Sen. Bob Graham, right, speaks during the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling meeting on Sept. 27, 2010 | AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Published on April 17, 2024 at 12:03 pm
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Former Sen. and Gov. Bob Graham passed from this mortal coil this week at 87 years old.
And with his passing came another reminder of what Florida once was and likely won’t be again any time soon.
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Graham was arguably the last of the great governors of the state, one who could talk to “old Florida” and “real Floridians” in a way “Walkin’ Lawton” Chiles also understood how to do, and in a way his successors have seemed less interested in doing.
This is a new Florida — one increasingly shaped by the manias of the current age, filling will so-called “COVID refugees” and others coursing in by the millions to see if the state lives up to the billing on Fox News opinion shows.
It’s not Bob Graham’s Florida anymore.
As a governor and a senator, and beyond, he was willing to question the orthodoxies of the day.
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The best example of that — or at least the most popularly accessible — was his staunch opposition to the Iraq War in 2003, a time when the media and the political establishment was clamoring for that fateful commitment.
Time and experience proved him right. Far from having liberated Iraq, America poured trillions of dollars into the region, only to end up seeing Iraq aligned with Iran — a surreal outcome for those who remember the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
After leaving the Senate and while pushing 80 years old, Graham pushed then-President Barack Obama for disclosure of the so-called “28 pages” that detailed Saudi links to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He had pushed for the release of the material while in the Senate, a move rebuffed by colleagues and by then-President George W. Bush, who said releasing the material would “make it harder” to “win the war on terror.”
“Eventually, all of this information is going to come out anyway. It’s just a question of when,” Graham told me in 2016, shortly before the material was declassified. He was blunt, saying that Bush had already stained his legacy, and Obama – though “late” in giving the American people a little more truth about one of the most fateful times in our history – at least was in a position to achieve 11th hour redemption.
But it’s not just the big-picture stuff that made Graham great.
It was the little things that didn’t make headlines as well.
Bob Graham was a people person, not an entertainer or headline-hunter – a model that worked in the Florida of its time but has seen its denouement since.
The 2018 election for governor saw two people running who could have carried, to some degree, the Graham legacy or ethos. The first one was obviously his daughter Gwen, who was the frontrunner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination until the end. Negative ads targeted her, clearing a path for Andrew Gillum to overcome a lack of funding and galvanize a youth vote that had no context for the Graham legacy.
The second one? Adam Putnam. The former agriculture commissioner is and was Republican, but he represented someone who at least spoke the language of Florida. At a campaign stop here in Jacksonville where protesters for the rights of agricultural workers showed up, Putnam engaged them and disarmed them. They might have been on the opposite sides of economic issues, but they spoke the same language.
Today, Florida leaders often don’t speak our language, much less to our concerns.
Graham’s life touched many people I know, and some stories can’t be told here because they are personal and not mine to tell. And his legacy is carried on locally by his former aide and literary collaborator Chris Hand, the former Alvin Brown chief of staff and current political commentator who teamed up with Graham on his book, America, the Owner’s Manual: You Can Fight City Hall-and Win.
The book doesn’t suggest that it’s easy to win. Or that you’ll win every time. Indeed, as Graham’s own life teaches us, civic involvement includes many seasons of disappointment amidst the successes lionized in histories of a given era.
But it’s not just civic involvement.
It’s also being a decent person, as Mayor Donna Deegan noted in a pithy personal remembrance of the man:
“Bob Graham was Florida’s governor when I was a cub reporter covering the Florida Legislature right out of college. He made me feel at ease and always remembered me by name. It’s how he treated everyone. Godspeed to a great man,” Deegan posted to social media just after Graham’s passing was announced.
We’ll never see his like among us again. And without his selfless approach to public service, Florida never would have gotten to be what it once was.
