My Story, It’S My Job

Table of Contents Forward VII Page 2 Page 53 I VIII Page 4 Page 59 II IX Page 10 Page 71 III X Page 25 Page 84 IV XI Page 30 Page 100 V XII Page 38 Page 115 VI Page 43 Paid for by Lindsey Graham 2016 2 veryone has a story. Not everyone has to tell it, of course, and most people have the good sense not to. But if you’re in my line of work, and the time arrives when you start imagining a big promotion, and you let your imagination get the better of you, you are by custom expected to give a general account of your life. The thought is that somewhere in the story of your early life, your people and place, your achievements and setbacks, Ehides the key to understanding how you acquired such a notion in the first place. I didn’t try to produce an exhaustive account of my life. That would try the patience of readers more than necessary. I thought it was better to take a more impressionistic approach to the material, so to speak, just a glance back at the experiences that most influenced the course of my life for good or ill. I haven’t included an account of my congressional career. I’ve produced only what you might call my backstory, which ends with my election to Congress. From that point on, 3 most of my life is a matter of public record, and falls under the heading of “recent events,” as most of the issues I’ve been involved with in Congress remain the subject of debate today. I believe I’ve gotten better at the job over the years. I enjoy the work and am grateful to have it. But I’m pretty sure I was a fully developed human being before I got to Washington. I think a person’s story should point the reader to the why, and less so to the who. I’m a U.S. Senator, but that’s not my story, it’s my job. It doesn’t tell you much about me really. It doesn’t tell you why I became a senator other than I convinced the voters of South Carolina to grant me the privilege. People have seen me on TV or met me on a campaign. Maybe they’ve just heard my name abused from time to time. They know I’m Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina. But they don’t know how I came to be that guy. What follows is that story, the important parts of it anyway. It’s not a tale of woe or of triumph. It’s a story of the people and places I was lucky to know, and the life I’ve been lucky to live. I don’t propose that it’s a better story than anyone else’s. It’s just my story, and paraphrasing Mark Twain, it’s the truth, mainly. Lindsey Graham Seneca, South Carolina 4 I ’m from the Upstate, the northwest corner of South Carolina. It’s a fast growing region in the state, both in terms of economic development and population growth, as commercial investment continues to proliferate along the I-85 corridor. The Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson metro area is home to regional offices for Fortune 500 manufacturers and financial institutions and the North American operations of foreign investors such as BMW and Michelin. But when I was growing up there in Ithe second half of the last century, the Upstate was mostly farming and textile mill country. It’s beautiful country, too. Rising and falling in the foothills and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a landscape of wild rivers, waterfalls and mountain lakes, state parks, national forests and quiet country crossroads within a few minutes drive of busy cities, commercial hubs, and prominent universities. Take a drive on Highway 11, the old Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway, through scenery as grand as the most popular natural attractions in the eastern United States. 5 My dad took me fishing in Lake Hartwell and on the Chattooga River. He took me hunting on my grandparents’ farm. Like any other boy would have, I concentrated my attention on the fun of catching a fish or getting a rabbit. But I remember being aware, too, of the beauty of my surroundings, sunlight filtered through treetops, morning mist in the hollows, birdsong at the lakeshore. I’ve always known it’s a special place to grow up. Most of my growing up, though, happened on the main street of a small mill town, in my parents’ business establishment, a combination beer joint, restaurant, liquor store and pool hall, the Sanitary Cafe, my childhood home. I was born in Seneca in Oconee County, in the same hospital, Oconee Memorial, where former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards was born. I’ve joked that John and I were born in different wings of the hospital, he in the left wing and I in the right. I could also joke that I never went very far in life. I live in Seneca today, just a few miles from that hospital. I grew up in the town of Central in Pickens County, about ten miles east of Seneca. Central was a railroad town founded by Scots-Irish settlers ten years after the Civil War ended. It’s located exactly halfway between Charlotte and Atlanta on the old Atlantic and Richmond Line, and the railway built its maintenance depot, Central Station, there. The busy tracks run right through downtown Central today. By the end of the 19th century, the maintenance operation had moved to Greenville. But Central was spared extinction by the arrival early in the 20th Century of the soon to be dominant industry of the Upstate, textile mills, and the Southern Wesleyan University. Issaqueena Mills set up shop in Central in 1906. It went bust in the Depression. But Cannon Mills purchased the plant in 1936, and still owned it when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. It was the main employer in town, and the center of the local economy. Central was organized like a medieval village. The plant was the castle. The executives and shift 6 supervisors lived in the best houses closest to the castle, which were surrounded by successive rings of company owned homes that mill workers rented by the month. It seemed like every place in Central that wasn’t named after the town was named Cannon. There was Cannon Memorial Baptist Church, where I went to Bible school, and Cannon Field, where I played baseball, and Cannon Memorial Hospital in the neighboring town of Pickens. We might have named the bar after the place, too, since most of our customers worked there or at the grain mill just across the railroad tracks from the bar. My mother’s people, the Walters, were farmers. When my mother, Millie, was a young girl, her family left their farm near Elbert County, Georgia and bought a hundred acres of Upstate red clay and rolling hills in Earl’s Grove near Seneca. They raised cattle and hogs, and grew cotton and corn. Once a month when I was young, my folks would take me on a Sunday to visit my grandmother at the old homestead. When my father had a heart attack in his fifties, my mother sent me to the farm to live with my grandmother while he recuperated. I have only dim memories of my grandfather, who died before I started kindergarten. I have a picture of him holding me when I was must have been about two, and I faintly recall attending his wake at the farm. I inherited his double barrel shotgun when I was a kid. I still own it today. It’s one of my most cherished possessions. I remember my grandmother vividly and fondly, a very slight, stooped, hardworking woman. She was quiet, rarely raising her voice, uncomplaining, tough minded and loving. My mother was very much like her. While I can’t say farming’s endless chores and constant attention to the whims of nature ever appealed to me, I loved the farm itself. I loved hunting rabbits and birds in its fields and hills with my Dad and uncles, and enjoyed spending time outdoors with my cousins, especially Jerry, Marlene and Gail, who were close to my age. 7 Starting from Top clockwise: The Walters family, with Millie on far right. Lindsey, age 12, with friends in drug store dressed for a town festival. Lindsey and Darline, 1964. 8 My Mom had four sisters and five brothers, my aunts Sis, Verna Mae, Nell and Jean, and my uncles, Stewart, Zell, Tom, Lloyd, and Bobby, the much loved youngest child of the family, who died in a boating accident when he was hardly older than a boy, and whose loss his surviving siblings still grieve. My Uncle Zell married my dad’s sister, my Aunt Mildred, so their children, Jerry, Gail, Wayne and Rainey, are my double first cousins and were almost like brothers and sister to me when I was growing up. Zell stayed in farming, and he and Mildred bought a place near the family farm. Rainey still farms there today. My mother and her other siblings had to leave farming in their teens in search of gainful employment in town. The farm had produced a living but not much income. It really hadn’t amounted to more than subsistence farming. The Walters were part of a generation of southern country folks that saw most children in large families seek occupations other than farming.

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