Bob Graham, ex-US senator and Florida governor, dies at 87

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. and two-term Florida Gov. Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 87.

Graham's family announced the death Tuesday in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham.

“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family said.

Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq invasion.

But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.

Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.

Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them.

“I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.

Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying it diverted America’s focus on the battle against terrorism centered in Afghanistan. He was also critical of President George W. Bush for failing to have an occupation plan in Iraq after the U.S. military threw out Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Graham said Bush took the United States into the war by exaggerating claims of the danger presented by the Iraqi weapons of destruction that were never found. He said Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led him to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.

“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.

During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.

As a politician, few were better. Florida voters hardly considered him the wealthy Harvard-educated attorney that he was.

Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966.

He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the U.S. Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.

Graham remained widely popular with Florida voters — winning reelection by wide margins in 1992 and 1998 when he carried 63 of 67 counties. In that latter election, he defeated Charlie Crist, who later served as a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011.

“He blew me out of the water, and I came to know even more so why during the course of the campaign,” Crist said Tuesday night. “I learned to respect him even more than I already had, and love him for the good, decent man that he was.”

Crist, who has since switched parties and most recently served as a U.S. representative, said Graham was an influence on him.

“I always felt that when he was governor, that he was trying to govern for the people of Florida — not in any way political or partisan — and I took that to heart and tried to, in some small way, emulate it,” Crist said.

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi called Graham “a patriotic American" and thanked him for his “distinguished public service.” She highlighted his work on the inquiry into 9/11 and said he “bravely opposed entry into the war in Iraq.”

“He brought his love for his family and for his state of Florida to the Senate, where he served with immense dignity and courage," she said in a statement Tuesday.

Even when in Washington, Graham never took his eye off the state and the leadership in Tallahassee.

When Gov. Jeb Bush and the Republican-controlled Legislature eliminated the Board of Regents in 2001, Graham saw it as a move to politicize the state university system. He led a successful petition drive the next year for a state constitutional amendment that created the Board of Governors to assume the regents’ role.

Daniel Robert Graham was born Nov. 9, 1936, in Coral Gables, where his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, had moved from South Dakota and established a large dairy operation. Young Bob milked cows, built fences and scooped manure as a teenager. One of his half-brothers, Phillip Graham, was publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek until he took his own life in 1963, just a year after Bob Graham’s graduation from Harvard Law.

Graham was president of the student body at Miami Senior High School and attended the University of Florida, graduating in 1959.

In 1966 he was elected to the Florida Legislature, where he focused largely on education and health care issues.

Graham got off to a shaky start as Florida’s chief executive, and was dubbed “Gov. Jello” for some early indecisiveness. He shook that label through his handling of several serious crises.

As governor he also signed numerous death warrants, founded the Save the Manatee Club with entertainer Jimmy Buffett and led efforts to establish several environmental programs.

Graham pushed through a bond program to buy beaches and barrier islands threatened by development and started the Save Our Everglades program to protect the state’s water supply, wetlands and endangered species.

Graham also was known for his 408 “workdays,” including stints as a housewife, boxing ring announcer, flight attendant and arson investigator. They grew out of a teaching stint as a member of the Florida Senate’s Education Committee and then morphed into a campaign gimmick that helped him relate to the average voter.

“This has been a very important part of my development as a public official, my learning at a very human level what the people of Florida expect, what they want, what their aspirations are and then trying to interpret that and make it policy that will improve their lives” said Graham in 2004 as he completed his final job as a Christmas gift wrapper.

After leaving public life in 2005, Graham spent much of his time at a public policy center named after him at the University of Florida and pushing the Legislature to require more civics classes in the state’s public schools.

Graham was one of five members selected for an independent commission by President Barack Obama in June 2010 to investigate a massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatened sea life and beaches along several southeastern Gulf states.

FILE - Gov.-elect Bob Graham talks to members of the press, Wednesday, Nov. 8, 1978 poolside at his Miami hotel after his Tuesday night victory over opponent Jack Eckerd. Graham, who chaired the Intelligence Committee following the 2001 terrorist attacks and opposed the Iraq invasion, has died, according to an announcement by his family Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jennings, File)

FILE - Florida Gov. Bob Graham, right, signs an autograph for Maria Dulce before a campaign appearance at the Miami River Festival in Jean Marti Park, Oct. 25, 1986, in Miami. Graham, who chaired the Intelligence Committee following the 2001 terrorist attacks and opposed the Iraq invasion, has died, according to an announcement by his family Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

FILE - State Sen. Bob Graham gets a congratulatory kiss from his wife at their campaign headquarters in Miami, Oct. 5, 1978, where he won the Democratic runoff election for governor. Graham, who chaired the Intelligence Committee following the 2001 terrorist attacks and opposed the Iraq invasion, has died, according to an announcement by his family Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

FILE - Sen. Bob Graham, right, speaks during the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling meeting on Sept. 27, 2010, in Washington. The former Florida Sen. Graham, who chaired the Intelligence Committee following the 2001 terrorist attacks and opposed the Iraq invasion, has died, according to an announcement by his family Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., gestures as he answers questions regarding the ongoing security hearing on Capitol Hill, June 18, 2002, in Washington. Graham, who chaired the Intelligence Committee following the 2001 terrorist attacks and opposed the Iraq invasion, has died, according to an announcement by his family Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has relegated a Civil War-era ban on most abortions to the past by signing a repeal bill Thursday.

Hobbs says the move is just the beginning of a fight to protect reproductive health care in Arizona. But the repeal may not take effect until 90 days after the end of the legislative session, in June or July. Abortion rights advocates hope a court will step in to prevent that outcome.

The effort to repeal the long-dormant law, which bans all abortions except those done to save a patient’s life, won final legislative approval Wednesday in a 16-14 vote of the Senate, as two GOP lawmakers joined with Democrats.

Hobbs denounced “a ban that was passed by 27 men before Arizona was even a state, at a time when America was at war about the right to own slaves."

“This ban needs to be repealed, I said it in 2022 when Roe was overturned, and I said it again and again as governor,” Hobbs said.

The vote extended for hours as senators described their motivations in personal, emotional and even biblical terms — including graphic descriptions of abortion procedures and amplified audio recordings of a fetal heartbeat, along with warnings against the dangers of “legislating religious beliefs.”

At the same time Wednesday, supporters of a South Dakota abortion rights initiative submitted far more signatures than required to make the ballot this fall, while in Florida a ban took effect against most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, an opponent of the near-total abortion ban, has said the earliest the dormant abortion-ban law could be enforced is June 27, though she has asked the state’s highest court to block enforcement until sometime in late July. But the anti-abortion group defending the ban, Alliance Defending Freedom, maintains county prosecutors can begin enforcing it once the Supreme Court’s decision becomes final, which hasn’t yet occurred.

The near-total ban provides no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. In a ruling last month, the Arizona Supreme Court suggested doctors could be prosecuted under the law first approved in 1864, which carries a sentence of two to five years in prison for anyone who assists in an abortion.

A repeal means that a 2022 statute banning the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy would become Arizona’s prevailing abortion law.

Arizona Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, a Democrat who has been key in the fight to repeal the territorial abortion ban, said she spent her early years on the Navajo Nation where her parents were schoolteachers and saw firsthand people being denied their reproductive rights.

She also watched her sister-in-law struggle with two difficult pregnancies that resulted in stillbirths.

“My daughter, who is 17 years old, should this law go in effect would have less reproductive freedoms than her great-grandmother in 1940 and Texas, who had to have an abortion,” Stahl Hamilton said. “We have people who need reproductive care now.”

President Joe Biden’s campaign team believes anger over the fall of Roe v. Wade gives them a political advantage in battleground states like Arizona, while the issue has divided Republican leaders.

Abortion-ban advocates in the Senate on Wednesday gallery jeered and interrupted state Republican state Sen. Shawnna Bolick as she explained her vote in favor of repeal, joining with Democrats. Bolick is married to state Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, who voted in April to allow a 1864 law on abortion to be enforced again. He confronts a retention election in November.

The 19th century law had been blocked since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, persuaded a state judge that the 1864 ban could be enforced. Still, the law hasn’t actually been enforced while the case was making its way through the courts.

Planned Parenthood Arizona filed a motion Wednesday afternoon that asks the state Supreme Court to prevent a pause in abortion services until the Legislature’s repeal takes effect.

Advocates are collecting signatures for a ballot measure allowing abortions until a fetus could survive outside the womb, typically around 24 weeks, with exceptions — to save the parent’s life, or to protect her physical or mental health.

Republican lawmakers, in turn, are considering putting one or more competing abortion proposals on the November ballot.

Dr. Ronald Yunis, a Phoenix-based obstetrician-gynecologist who also provides abortions, called the repeal a positive development for patients who might otherwise leave Arizona for medical care.

“This is good for ensuring that women won’t have to travel to other states just to get the health care they need,” Yunis said. “I was not too concerned because I have a lot of confidence in our governor and attorney general. I’m certain they will continue finding ways to protect women.”

FILE - The Arizona Senate building at the state Capitol stands, April 11, 2024, in Phoenix. Democrats at the Arizona Legislature are expected to make a final push Wednesday, May 1, to repeal the state’s long-dormant ban on nearly all abortions that a court said can be enforced. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

FILE - Pro-life demonstrators walk in the front of the Arizona Capitol prior to the vote on the proposed repeal of the state's near-total ban on abortions prior to winning approval from the state House on, April 24, 2024, in Phoenix. Democrats at the Arizona Legislature are expected to make a final push Wednesday, May 1, to repeal the state’s long-dormant ban on nearly all abortions that a court said can be enforced. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Arizona state senator Shawnna Bolick, R-District 2, speaks, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Anti-abortion supporters stand outside the Capitol, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Democratic Arizona state senator Anna Hernandez, D-District 24, left, hugs a colleague after a their vote, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. Democrats secured enough votes in the Arizona Senate to repeal a Civil War-era ban on abortions that the state's highest court recently allowed to take effect. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona state senator Jake Hoffman, R-District 15, speaks Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. Democrats secured enough votes in the Arizona Senate to repeal a Civil War-era ban on abortions that the state's highest court recently allowed to take effect. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Democratic Arizona state senators hug after a their vote, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona state senator Eva Burch, D-District 9, looks on, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona state senator J. D. Mesnard, R-District 13, plays audio of a heart beat from his cell phone, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona state senator Jake Hoffman, R-District 15, motions as he speaks to the Senate President, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Arizona state senator Shawnna Bolick, R-District 2, speaks, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)