It was May 2007, and I was sitting with Sen. Lindsey Graham in the studio of a Greenville, South Carolina, radio station as he fielded calls from his constituents. Many were outraged that he was a lead sponsor of legislation to enact immigration reforms that would give the nation's 12 million undocumented workers — "illegal aliens" in South Carolina — a path to citizenship.
The radio station carried the syndicated talk show of Rush Limbaugh, who had taken to calling Graham "Senator Grahamnesty" for pushing legal amnesty for mainly Hispanic laborers who'd broken the law by entering the United States without a visa or remaining here after their temporary work visas expired.
The guttural vitriol aimed at Graham in that studio stunned me. During 13 years covering Congress, I'd never heard people yell at a sitting senator, much less one elected to represent them in Washington.
Calmly and methodically, Graham answered each caller, starting each response with a "good question" or a soothing, "I understand why you're mad" — before proceeding to eviscerate the emotional claims.
Joyce from Greenville accused Graham of doing the bidding of "poultry workers who are gonna give us hepatitis C."
"They are not your constituents!" she scolded. "I am! I voted for you, but I will never vote for you again!"
Graham, a year out from his next reelection campaign, told Joyce: "South Carolina's economy would collapse without new workers. As South Carolinians get better educated and get better jobs, somebody's got to do the chicken processing, somebody's got to pick the lettuce from the field, somebody's got to pour the tar. And it's a fact that we have a labor shortage."
After the show ended, I asked Graham how he could withstand such furious criticism from constituents.
"I think I'm in good standing with the people of South Carolina," he told me. "My biggest fear has never been of losing; it's of copping out."
Fast forward to 2020, and I wonder whether Lindsey, as I called him during my six years of covering him for The State, has committed a worse sin than copping out. I wonder whether he's sold his soul to a president he once called a "race-baiting, xenophobic bigot."
How can a senator who took considerable political risk in defending Mexicans he said had crossed the Rio Grande in search of the American dream — how can he back a president who has denigrated them as drug dealers and criminals, rapists and gang members?
That doesn't square with the Graham I saw get emotional in 2007 as he received an award from the National Council of La Raza, the country's largest advocacy group for Hispanics' rights. A former military lawyer, Graham paid homage to his first Air Force commanding officer.
"On behalf of the Dan Garzas of the world, we're going to solve this (immigration) problem," he said, his voice breaking. "We're not going to run people down. We're not going to scapegoat people. We're going to tell the bigots to shut up, and we're going to get this right."
Graham showed other profiles in courage while I covered him. In late summer 2006 and into the fall, he opposed Vice President Dick Cheney and then-intelligence czar John Negroponte — along with most other Republican senators — as they tried to remove limits on how alleged jihadist terrorists were questioned and detained. The Bush administration also wanted to give U.S. interrogators blanket immunity from prosecution for using abusive techniques such as waterboarding, a widely recognized form of torture based on simulated drowning.
"Now are we going to start being the first country in the world that changes the Geneva Conventions so the secret police program of those nations will be OK? I mean, look how that would unravel."
During that protracted national security policy fight, Graham and I sat at an empty bar in a deserted terminal of Reagan National Airport. Our flight to Greenville was on hold for hours. Graham, famously, is a teetotaler, but he ordered a tumbler of creme de menthe to join me with my bourbon. He started in on the Cheney-led neoconservatives pushing to legalize "enhanced interrogations" of terror detainees at Guantanamo and CIA black sites around the world.
Leaning into me as he sipped his drink, Graham said: "Jim, these neocons are f ---ing crazy."
Graham was among the few Republican senators who backed President Barack Obama's eventually failed efforts to close the Guantanamo prison for accused terrorists, saying it gave jihadists an effective recruiting tool. While Republican activists reviled Obama, Graham quietly worked with him on a range of terror and other foreign policy issues during most of his White House tenure.
While a sitting senator, Graham served a dozen active-duty stints in Iraq and Afghanistan as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, helping both countries set up their judicial systems.
What a difference four years make. Graham, facing the most serious reelection challenge of his career from Democrat Jaime Harrison, is now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He presided over the hearings on Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's pick to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the high court. Far from the let-the-people-have-a-say position Graham took in 2016 with Obama's stymied nomination of Merrick Garland, a vote on Barrett will happen after tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots.
Graham says he changed his position on election-year confirmation of a Supreme Court pick because Democrats "tried to destroy (Brett) Kavanaugh" during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in September 2018 on Trump's second high court nominee. The full Senate confirmed Kavanaugh following combustible hearings over his alleged sexual assault of a fellow high school student decades ago.
"After Kavanaugh, everything changed for me," Graham told Fox News' Sean Hannity last month. "They're not going to intimidate me."
I wanted to ask Graham why he's abandoned his original judgment of Trump and become a key supporter, but to my disappointment he declined my interview request.
It's hard not to like Lindsey Graham. He's a great raconteur with a stand-up comedian's ready wit. His life story is appealing: He spent his early childhood in the backroom of a bar and pool hall his parents owned in Central, South Carolina, later moving with them to a trailer. While finishing studies at the University of South Carolina, his mother died of Hodgkin lymphoma and his father passed away 15 months later of a heart attack. Graham took over care of his sister, then 13, later becoming her legal guardian so she could receive his Air Force benefits.
Graham is also more candid than most high-profile politicians — at least he was when I covered him. Now, his explanations for why he supports Trump seem disingenuous at best.
When I covered Graham, he used one word to explain why he worked with Obama following a 2008 presidential campaign in which he and Republican nominee John McCain had spent a year-plus excoriating the Illinois senator.
"Relevance," Graham told me so often, it was like a mantra. "If you're not relevant, you should get out of politics."
Graham claims that Trump consults with him frequently. He takes credit for persuading the president to slow his planned withdrawal of troops from Syria and says he has more influence with Trump than he had with any previous president during his quarter-century congressional career.
My problem with that rationale is this: Kissing up to a pathological president isn't the only way to remain relevant. Standing up to this president, especially as a lonely Republican dissenter among GOP lackeys, would make any senator even more relevant than Graham claims to be by appeasing him. There's no better example than McCain's historic and decisive vote on July 27, 2017, that prevented Trump and his Republican enablers from ending Obamacare.
When I covered Graham, folks would joke that he was McCain's "little brother." After McCain's death, Graham himself said the maverick senator had been like an older brother or a commanding officer.
"What I miss was the collaboration," he told the Times. "It was a political marriage."
McCain, though, was all about character and duty to country. Having covered him in the Senate and on the presidential campaign trail, I have little doubt that he would not be making nice with a narcissistic and treacherous president from his own party. And as close as he was to Graham, McCain might well be asking for a political divorce.
