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Man in the Middle
But the audience wants to know about the tension just below Graham's serene surface. Sure enough, when Graham opens the room for questions, the first person up asks if he'll quit the Senate to run for governor in 1998.
Slightly pained, Graham gives his pat response: he won't decide until after the November elections. Later, his aides roll their eyes and profess bemusement. "It's the first thing everybody wants to know," says one wearily.
A week later in Washington, when a reporter asks Graham over breakfast in the Senate dining room about what will influence his decision, Graham hardly looks up from his bowl of granola and strawberries. Not only is he not making his decision until year-end, he says, he's decided not even to think about it until then. A disingenuous answer, perhaps, but with his innocent brown eyes and his chubby cheeks, Bob Graham always comes across as sincere.
"What he's doing is freezing people," asserts a Republican political operative who knows Graham well. "He is not only saying he's keeping his options open, he's telling the financial infrastructure of the Democratic Party to keep their options open, not to do anything right now," says the strategist.
He certainly has people in Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay's camp on edge. MacKay, who has announced he will run in 1998, shares a circle of close friends and fund-raisers with Graham. "Graham won't make up his mind and that's what's making them mad," says a top MacKay adviser in Tallahassee. "I think the more he strings this out, the more divisive it will become."
Or maybe, the longer Graham strings this out, the more likely nervous Democrats will be to beg him to run. "One problem the Democrats have in Florida is they are always looking for a 'deus ex machina' to bail them out. That's the role Chiles played in 1990, and it's the role they hope Bob Graham will play in 1998," says Robert L. Joffee, vice president with Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research in Miami. "It's a common belief among Democrats that, 'There's only one guy who can do this for us.' "
But if the Democrats need a man on a white horse, is Bob Graham really the right man? There is no diminishing his accomplishments and his enormous political capital. Fully 62% of Floridians have a favorable impression of him, according to the latest polls. "He may have some political enemies, but I don't know of any," says former Democratic Congressman Jim Bacchus, now a World Trade Organization judge. Graham has been a dominant political figure in Florida life over the last quarter century, and he is nearly the stuff of legend by now in some political quarters. Many Floridians remember Graham's two terms as governor as an era of honest progressive government combined with great promise and prosperity. It's tempting to assume that if Graham returned to Florida as governor, so would the good times that marked his first two administrations.
A thoughtful centrist
Yet a close look at 59-year-old Graham's record and temperament suggests that he might not be much happier in Tallahassee than he has been in Washington, D.C., in recent years. When he governed before, Democrats controlled the Legislature and the electorate didn't howl in outrage every time taxes rose. And while Graham did raise taxes to help pay for Florida's rapid growth, he failed to push for fundamental tax reform, something the next governor almost certainly will have to do. In a 1986 profile of several top Graham aides, Florida Trend noted that even in less contentious times, Graham needed a tough-minded staff to help him deal with the Legislature. Until hard-nosed Jacksonville businessman Dick Burroughs became chief of staff in 1981, Graham's image was that of a ditherer. A St. Petersburg Times editorial once dubbed him "Governor Jell-O."
In Washington, Graham has developed a reputation as a thoughtful centrist, but he has never sponsored a piece of major legislation that became law. If Florida is approaching a financial day of reckoning, as many believe, it is worth asking whether Graham would risk the enormous political capital he's built up over 30 years to push for reforms on taxes, education, entitlements or growth management. Maddeningly, the person who could answer the question says he's not even thinking about it.
In 1998, constitutional revision will be on the ballot for the first time since 1968, meaning voters could be asked to make changes to the state's tax system, the public school system, even to the balance of power between the governor, the legislature and the cabinet.
Rod Petrey, president of the Collins Center, a Tallahassee think tank, predicts there could be competing proposals to revise Florida's tax system - which could either open up new revenue streams or severely limit the state's taxing powers - and to reduce the independence of Florida Cabinet officials, thus increasing the governor's powers. "There could be a dramatic changeover in the next couple of years in the way Florida is governed," Petrey says.
And because these proposals will go to a statewide vote, candidates for governor will have to endorse one set or another: Both parties will stress making government more efficient, but Democrats probably will ask for new taxes to pay for schools, social services and infrastructure while Republicans will favor government that taxes less and offers less.
"I think we are approaching a train wreck, where our population growth continues to accelerate and the need to take care of the most needy of our citizens - children, the people with tremendous health problems, the elderly - continues to accelerate," says Board of Regents Chancellor Charles Reed, a former chief of staff to Graham in Tallahassee.
To Reed, that means the day is coming when the university system will turn away qualified students for lack of space. In just the next dozen years, the number of students graduating from Florida's public high schools will grow from 91,000 annually to 142,000. Building more schools and universities means paying more taxes or making draconian cuts in other government programs.
In short, 1998 has all the makings of a dramatic race."I think it's going to be a pivotal race," says MacKay. "I think candidates for governor are not going to be able to avoid saying how they would deal with these central issues."
Both MacKay and Jeb Bush, who is expected to be the GOP's choice for another run at the state house in 1998, often speak with disarming candor about controversial issues. MacKay openly calls for higher fees on new development, for example, which makes him anathema to builders. Bush supports giving parents vouchers and forcing public schools to compete for students, an idea many educators hate.
Graham, on the other hand, is as cautious as a football coach with a two-touchdown lead. Asked a tough question, he's as likely to turn it around and ask a reporter's opinion as he is to answer it. He won't even respond when asked what were the most difficult two or three votes he's ever had to make in the Senate. In meetings with his staff, Graham plays a Socratic role, listening to an aide's report then asking questions, rarely injecting his own opinions. "He's very deliberative, the way he works things through," says Sen. Jay Rockefeller, one of Graham's close friends.
And he eschews confrontation when possible. "I don't think politics has to move from being competitive to being confrontational," he says. "If you end up making enemies every time you disagree, you're not going to get anywhere."
Even a few admirers admit Graham's style is better suited to synthesizing ideas than leading with his own. "I don't think that's his inclination, to be the first person out," says Tom Herndon, who was Gov. Graham's planning and budget director. "His instinctive caution probably prevents him from being the first person out of the box on some of these leading issues. But he brings a tremendously powerful intellect to the issues. Somebody who is less studious might jump out first, and then somebody like Graham comes in behind and addresses these questions others may have overlooked."
Never discussed the death penalty
Graham is not just cautious, however. He's virtually opaque. A 1984 profile in the Miami Herald noted that many of Graham's longtime aides had never had a personal conversation with their boss. His wife said he'd never discussed with her his controversial support for the death penalty, even though protesters regularly disrupted his public events, including his 1980 nominating speech for Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention.
For years, he's carried the now-famous small notebook everywhere, recording all the little details of his day. His wife of 37 years, Adele, tells the story of a flight in South America, when the pilot warned the startled passengers that the plane was about to crash. During what might've been their last moments on earth, Adele Graham quaked while Bob jotted down the pilot's instructions on preparing for impact.
"He doesn't have the kind of charisma that some people are born with or cultivate," allows Herndon. "But he is always there working harder than anybody else."Graham, like other politicians, has become adept at avoiding discussion of tough issues. For example, bring up the subject of Florida's mediocre public schools, and Graham doesn't talk about solutions such as vouchers or trimming a larded education bureaucracy, like Bush, or about addressing the stresses caused by population growth, like MacKay. Rather, he spins out an anecdote about one of his four daughters, Virginia teacher Suzanne Gibson.
"If I can put it personally, my third daughter is a wonderful early childhood education teacher," he says over breakfast in Washington. "She taught for several years in Dade County. Her last year at a new elementary school in northwest Dade, she had 38 students in her kindergarten class. Then she got married and moved to Great Falls, Va., and taught in the Fairfax County system. The first year she taught kindergarten there, she had 24 students in her class.
"That's a pretty dramatic example of the level of concern about primary education in those two communities, and if you are somebody who is deciding 'Am I better off locating my software company in Great Falls, Va., or in Miami, Fla.,' 38-to-24 will be a figure that will be influential on your judgment as to the values of those communities."
Does that mean Graham favors raising taxes to build more schools and hire more teachers? Hard to say. Before one can ask, he pulls out a photo of his daughter's one-year-old triplets. "Her class size went from 38 to 24 to three," he beams. Similarly, Graham is a master at managing his image. Recent history shows no other Florida politician can match Graham's ability to connect with regular people, even though Graham himself is a Harvard-educated lawyer and a millionaire.
Back in the 1970s, when Graham was a mere state senator, he was given to delivering high-minded lectures on the Senate floor. At the time, the Legislature was dominated by rural conservatives, and Graham led the "Doghouse Democrats," so-called because their progressive ideas irked the leadership. Back then, Graham reflected his constituents in Dade County, who were so liberal that they re-elected Claude Pepper, Dante Fascell and Bill Lehman to the U.S. Congress for more than a generation.
When Graham ran for governor in 1978, he overhauled his Dade persona to reflect the conservatism that existed in the state as a whole. He stopped calling himself D. Robert Graham, becoming simply Bob. And to counter the image of the wealthy WASP with a Harvard degree, Graham borrowed an idea from Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and began spending days working at ordinary jobs, many of them menial. On his way to the state house, Graham did 100 of these jobs and wrote an illustrated book about it called "Workdays."
A sense of ordinary life
Aided by this new populist image, Graham upset heavily favored Attorney General Robert Shevin in the Democratic primary, then beat drug store magnate Jack Eckerd in the general election. He still spends one day each month on a workday. Many have called it a gimmick, but Graham says he genuinely enjoys it. Chancellor Reed claims it gives Graham a sense of ordinary life that most leaders lack. "It makes a tremendous difference in his decision making and how he looks at the world," Reed says.
When Graham spent a recent workday building scenery at a new theme attraction near Daytona International Speedway, he pounded nails alongside a former rock musician. True to form, Graham looked for common ground with the younger man and found it: country music. Before the day ended, they had written a song together. "When you hear a song with the words 'I've got tension on the surface but I'm boiling just below, because of you, hon,' that's my song," he recounts later to his amused staff.
The image he created nearly two decades ago stuck, as Florida voters have come to see Graham as a pleasing mix of Ivy League sense and old Florida sensibility. Even his omnipresent foulard necktie, imprinted with little images of Florida, bespeaks approachability and good humor. It's hard to imagine, for instance, Graham's fellow Harvard alumnus and proud intellectual, New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, sporting little Empire State buildings on his ties - even if his re-election depended on it.
Everyone who knows Graham describes him as extremely smart. Former Congressman Bacchus calls him "extraordinarily bright, far brighter than most other people who are in public office or who seek public office."
And while he is not averse to displaying his intellect among his peers, to Florida voters he's simply a rather modest, nice guy. On the wall above her desk, Graham's press secretary has a description by biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a description that she says reminds her of her boss: "In talking on the radio, Roosevelt used simple words, concrete examples and every day analogies to make his points. He looked for words that he would use in informal conversations with one or two of his friends, words the average American could easily understand."
But this fixation on public opinion has led to criticism over the years that Graham is alarmingly malleable. In his 1995 book about the revival of death row in America, "Among the Lowest of the Dead," former Miami Herald reporter David Von Drehle portrayed Graham as "a protean genius" who signed death warrants on dozens of convicted killers to deflect criticism that he was too liberal for Florida. In 1979, when Graham took office, only one man, Gary Gilmore, had been executed in America in the previous decade. In Graham's eight years in office, Florida executed 16 convicted killers, more than any other state. Many more death warrants signed by Graham were stayed by courts because the defendants still had appeals available to them.
" 'Cynical' is the word that I have always used to describe Graham's use of the death penalty," says Michael Mello, a former West Palm Beach public defender and now a professor at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vt. "He cynically exploited Floridians' legitimate fears of crime to further his own political career."
At the same time, Graham eschewed the more expensive task of building prisons during his last term as governor. When he left office, Florida's prisons were filled to 99% of capacity. That forced his successor, Bob Martinez, to call a special session of the Legislature less than two weeks after his inauguration in 1987 to respond to the court-ordered mass release of inmates from overcrowded facilities.
Graham's image and reality diverge in other areas as well. For one thing, though he's deservedly credited with guiding Florida through a period of unprecedented growth during the early 1980s, Graham shares responsibility for some of the problems besetting state government today.
A month after Graham left Tallahassee in 1987, a 21-person committee of legislators and civic and business leaders headed by Charles Zwick, then chairman Southeast Bank, issued a devastating report on the state's inability to provide basic services and to cope with its exploding population.
What's most troubling about the Zwick report, commissioned by the Legislature, is that all of the problems it cited, including a creaky tax structure, a low-skill work force, a mediocre system of roads and highways and an economy based on growth and tourism, continue to plague the state to this day. And they will still be there when the next governor takes office.
While that speaks poorly of Graham's successors, the Zwick report also notes that when Graham left office, Florida faced a 10-year structural deficit of $52.9 billion and ranked 50th of the 50 states in per capita spending on basic human services.
Even the crown jewel of the Graham administration - the Florida Growth Management Act of 1985 - ultimately failed to rein in sprawling development. The law required cities and counties to show they could build infrastructure to support new development before issuing building permits, and gave the state new powers to prevent the issuing of permits. But the law's reliance on bureaucracy and red tape doomed it to failure. Today, the act has been gutted, and Florida has enough permitting in place to accommodate a population of 90 million people, more than six times the current figure.
Graham also left tax reform to Bob Martinez, a governor with far less political capital. Martinez proposed an ill-fated services tax and implemented the lottery.
Graham's style of governing exasperates some in his own party. Miami attorney Sonny Holtzman, a major Democratic fund-raiser and longtime confidante of Lawton Chiles, shakes his head when asked what a Graham run for governor would mean to Florida. After a moment he allows that if Graham quits Washington perhaps Florida could get a better senator.
"Wouldn't it be nice if we had a couple of powerful senators who got things done and brought things home?" Holtzman asks. "What have we got now?"
As for Graham's previous tenure as governor, Holtzman's not impressed. When Graham was governor before, he says, "it was all peaches and cream. Let's pass this and let's not pass that." He believes Graham would struggle in today's more contentious environment where Republicans share power with Democrats.
Even if Graham was a governor who didn't take on all he might have, he still departed Tallahassee enormously popular with an unlimited future. As he arrived in Washington, there was even talk that he might one day run for president.
And why not? He'd defeated an incumbent Republican, Paula Hawkins, during the middle of the popular Reagan administration. He looked like a Democrat who might fare well in the Sunbelt in a national election. He was wealthy, untainted by scandal and even faintly glamorous - his famous sister-in-law, Katharine Graham, ran the Washington Post.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. Rather than hit the ground running, Graham landed inside the Beltway with a dull thud. He joined the Senate amid a large class of freshman Democrats, many of whom had moved over from the House of Representatives and knew more about the ways of Washington than he.
Ending up with plain vanilla
Graham's inherent formality seemed to return when he got to the nation's capital. Upon arriving there in 1986, freshman Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota paid a personal visit to Lloyd Bentsen, the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which writes policy on key matters like taxes, health care and Social Security, to plead for a seat. Graham sent out letters to top senators.
Daschle's personal approach won out, gaining him the seat he wanted. Graham ended up with three plain vanilla assignments: Environment and Public Works; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and Veterans' Affairs. A decade later, Daschle is Senate minority leader. Graham did get a much-coveted seat on the Finance Committee, but not until 1995.
Graham also got the worst of it in a few scrapes with West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, which controls spending bills. Byrd has long opposed a balanced budget amendment and a presidential line item veto. Graham supports both measures. Byrd is also thin-skinned and a notorious pork barreler. After Graham took to the Senate floor to chastise Byrd for inserting "little piglets" that grow into "giant hogs" in an appropriations bill, Byrd did not look kindly on Florida spending projects, Graham staffers say. Graham likely will cross paths with Byrd again next year, when the federal transportation spending program comes up for reauthorization. Florida currently gets less than 80 cents back for every dollar it pays in gasoline taxes, which one Graham staffer terms "a rip-off."
For the most part, though, Graham seems to have avoided both confrontation and headline-grabbing political events. Graham's image appears only occasionally on TV or in the press, even in Florida. After nearly a decade in Washington, Graham is so little-known there that during a recent stroll on the long block from the Capitol to his office, he elicited not so much as a hint of recognition from passers-by.
To be sure, Graham has many admirers in Washington. They tend to be people who abhor the current gridlock and applaud the senator's willingness to work with Republicans for the common good. "What I would say is he's done a terrific job in the Senate," says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Almost everybody respects Graham as one of the thoughtful centrists, one of a handful of people who keeps things together and makes real contributions."
Sen. Rockefeller describes Graham as fiercely independent, which his peers respect. "I think the thing about Bob Graham that is very important to understand is he marches to his own drummer," he says.
In describing how Graham often keeps his own counsel even among fellow Senate Democrats, Rockefeller recalls a 1993 vote on the federal budget in which Graham's vote was crucial. Graham was unhappy with some Medicare cuts he deemed too drastic - cuts Rockefeller had negotiated personally. For days, Graham said nothing. When the full Senate met for the vote, Graham still kept silent. Rockefeller was afraid to lobby his friend.
"A little voice inside of me said 'Jay, don't say a word to Bob. Don't say a word. He is going to come to his own decision and if you come in and try to influence him, it's not going to be a happy result.' And that's from me, his friend," Rockefeller says. At the last moment, Graham told fellow Democrats he'd vote for their budget.
When Graham does move into the spotlight, it is almost invariably to address a Florida issue. He was uncharacteristically strident in opposing a recent Republican plan to make block grants to states for Medicaid that didn't include allowances for population growth in future years, for example. "He stood between that and passage and said, look at what you are doing to the growth states," says Mitchell W. Berger, the Democratic Party's Florida Finance Committee chairman.
Similarly, when President Clinton wanted the U.S. military to invade and occupy Haiti in 1994 to insure the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, there was strong opposition in Congress. But Graham supported the plan. "Bob Graham was the person in the Senate who was rallying that cause," says Berger, a Tennessee transplant and close friend to Vice President Al Gore. The U.S. occupation, in turn, staved off a potential flood of illegal Haitian immigrants to Florida and probably saved the state millions of dollars in social services costs.
But in his biggest national assignment, as 1994 chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, the result was unspectacular. Although his committee raised a record $25 million, including $13 million that went directly to candidates, it couldn't stop the Republican stampede, as the G.O.P. won 10 Democratic seats to gain a 54-46 Senate majority.
Arguably, there wasn't much Graham could do to reverse events - the Republicans won a majority of governorships for the first time since 1970 and a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. But he still took criticism. "His shot at the big time was chairing the DSCC, and he blew it," says one Capitol Hill reporter who's followed Graham for years. "You could argue that if he had done a better job campaigning for Senate Democrats, they wouldn't have lost so much influence and he wouldn't have lost so much influence."
On budget questions, Graham characterizes himself as a fiscal conservative, and compared to other Democrats he is. Paul Hewitt, executive director of the National Taxpayers Union, says Graham voted to cut a net $2 billion from the federal budget during 1995. On its face, that sounds pretty good, but when compared to total federal spending, it amounts to only 0.125%.
Hewitt says Graham's voting record puts him closer to the most conservative member of the Senate, Hank Brown (R-Colo.), who voted for total spending reductions of $40.8 billion, than to the most liberal, Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), who voted for a net spending increase of $47.6 billion. But it's still safe to say he's in the middle of the road when it comes to cutting federal spending.
During the year, Graham voted to cut foreign aid by $1.1 billion and defense by $4 billion. Plus, he favored tough welfare reform and even Medicare spending reductions. "He's obviously among the most fiscally conservative Democrats in the Senate," says Hewitt.
Graham was faced earlier this year with a difficult vote on whether or not to renew the federal price support program for sugar. Graham grew up in northwest Dade on the fringes of the Everglades, and he takes great pride in his environmental record. Conservationists urged him not to back the price support program, which has enabled farmers to plant some 500,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee.
But confronted by intense lobbying from Florida's powerful sugar growers, Graham voted to keep the program, arguing two contradictory points: that Florida farmers would keep growing sugarcane whether or not the price supports existed and that since the European Union subsidizes its sugar farmers the U.S. shouldn't abandon price supports.
Graham also voted in favor of a Farm Bill provision to give the Interior Department $200 million to buy up sugar farmland and return it to wetlands. The result: Graham's votes cost consumers $1.4 billion annually in higher sugar prices, according to the government's General Accounting Office, and taxpayers $200 million for land acquisition. But Graham avoided making enemies.
Stuart D. Strahl, executive director of the National Audobon Society's Everglades ecosystem restoration campaign, acknowledges disappointment over the senator's actions. "I'd say disappointment would be a good word, but we are certainly not surprised," Strahl says.
If Graham has to struggle with tough decisions, he finds it even harder to talk about them. On a conference call with a group of Florida reporters shortly after the Senate passed the Farm Bill, one asked his opinion on a proposed penny-per-pound tax on sugar to help pay for Everglades restoration. Graham wouldn't touch it. "My focus has been on getting this $200 million entitlement" and the land sale provisions, he said.
Reflecting his middle of the road philosophy, Graham works well with Republicans. He and Arizona Sen. John McCain, for example, have zeroed in on campaign finance reform, an issue that is not making either man especially popular on Capitol Hill right now. Sen. McCain, who also has teamed with Graham on mutual problems Arizona and Florida face obtaining sufficient Veterans Administration benefits, came to Washington with him in 1987. Then, Democrats held a Senate majority, but nevertheless, Graham sought McCain out. "When I was in the minority, he always showed me the greatest respect and included me on issues," McCain says. "That is not as common as you would think."
Coming into his own at last
Graham takes special pride in his close relationship with Florida's Republican junior senator, Connie Mack. In what for Graham passes off as an outburst, he likened Mack to an "ideological wacko" during Mack's 1988 Senate campaign against Buddy MacKay. But today Graham counts Mack as a good friend.
In some respects, Graham appears finally to be coming into his own in Washington. He got his Finance Committee seat in 1995, and with the unexpected retirements of Democratic Senators David Pryor and Bill Bradley this year, Graham will move in less than two years from back bench to middle of the committee in terms of seniority. He also made the Armed Services Committee in 1993, another high-profile assignment.
If Graham is thinking about returning to Tallahassee, Ornstein suggests it is because life on Capitol Hill has become unpleasant for pragmatists like him. Republican Senators like Nancy Kassebaum, Alan Simpson and Bill Cohen all have chosen to retire this year. "It's not just Democrats who are bailing out right now," he says.
Graham says almost the same thing, noting that some 13 senators plan to retire this year, including respected fellow Democrats like New Jersey's Bill Bradley and Georgia's Sam Nunn. "The past year and a half has not been one of the most productive times for the Congress," he says.
If Graham is unhappy in the nation's capital, he retains a large and influential fan club in Florida. Former aides like Reed, Herndon and Villella believe he's likely to come back, and seem eager for it to happen. And some of Graham's longtime friends also suggest coming back to Tallahassee wouldn't necessarily be the final chapter of a storybook career.
One Republican campaign strategist argues Graham's only hope of becoming president is to run for governor in 1998. It is the only way, the strategist says, he could hope to leapfrog people like Gore and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey in the party hierarchy. "This is all about positioning," says the strategist of Graham's possible run for governor. "If he wants to be president, he has to run for governor."
Friends and supporters believe Graham could use his consensus building powers to reach bipartisan solutions to some of Florida's structural problems. That, in turn, might polish his image as a strong executive. After all, no one since John F. Kennedy has stepped straight from the Senate to the Oval Office, though Bob Dole is trying. But plenty of governors have run, and won.
Graham aides scoff at such reasoning. "Graham's not thinking about this stuff. He's not weighing all these arguments and won't until the year ends," protests one of his top staffers.
Graham may want to look hard and long at perks, prospects and security of his present job compared to the one he may yearn for back in Tallahassee. Certainly not everyone will welcome him back with open arms. "If he wants to come home," says an adviser to Buddy MacKay, "then his record gets the spotlight shined on it." What's more, he may find that his caution and his centrism, which have made him uncomfortable in Washington's extremist climate, may be out of style in Tallahassee, too. "You know what's in the middle of the road these days?" asks Hewitt of the National Taxpayers Union. "Road kill."
Dade's "Best All Around Boy"
Bob Graham is one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. Senate, thanks to a hurricane, the Great Depression and a shrewd older brother.
Graham's father, Ernest R. "Cap" Graham, was a farmer, one-time gold miner and World War I Army captain who came to Dade County after the war to run a plantation in the Everglades for the Pennsylvania Sugar Co.
Unfortunately for the company, but fortuitously for Graham, the 1926 hurricane devastated the sugar plantation, known as Pennsuco. A few years later, the Great Depression struck, again wiping out the farm. In the 1930s, the company agreed to give Cap Graham the 3,000-acre plantation to avoid paying property taxes on it.
The elder Graham turned the land into a dairy farm and prospered. By 1936, when he was 51, his stature in the community was such that he won a seat in the Florida Legislature, where he served eight years. Cap Graham's first wife had died of cancer, and early in 1936 he married Hilda Simmons Graham. Ten months later in November, just days after he was elected to the Legislature, the youngest of his four children was born, Daniel Robert.
The littlest Graham excelled even in his youth. When he was 16, Bob Graham was named Dade County's "best all-around boy" by the Miami Herald and posed for a photo with his public-speaking and cattle-raising trophies. He was elected president of Miami Senior High's student body and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors at University of Florida, where he also was admitted to the prestigious Blue Key society.
At the University of Florida he met his future wife, Adele Khoury of Miami Shores, and as legend has it, told her he would be governor one day. They married in 1959, and he got a job in Washington interning for young Dade Congressman Dante Fascell. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1963 and got elected to the state legislature in 1966, when he was 30. He became a state senator in 1970. Along the way, he and Adele raised four daughters.
For all his talents, Bob Graham's political rise was aided in no small measure by his two older half-brothers. Phil Graham, 21 years older than Bob, preceded his baby brother at Harvard Law School and married Katharine Meyer, whose father owned the Washington Post. Phil Graham took over management of the paper from his father-in-law in the 1940s.
But while Phil was brilliant at business he was a manic-depressive. In 1963, he shot and killed himself, leaving Katharine Graham to run the Post and to become in her own right one of the best-known businesswomen in America. Today, the senator's nephew Donald Graham runs the publishing company.
If Phil and Katharine Graham made the family name famous, second brother Bill, 12 years older than Bob, made his brother rich.
In 1962, with Dade growing rapidly, Bill Graham began developing the Pennsuco property. After law school, Bob Graham joined the family business until he took up politics full-time. Today, Miami Lakes is a five-square-mile planned community with 23,000 residents and 4.5 million square feet of office, commercial and industrial space, about one-third of which is still owned and managed by the Graham Cos. The company expects to build another 2 million square feet of office and commercial space over the next 15 to 20 years.
The Graham Cos. still milk 2,100 cows in Moore Haven and operate a bull-breeding farm in Georgia. One of the few controversies that has dogged Bob Graham in his political career is the fact that the Graham Cos. benefit from a state law that lets them pay taxes on undeveloped Miami Lakes land as agricultural property, instead of commercial or residential land.
In 1978, when Bob Graham wanted to run for governor, he financed his campaign in part by selling $500,000 worth of Graham Cos. stock. And although he's worked in public service since 1966, Sen. Graham today puts his net worth at between $5 million and $10 million.
"We couldn't have done what we do in life if it had not been for Bill," Adele Graham has said of her business-savvy brother-in-law.
