The Last of the Three Amigos - The Atlantic

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More than 20 years ago, Senator Lindsey Graham visited Ukraine for the first time. An election was looming, one that would be reversed and run again, and that would ultimately produce victory for the pro-Western Orange coalition. In the summer of 2004, however, all of that lay in the future. Graham, then in his first Senate term, joined his friend John McCain on a congressional delegation. At the time I was serving as McCain’s foreign-policy adviser, and tagged along.<br>We met President Leonid Kuchma at his dacha in Crimea—a Soviet construction, it had an escalator leading down to the beach. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had recently been through town, praising Ukraine’s contribution of troops to the war in Iraq. For Graham, however, Ukrainian democracy and independence were at least as important. “Participating in Iraq does not,” he said, “give any country the right to hold elections that are not fair.” He reiterated the message to Kuchma in private, and then to opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and others. He added that Ukraine should have “people free of fear willingly voting for the candidate they want.”<br>There was little political upside for the new senator in advocating for Ukrainian freedom. But that was Lindsey Graham. Years later, after Russia’s invasion, after dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy, and despite Graham’s own embrace of President Trump, his commitment endured. It is fitting, if tragic, that his last public act took place in Kyiv. He cared about Ukraine, and about America’s role in keeping it free, to the end.<br>That’s not all Graham cared about. Over more than five years, I traveled to dozens of countries with him, and saw him work the Senate on a weekly basis. He was the last surviving member of the “three amigos,” after the deaths of McCain and Joe Lieberman. True believers in the use of American power for good, they worked and traveled the world together. And there was no one like Lindsey.<br>Anne Applebaum: The quintessential politician of this era<br>He was smart, even if he sometimes played a southern hayseed. “This is my first time in Ukraine,” he drawled to Kuchma back in 2004. “Y’all got a beautiful country here. People seem real nice.” Then the zinger: “But if the elections aren’t fair, we’re going to have to take action when we get back to Washington.” In meetings, McCain sometimes joked that the translator was there to help the Americans understand Graham’s accent. On occasion he’d add that Graham’s favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. Graham would agree.<br>He was also the funniest man in the Senate. During a meeting in Kyrgyzstan, an eager House delegation joined our group. Not realizing that our counterparts were fluent in English, one member spoke very slowly and very loudly, emphasizing that, among other vital commonalities, both the United States and Kyrgyzstan have mountains. Graham elbowed me. “Take me to your leader,” he whispered. “We come in peace!” Running for president in 2015, he made an appearance among the Mitt Romney faithful. “We tried tall, good-lookin’, smart, nice, great family,” Graham said. “Vote for me. We’re not going down that road again!”<br>During the brief U.S.-Libya thaw, Graham traveled to Tripoli. In the time-honored tradition of tin-pot dictators, Muammar Qaddafi kept the delegation waiting for hours. Smarting after his son Hannibal’s arrest in Geneva, the Libyan leader had announced a lunatic proposal to partition Switzerland. Graham, anticipating the meeting, said that he would praise Qaddafi as “the only leader with the courage and vision to do what we all know, in our heart of hearts, is right.” (He was kidding, and he didn’t actually say that to Qaddafi. He seemed to like Switzerland.) That night, the delegation finally sped through the desert in black sedans. After the high-speed convoy turned off the highway onto a dirt road, we came upon Qaddafi’s legendary tent. “I expected something out of Arabian Nights,” Graham said. “This looks more like a Winnebago.”<br>In actual meetings, Graham was deadly serious—usually. In Bhutan, we met with King Singye Wangchuk, who had married four sisters. “Your majesty,” the senator began, “I understand you have four wives. You’re going to have to tell me your secret, because I can’t even seem to find one.” Graham succeeded Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who wed a 22-year-old while in his 60s. Graham, who never married, would sometimes point out that, given Thurmond’s record, his wife had not been born yet.<br>Over the five years that I traveled with him, we swam in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, smoked hookah in the Islamabad Marriott, and sailed on the Bay of Tallinn with Senator Hillary Clinton. He walked around Lake Como wearing a Joint Task Force Guantánamo baseball cap, not the greatest exercise in public diplomacy. The more far-flung the place, the better: Yemen, South Ossetia, Greenland, Yukon, Svalbard, Hanoi, Beirut,...