Imagine being able to recall what you were doing at any given moment, on any random day of your life.
Bob Graham, a Democrat who served Florida in the US Senate and as governor and died aged 87 on Tuesday, was one of the few people on the planet who could.
Graham will be remembered as an old school, moderate Democratic senator who served three terms, voted against the Iraq war and co-chaired the congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks in 2001. But his most distinctive trait was his idiosyncratic habit of writing detailed descriptions of his life, at five minute increments, in spiral notebooks he carried everywhere with him. Here's an entry from September 1994, published by Time Magazine six years later.
"8:25: Awaken at MLTH (Miami Lakes Town House).
8:45-9:35: Kitchen, family room. Eat breakfast, branola cereal with peach.
9:35-9:40: Complete dressing. Watch 'Meet the Press.'"
Graham goes on in a similar vein for the rest of the day — on a date that was especially important to him because his daughter Cissy gave birth. He recorded how he spent time at the hospital waiting for his new grandchild.
9:05-9:10: "Waiting room. Read NYT, mingle.
11:00-12:45: Waiting room. Watch CNN, CBS News.
12:44: It's a boy!
Graham adopted the quirk in 1977 when he was running for Florida governor and wanted a way to record who he met and ideas that people on the campaign trail suggested. Once he started, he couldn't stop. Graham explained in an article that he didn't record his emotional reaction to an event or an editorial comment, but simply jotted down who he was with and where he was at any moment of the day. "The level of detail serves as a memory facilitator. If I know the time, place, attendees at a meeting, even if it were held several years earlier, these contextual items facilitate my recall of the substance of the meeting," Graham wrote.
Over the years, Graham filled thousands of the notebooks, which were color coded to reflect the season of the year to which they corresponded. He also hoarded other minutiae including boarding passes, business cards and other documents that recorded his actions on any given day. In 2003, The New York Times published the Graham notebook entries for the day of the September 11 attacks: "9:04: Tim gives note on two planes crash into World Trade Center NYC," Graham wrote, referring to an aide. He later wrote down that he called his wife and daughters following the worst terror attack on US soil.
When a notebook was complete, Graham placed it in a manila envelope, and then in a box big enough to hold 15 envelopes. He'd keep three years worth of notebooks and then send older ones to an archive at the University of Florida. This unique documentation of the life of one of the Sunshine State's most popular politicians will be available for future scholars.
Graham's notebook obsession might have cost him politically. He was sometimes talked of as a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000 and 2004, but some pundits wondered whether his incessant recording of his life would strike voters as a little weird for someone who could end up president. But Graham's notebooks once got him out of a political fix. He used his detailed annotations to prove that the CIA was wrong when it said that Democrats were briefed more deeply about enhanced interrogations of terror suspects than they claimed.
"If I have a choice between keeping and throwing away, I'm a keeper, much to my wife's chagrin," Graham told the Ocala StarBanner newspaper in 2010.
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