More than 20 years ago, Senator Lindsey Graham visited Ukraine for the first time. An election was looming, one that would be reversed and run again, and that would ultimately produce victory for the pro-Western Orange coalition. In the summer of 2004, however, all of that lay in the future. Graham, then in his first Senate term, joined his friend John McCain on a congressional delegation. At the time I was serving as McCain’s foreign-policy adviser, and tagged along.We met President Leonid Kuchma at his dacha in Crimea—a Soviet construction, it had an escalator leading down to the beach. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had recently been through town, praising Ukraine’s contribution of troops to the war in Iraq. For Graham, however, Ukrainian democracy and independence were at least as important. “Participating in Iraq does not,” he said, “give any country the right to hold elections that are not fair.” He reiterated the message to Kuchma in private, and then to opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and others. He added that Ukraine should have “people free of fear willingly voting for the candidate they want.”There was little political upside for the new senator in advocating for Ukrainian freedom. But that was Lindsey Graham. Years later, after Russia’s invasion, after dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy, and despite Graham’s own embrace of President Trump, his commitment endured. It is fitting, if tragic, that his last public act took place in Kyiv. He cared about Ukraine, and about America’s role in keeping it free, to the end.That’s not all Graham cared about. Over more than five years, I traveled to dozens of countries with him, and saw him work the Senate on a weekly basis. He was the last surviving member of the “three amigos,” after the deaths of McCain and Joe Lieberman. True believers in the use of American power for good, they worked and traveled the world together. And there was no one like Lindsey.[Anne Applebaum: The quintessential politician of this era]He was smart, even if he sometimes played a southern hayseed. “This is my first time in Ukraine,” he drawled to Kuchma back in 2004. “Y’all got a beautiful country here. People seem real nice.” Then the zinger: “But if the elections aren’t fair, we’re going to have to take action when we get back to Washington.” In meetings, McCain sometimes joked that the translator was there to help the Americans understand Graham’s accent. On occasion he’d add that Graham’s favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. Graham would agree.He was also the funniest man in the Senate. During a meeting in Kyrgyzstan, an eager House delegation joined our group. Not realizing that our counterparts were fluent in English, one member spoke very slowly and very loudly, emphasizing that, among other vital commonalities, both the United States and Kyrgyzstan have mountains. Graham elbowed me. “Take me to your leader,” he whispered. “We come in peace!” Running for president in 2015, he made an appearance among the Mitt Romney faithful. “We tried tall, good-lookin’, smart, nice, great family,” Graham said. “Vote for me. We’re not going down that road again!”During the brief U.S.-Libya thaw, Graham traveled to Tripoli. In the time-honored tradition of tin-pot dictators, Muammar Qaddafi kept the delegation waiting for hours. Smarting after his son Hannibal’s arrest in Geneva, the Libyan leader had announced a lunatic proposal to partition Switzerland. Graham, anticipating the meeting, said that he would praise Qaddafi as “the only leader with the courage and vision to do what we all know, in our heart of hearts, is right.” (He was kidding, and he didn’t actually say that to Qaddafi. He seemed to like Switzerland.) That night, the delegation finally sped through the desert in black sedans. After the high-speed convoy turned off the highway onto a dirt road, we came upon Qaddafi’s legendary tent. “I expected something out of Arabian Nights,” Graham said. “This looks more like a Winnebago.”In actual meetings, Graham was deadly serious—usually. In Bhutan, we met with King Singye Wangchuk, who had married four sisters. “Your majesty,” the senator began, “I understand you have four wives. You’re going to have to tell me your secret, because I can’t even seem to find one.” Graham succeeded Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who wed a 22-year-old while in his 60s. Graham, who never married, would sometimes point out that, given Thurmond’s record, his wife had not been born yet.Over the five years that I traveled with him, we swam in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, smoked hookah in the Islamabad Marriott, and sailed on the Bay of Tallinn with Senator Hillary Clinton. He walked around Lake Como wearing a Joint Task Force Guantánamo baseball cap, not the greatest exercise in public diplomacy. The more far-flung the place, the better: Yemen, South Ossetia, Greenland, Yukon, Svalbard, Hanoi, Beirut, Cartagena, Mexico City.And of course he went to Iraq and Afghanistan, over and over. After trips to those countries, we’d leave and he’d stay, serving reserve duty as Colonel Graham, United States Air Force. He did more than a dozen active-duty stints in combat zones while serving in the Senate.The senator stood for principles others ignored, in places most people avoided. That usually served the country well. He joined McCain in opposing the use of torture, embraced Ukraine, pushed to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, and generally supported foreign aid and strong diplomacy. Sometimes, his belief in the muscular exercise of U.S. power pushed him in the wrong direction, like when he advocated war with Iraq in 2003 and with Iran in 2026.Graham loved a deal, or at least the pursuit of one. When, beginning in 2018, Trump threatened to abandon Kurdish allies by withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria, Graham brokered an agreement. Trump would leave some troops in place, purportedly to protect oil fields, and Graham tried recruiting European countries to fill the gap. He once pushed immigration-reform and climate-change bills alongside Democrats, and in 2024 sought to tie border security to Ukraine aid. Many of these efforts failed. That never seemed to dissuade him from trying again.Many of the tributes now flowing from both sides of the aisle note deep disagreements with Graham. No one thought he was right all the time, and Graham himself changed his mind. But when he was on the right side of an issue, no one was more articulate or more tenacious. He was a man in the arena, always running toward the sound of the guns.That explains, perhaps, his latter-day embrace of President Trump. The senator’s evolution from McCain-allied maverick to Trump loyalist has occasioned many an armchair analysis over recent years. Graham would say that the people had chosen a leader, and that his loyalty was the price of policy influence. Someone, he’d suggest, had to talk to the president about Syria, Ukraine, and Iran, and someone had to make the case for American leadership in the world. Maybe that was it. Possibly there was more to the realignment.[Read: What Lindsey Graham wanted]Either way, the stakes remind me of a question I once asked Graham on a long flight over Central Asia. At what point in his career, I wondered, had he gathered the boldness to assert himself so overtly in foreign policy?“When I was first elected to the House,” he recalled, “I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.” After that, he went on, “I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they.” “What I finally realized,” he concluded, “is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”Overly harsh, perhaps, but also possibly the reason for a senator from South Carolina, raised in the back of a bar and wholly a self-made man, to engage every foreign-policy occasion. The country is better for his service, and I suspect we’ll miss him very much.Graham visited Ukraine this weekend, more than two decades after that initial visit. Standing before the rusting hulks of captured Russian tanks, he announced an agreement with the White House on a bill sanctioning Russia. When he returned to Washington, he said, he would join with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal to move a legislative package, one that would contain support for Ukraine to defend itself against missile attacks.Little more political advantage could be had in supporting Ukraine this year than in 2004. But a belief in using American power for good ran through Lindsey Graham’s veins. He was complicated, sometimes contradictory, and always on the move. Washington will be a little less energetic and creative after his sudden loss. It will certainly be less funny and fun. They don’t make them like Lindsey Graham anymore. They never did.