Sunday morning, I started looking in some old files for several pieces of correspondence from years ago. One was a thank-you note. Another was a letter from the 2020 United States Census Committee, and the third one was another note from the office of Senator Lindsey Graham. They had all been sent to City Hall, and two of the three were in a handwritten scrawl addressed to my name, City Hall, Swainsboro, Georgia. The letter from the Census folks was spit out by some random computer in Washington and was a perfect example of what we all despise about big government agencies. It concerned a dispute over who should be counted and who shouldn’t be counted in the 2020 census count of Swainsboro. It was mostly a meritless jumbo of minutiae. It was a masterpiece of government red tape written by a master egghead of red tape that told me what a terrible mistake we had made in our city count and how I didn’t understand policy. Right after that, Mr. Egghead went on to do a backward summersault and informed me that the city would be allowed to conduct the count just like we wanted to and in fact had already done. Then Mr. Egghead apologized for the delay and thanked me for questioning the count. At the bottom of the letter, it was copied cc: Senator Lindsey Graham.
All of this happened about a week and a half after I had sent Senator Graham a note thanking him for helping the Emanuel County Development Authority with a federal grant problem in the construction of the Pathway Technology Park in Swainsboro. In that note, I also offhandedly mentioned the problem with the Census people. In my life, I have been very fortunate to know some fine people in government, many willing to help. But I didn’t mention the census problem to any of them. I just happened to have referred to it in my note to Senator Graham. To my amazement, a week and a half later, the problem had been taken care of. In my imaginative mind, I still have the vision of Senator Graham chasing Mr. Egghead up and down the hall in the Senate Building with a hickory switch. Graham was the kind of public servant who lived up to the title and the job. To him, state lines didn’t matter. If he could help, it was his natural inclination to just pitch in and get the ball rolling. In the years after that, there were several other situations where Senator Graham provided quiet assistance behind the scenes for our area.
More than 20 years ago, I made a small contribution to Lindsey Graham’s first senatorial campaign because he struck me as a fresh, balanced and sensible voice in national politics. Although it was small, that contribution was personally acknowledged by Graham, and it began a paper thread that exchanged ideas on South Carolina Gamecocks and Georgia Bulldogs football and other matters dealing mostly with the general state of politics. Senator Graham was the dean of a disappearing breed of statesmen. He was well-read and extremely talented in foreign affairs and diplomacy. You may not always have liked his stance, but you were never in doubt about where he stood. He was frank and outspoken, but at the core, he was a gentleman with an overwhelming love for his country and its well-being. He might have been from a little town in upper South Carolina, but his reach spanned the whole country. Senator Lindsey Graham will be greatly missed.
