Whenever someone as rare as Bob Graham dies, it’s an occasion to wonder whether such leadership is a thing of the past.
Graham, who died Tuesday at age 87, was as unlike a demagogue as a politician could possibly be. He was no phony glad-hander, either. Apart from the daring that it took to defy history and the odds to run for governor in the first place, his career was marked by such caution and moderation that an exasperated Florida editorial writer nicknamed him “Governor Jell-O” after an especially indecisive 1981 legislative session.
But once Graham made up his mind, he let nothing stop him from making major improvements in education and the environment in Florida. He was a Save the Everglades pioneer, launched the successful campaign to restore the Kissimmee River, supported stronger growth laws and joined his friend Jimmy Buffett’s Save the Manatee campaign.
He insisted on investing more in schools and universities. When a wayward freighter destroyed part of the Sunshine Skyway bridge near Tampa, he refused to simply replace it, insisting on a revolutionary iconic bridge that bears his name. He was steadfast in crisis situations such as hurricanes, the Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees and a surge of Haitian migrants.
Graham appointed four outstanding Supreme Court justices: Parker Lee McDonald; Raymond Ehrlich; Rosemary Barkett, the court’s first woman member; and Leander Shaw Jr., the second Black justice, who wrote the historic 1989 opinion protecting abortion under Florida’s constitutional right of privacy. That was the landmark decision that the court’s current reactionary majority repealed on April 1.
It was by Graham’s signature that executions resumed in Florida in 1979. He presided over 16 and drew unrelenting criticism from opponents of capital punishment. He was also the last governor who granted clemency to any death row inmates, sparing six.
Moving to the U.S. Senate after two terms as a Democratic governor, Graham was one of 23 senators who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now widely and rightly regarded as the nation’s worst foreign policy blunder.
His opposition was particularly significant because of his chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee during and after the 9/11 attacks. He co-chaired the joint congressional investigation and never tired of trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia accountable for some of the 15 Saudi citizens who hijacked aircraft. He persisted even after leaving office following 2003 heart surgery that ended his campaign for the presidency.
Someday, perhaps, the nation will learn how right Bob Graham was about that, too.
It was in his character to resist war fever. The evidence simply didn’t persuade him that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had anything to do with 9/11 or with accumulating weapons of mass destruction.
He was a good governor, a good senator and would have been a good president (despite the harping among journalists about the detailed notebooks he obsessively kept).
But few people saw that future potential when he arrived in Tallahassee in 1967 among the largest group of House freshmen ever, thanks to court-ordered reapportionment. A subsequent special election swept out so many lawmakers that Graham was suddenly thrust into chairmanship of a budget panel for higher education, which he used to launch his reputation in that field.
As a state senator, he became one of several “Doghouse Democrats,” so named for resisting the deeply conservative leadership of Senate President Dempsey Barron.
Not even his wife, Adele, thought he had a chance to become governor. There had never been a governor from Miami, and Graham’s reputation as a child of wealth and privilege was considered an insurmountable handicap.
He overcame it with one of the most original strategies in American political history. It was a commitment to periodic “workdays” on which he took on hundreds of jobs, many as menial as picking tomatoes, hauling trash and gutting mullet, to learn how less privileged Floridians led their lives — and to show he cared. He not only finished every day’s duties, but kept doing work days as governor and senator, 921 jobs in all.
Critics called it hokey. But it shed his rich-kid image and made for iconic campaign photographs that drove opponents to distraction.
Graham credited the workdays to a high school teacher, Sue Reilly, who challenged him to see for himself what her day was like. “He agreed,” according to the state archives, “thinking it would never happen.” Reilly made it happen at Carol City High School in Miami Lakes, the Graham family’s development.
Without the workdays, which University of Florida historian David Colburn called Florida’s most effective media campaign of the 20th century, it’s likely that Graham would have had no more success at running for governor than did his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, who placed third in the 1944 Democratic primary.
Former Florida Attorney General Robert Shevin, a legislative colleague also from Miami, was favored to win the 1978 Democratic primary and did, but with only 35.2% of the vote in a field of seven.
In the runoff, Graham vaulted from 10 points back to win the nomination with 53% of the vote, sweeping all but one county in the Panhandle.
Graham’s choice of Wayne Mixson, a senator from rural upstate Marianna, as his lieutenant governor, formed the “Graham-Cracker” ticket, and when he left Tallahassee eight years later, Graham’s popularity was an astounding 83%.
He was the last governor who owed his election to the runoff, or second primary, which the Legislature imprudently abolished in 2002.
Without the ability to coalesce behind a moderate runner-up, both major parties are now vulnerable to their extreme elements. We’re much less likely to ever again see a solid, hard-working consensus-builder like Bob Graham, and Florida is poorer for it.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
