The passing of Senator Lindsey Graham a week ago shocked Washington. Graham was many things, but he was always interesting, always known for his sense of humor, and always tireless. He seemed to be everywhere at once, a trait that only accelerated with the passing of his fellow members of the so-called “Three Amigos,” Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Graham was one of Donald Trump’s harshest critics a decade ago, but had, in time, become an essential and effective ally of his policies in the Senate. He was hated by many — including some in his own party — for his vociferous neoconservative foreign policy, his aggressive support of Ukraine in the war against Russia, and his status as one of Israel’s best allies in U.S. politics. But he was also hated for his effectiveness — he could get things done, and not just in national security. Pro-life organizations mourned him as one of their staunchest allies on the abortion issue. And no one can forget his brilliant defense of Brett Kavanaugh, in the midst of a Democratic smear campaign and a moment when weak-willed Senate Republicans seemed ready to cut and run.
Graham leaves a legacy of staunch belief, but also, in a rare capacity in this day and age, an earned reputation as someone who was truly respected on both sides of the political aisle. The Daily Wire discussed Graham and his unique life with someone who knew him best: Bob Heckman, a longtime respected consultant for him, John McCain, and many other Republicans.
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Ben Domenech: So, Bob, because we have different guests and people we interview who are known to The Daily Wire audience as politicians, influencers, or the like, I’m sure they’re all familiar with your storied career. But it’s also incumbent upon me to say, how do you know Lindsey Graham? How long have you known him, and what professional background connections led you to develop the kind of friendship you had with him?
Bob Heckman: I first met Lindsey during John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. Lindsey was probably our number one surrogate for John. I traveled everywhere with him, or wherever Lindsey was asked to travel with him. I got a glimpse into their relationship because Senator McCain used to never refer to him by name, but rather, he would refer to him as that little twerp. John would say, “Somebody talk to the little twerp and see if he can go with me on this trip,” or whatever. They had a unique friendship, to say the least. They would bicker back and forth, but they loved each other. And then I worked on Senator McCain’s reelection.
In 2010, I worked on Senator McCain’s reelection to the Senate. In 2014, he and a mutual friend, Charlie Black, reached out to me and said, “Lindsey’s got problems from the Right in South Carolina. Would you be interested in working on his race?” And I said yes. I thought the guy was great when I interacted with him. And so I got to know him mostly in 2014, working on that race. And ironically, the candidate we were most worried about from the Right was Nancy Mace. But she actually finished fourth, I think, in a four-way primary, or maybe it was a five-way primary. But I got to know him in 2014. And then in 2016, he ran for president briefly. Lindsey liked to say I always wanted to run for president badly, and so I did. I drew the short straw because Lindsey wanted to campaign in Iowa, and nobody wanted to travel there.
So I wound up accompanying him on a number of Iowa trips, and it was delightful. He was great to be around, and we had fun while campaigning. And then from there, I worked on every one of his Senate re-elections, and I stayed in touch with him in between. And he became not just a client, but a very good friend.
BD: You got a close look at the relationships that Lindsey had. And one of the things that has been cited by so many different people across the aisle in terms of their relationship with him was how well he got along with Democrats that he had very strong and vociferous disagreements with. It’s pretty rare to see somebody who is known as being one of the most prominent defenders of the pro-life cause in the Senate also be able to get along with Democrats on the other side of the aisle. Why was that?
BH: That’s why he was so valuable — his ability to do that. I think there are two reasons why. Number one, he was disarmingly funny. In fact, he’s maybe the funniest person I’ve ever known or been around. He had a sharp wit, but it was never a mean-spirited wit. The second thing is that he was a thoroughly decent person. He was easy to talk to. He was gracious and kind. He never talked down to people. He was always inquiring about your family or personal life. He got to know my daughter, and he asked about her constantly whenever we were together. And I think that made it very easy for people who disagreed with him to actually be friends with him. And I’m seeing some of the tributes from Democrats like Amy Klobuchar. And what comes through to me is the fact that they liked him. He was a likable guy. He was friendly. And as I said, he was a thoroughly decent person.
BD: I had multiple disagreements over the course of Lindsey’s career with his policy positions, and I was a pretty vociferous critic of him on a number of different national security and foreign policy steps where I thought that he was making the wrong choice — an opinion that was shared by a lot of folks who were in the Tea Party movement or people who are still around today.
What I found to be pretty shocking, once I got to know him more closely, once I started dating Meghan and was around him more, was how little that mattered to him. It didn’t matter to him at all that I had been critical of him. That’s a pretty rare thing in politics. People tend to take things personally.
Why did Lindsey have this aspect to him when somebody could be beating him up? Even the vice president, J.D. Vance, tweeted out, “I was getting into arguments with him about Ukraine funding, and then I found out that he was pushing a bill that I cared about through committee at the same time.” Why did Lindsey have that capacity?
BH: He was tenacious when he sank his teeth into an issue that he really cared about. You and I both know what those issues were. America’s standing in the world, having a strong military, standing by Ukraine against Russia, solving the Middle East problem, and following through on Iran. And the pro-life cause, on the things that he really cared about, he was absolutely tenacious. It didn’t really bother him if somebody disagreed with him. He had it in his mind that he could somehow convert everybody, which is just a great quality. In 2016, when Senator McCain was reelected for the last time, I was in Phoenix. That was election night. That was the night that Donald Trump was elected president. I was in Phoenix.
So was Senator Graham, so was Senator [Joe] Lieberman — the “Three Amigos” together. And I remember on election night, Lindsey and I were watching the same TV with results coming in from Wisconsin, and the race hadn’t been decided yet. And he turned to me, and he said, “How well do you know Wisconsin?” I said, “Fairly well.” And he said, “Are there enough votes left for Hillary to win?” And you remember during the presidential campaign in 2016, he had had some bitter exchanges with Donald Trump. And so he asked me, “Are there enough votes left for Hillary to win?” I started joking, he said, “Shouldn’t you be cheering for the Republican?” And he kind of smirked at me. Well, about 10 days later, I ran into him at a reception, and we talked for a couple of minutes. And I said, “Okay, so Trump was elected. What the hell do we do now?” And immediately he said, “The guy is president. We learn to deal with him.” That was his mindset. He wanted to be in the room when important decisions were being made because that was the only way he could have an influence. And making up with Donald Trump and becoming a Trump partisan was the way to be in the room. So good for him because he accomplished so many different things by doing that.
BD: I’ve been making this point in a number of the interviews that I’ve done the past couple of days. I think Lindsey might be the last guy; maybe there are a couple of other guys who are still around, but he might be the last guy in Washington who understood politics just on a root level. He was a political animal. He had the ability to adapt — to take lessons from the voters rather than “The voters have spoken, the bastards.” It’s more like, okay, I’m going to take a signal from this, respond to it, and try to make the best of what they have given me. And in this case, I truly believe, and I wonder if you share this belief, that he made Donald Trump a better president.
BH: I totally agree with that. Lindsey was a strategic thinker all the time. He was always trying to figure out how to actually accomplish what he wanted to accomplish. It’s like the old saying that politics is the art of the possible. Lindsey was a thorough believer in that. And I think some of it at least rubbed off on President Trump. You can see from the accolades that have come from people like John Thune that the valuable role that Lindsey played in being able to speak truth to President Trump about the possibility of getting various things done, and how you get them done, and Trump’s own flexibility at times, I think, comes from Lindsey coaching him.
BD: One of the accolades that came in, which was truly a surprise to me, but since you’re an old Washington hand, maybe you were less surprised, came from Monica Lewinsky, who tweeted out her appreciation. She said, of course, she disagreed with a lot of what Lindsey believed, but that he was the one impeachment manager who truly defended her against the Clinton machine. It seems like a hallmark of Lindsey throughout his career that he would get truly pissed off when he thought that something unfair was happening, where, in particular, Democrats were coming down on someone who couldn’t fight back.
BH: That’s exactly right, Ben. The defining moment of his career was probably the Kavanaugh hearings. When I saw him on TV getting enraged like that — the one thing I knew about him and his personality is that there was nothing fake about that. It was not staged. It was not planned. He saw an injustice being done, and he reacted to it. And in particular, when he said to the Democrats, “I voted for [Elena] Kagan, I voted for [Sonia] Sotomayor. I would never have done what you’re trying to do to this man now.” And he meant that. I mean, that’s where I think John McCain rubbed off on him a lot, too. And that is the commitment to wanting to do politics, but do politics in a civil way.
BD: Did you watch that live?
BH: Yes.
BD: I think there’s a before and an after in the way we view the Senate and the judiciary fights. I was driving across Texas with a good friend of mine, and we were listening to C-SPAN radio. When that happened, we literally had to pull over to the side of the road because we thought, “What the hell was that? That’s amazing.” But the thing that I also took away from it — and this is Lindsey’s political brain working — is that the message wasn’t just for Democrats; it was for Republicans, because everything that we were hearing, everything that I was getting in my email, was from Republicans who were about to squish out — they were about to cut and run.
They said, “We have plenty of other good candidates. Why are we going to throw in our lot with this guy? Why are we going to go along with defending him? It’s easier to just cut bait and move on to a different candidate.” And in that moment, of course, I was infuriated by that because it seemed so deeply unfair. But to hear a Senator express that was just unbelievable to me. And I think it’s truly, as you said, a defining moment of his career.
When you look back on that moment, do you think that set a new precedent for the way that Republican Senators, in particular, will be judged on — sticking by judicial nominees going forward and holding the line? Because I think that it is, and I hope that there are people who will be able to do that in Lindsey’s absence.
BH: Yeah, that’s a great point, Ben. One would hope that it would set a new standard and that there would never be a Robert Bork-type problem. Bork was eminently qualified to serve on the Supreme Court when Ronald Reagan tapped him, but Senators were coming up to the White House saying, “Hey, we’re not going to be able to get this done,” and they backed away. The other defining moment like that, ironically, was Arlen Specter defending Clarence Thomas. And it’s ironic that it was Arlen Specter. But what runs through all of that is the question of fairness. Also, Lindsey thinks like a lawyer. And, like a lawyer, he had looked at the evidence against Kavanaugh, and it was incredibly thin, all hearsay. And then he talked to Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh denied it all.
In his mind, there were no witnesses. There was no proof. And the only person who was in the room who could speak to it denied it. And Kavanaugh had a spotless record prior to that. Lindsey weighed all that, and he thought, “There’s no question in my mind that in a court of law, this guy would be found not guilty of these charges that probably wouldn’t even have been brought against him.” So I think that was part of it, too. But yes, I think it sets a new standard. I sure hope it does because if, as Republicans, we don’t stand for backing our judicial nominees, then I’m not sure what we do stand for.
BD: Regarding the humor aspect you mentioned earlier, I know you probably have a bunch of stories. If you want to share some of them, you can. I’m curious, where do you think that really came from? He had such a hard life, a life, by the way, that I think I was familiar with it because I grew up in South Carolina, but I think a lot of people were not familiar with it until this week. There were a lot of people online reacting with shock when they learned about his background and what he had to deal with from a young age. By the way, they were reacting with shock to learn that he’s one of the poorest senators.
BH: That’s right. Yes.
BD: I think that there was this revelation moment that was happening about where he came from. You don’t normally think of people coming out of that experience and having just a deep sense of humor about life. Why do you think that was what happened to him?
BH: I think it’s because of his upbringing and particularly because he spent a lot of his time in a pool hall in a barroom where you have the coarsest kind of ribbing going back and forth, all of it in good humor. I grew up in New York, and I actually was a bartender in a previous life. And I used to tease him that he had a New York-type sense of humor because he was always trying to needle somebody else. And also because there were no bounds on it. If he thought something was funny, he thought it was funny, and he went with it, and there was no restriction as to whether or not it was culturally appropriate or anything like that.
I was talking about how thoroughly decent a person he was. And my daughter went to college at Charleston, and he was very, very good to my daughter. He talked to her before she went and encouraged her while she was there. But I recall one of the funniest stories about Lindsey, in my opinion. After he had left the presidential campaign, there was a North Charleston debate. And of course, he wasn’t in it, but I got a couple of tickets through his office, and I took my daughter, who was going to school down there. We met Lindsey as he was coming into the arena, and I introduced him to my daughter, Victoria, because he hadn’t met her before. He had talked to her on the phone, but hadn’t met her. And he put his arm around her and walked her away from me.
They talk for several minutes, then finally split, and he gives me a little wave goodbye. And I asked my daughter, “What were you guys talking about?” And she said, “Well, he asked me if anybody was giving me a hard time at the College of Charleston. And he told me that if anybody was giving me a hard time, just to let him know, and he would have them killed.”
She’s looking at me with wide eyes, “And he said to me, ‘You know I’m a senator. I could do that.’”
BD: It’s “The Godfather” scene. That’s excellent.
Last question. People are obviously making note of what is going to be absent from the Republican Conference without Lindsey there. And certainly, I think that that absence is going to be felt in the foreign policy side of things, where he held people’s feet to the fire, where he prioritized Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the different foes around the world as being serious. I view him as being one of the last guys who has the pre-9/11 memory that’s still around. There are many Senators who’ve been around during that, but he was obviously very close to it. And I think that that memory was very important to tell to the younger members who’ve arrived in the last 20 years or so. What do you think can possibly fill that gap? Do you think it can be filled, or is this a situation where the Republican Conference is going to fundamentally change because Lindsey’s voice isn’t there anymore?
BH: I don’t think there’s any one Senator who can fill that void because what he brought to it, besides the commitment to what I’ve been calling the Reagan-McCain foreign policy model, was his ability to talk to the president about it. And I don’t think there’s anybody else in the Senate who has that ability. He was also tenacious. I think I used that word before, but he was tenacious about this kind of stuff, too. He never gave up. He never backed down. He had a strong sense of what he thought was right and was going to hang on to pursuing it as long as he could, in maybe a strange sort of way. It reminded me of President Reagan’s commitment to the Contras in Nicaragua. Reagan was never able to convince the country or Congress to back him on that commitment, but he knew it was the right thing to do, and he kept talking about it until his last days in the presidency.
To Lindsey, small temporary defeats don’t matter. You just have to keep going because you know what the ultimate objective is. I don’t know that there’s any Senator who can fill that role. There certainly are a number who agreed with him — not as many as I’d like, and I’m sure that they will step forward — but the fact that there really isn’t anybody who has that kind of close relationship with the president makes him unique.
BD: Bob, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, and I really appreciate the insight into Senator Graham’s legacy. It’s a big loss.
BH: Yes, it really is, Ben.
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