime Armed Services Committee member was a throwback to an earlier day of globetrotting lawmakers who viewed themselves as representatives of a fully co-equal branch — in fact, the Article One branch that controlled spending and determined treaties.

Graham was constantly on the road. He had just returned from Ukraine this weekend and, as he told Trump in a phone call Saturday, was going to discuss his trip on “Meet the Press” Sunday. In studio, too. The only thing Graham may have liked more than CODELS may have been Sunday shows.

Instead, Sunday morning, Trump dialed in to moderator Kristen Welker to heap praise on the senator as an uncommonly gifted politician, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared from Jerusalem to hail his friend and even venture a South Carolina accent by impersonating Graham.

Only his friend and fellow amigo, John McCain, appeared on the world’s longest-running television show more often. As my wife, the former executive producer of the Tim Russert-era program, reminded me: Graham first appeared with Russert on “Meet the Press,” nearly 30 years ago, as a junior House member.

This also wasn’t the first time Graham's scheduled appearance on "Meet the Press" was overtaken by tragedy.

Graham was there at NBC’s old Nebraska Avenue bureau a week after Russert also died suddenly of a heart attack in 2008. To honor the legendary moderator, the Republican was joined that day by his Democratic colleague, Joseph R. Biden Jr. The duo had originally been scheduled to debate about that year’s presidential campaign — this was before Biden was tapped for vice-president — until that show was repurposed as a tribute.

The two lawmakers had a close friendship. Graham joked that, once when travelling with Biden overseas, he began the flight with a question of his equally garrulous counterpart, and the Delawarean was still answering it as the plane touched down.

Graham welled up with tears in 2015, describing his relationship with Biden, testifying to his friend’s character. It was not a portent of things to come.

His final decade, though, would represent the pinnacle of Graham’s clout. He aligned himself with the president, it was always noted, as he did with McCain a generation and political epoch earlier.

Having Trump’s ear but also credibility with so many Democrats, who he always worked with on foreign policy, meant Graham could sit with heads of state and attempt to fulfill what may have been his second-abiding passion — Israel-Saudi Arabia normalization.

He shuttled between Jerusalem and the Gulf States so much that Graham joked with me at the Munich Security Conference this year that he was tempted to franchise a Chick-fil-A in the Holy Land (it would be closed on Saturdays, not Sundays, he noted).

If it wasn’t the Middle East, he was often somewhere in Europe. He talked about being with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Davos earlier this year, and, even all these years later, there was a holy-shit-is-this-real quality to his voice. Here were two South Carolina kids from humble backgrounds, one raised on the coast near Myrtle Beach and the other in the Upstate, at the height of global influence.

Part of the reason why Graham survived all those primaries despite his apostasies was because he always did what he had to do around campaign season. It should be noted, also, for the McCain hagiographers that the Arizonan did the same himself to survive in 2010, the year the Tea Party wave came ashore, heralding what was to come. These were politicians, not saints.

And boy, was Graham a gifted one.

In a Congress that has become filled with play-it-safe types scared of their own shadow and performance artists, Graham was both a character and workhorse. I often wondered why more lawmakers didn't see the press as he did — as an opportunity, not a risk.

He possessed that Southern gift of gab, a trial lawyer’s talent for evasive maneuvers out of verbal cul-de-sacs and enough emphasis on the right issues (namely his opposition to abortion rights) to keep winning a state more conservative than he ever was.

Knowing my parents were constituents, he rarely failed to ask after them. As with Thurmond and Hollings, he worked across party lines to bring projects back home. Graham would never shift on that and was uneasy when Trump pushed South Carolina state legislators to draw Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) out of his seat.

Why give up a crucial Democratic elder, and the only Democrat in the state’s delegation, when he helped on issues such as getting federal dollars to deepen Charleston’s port? The opposition would eventually run Congress or the White House again, and it helped to have seniority from both parties representing the state.

That same logic is why Graham was a crucial backstage player when Democrats were last in charge, in the Biden years. Clyburn wanted to elevate a South Carolina judge to the Supreme Court. Michelle Childs would fall a rung short, but the reason Judge Childs is on the prestigious D.C. Circuit has everything to do with a Black Democrat and White Republican.

Graham is remembered, and disdained by the left, for his fiery defense of Justice Brett Kavanaugh but is less recalled for being one of just nine Senate Republicans to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the Obama years (of that group, only Maine’s Susan Collins remains in the chamber).

As for his skeptics in South Carolina, well, one of them had a new appreciation for Graham from seeing him up close.

When former South Carolina Democratic chair Dick Harpootlian’s wife, Jamie, was appointed by Biden as ambassador to Slovenia, Graham helped usher through her through the confirmation process — and then brought a delegation of American lawmakers to see her in Ljubljana.

It all sounds quaint. But it’s also how the institution is supposed to work. It should be de rigueur, not newsworthy.

Yet with Graham’s passing, the question now is who will help sustain the institution.

Stalwarts such as Lamar Alexander, Roy Blunt and John Cornyn have already left, voluntarily or otherwise. Mitch McConnell is awaiting retirement in a hospital bed. And much younger, promising figures such as Steve Daines are also headed for the exits.

Does even Senate GOP Leader John Thune want to keep a fractious party together post-Trump?

Who will step in as the Trump whisperer? Sure. But when he’s gone, who will also work across party lines on national security and find areas of common ground with Democrats at home? Could two of his fellow Southerners, 40-somethings Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and soon-to-be-senator Julia Letlow (R-La.), play that role when they have a bit more seniority?

Even after Trump, it will be difficult. I don’t have to document all the incentives that conspire against such work.

When he won his primary in June — with Trump’s crucial support, nobody serious challenged him — I congratulated Graham. I said, “You were so shy and restrained before, but now you can really mix it up.”

“It will be fun,” he said.

This surely would be, I thought to myself, Graham’s final term. Even with his Houdini-like skills, there was no way he could survive another right-wing primary six years on.

But who knows? Graham could make it look easy. He was, as they say in sports, one of one. And nobody relished the political life more — its concessions, its compromises but most of all its fun.