As much as he was a political animal who gloried in the fray, Lindsey Graham also had a core.
Lindsey Graham was the last truly interesting man in Washington. Even when you knew where he wanted to go, you never quite knew how he was going to get there. The Senate will be a less vivid place without him. Fritz Hollings, with whom Graham served when he first reached the Senate, quipped when he retired, “We had . . . five, six drunks when I came here. [Now], there’s nobody drunk in the United States Senate. We don’t have time to be drunk.” Today’s senators are doing a lot less work and a lot more television, but the gray indistinguishability even of their outrages would have made Hollings cringe. Nobody ever accused Graham of being colorless.
A Faulknerian character of mischievous, impish wit, Graham first shot to national prominence as a boyish House impeachment manager in Bill Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial. He took over Strom Thurmond’s seat in the Senate. The two men could not have been more different, yet Graham’s priorities on foreign policy and the judiciary carried on the best parts of Thurmond’s own complex legacy without the baggage. A consummate, Talleyrandish political survivor even by the baroque standards of South Carolina politics, he saw generations of Republican coalitions and movements come and go, and he endured the brickbats of being simultaneously called a traitor to, and a craven pawn of, each of them. Instant obituarists who focus on one or another of these postures will miss the man.
More a McCain Republican at heart than a Gingrich, Bush, Tea Party, or Trump guy, Graham seemed to draw strength from infuriating friends and foes alike, whether he was mugging for the cameras against a backdrop of shrieking Democrats during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings or outlasting MAGA primary challenges (one of them by the principal author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Paul Dans, this spring). A lifelong confirmed bachelor, he floated above decades of speculation about his sexuality. He had friends across the aisle, most notably the simpatico Joe Lieberman.
As much as he was a political animal who gloried in the fray, Graham did, in fact, have a core. He was tireless in defense of America’s interests and allies, an implacable foe of its enemies, and devoted to getting conservative judges on the courts. South Carolina’s hawkish, veteran-heavy electorate rewarded him again and again for that. He visited Ukraine ten times since Russia’s invasion, and he met with Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday; the Ukrainian people had no better friend in Washington, as Zelensky’s tribute reflects.
Governor Henry McMaster will now appoint a new senator to fill a seat that is vacant for only the second time since 1956. Republicans will also scramble to get a new candidate on the ticket; Graham won his primary in June and was running for a seventh term. But there will be no replacing Graham. He was one of a kind.