Bob Graham left his mark on Northeast Florida — in places and people

People from around the state and country headed to Florida’s old Capitol Friday to pay their final respects to Bob Graham.

As Florida governor and U.S. senator, Graham had many talents. One of them was to take a massive state and somehow work his way around it like it was a small town.

He was from Miami Lakes. And ever since he died April 16 at age 87, many of the tributes have pointed to what he did in South Florida, particularly with the Everglades, and in Tallahassee, as a two-term governor, and in Washington, as a three-term senator.

But he touched every corner of this state — including Northeast Florida.

Some of it is the land, magnificent pieces of old Florida here, from the driftwood beach of Big Talbot Island State Park to water and woods of the Guana River Marsh Aquatic Preserve.

“That’s Bob Graham through and through,” former Jacksonville Mayor John Peyton said of the Guana land the state bought from his father and Gate Petroleum in 1984.

But some of it is the people who met Graham and, in quite a few cases, worked for and with him. That’s a very long list, perhaps epitomized by Graham’s more than 400 “workdays” and the thousands of small spiral notepads he filled with details of each day. So this is just a sample, a few names that ended up in those notepads.

John Peyton

In 1984, Peyton met then-Gov. Graham at the celebration for the state purchase of the Guana property.

“I remember it was a hot summer day,” Peyton said. “I told him I had an interest in politics. And he said, ‘You should consider an internship.’”

When Graham became a freshman senator, Peyton became an intern.

“I was about as low on the totem pole as you can go,” he said. “I started out in the mailroom and the reception desk, and I was later hired to be a legislative correspondent, which is a fancy term for letter opener. But I loved every minute of it. … That’s really where my early interest in public service was solidified, by working for him.”

Peyton rattles off a few words to describe Graham.

“Genuine, authentic, practical, transparent, ethical,” he said. “He was the standard bearer for what a statesman could and should be.”

And then he adds this, something that others say: He was an extraordinary listener.

“He knew everybody and everybody knew him — and he never forgot a name,” Peyton said. “I watched him with constituents where he could tell them where they met, where they were doing, what they talked about five, 10 years ago. He had a capacity to retain almost every interaction. It was a form of genius that I had never seen before.”

While in Graham’s office, Peyton worked for Rena Coughlin, a legislative assistant for Graham for eight years. When Coughlin return to Jacksonville, she became involved in the nonprofit world. She recently retired after 18 years leading the Nonprofit Center Center of Northeast Florida.

That, Peyton says, is part of Graham’s legacy in Northeast Florida: the many people he mentored and inspired here.

Steve Diebenow

Diebenow, an attorney who served on Peyton’s staff, also began his professional career, after graduating from UF Law School, on Graham’s legislative staff.

“First job out of law school, I was answering the phone,” he said.

He eventually was asked to help with some legal research and writing. And he points to two things he worked on as both memorable for him and indicative of Graham’s ability to bring people together.

One involved getting the state delegation, Democrats and Republicans, to sign off on a letter to Nelson Mandela, at the time a more polarizing figure than often remembered, hoping to get him to come to UF to accept an honorary doctorate. The second involved something even more politically fraught: U.S. immigration policy and the Cuban Adjustment Act.  

Graham came up language about the Cuban Adjustment Act that appeased both Democrats and Republicans. When he told Diebenow to “go talk to Bob” about it, Diebenow was confused at first. Then he realized Graham meant Bob Dole, who not only was Senate Majority Leader but was running for president.

Diebenow talked to Dole, then was told to go talk to Connie Mack, the Republican Senator from Florida. Both ended up supporting Graham’s idea, leading to something that’s hard to imagine happening today: an immigration vote passing with bipartisan backing, shortly before a presidential election.

“Those two stories to me are the epitome of Senator Graham — which is reaching across the aisle, coming up with compromise language that people could live with,” Diebenow said. 

Diebenow has other stories from his time as a Graham intern. But perhaps it’s as telling to spin ahead to 2024 and what he did the day after Graham died.

He pulled out a special tie to wear to work that day. Graham gave it to him. It’s one of the ties that Graham always wore when representing Floridians. The ties came in a variety of colors, but always were dotted with the same pattern — the familiar shape of the state.

Buddy Shorstein

A Jacksonville native, he’s one of Graham’s closest friends, going back to when they arrived at the University of Florida as freshmen and lived in neighboring dorms.

When they graduated in 1969 and both ended up in Boston — Shorstein became a naval officer on a ship there, Graham went to Harvard Law School — they spent time going to Red Sox and Celtics games, and playing penny-ante poker games.

Shorstein became a CPA back in Jacksonville. And when Graham became governor in 1978, he encouraged Shorstein to be involved in a program where people took a year away from their business and spent it working in state government. Shorstein did that, with the Department of Professional Regulation, before returning to Jacksonville to work as an accountant.

But after Graham’s reelection, the governor called Shorstein and asked him to be his deputy chief of staff, which led to being chief of staff, which led to Graham asking him to follow him to Washington to lead his Senate staff. Just for six months.

“Six months turned into 11 years,” Shorstein said with a laugh.

When people tell the story of Graham as a politician, it inevitably leads to recording the details of his day in those small spiral notepads. Shorstein can explain where that habit came from.

“He grew up on a family dairy farm,” he said. “That was his dad’s means of keeping track of things. That’s why he did it. Unfortuntatey, he got a little bit of a bad rap with that.”

Now it is portrayed as charming. But that wasn’t always the case. Shorstein says that at the time some in the press, even those who liked Graham, described it as “quirky.” And quirky didn’t necessarily play well when running for president, as Graham did in 2004, or being vetted for vice president.

“He was vetted three different times to be vice president,” Shorstein said. “I’ve often wondered if that quirky term may have turned off the people who were vetting him.”

Shorstein now lives in a retirement community in Gainesville. Graham lived there, too. In 2020, shortly after moving in, Graham suffered a stroke. Shorstein says, “We thought we’d spend our last years bragging about all the things we’d accomplished and complaining about all the things we didn’t.”

Those accomplishments — particularly in Graham’s priorities of the environment and education — still are worth bragging about. And when it comes to some pieces of old Florida, thanks to Bob Graham’s efforts, they’ll be here long after we’re all gone.

Henry Dean

Dean, now a St. Johns County commissioner, probably has as good a sense as anyone of Graham’s accomplishments when it comes to preserving pieces of natural Florida.

Dean spent 26 years working for the state and, during that time in a variety of roles, he helped the state acquire 1.25 million acres of land, from the Panhandle to the Keys — and here in Northeast Florida, he negotiated the deals for Big Talbot Island in 1982 and Guana in 1984.

He can trace the start of this back to when he was in law school at Florida State, looking for a part-time job, seeing a 3x5 card on a bulletin board that said: legislative research aide needed.

The previous year, 1972, the state Legislature had passed some major environmental legislation dealing with growth management and water resources. It involved creating a commission. And Dean recalls that one of the people on that commission, a sponsor of the legislation, was “a little-known state senator from Miami Lakes.”

“He and I just hit it off,” Dean said. “I'm not sure exactly why, but we became close friends.”

When Graham became governor, Dean became general counsel of the Department of Natural Resources. In 1984, when Graham was still governor, Dean became the executive director of the St. Johns River Water Management District and held that position for 17 years.

He describes Graham as the “primary backer, pusher, cheerleader” of the St. Johns River headwaters restoration project. He recalls how Graham wanted to ensure that Florida’s coast wasn’t completely developed. That led to Henderson Beach State Park in the Panhandle, MacArthur Beach State Park in Palm Beach and, here in Northeast Florida, the deal Dean negotiated for the Guana property — about more than 5 miles of oceanfront and 11,000 acres in the Guana property for about $48 million.

Out of all of the state acquisitions, Dean says, "Guana River Preserve is probably in the top three as far as beauty, accessibility, recreational use, and protection of natural resources.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of that deal. Dean asked a couple of people in real estate what they think that land is worth today. They told him easily $1 billion. Not that it’s for sale.

At the celebration of the deal in 1984, Graham said: “Won’t it be nice for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to stand where we are today and look at this magnificent statement of what Florida is.”

Dean ended up working for five governors: Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, Bob Martinez, Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush. He says “all five were really outstanding governors.” But Graham, he says, inspired him in a way few leaders have.

“If I were making a list of my heroes in Florida government, I would put Senator/Governor Bob Graham at the top, or maybe tied at the top with a couple of others,” he said. “When he got up every morning for those 38 years he served in public office. I think the first thing he thought of was: What can I do to help the people of Florida today? Not every politician follows that rule, I can guarantee you.”

Chris Hoffman

In 2020, Hoffman became the first woman to be elected mayor of Jacksonville Beach.

She says she can trace some of her inspiration for public service back to the summer of 1998, when she interned for Senator Graham between her junior and senior year at UF. Because she had been volunteering with the American Cancer Society in Gainesville, she was assigned to the health legislative team in the office.

She says that even as a 20-year-old intern, she noticed two things from watching Graham.

“He approached everything from a bi-partisan perspective,” she said. “His office was filled with staffers from a variety of political affiliations and he was constantly reaching across the aisle for co-sponsors for important legislation.

“Second, he considered the state of Florida in every decision he made. His constant physical reminder were his ties. He must have had dozens of the same tie in a variety of colors.”

She jokes that she did hold it against him that on the day of their picture on the Capitol steps, he wore a garnet-and-gold tie. 

“He was the model of servant leadership for me years before I had even heard the term,” she said.

John Delaney

Delaney didn’t work for Graham, like some others in Jacksonville. But as mayor, Delaney did end up working with Graham — and not just in typical political ways.

When Delaney became mayor, he copied Graham’s workday idea, doing one workday a month in the city. And when the Fuller Warren Bridge was converted from a drawbridge to what it is today, he and Graham worked on it together.

“I told him I had kind of stolen his idea and adapted it to city government,” Delaney said. “He chuckled about that and said, ‘I do not consider that a copyright violation.’ And he actually sent me a note after that, saying he appreciated that I kind of borrowed his idea and to go ahead and take full ownership.”

The other thing Delaney remembers is that when Graham did a workday, he worked.

“He wouldn’t just stand around and talk,” he said. “I mean, he’d be talking to people, but while he was working.”

Not that this meant Graham did the talking in a typical conversation.

“He’d probably talk 5 or 10 percent of the time,” Delaney said. “And the rest he’d be listening, writing notes in that little spiral notebook.”

Allison DeFoor

Allison DeFoor, the president and CEO of the North Florida Land Trust, has been involved in Florida conservation efforts for decades. And in 2014, he co-chaired the push to pass Amendment 1. The other chair: Bob Graham.

This was hardly the first time they’d worked together, though. Both had South Florida roots. And in that time in South Florida, DeFoor says, “It was impossible to not know Bob Graham.”

DeFoor recalls that the goal was to make Amendment 1 a bipartisan effort, to illustrate that conservation wasn’t a Democrat or Republican issue. Organizers of the efforts paired Graham, the Democrat, with DeFoor, who had served as Everglades Czar under Gov. Bush and was vice chair of the Republican Party of Florida.

“It’s almost hard to believe there was a time when you could reach across lines of party,” DeFoor said, recalling working together on the Everglades and other issues. “It wasn’t like it was a matter of putting down the swords and singing kumbaya. It was a pact to get things done for Florida.”

In the case of Amendment 1, they did. It passed with 74 percent of the vote and became one of the most significant land protection efforts ever.

Chris Hand

Hand, a Jacksonville attorney who was chief of staff for Mayor Alvin Brown, figures that, one way or another, Graham has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember.

He was 5 ½ years old when Graham was first elected governor.

“As I got older and interested in government and politics, Bob Graham was the dominant figure in the state,” he said. “He was really the elected official I looked to the most.”

When Hand graduated from college in 1995, he decided to move to Washington and try to work on Capitol Hill. He got a job in Sen. Bill Bradley’s office, but he kept stopping by Graham’s office, asking if they had any openings. The person who greeted him — often Diebenow — kept telling him they didn’t. But one day Hand was checking the printer in Bradley’s office and saw that someone had printed out a job posting: Bob Graham was looking for a new speechwriter.

“I’m not necessarily the most fluid or graceful person,” he said, “but in one fluid motion, I grabbed that printout and went immediately over to Senator Graham's office, to his longtime office manager, and said, ‘I want this job.’”

He not only got that job, it led to him becoming Graham’s press secretary. And that led to a 30-year friendship.

They’ve written two books together about effective citizenship and democracy. And along the way, he’s become close with the Graham family — his wife, four daughters, 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

After Bob Graham died, the second paragraph of a New York Times story said that “his death was announced in a family statement sent by Chris Hand, a family spokesman who is a former aide to Senator Graham.”

Before heading to Tallahassee for the memorial services, Hand said he kept coming back to a scene at the end of the Superman movie where the hero dies and the plaque on his memorial reads, “If you seek his monument, look around you.”

He figures that if Graham were here, he’d point out that this really comes from an epitaph for Christopher Wren, the architect who rebuilt much of London after the Great Fire of 1666. It was written in Latin on the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

“The Superman movie borrowed that,” Hand said. “But I think it also applies to Bob Graham when it comes to Northeast Florida.”

If you seek his monument, look around you.

“Every time I stand on that driftwood beach at Big Talbot Island State Park, I think of Senator Graham, just like I do every time I hike through the Guana Preserve,” he said. “And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg all over the state. I think what he really did was establish a culture of preservation.”

If you seek his monument, look around at the people. The tens of thousands — no, probably hundreds of thousands — with their names in the more than 4,000 spiral notepads he filled. The people who worked with him in more than 400 workdays. The people who worked for him in Tallahassee and Washington D.C.

But beyond that, Hand says look at the future and one of his most important monuments, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at UF, devoted to developing effective leaders and citizens.

“At a time where bipartisanship, civility and progress sometimes seems impossible, Bob Graham proved they are possible,” Hand said. “If we follow his lead.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212