Lindsey Graham, the senator who stole beer off strangers' tables as a child, spent forty years in public life, and somehow managed to be both a profile in courage and a profile in spinelessness depending on which year you caught him, died last Saturday at 71. South Carolina, which has never done anything simply, is now left to mourn a man it couldn't make up its mind about while Republicans have roughly a month to figure out who fills his seat before November's midterms. The Guardian has the full story from Columbia, and it is something.
The Kid Who Stole Your Beer and Grew Up to Be Your Senator
Start with this, because you won't find it in any of the formal tributes: Lindsey Graham grew up in the back of a bar. Not near a bar. In the back of one. The Graham family, his parents Millie and Florence, ran a restaurant, pool hall and bar in Central, South Carolina, and the four of them, Lindsey and his sister included, lived in a single room behind it. The bar's bathroom was the family's bathroom. The kitchen was their kitchen.
When the textile mill workers came in after their shift, young Graham worked the room. According to Jennifer Berry Hawes, who writes about the South for ProPublica and interviewed Graham extensively, the kid dressed up as a cowboy, walked the length of the bar, and when customers disappeared to the toilet, stole their beers and poached their cigarettes from the ashtrays. His nickname was "Stinkball." No, really. Your four-term U.S. senator was called Stinkball.
This matters. Not as a cute anecdote to soften the obituary, but because it actually explains something true about Graham that the Washington version of him obscured. Hawes told The Guardian that he learned early that rooms contained multitudes, and that the job was to read them all. "He was much more apt to work across the aisle," she said of the earlier Graham. "He struck me as much more of someone from that world who knew a lot of people who struggled." That man existed. He just had some competition from a later model.
Tragedy, Responsibility, and a Law Degree He Actually Used
Graham was a C student in high school and became the first person in his family to attend college, landing at the University of South Carolina. Then things got hard fast. His mother died of Hodgkin's lymphoma. His father, diagnosed with prostate cancer, died of a heart attack not long after. Graham, barely into adulthood, became the legal guardian of his sister Darline, who was nearly nine years younger.
He later became one of the more vocal defenders of Social Security in the Republican caucus, which always confused people who only knew him as a hardline conservative. It shouldn't have. He watched those benefits keep his household from collapse. That's not ideology, that's memory.
Armed with a law degree, he went into the Air Force as a JAG officer, starting as a defense attorney for accused troops and eventually becoming the Air Force's chief prosecutor in Europe. He stayed in the reserves for decades. That military background wasn't window dressing for campaign ads. It was where he built his foreign policy obsessions, his hawkishness, his bone-deep conviction that American engagement abroad was not optional. That conviction would later put him in the awkward position of serving an isolationist president while pretending the contradiction didn't exist.
The Senate Career: Great, Then Complicated, Then... You Know
Graham entered the House in the 1994 Republican Revolution and made the leap to the Senate in 2002, taking over the seat held by Strom Thurmond, who served for nearly half a century and is perhaps best remembered now for the revelation, after his death, that he had fathered a child with a 15-year-old Black maid. Graham inherited a legacy with a lot of subtext and, to his credit, did not completely embarrass himself with it.
He was, for a real stretch of years, one of the Senate's more functional Republicans. Bipartisan immigration reform. Foreign policy coalitions that crossed party lines. A genuine reputation for constituent service that transcended politics. Bakari Sellers, a political commentator and former South Carolina state representative, told The Guardian that when South Carolinians needed federal help, there were two names: Jim Clyburn or Lindsey Graham. "We're going to miss him for that, truly," Sellers said.
And then 2016 happened. Graham spent the Republican primary calling Donald Trump a race-baiting con man and a xenophobe, and then, when Trump won, methodically reversed every one of those opinions in public, on television, with the cameras rolling. A foreign policy hawk who spent his career arguing for American global leadership bent himself into a pretzel to accommodate a president who thought NATO was a protection racket. Whatever you want to say about Graham, he made the transaction visible. He didn't pretend he hadn't said what he'd said. He just stopped caring that you remembered.
South Carolina Reacts, Because South Carolina Is Always Reacting
The Guardian sent a reporter to Columbia, to the state house grounds, which is itself a monument to South Carolina's inability to resolve its own history. There are memorials to Confederate war dead and African American history within eyeshot of each other. Beneath a statue of Strom Thurmond, the names of his five children are inscribed, including Essie Mae, whose mother was that 15-year-old Black maid. The state contains multitudes. Uncomfortably so.
Caleb Davis, 21, an Air Force enlistment candidate who was wandering the grounds on Tuesday, told The Guardian he was shocked by Graham's death. "He was our senator longer than I've been alive," Davis said. "Whether I liked the man or his politics hasn't got much to do with it. He was truly great and his shoes are gonna be some big ones to fill." That's a pretty measured take for a 21-year-old, honestly. Some veterans of the Graham years are less generous.
Sellers' description of Graham's personal style is worth saving: shirt never buttoned all the way, tie always hanging loose, always asking about your family, always cracking a joke and walking away. "He was always a funny type of individual who kept his pulse on the heartbeat of South Carolina," Sellers said. That's the thing about Graham. Even his harshest critics usually end up conceding the personal charm. It was real. It didn't excuse everything, but it was real.
What Happens Now: Darline's Oath and a Republican Scramble
Here is where things get genuinely strange, in that only-in-America way. On Tuesday, Graham's sister Darline, the girl he became guardian to after their parents died, was sworn in to serve out the remainder of her brother's unexpired Senate term. The Guardian confirmed this. Darline Graham is now a United States Senator. The arc of that story, from orphaned children sharing a room in the back of a pool hall in Central, South Carolina to both of them holding a Senate seat, is the kind of thing a novelist would cut for being too on the nose.
Meanwhile, South Carolina Republicans have about a month to organize a primary to find a candidate to run in November's midterms. That's not a lot of time to sort out who gets to inherit the mantle of the state's longest-serving senator. The jockeying, per The Guardian, has already started. It will not be dignified.
The Dingo Take
Here is the honest obituary: Lindsey Graham was a genuinely complicated man who spent the first half of his career earning the complicated part and the second half squandering it. He understood struggle because he'd lived it. He understood military service because he'd done it. He understood constituent service because he was obsessively good at it. And then he decided that proximity to power mattered more than any of that, and he spent the Trump years performing somersaults on national television to stay in the room. History will not be kind to that chapter, and it shouldn't be.
But the bar kid from Central who became the first in his family to go to college, buried both his parents before he was grown, raised his kid sister, and then represented his state for decades longer than most politicians dream of? That person deserves the complicated grief South Carolina is clearly feeling. "You loved him and you hated him," as The Guardian's headline puts it. That's not a failure of clarity. That's accuracy.
His sister is a senator now. Republicans are scrambling. The seat beneath the statue of Strom Thurmond is empty. South Carolina has always been too much for easy description, and so was Lindsey Graham. The least we can do is not flatten him into something tidier in death than he was in life. He wouldn't have wanted that. Stinkball never did like the buttoned-up version of anything.
