Lindsey Graham never got rich. That’s an important thing worth knowing about him.
He died Saturday night with a net worth of just under $1.5 million. That put him 294th out of 535 voting members of Congress — closer to the bottom than the top, after 31 years in Washington and a run leading his party’s foreign policy. Compare that to Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia, worth more than $664 million. Both men drew the same Senate salary. One came home with a fortune. The other came home with a townhouse and some bond funds.
That tells you something about a man.
Graham grew up over a pool hall. His parents ran it — the Sanitary Cafe, in Central, South Carolina — and he slept in the room behind it. He was the first in his family to go to college. Then, while he was still a student, both his parents died within fifteen months of each other. Graham was left to raise his 13-year-old sister himself. He got her through school. He didn’t complain about it, and he didn’t build a legend out of it either.
He just did it.
He went on to serve in the Air Force, then in the House starting in 1995, then in the Senate from 2003. He became one of the most recognizable Republicans in the country. He ran for president in 2016 and lost. Through all of it, the money never followed the power. For ten straight years, watchdogs ranked him among the least wealthy senators in the chamber. He never married. He never had children. He kept a modest place near the Capitol and another back home in Seneca.
Graham died Saturday evening, not long after a trip to Ukraine, from what his office called a sudden illness. The cause, doctors later found, was a ruptured aorta brought on by chronic heart disease.
He was 71. He spent his life in the arena and left it with less than most people who never went near it. That’s not nothing. That’s a life spent on the job, not on the take.
