Still boyish, energetic, enthusiastic, Lindsey Graham died suddenly last weekend at the age of 71. Once upon a time, death at such an age was not unexpected. The two Presidents Roosevelt died aged 60 and 63, and in the summer of 1949, two Supreme Court justices in their 50s died of heart attacks.
But advances in medicine and pharmacology have increased not only Americans’ lifespans but also the professional careers of many notable figures, while the nation, which never had a president over age 70 until the 1980s, now, in the 2020s, has had two over 80.
Graham had a long political career in his own right. He was the last still serving in Congress of the Republicans of the class of 1994, whose election in November gave the party its first House majority in 40 years — a majority it has mostly maintained ever since.
That was 32 years ago — a longer interval than that between Franklin Roosevelt’s first victory and John F. Kennedy’s — and closer in time and spirit to Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House than President Donald Trump’s. And Graham’s positions on major issues, such as foreign policy and immigration, have remained closer to Reagan’s than Trump’s.
But politics is more than a listing of issue positions or committee appointments or even election victories. It is also a matter of personal relationships and the skill of maintaining your principles and working with those who don’t share them, without renouncing one or antagonizing the other.
With political instincts honed while running the family’s Upcountry South Carolina bar, Graham excelled at this. He was open, even brash, about his views on issues while working with others who disagreed.
That was apparent in the flood of commentary that came out of his unexpected death on Saturday, a day after he returned from his 10th trip to Ukraine and a day before he was scheduled to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Especially moving, in my view, were the extended comments — heartfelt remembrances — of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Klobuchar, as a partisan Democrat, and Miller, as an advocate of Trump’s immigration policies, have had strong and principled disagreements with Graham over the years, and neither is known as a sentimentalist. But both were writing out of grief and in appreciation of their sometime antagonist.
All of this was accomplished with a sometimes self-deprecating frankness and with a sense of humor that his Democratic colleague Al Franken, a one-time professional comedian, said was the best in the Senate. When he encountered a conservative pundit who had just pummeled him, Graham’s first comment was “Everyone has opinions.”
It is in that manner that Graham became friends with and an ally of President Donald Trump. On foreign policy, they looked like opposites. Trump campaigned against and ridiculed the war in Iraq. Graham, with his close friends John McCain and Joe Lieberman, was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and of President George W. Bush’s 2007 “surge,” which converted what many considered a defeat into what at this stage is looking like a success.
Whether out of his 30 years’ service in the Air Force Reserve or his background in a state long known for its hawkishness, Graham was a believer in what I have called a Churchillian foreign policy. That is the idea that the leading Anglosphere nation has a responsibility to oppose hegemonic dictatorial powers emerging in the landmass of Eurasia.
That tradition goes back to the Dutch William, Prince of Orange, and the 1688-89 Glorious Revolution he engineered, which made him King William III and joined England to his lifelong opposition to the absolutist Louis XIV of France, who sought to dominate all Europe. It was carried on after William’s death by John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, and later in the struggles of William Pitt the Younger and his heirs against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
Often, the British elite and public are tired of the fearsome cost in money and lives in this enterprise. But in the 20th century, it was renewed against Adolf Hitler and Nazism by Marlborough’s descendant Winston Churchill and by the scion of a Dutch patron, Franklin Roosevelt. And then against Soviet Communism, led by American presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush.
Trump came to office with a different view, with an admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader who seemed ignorant of his cold-blooded willingness to kill, and with a contempt for European allies. Earlier presidents had urged them to spend more on their own defense. Trump made that a major policy, with advocacy that verged on contempt.
Lindsey Graham set about trying to influence the 45th and 47th president — and with different tactics, drawing on their years as Senate colleagues, the 46th. Using humor as much as exhortation, agreement more than confrontation, he was able to point out that Putin was not, as Trump initially supposed, seeking peace in Ukraine and that Ukraine, with an ingenuity typical of a free society, was developing weaponry and tactics to turn the tide.
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And when Trump, together with Israel, attacked Iran in June 2025 and again in February this year, he watched as events proved that Iran’s government was not willing to honor any agreement. As a Churchillian, he understood that Putin and the Iranian mullahs were no more willing to live peaceably with others than Louis XIV or the French Revolutionaries, or Hitler or Stalin had been in times past.
Whether Graham saw his role in this historic perspective, I don’t know, and never thought to ask him in our (usually humorous) interchanges over the many years of his career. That he belongs in that long historical chain, and not just in a subordinate position, I am certain.