By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
We were preparing ourselves for it all weekend. We read
the news and had been tipped to get working on our obituaries early, because
there was so much history and politics to reckon with: One of the Republican
giants of the Senate was reportedly on his last legs, suffering a terminal
health crisis at the end of a long and storied career. It was time to gather
and compose our thoughts, hunker down, and write our memorials as we waited for
the sadly inevitable.
And then South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham surprised
everyone this weekend by dying from a massive heart attack at the age of 71.
Spare me your Russian-poison conspiracy theories. The heart condition ran in
his family — it felled his father at nearly the same age. Sometimes terrible
things happen at inconvenient times. Even so, it’s never the ones you expect,
is it? A bit like bracing for a meteor impact only to get wiped out by an
earthquake.
Others have already written their tributes to Graham — to
his policy focus, his political longevity, his fierce defense of the Western
alliance, and his famously vibrant sense of humor. Both Jim Geraghty’s and Dan McLaughlin’s reflections are worth reading. I cannot
hope to match the sweep of their surveys, for Graham was a man with far too
broad a career to ever be reduced to a 1,000-word epitaph, or even three of
them: In a modern era when politicians are so easily caricatured (usually
because they are as shallow as the archetypes they slavishly imitate), Lindsey
Graham was Shakespearean in his complexity. I could not purport to summarize
him here, and I frankly scoff at the attempts of most others to do so.
(Particularly his enemies, who speak of him with the irrational venom of
scorned lovers.)
Instead, I’d like to take you back to the moment when the
child became father to the man, because if you need a real explanation for the
impulses that drove Lindsey Graham in his public career — if you crave those
“Rosebud was a sled!” Citizen Kane moments, because everything must be
tidy and pat — then you’ll almost certainly find it there. For while Graham
comported himself as politician in the classic South Carolina way — with
gentlemanly lilt in his accent and a sly joke always at the ready — he learned
his dignity from the school of hard knocks.
Graham was no born wheeler and dealer, or scion of
privilege. He was an anonymous middle-class kid of the mid-Seventies. His
parents ran a pool hall and liquor store in the (ironically named) small town
of Central, S.C., and Graham was the first member of his family to attend
college, at the University of South Carolina. As the dutiful and respectable
son of Scots-Irish Southerners, he also joined the Reserve Officer’s Training
Corp while in school. Now he was a young man on his way in life.
And then his life collapsed around him, almost instantly.
Graham’s mother succumbed to Hodgkin’s lymphoma (suddenly and rapidly) when he
was 20 years old, a junior in college. A mere 15 months later, his father died
of a heart attack at age 69. And now the young man was an orphan — with a
13-year-old sister to care for.
He focused on what mattered. He became his sister
Darline’s legal guardian, shepherding her through high school even as he
pursued his own law degree at the University of South Carolina. After
graduation, he took a commission with the Air Force as a JAG officer and served
for seven years in active duty. He retired to private practice for a few years,
then ran for state house in 1992, and then, in 1994, entered national politics.
It was the year of the alignment-shifting “Republican Revolution.”
The rest, from managing Bill Clinton’s House impeachment
process in 1998 to managing Donald Trump’s occasional flare-ups against
Volodymyr Zelensky in 2026, is history. (You can name your favorite career
highlight of his, but I’ll start by suggesting his stirring and pivotal defense of
Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.) Lindsey Graham was a
public servant of the old school, surviving and gliding above the partisan
vipers’ nest of South Carolina politics — domestic politics in general, really
— to focus almost exclusively on foreign policy later in his career.
He took to the role of senior statesman almost as if to
the manner born — and perhaps he was, having already served both the U.S.
military and his surviving family since before he turned 21. An abruptly
foreshortened childhood reorients one’s sense of personal and public
responsibility, and Lindsey Graham was that rarest of “lifer” politicians, one
who never gave you the sense that he was hanging around for the glamour of it
all. Only the responsibility.
So it was both altogether predictable and mildly
appalling to see the postmortems for Graham cloddishly and constantly
mentioning his power and “careerism,” as if he was little better than an
unusually long-lived internet “influencer.” (I expect it from Anne Applebaum;
less so from The Dispatch.) But few slanders were worse than that of Steve
Schmidt, former campaign manager for John McCain’s doomed 2008 campaign:
Lindsey Graham was a simple,
tragic man. He lacked a moral core. The great empty spaces of his life were
filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in
the most malignant reality show ever made.
I don’t think it’s possible, in 2026, to be more
clammily, odiously incorrect about a person’s decision to dedicate their lives
to public service than this. (Worth noting: Schmidt was pointedly not invited
to Senator McCain’s funeral in 2018.) Lindsey Graham had his limitations and
knew them — he was never going to president, and he knew this even when he ran
for president.
But when he dropped out, he turned around and immediately
worked wholeheartedly with the Trump administration — with joie de vivre, with
that abiding sense of sly humor and perspective — for the same reason he got
into politics in the first place (and which few do anymore). That is, he
believed in basic principles worth fighting for — most clearly, the American
alliance structure, but beyond that simple human decency — and he was probably
right that nobody could have done a better job of embodying them.
Mitch McConnell, Back from the Edge
All is not lost, however! Yes, I’m as surprised as you
are, but it should be briefly mentioned that the senatorial death we were all
bracing for, rather obviously, was that of former Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell. He suffered a fall at his Washington, D.C., home several weeks
ago (in mid-June) and abruptly disappeared from view, with the only word being
that he was convalescing in the hospital. To us cynical political observers,
who have noticed McConnell’s difficulties in recent years, the assumption was:
This is it. Prepare your obits.
Instead, no! The old turtle’s shell may have taken a
beating, but the carapace remains uncracked: McConnell posted an update to the
press and social media on Sunday morning, with a written statement explaining
his fall and recovery — an intervening bout of pneumonia was the complication —
as well as a photograph with his wife, Elaine Chao, in the hospital.
(Hilariously, just half out of frame, Mitch holds a copy of that day’s Washington
Post as subtle “proof of life.”)
I’m glad he’s still with us, because it’s been a hard
enough week already. (I didn’t even mention Sam Neill!) Mitch is retiring in
November, and his seat is safe, but much like Lindsey Graham, his spirit in the
Senate will be irreplaceable. The old mainstays are passing, and that
Republican Eden of my youth is burning; as Dylan might have said, our hearts
must have the courage to recognize the changing of
the guard.
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