Politically, Lindsey Graham did not finish strong.
The long-time senator from South Carolina had one of the most compelling backstories anyone could ask for, built on tragedy, grit and success. A caretaker for his sister after the death of his parents. A military veteran. A hawkish lawmaker who called John McCain, one of the most honorable public servants of our time, his best friend in the Senate.
Graham died suddenly July 11 at the age of 71 just hours after he returned from a grueling trip to Ukraine, where he had met with leaders.
His death has prompted the inevitable question that every public servant faces: how will history remember me?
History has a way of remembering the moments when courage is required. Graham’s obituary is one that describes two political lives: the senator who once warned that candidate Donald Trump was unfit to lead the Republican Party and the senator who became one of his closest allies. That transformation has become central to assessments of his legacy, even as many also remember his long record on national security, military service and bipartisan work.
Those opposing political truths serve as an asterisk as we evaluate Graham’s life.
Here in Michigan, we have another Republican whose career offers a different lens.
George W. Romney, three-term governor from 1962-1969.
Gov. Romney is not remembered because he always won. He’s remembered because there were moments when losing mattered less than being able to look at himself in the mirror.
As governor, he championed civil rights. As president at American Motors, he expanded opportunities for Black workers at a time when much of corporate America lagged. As Nixon’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he fought to use the Fair Housing Act to break down residential segregation, even when it put him on a collision course with the president.
Romney was jeered by detractors in the suburbs of Detroit. Nixon overruled him, and isolated him, politically, but he did not change his position simply because it had become inconvenient.
Every politician eventually confronts two competing ambitions:
To stay influential or to stay true.
Sometimes those goals align. Sometimes they do not.
The measure of a career isn’t whether someone was conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. It is measured by whether you upheld your values in the face of political pressure when you know it’s best to do the right thing.
I don’t mean to diminish Graham’s decades of public service. Frankly, I’m going to miss his breathless Southern drawl on the Sunday morning shows, manufacturing anger at, and pointed jabs toward, those with whom he had a disagreement. He was an entertaining as he was politically effective.
But for that asterisk.
Graham once supplied a steady drip of invectives for Trump. Graham went from calling Trump a “jackass” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” to becoming one of his closest Senate allies, even golf companions, after Trump took over the GOP.
Jan. 6 was the night Lindsey Graham sounded finished with Trump. On the Senate floor that night, he said, “count me out” and “enough is enough,” a raw condemnation that sounded like the end of a long political relationship.
Within days, he was back at Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s private Florida country club, and back into the fold.
I don’t write this to diminish Graham’s decades of public service. Anyone brave enough to put themselves out there in front of God and everybody to represent constituents deserves praise. But public lives are complicated, and no obituary can fully capture all aspects of it.
I write it because Michigan has given the country a reminder worth revisiting.
George Romney showed us there are moments when the highest office is not the one you hold. It is the one that guides you to do the right thing when everything is on the line.
When our own obituary is written, people will ask whether we sought to remain close to power and lose our dignity or whether we remained close to the principles that guided our moral compass.
That is what will determine if we finished strong and how much of our life needs an asterisk.
Byron McCauley is a regional columnist for USA Today Co. in Michigan. Email: bmccauley@usatodayco.com; phone: (513) 504-8915.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Legacy lessons from Lindsey Graham and George Romney | Opinion
Reporting by Byron McCauley, Holland Sentinel / The Holland Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Byron McCauley, Holland Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
