The Republican Leading the Rebellion Against Bush

By KAREN TUMULTY, Perry Bacon Jr. / Washington

If you want to understand how a baby-faced freshman Republican Senator from conservative South Carolina has come to be standing against President George W. Bush on the issue of how to interrogate and try terrorism suspects, it helps to know how Lindsey Graham spent part of his summer. A month ago, when most Senators were back home campaigning and fund raising, he was in Kabul, Afghanistan, answering to "Colonel." Wearing desert fatigues, with an M9 pistol strapped to his hip, Graham was conducting a two-day tutorial on the principles of U.S. military law at the Afghan Defense Ministry. He recalls coaching Afghan military lawyers, who are modeling their system after that of the U.S.: "It's important that when the troops act badly, they are punished to keep good order and discipline, but it's equally important that people believe that the punishment and the system itself are fair." The only Senator now serving in the National Guard or reserve, and the first in decades to do military duty in a combat zone, Graham adds, "It has to be based on what the person did and not who the person is."

That's pretty much the same argument that Graham is making back in Washington, where he is helping turn what looked like a smart political strategy into an internecine battle among Republicans on Capitol Hill. White House and congressional leaders had hoped that focusing on terrorism in the final months before a tight midterm election would give their party an advantage over the Democrats. But they didn't count on a rebellion in their own ranks, made worse by the fact that it is led by Graham and two more senior members of the Armed Services Committee who also have impressive military credentials: chairman John Warner, a former Secretary of the Navy who was a Marine ground officer in the Korean War, four years before Graham was born; and John McCain, a former Navy pilot whose father and grandfather were admirals and who still suffers from what he endured during 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

Graham got his battle testing in a military courtroom, first at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and then as a chief prosecutor for the Air Force in Europe during the 1980s. He insists that Bush's proposal to tamper with the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and put detainees on trial without letting them see all the evidence against them would have far-reaching consequences because it would invite future enemies to do the same, or worse, to Americans they capture. That argument has drawn strong support from such powerful voices as Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ex--Secretary of State, who in a rare public criticism of Bush policy sent McCain a letter warning that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." Caught in the middle have been Graham's fellow military lawyers, many of whom share misgivings about the detainee program. At a closed session of the Armed Services Committee last week, Senator John Cornyn of Texas brandished a letter signed by top lawyers of each service saying they "do not object" to a key part of Bush's plan. But he may have overstated their level of support. "That's not the whole story," Graham said to Cornyn, according to a witness. Last week, amid bitter Republican infighting and despite a White House lobbying effort that brought both Bush and Vice President Cheney to Capitol Hill, the committee defiantly passed the trio's proposal for trying and interrogating terrorism suspects, rather than Bush's. The showdown on the Senate floor, where majority leader Bill Frist is expected to introduce the President's proposal, is not likely to be pretty.

It's not the first time Graham has put the Bush Administration on the spot. When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke most inconveniently in a presidential election year, he demanded accountability up the chain of command. "What are we fighting for?" the Senator asked at a hearing. "To be like Saddam Hussein?" On Bush's biggest domestic initiative, Graham supported the President's idea to add individual savings accounts to Social Security but also suggested a heretical payroll-tax increase to finance them. He infuriated the right last year by joining the bipartisan, largely moderate "Gang of 14" that blocked a change in Senate rules that would have ended Democratic filibusters of Bush's judicial nominees. Graham more recently helped ice the appeals-court nomination of Defense Department counsel William Haynes, an architect of the Administration's detainee policy.

Graham, 51, so confounds political labeling that his fellow apostate McCain, 70, has dubbed him "my illegitimate son." Like McCain, the presumed front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Graham has a voting record that defies the headlines he creates. From the time he introduced his first piece of legislation in the South Carolina General Assembly, a bill barring gays and lesbians from serving in the state's National Guard, Graham has hewed to the right on social issues. He got a 96% rating from the American Conservative Union last year, and a zero from NARAL Pro-Choice America. As a House member, Graham caught the nation's attention playing corn-pone puritan as a House manager in Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. "Where I come from," Graham memorably drawled during the trial in the Senate chamber, as he described a phone call the President made to Monica Lewinsky, "you call somebody at 2:30 in the morning, you're up to no good." But in the Senate, Graham has become one of Hillary Clinton's good friends and has sponsored legislation with her to expand health benefits for reservists and members of the Guard--one of many times he has worked across the Senate aisle. Alex Sanders, the Democrat he defeated in 2002 to get the job, told TIME, "If I'd have known how Lindsey would turn out, I would have voted for him." And Dick Harpootlian, who in 2002 chaired the South Carolina Democratic Party, has gone so far as to send Graham a $1,000 campaign contribution.

As you might imagine, none of that sits particularly well with the G.O.P. establishment back home. "To say that Lindsey Graham has been a disappointment to the conservatives who were the heart and soul of his campaign would be an understatement," Republican political consultant Jeffrey Sewell wrote last week in the State, one of South Carolina's largest newspapers. "Unfortunately, our senior Senator has moved from disappointing to downright dangerous." Some Republicans are encouraging wealthy shopping-center developer Thomas Ravenel to take Graham on in the 2008 G.O.P. primary and have circulated an online petition to draft him. Ravenel--who has called Graham "the third Senator from New York"--says he has "no intention" of running against him, but that could change.

Making his own way is nothing new for Graham. He grew up in the rooms behind the Sanitary Cafe, a pool hall, bar and liquor store that his parents owned in Central, S.C. Graham's father, known as Dude, tended bar for the millworker clientele; the future Senator racked balls and answered phones. You've learned everything you really need to know about politics, Graham says, when you've had the experience of telling a wife who is on the line and looking for her husband, "He says he's not here." Graham set his sights on the military early, joining the ROTC in college, and he would have been a pilot were it not for a bad ear and dismal math scores. He had to adjust his plans again when his parents died within two years of each other while he was still in college, leaving him with a 13-year-old sister to provide for. After graduating from law school, he formally adopted her, mostly so that she would be eligible for his military benefits.

Once out of the Air Force, he returned to South Carolina and entered politics, where it seemed as if everything went his way. After two years in the legislature, he caught the Republican wave of 1994 and rode it to the House of Representatives. He supported McCain in the state's brutal 2000 G.O.P. primary and might have been punished by the new President's team, except for the fact that a Senate seat opened up with the retirement of 100-year-old Strom Thurmond two years later, and Graham had the best shot at winning it. Bush ended up coming to the state to campaign for him, in what became the most expensive Senate race in state history.

Those who don't like Graham say he is an opportunist and a grandstander. There are stories of him driving two hours for the chance to be on television for three minutes. But this month's "Best and Worst of Congress" rankings in Washingtonian magazine--the kind of popularity contest you might remember from your high school yearbook--have him pegged by a poll of 1,700 Capitol Hill insiders as one of the top choices in four categories: "Rising Star," "Straightest Shooter," "Bridge-Building Centrist" and "Funniest."

One place where Graham is not giving anyone much to laugh about these days is the White House. In an impassioned Rose Garden news conference, Bush warned that the proposal by the rebellious Republican Senators, if carried out, would give him no choice but to cancel the CIA's interrogation program of high-value terrorism suspects because it would deprive "our professionals" of the clear permission they need to continue using aggressive interrogation techniques. And the President suggested that the consequences of losing those techniques could be dire: "Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland."

Graham insists that there are still ways to work out a compromise, although both sides appear to be digging in. "I share the President's goal of pursuing a CIA program that would protect us and operate within the rule of law," he told TIME. "And I will work with him to achieve that." That's a call to duty for both Senator and Colonel Graham.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly / Washington