By Miles Layton

Earlier this week, my lovely wife came home after a meeting attended by the region’s movers and shakers and said, “Did you know (Tyrrell County Manager/Attorney) David Clegg knew Lindsey Graham since their law school days?”

I answered, “No, but that’s amazing. That’s a story I need to write. Clegg is a fascinating guy. Tyrrell County is lucky to know someone like that.”

So I called to interview Mr. Clegg about his friend — great interview.

COLUMBIA — For Tyrrell County Manager/Attorney David Clegg, the phone call came in the dead of night — the kind of call that jolts a person out of sleep and into disbelief.

“A friend of mine who was in our group, who is a recently retired executive, called me at two o’clock in the morning on Sunday morning and said, ‘You know, Lindsey’s dead,’” Clegg recalled. “And I went, ‘What?’”

Just hours earlier, Clegg had seen his old friend on television, stepping off a plane after a trip overseas. “I just saw him on CNN about when he got off the plane from Ukraine,” he said. “He said, ‘Yeah, he went home, had a heart attack, and he’s dead.’ And then I started looking, and lo and behold, he was.”

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, died suddenly on July 11, days after returning from a trip to Ukraine. He was 71. Graham’s office said he died from a brief and sudden illness, and preliminary medical findings pointed to an aortic dissection. Tributes poured in from Washington and abroad, from President Donald Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, remembering a senator whose three decades in Congress were defined by his hawkish foreign policy views and, as those closest to him tell it, an unshakable loyalty to the people he knew.

Few knew that side of Graham longer than Clegg, who has served as Tyrrell County’s manager/attorney and who first met Graham as a fellow law student at the University of South Carolina in 1978.

“We specifically met in 1978 when we started law school,” Clegg said. “You know, when you go to law school, they divvy the first-year class up into groups. You have all of your classes together for that first year. So Lindsey was in my group, and so I knew him every day, and we were in study groups together and what have you. And we just became friends, and so many of the folks in that group — we are still very tight. And you bond in situations like that.”

Graham never actually lived with Clegg, despite spending plenty of time at his house. “He stayed at our house a lot. He wasn’t — he didn’t necessarily pay the rent,” Clegg said with a laugh. Graham’s actual roommate was Lee Jedziniak, who went on to become South Carolina’s insurance commissioner. Clegg’s own housemates during law school included Tom Bolt, now a prominent attorney in the Virgin Islands, and Doug Kotti, a respected domestic relations attorney in South Carolina.

The friendship endured long after graduation, through Graham’s stint as a JAG officer, his years in the South Carolina House, his election to Congress, and eventually his rise to the U.S. Senate. Clegg said what struck him most was how little Graham changed along the way.

“The one thing about him that I think endeared him to everybody is the Lindsey Graham of last week was the same Lindsey Graham I knew in law school,” Clegg said. “He never changed. And he had the same attitude, level of interest in people, an engaging personality. The fact that his position had changed never changed him.”

Asked to describe Graham as a person, Clegg didn’t reach for a politician’s polish.

“Not flashy. Very down-home. Very upstate rural South Carolina,” Clegg said. “Earnest. Interested. Enjoyed playing ball and stuff like that. Was just sort of everybody’s friend.”

That informality showed up in small ways. Clegg remembered working as the business manager while Graham was playing ball nearby. “He would be playing ball with a lot of people from law school and then see me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ Well, of course I was in the middle of moving stuff for Miss University of South University Pageant and I would be saying, ‘I need help moving this or whatever.’ Then he would go help me.”

Clegg said he wasn’t surprised when Graham entered politics, even if Graham himself seemed startled by his own success. 

“The fact that he got elected to Congress, he seemed to be a lot more surprised about it than anybody else was,” Clegg said. Still, Clegg saw the signs early. “I knew that when he got through with the JAG, and he went back to practice law in Greenville, that it was just a matter of time. He was concerned about defense, access to health care and access to education. He was just engaged in things like that.”

Graham was so convinced he would lose his first congressional race — in a district that had not elected a Republican since Reconstruction, part of the 1994 wave that swept in Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America — that he didn’t sign an apartment lease in Washington.

Why?

Clegg answered, “Because he’d go back home every weekend and drive back up — he said, ‘I am going to lose. Why should I rent an apartment?’ After about the third term, I said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to find a room?’”

That memory triggered another memory that has become, in Clegg’s words, “my Lindsey Graham story.” In the mid-1990s, while Clegg was serving as deputy chairman of North Carolina’s Employment Security Commission, he and Graham arranged to meet in Georgetown. “We were walking down the street talking, and somebody came up behind us and went, ‘Representative Graham,’” Clegg said. “And Lindsey turns around and we stand there and just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Well, that was when I met George Stephanopoulos.”

The moment struck Clegg as emblematic of Graham’s ease in moving between worlds. 

“There I was — a political appointee of Governor Jim Hunt. In D.C., there he was, a conservative Republican member of Congress, and we’re standing there talking to the recently resigned chief of staff for Bill Clinton, who had just gone to work for ABC News,” Clegg said. “You know, if somebody would have driven by that picture, they would have said, ‘What the hell?’ But that was just the way it was.”

Clegg said Graham’s directness, which sometimes drew criticism, came from a place of genuine conviction rather than performance. “He could get a little exhorted about things, but it was because he cared and he did not suffer fools,” Clegg said. “He wasn’t going to play the game. He was going to call it like it was. And a lot of people didn’t like that because he told a version of the truth that was a lot more unvarnished than a lot of people wanted it to be.”

That loyalty extended to North Carolina and Tyrrell County itself. Clegg said he and Graham spoke about the Tarheel State; he was a frequent visitor. 

“People would sometimes approach me about the best way to invite him to statewide events,” he said.   

When Clegg visited Washington, Graham was responsive whenever Clegg reached out on the county’s behalf — including during hurricane recovery efforts.

“There were times, and there have been times, on behalf of Tyrrell County I have called him,” Clegg said. “I also called him a lot regarding stuff in state government. But yeah, a lot like with some of our hurricane stuff and dealing with FEMA and what have you. I’ve called on him.”

For Tyrrell County, the loss is personal as much as political. 

“I know things happened on behalf of Tyrrell County that would not have happened had somebody from his office not asked questions,” Clegg said.

Asked whether Graham’s legacy would endure, Clegg didn’t hesitate. 

“It will in South Carolina. It should on a national basis, because he was absolutely relentless in education and foreign policy,” he said. “His fingerprints are on so many things which will endure themselves. And it’s just going to mean that people like me or like other people help keep that alive and know that if he were alive, he would not want his role necessarily published, but it needs to be now.”

Clegg said the shock of Graham’s death has only begun to give way to grief and to memory. Plans for how Graham will be honored — whether he will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol or in Columbia, or whether a service will be held at the National Cathedral, in Columbia, or in Greenville — remained unsettled as of Clegg’s interview.

“You always hear people talk about people who have the widowmaker,” Clegg said, referring to the sudden, catastrophic nature of Graham’s death. “Well, he had it. That was it. So yeah, it’s a loss.”

More than four decades after two law students were assigned to the same first-year study group in Columbia, Clegg is left holding the memories — and, in his words, an obligation to keep them alive.

Senator Graham — loved you during this moment — click here — we need more elected leaders like this —RIP

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