Steve Schale on Bob Graham: An appreciation of a 20-year friendship

My 20-year friendship with Bob Graham started with a lunch we had towards the end of his U.S. Senate career, when I was just a pup staffer in the Florida House Democratic Office, and him, a 38-year public servant starting to think about life after public office.

Bob was committed to remaining involved after he left the Senate, and was incredibly supportive of my work, especially over the two Obama campaigns, where he offered the kind of guidance only someone with his intricate knowledge of Florida could provide. When I tried to quit campaign work, he dragged me right back to help his daughter Gwen, as she embarked on her own career.

Spend enough time with him, and you learned his superpower: His ability to listen. He may have a degree from Harvard, but his real education came from the people of Florida, one work day, one meeting, one person at a time. He wanted to learn, and he believed everyone he came in contact was someone he could learn from.

During one of Gwen’s campaigns, I spent a day going through his Senate papers at the University of Florida. Go ask for his papers and what you will get are boxes and boxes of boxes of letters. Letters from U.S. presidents, letters from foreign leaders, but more importantly, letters from people of every walk of life.

People wrote him or even stopped him in public to tell them their hopes, their fears, and their ideas. He jotted down those interactions in his notebooks, and not only did he write everyone back, every one of those letters, at some level, was personalized, a genuine acknowledgement that he heard them. He took something from every one of those interactions and each one molded how he saw his state, his country, and his place in it.

He believed you could find common ground – even on the most intractable issues, if you were willing to have honest conversations. He believed that you can disagree without being disagreeable, that you can absolutely succeed in public life by being a decent person. And he believed that everyday citizens, if they worked hard enough, could affect real change.

Yes, he was a proud Democrat, but when it came to doing right by Florida, that was the only jersey he wore. Gwen always says of her Dad, simply: “He is just the best.” And he was – he was the best of all of us.

He loved this state like his own family. History will no doubt remember him as one of the most consequential Floridians our state has ever seen. But as any of us know who were blessed to know him personally, his real legacy was that he was an even better human.

I don’t know why Bob showed a fondness towards me, but I am blessed that he did. I will miss his leadership and counsel, but most importantly, I will miss him.

Steve Schale, now with The Advocacy Group at Cardenas Partners, is a longtime governmental and public affairs strategist, based in Tallahassee. He also has been an advisor to President Barack Obama and to Florida candidate for governor Gwen Graham. 

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Steve Schale on Bob Graham: An appreciation of a 20-year friendship