Graham puts views on terror in black, white
By S.V. Date, Palm Beach
Post Capital Bureau
Saturday, September 11, 2004
TALLAHASSEE — Manhattan reeled, the Pentagon smoldered and Bob Graham became famous.
Call it an unintended consequence of Al-Qaeda's attacks on America, similar to the soaring popularity President Bush and Rudolph Giuliani enjoyed in the days and weeks after a searing national trauma.
Just so, Florida's senior senator, a man immensely popular in his own state but little known outside of it, by dint of his chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee became a fixture on the news channels and the nightly news. This week, the renown that gave him a credible platform for a brief presidential run even catapulted him into best-selling authordom, with a new book slamming Bush's handling of terrorism.
Graham points to previous instances when he said U.S. senators merely "doing their day-to-day Senate duties" rose to national prominence: Sen. Sam Ervin during Watergate, and Sen. Daniel Inouye during the Iran-Contra scandal.
"And I will modestly agree that it happened to me," he said.
For Graham, who was 64 at the time, the national glare was a new thing.
His name had been tossed about as a possible running mate on the Democratic ticket before three separate elections, but the only time he'd won serious national attention before was in 1980, when he delivered the nominating speech for President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention.
Graham's relative anonymity continued through the better part of three terms in the Senate — until that Tuesday morning three years ago when 19 hijackers killed themselves and more than 2,000 Americans and Graham suddenly found himself a national spokesman for a terrorized nation.
Like just about every other politician in America in those first weeks and months, Graham was solidly behind Bush.
He supported immediate military action against Afghanistan and helped draft the Patriot Act.
"There will be plenty of time to decide how to proceed in determining what occurred before, during and after Sept. 11," Graham said on Oct. 22, 2001. "Now is not that time."
He could not have known then just how intense the finger-pointing would be — and just how much of it he himself would be doing a mere 12 months later.
On Oct. 9, 2002, Graham — the guy everyone thought of as quiet, mild-mannered, deliberate, conflict-averse — let loose on his Senate colleagues for going along with President Bush's war against Iraq.
"We are locking down on the principle that we have one evil, Saddam Hussein. He is an enormous, gargantuan force, and that's who we're going to go after," Graham said on the floor. "That, frankly, is an erroneous reading of the world. There are many evils out there, a number of which are substantially more competent, particularly in their ability to attack Americans here at home, than Iraq is likely to be in the foreseeable future."
He told his fellow senators that if they didn't recognize that going to war with Iraq without first taking out the actual terrorists would endanger Americans, "then, frankly, my friends — to use a blunt term — the blood's going to be on your hands."
It was a watershed moment. Gone was the meticulous thinker who would talk completely around and through a problem before answering a question about it.
What made the remarks even more stunning was his track record in the Senate.
Graham, unlike other anti-war Democrats of years past, was never allied with the party's liberal wing. When fellow Democrats were trying to stop American aid to the Nicaraguan "contra" rebels, Graham stood with then-President Ronald Reagan to support it. When his party opposed the first President Bush's 1991 Gulf War, Graham cast one of few Democratic senators' votes in favor.
Through the first year following the terrorist attacks, Graham focused on his job as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Riding herd over a 37-member joint congressional committee, Graham watched as his investigators dug through both prologue and aftermath of the attacks, including the spooky fact that a dozen of the hijackers had called Palm Beach County and elsewhere in South Florida their home.
Graham said he ultimately concluded that there was nothing particularly nefarious about that.
"One, they were close to aviation centers, and some of them were still refining their skills," Graham said last week. "Number two, they are places that are easier than most to be anonymous."
Far more disturbing than his home state's role in the hijackers' plans, though, was his sense that Bush, despite his poll numbers, was botching the nation's response to terrorism.
And it was that conviction, he said, that led him to take his new national profile and enter the presidential derby.
The campaign began — following unexpected heart surgery in December 2002 — in January 2003 and promptly ended that October.
He was the last Democratic candidate into the race, and the first out.
The reasons for this were many, including his late start, a poorly organized campaign and, ultimately, his inability to raise serious money. Yet, in those nine months, Graham's presence helped alter both the content and tone of the primary campaign.
Before Graham's strident attacks on Bush's Iraq policy, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's was the sole voice among the major Democratic candidates to oppose the Iraq war.
By the summer of 2003, Graham was saying that Bush had either lied or was incompetent regarding Iraq, and that if he had lied, it was a far worse lie than the one Republicans had used to impeach former President Bill Clinton. Graham took heat for the remarks.
Still, that he said them appeared to give the go-ahead to other candidates to adopt similar views.
By the end of 2003, of the Democratic members of the Senate running for president who had voted in favor of the Iraq war, only Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman continued to support the war.
Some weeks after dropping out of the presidential race last year, and about two weeks before announcing he would retire from the Senate, Graham decided during the Thanksgiving holidays that he would set down on paper exactly why he believed Bush had gone wrong.
The result was Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror, which was released by Random House Tuesday with a No. 14 ranking on Amazon.com's bestseller list.
In it, Graham goes over much of the territory covered by both his congressional joint inquiry as well as the independent 9/11 Commission.
But while both of those were bipartisan works, resulting in clinical recitations of facts and dry recommendations, Graham felt no such constraint to tone it down.
ΠRegarding the CIA's refusal to admit that Bush had seen a controversial briefing memo on Aug. 6, 2001: "We would be allowed to see the information, but not allowed to say that the president had seen it. The decision flew directly in the face of the rules regarding classification: protection of sources and methods is a reasonable rationale for keeping something classified, but protecting an individual from embarrassment is not."
ΠRegarding Bush's granting family friend and Saudi Arabian Ambassador Prince Bandar a meeting on Sept. 13, 2001, leading to the evacuation of 140 Saudi nationals from the country during the next six days and the later censorship of 27 pages of the congressional report that implicated Saudi Arabia: "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."
ΠAnd regarding Bush's appearance at a national press banquet in which he showed slides of him looking behind and around White House furniture while joking that he couldn't find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: "It was one of the more offensive things I have witnessed. Having recently attended the funeral of an American soldier killed in Iraq, who had left behind a young wife and two preschool-age children, I found nothing funny about a deceitful justification for a war."
Bush's reelection campaign quickly denounced Graham's new charges, calling them "bizarre conspiracy theories."
Florida GOP officials last year similarly accused Graham of ramping up his criticism of Bush in order to play to the hard-core liberal Democrats who tend to vote in presidential primaries.
But a 30-hour oral history at the University of Florida of Graham speaking to his former history professor shows that in the past he has been less critical of the Bushes in public than in private. In particular, he was far more critical of both President Bush and Gov. Jeb Bush in 2000 and 2001 in the private oral history than he was in his public statements.
As to the criticisms of his book, Graham is unyielding. He said while Bush campaign officials can offer only "sweeping statements" of denial, they cannot counter the factual allegations he spelled out in 253 pages.
"I laid the facts out in black and white," he said. "The response has been personal attacks. If somebody has facts they want to put on the table, then we can have a debate."
What's next for Graham regarding terrorism probably hinges on the outcome of the presidential election.
Should Bush win, Graham already has lined up a visiting professorship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard next year. He also plans to work with state universities in Florida to create programs to teach Middle Eastern languages and culture as a way to create a larger pool of analysts for U.S. intelligence services.
Should Democratic Sen. John Kerry win in November, there also may be available Cabinet-level positions in the new administration such as Homeland Security, perhaps attorney general or, should Kerry not want to keep Porter Goss, the CIA.
Graham, in keeping with his style during three decades, will not speculate.
"I believe in the philosophy of focusing on today," he said.
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