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- [00:01]
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- [01:59]
Martin (Host)
this is a special episode of history as it happens, it's July 12, 2026. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina conservative who won his first Senate seat in 2002 and was expected to win re election to a fifth term in November, is dead. He was 71. According to preliminary reports, he died from cardiac arrest. His office says he had a brief and sudden illness. In Washington. As soon as the news broke on social media, the debate began over Graham's legacy, his devotion to Donald Trump after first condemning him during the 2016 campaign, and Graham's unflinching support of US military interventionism and his support for Israel. You are of course entitled to your own opinion on whether Lindsey Graham left a positive legacy. And whatever your view, there is no denying he was influential. His political career was very long. He was first elected to the U.S. house of Representatives in 1994. And a few years later was a House manager in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
- [02:58]
House Manager / Lawyer
Thank you. This whole idea about being able to try our case boils down to this. They mentioned an impeachment trial of 130 years ago that resulted in an acquittal of Andrew Johnson. The conventional wisdom was that the votes were there to remove him about two months, maybe a little more, a little less. They had a trial that was meaningful and Andrew Johnson was acquitted. All I'm asking for here is a meaningful presentation on why the House managers and the House of Representatives believe Bill Clinton committed high crimes and that he should in fact be removed. And if the vote at the end of the day is against what we argue, so be it.
- [03:37]
Martin (Host)
He became a proponent of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a colossal mistake for which he never apologized. Here is Graham questioning then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 at a house hearing about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
- [03:52]
House Manager / Lawyer
Why don't we just be honest with people? Everybody in the administration has been telling us that Saddam Hussein has to go. That's what the gentleman's question was about. No matter what we do with inspections. We had two weapons inspectors in here, said that. It's really a joke. You'll never find what you need to find. They're masters at deception. We just need to level the people here in this country and in the world. Post 9 11, we view Saddam Hussein as a threat to this country, period.
- [04:21]
Martin (Host)
And Senator Graham left an important mark on the federal judiciary. Here to discuss it all now is Jeremy Surry, who teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin, and he writes the Democracy of Hope newsletter on Substack. Hello, Jeremy Surry.
- [04:35]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Nice to be with you, Martin.
- [04:37]
Martin (Host)
How influential was Lindsey Graham?
- [04:39]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Hugely influential. He occupies the seat that Strom Thurmond had occupied for many years before from South Carolina. And this is a seat in the Senate that has often been a very influential seat in Republican politics, before that in Dixiecrat politics. And Graham was a major voice in foreign policy, national security and. And Supreme Court and judicial related issues.
- [05:03]
Martin (Host)
A much different Republican than Strom Thurmond.
- [05:07]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Yes and no. He was certainly not an anti civil rights Republican, but he was a Republican who believed in a strong presidency and a Republican who was not open to many of the issues around civil rights that Democrats cared about.
- [05:24]
Martin (Host)
Yeah, I guess what I mean is there was a point in time where being a stalwart segregationist was accepted, was expected actually, from the south. As you say, Graham wasn't necessarily a champion on some of these issues. But by the time he's running for Senate from South Carolina, you couldn't be a Strom Thurmond anymore.
- [05:44]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
No, he was not a segregationist, but he was a critic of the use of the federal government to help vulnerable communities. And he believed that, as Strom Thurmond did, that states should have major responsibilities over questions about a women's right to choose, over questions about healthcare. So in that way, he aligned with many of Strom Thurmond's positions, but he was not an art segregationist in the way that Strom Thurmond was.
- [06:05]
Martin (Host)
Certainly. Yeah, of course, that issue had been resolved already, legally, judicially.
- [06:09]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Graham's critics would say that he was finding a soft form of segregation, a soft form of anti civil rights legislation that didn't look as mean and didn't look as illegal, but had many of the same effects. That's what his critics would claim. That's a fair criticism. It's probably not an entirely fair criticism, but it is an accurate criticism of some of the effects of his policies. For example, he opposed Obamacare. He opposed pieces of federal legislation that provided welfare benefits to communities. He supported President Trump's efforts to deport thousands of people living in the United States. So civil rights advocates would say that Lindsey Graham was carrying on the tradition of Strom Thurmond, but in a different way.
- [06:52]
Martin (Host)
And he opposed gay rights. And rumors followed him throughout his entire career that he may have been gay. He denied that. When I saw the news, the first thing I thought of was how Graham personified, or was a face of this recent transformation of the Republican Party from a political party to a personality cult around Donald Trump. This is 2015 at a town hall in New Hampshire. You'd remember. Lindsey Graham was running for president. He's asked a question from an attendee at the town hall at the start of this clip.
- [07:25]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
Would you be the first presidential candidate to publicly take a stand and say that you will not support Donald Trump if he becomes the nominee for president?
- [07:37]
House Manager / Lawyer
Okay, really good question.
- [07:39]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
I've called him every name I know to call him.
- [07:44]
House Manager / Lawyer
From race baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. I'm running out of adjectives.
- [07:53]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
I'm running as a Republican. Do I want to buy a ticket on the Titanic? No.
- [07:59]
Martin (Host)
Well, he did buy a ticket. Whether it's the Titanic, we don't know yet.
- [08:03]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Well, I think Graham went through three phases that we've seen the Republican Party go through in the last 30 years. Martin. First, he was a Reagan Republican, someone who argued for smaller government Someone who argued for reducing many of the economic restrictions on entrepreneurs and others of the 1980s. Then, at the end of the Cold War, he became a very stalwart moderate on national security. He was a leading figure, working with Senators Sam Nunn and John McCain to help remove nuclear scientists from Russia, help fund those countries in their transition. So he was in some ways a bipartisan foreign policy figure, working with Sam Nunn, Richard Lugar, various other figures. And then as the Republican Party moved right, he moved right as well. He abandoned his support for campaign finance reform, which he had supported for a long time. And even before Donald Trump appeared on the scene, Lindsey Graham felt that the party was moving to the right toward backlash policy politics, toward retribution politics, toward an argument against helping communities that had done well, especially immigrant communities over the last decade or so. And so he got on board with what we might call a right wing agenda, which in many ways contradicted where he had been in the first two phases of his career.
- [09:21]
Martin (Host)
How do you explain him? Well, this happens all the time in politics. That guy's an sob, but now I love him. What's your take on how Graham eventually became a stalwart Trump acolyte?
- [09:32]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Well, I think there's an easy explanation. He just loved power. This is a man who had been in politics since the early 1990s when he was in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He didn't have any life outside of politics. He was a bachelor, as you referred to before, and his entire life was about power. And when Donald Trump accumulated power, Lindsey Graham kissed up to power to increase his own power. Another clip that's interesting to find is, you know, on the night of the insurrection on January 6, 2021, Lindsey Graham said on the floor of the Senate that Trump had lost and that this was wrong, what was happening. He changed his tune weeks later, as other Republicans did, as he recognized that Donald Trump was not dead in the water and that Donald Trump had support within the Republican Party and might make a comeback. He got on board that train. So it's all about power with Lindsey Graham. And this is a problem in our politics today, Martin. There are too many figures of that stature who seem to care about power more than the country or more than any moral or ethical position.
- [10:38]
Martin (Host)
Here's that clip.
- [10:39]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he's been a consequential president. But today, first thing you'll see, all I can say Is count me out. Enough is enough. I've tried to be helpful, but when this Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that they didn't violate the supreme, the Constitution of Wisconsin, I agree with the three, but I accept the four. If Al Gore could accept five, four, he's not president, I can accept Wisconsin four to three.
- [11:15]
Martin (Host)
And that was him referring to court cases that were not going into Trump's favor.
- [11:20]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Every court case, when he gets Trump.
- [11:21]
Martin (Host)
That's right. He said, count me out. As you mentioned, he was referring to January 6th, like, enough is enough, it's over. He lost. He later said that he didn't mean he was out on Trump altogether, that he was just giving up on. I don't know. As we know, politicians can contort themselves to say what they meant. Didn't really mean it. I meant something else. Well, we know, though, it wasn't just him. Mitch McConnell had an opportunity to vote to convict Trump after the impeachment and ban him from public office forever and did not do it.
- [11:51]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Yeah, no, this is the problem. Right. We will, as historians, I think, write about this period, will have many things to say, but one of the things we will say is there is a epidem of cowardice among Republican Party leaders. Men like Graham and McConnell of esteemed stature. People who had been in the Senate, in Graham's case, almost 24 years, who, when they had a figure who so clearly not only violated the Constitution but destroyed parts of the Senate, went against the Senate's very institutional powers. They chose to allow this figure to do that rather than protect their own institution that they had lived for because they wanted short term power and they were afraid to stand up. Unfortunately, that's part of the problem we're seeing with our republic today.
- [12:38]
Martin (Host)
Yeah, calling people names on the campaign trail is one thing. Voting to convict them after an insurrection in a Senate impeachment trial, they didn't do it. A couple more things here. Jeremy Graham on foreign policy. He became almost a cartoon character, especially in these last decade or so. He had a one size fits all solution to every problem overseas. Drop bombs or invade. He never seemed to learn anything there.
- [13:04]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Well, he became a sort of simpleton hawk on many, many issues. But he wasn't that earlier on, and I do think we have to give him credit. He was part of a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans in the 1990s who worked very hard to secure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, to remove nuclear weapons from Ukraine, to provide funding to scientists, to AR control, and to many of the cooperative Institutions that were built after the Cold War, many of which Graham and Trump have now destroyed. But he was a big supporter of those. I think he became overly hawkish because it was a simple position, and it seemed to resonate with militarists on the far right of the Republican Party.
- [13:46]
Martin (Host)
What matters is what endures. We talk about this all the time on the podcast. Jeremy, one of Graham and really the modern Republican Party conservative movements. One of the most enduring legacies, influential legacies, will be the transformation of the judiciary. And Graham played a really important role there as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. First with Kavanaugh and then. Well, no, it was first with Merrick Garland and then with Kavanaugh.
- [14:12]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
What you want to do is destroy this guy's life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020. You've said that, not me. You've got nothing to apologize for. When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello. Cause I voted for them. I would never do to them what you've done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn't have done what you've done to this guy.
- [14:47]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Probably Graham's most enduring legacy will be that he was one of the senators, along with Mitch McConnell, two of the old senators who really, really gave, unlike limited support to efforts by Trump and other Republicans to push the Supreme Court to the far right as it has, and to create a strongly conservative, ultra conservative court that's really out of touch with the American public. They did a number of things in addition to supporting conservative justices, they eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so you could push someone through it with 51 votes, as happened with Kavanaugh, rather than with the 60 that were needed before. And second, they also refused to give a hearing to Merrick Garland, who was Barack Obama's nominee to replace Antonin Scalia. That was unprecedented. The Constitution says that the Senate has a role of advice and consent. It doesn't say the Senate decides whether to give a hearing or not. They prevented a hearing from coming to the floor because they were afraid there would be enough votes for Garland to be confirmed. So those are two legacies. Those are two areas where Graham played an instrumental role as a chairman of a committee and as a leading Republican. And so in that sense, the conservative court of today is Graham's court.
- [16:01]
Martin (Host)
Yeah, the Supreme Court and also lower courts are filled with conservatives.
- [16:04]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
That's True. That's true. Many justices in the lower court level, yes.
- [16:07]
Martin (Host)
All right, last thing here is age. Graham wasn't really that old. He was retirement age. He was 71. And he appeared healthy. He was active. He was just on a trip to Ukraine. But as we know, if the preliminary reports are true, people who look and appear healthy can die of a heart attack. He's not even close, or was not even close to the oldest, most frail and sickly people who hold on to the very end. You have anything to say about this age issue? I mean, voters keep sending these representatives back to Congress. Until that changes, I don't see how it'll change.
- [16:40]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
Yeah, there's a long history of, especially in the Senate, older men serving who were not healthy and often weren't even able to show up to vote. So this is an old problem. We don't have a mechanism to provide for the easy removal of someone who is incapacitated but still alive. And we should say that we don't want anyone to die where we're simply saying that people who are unable to do their job should be put into retirement and replaced by people who are able to do the job. This has become more of an issue as people are living longer. And there are more ways to keep people alive, of course. And also, there is such an advantage to incumbency now. I mean, let's look at it. Martin Graham had been elected four times to the Senate. That's 24 years. McConnell has been elected, I think, at least as many times, if not more. There is an argument to be made for term limits. It would, at the very least, make this less likely to happen as often as it is happening, particularly now. We have a Senate that is far older than the rest of the country, filled with people who are questionable in their abilities to perform their offices. And so this is an argument for term limits. It's also an argument for voters not simply reelecting the same old horses time and again.
- [17:55]
Martin (Host)
Yeah, I'm not for term limits, but, you know, I think people need to have the Republican virtue, as our founders would have put it, to step aside once they're no longer capable of doing their jobs.
- [18:06]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
I'm not for term limits either, necessarily, but I do think four terms in the Senate is probably too long for most people. 24 years in that role. I mean, just think, Lindsey Graham was elected to the Senate really before we even had an Internet. And now he was making decisions on things like crypto and artificial intelligence. Could he really be in touch with that world? It's Hard to imagine.
- [18:30]
Martin (Host)
Out of touch with younger voters for sure. And he was just about to start his next term. He would have been in his late 70s when that ended, and he probably would have run for reelection again and stayed in the Senate into his 80s, as is now somewhat commonplace.
- [18:45]
Jeremy Surry (Historian)
You know your point about virtues of the republic. You know, the founders presumed that public service would not be the only job people had, that they would go into public service and then they would do other things as well. There's nothing wrong with being a career politician. But there is something wrong, perhaps in defining your life by holding onto one office and just staying in that one office. There is something unhealthy for a democracy about that.
- [19:09]
House Manager / Lawyer
What makes America great, that's the discussion we need to have.
- [19:15]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
Tolerance,
- [19:18]
House Manager / Lawyer
the ability to pick your own leaders to speak up and have a say.
- [19:24]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
For a young woman to have a
- [19:27]
House Manager / Lawyer
say about the future of her children, for you to go to your church and for me to go to my
- [19:33]
Lindsey Graham (Archive Clips)
mosque
- [19:35]
House Manager / Lawyer
or not practice religion at all, that is our strength. That's truly what makes us great. And when we as a nation lose our way, as we have in the past, we always regret it.
- [19:53]
Martin (Host)
This has been a special episode of history as it happens, the death of Lindsey Graham. If you're a subscriber and you've made it this far, well, thank you for subscribing to the show. If you don't subscribe, think about supporting the important work we're doing here. Go to historyasithappens.com to sign up. Takes just a couple of minutes and costs only $5 a month. Ad free listening, bonus content and early early access.
- [20:22]
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