COLUMBIA, SC — (CNN) There are many subjects South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham wants to talk about on the campaign trail, but it’s the fascination about his bachelor status that has surprised him most.
So Graham — best known as a flame-thrower on immigration reform and an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy — has opened up about his lost loves and a near proposal to a Lufthansa flight attendant in a 126-page e-book released on his website this week.
The book entitled “My Story” was a collaboration with author Mark Salter, who he got to know during the two presidential bids of his close friend Arizona Sen. John McCain. It delves more deeply into Graham’s hardscrabble childhood in Pickens County, South Carolina — where he lived with his family in one room behind a bar — as well as the early death of his parents, and his efforts to keep the family liquor store afloat while raising his sister, who was nine years his junior.
The South Carolina senator said he felt compelled to open up about his personal journey because it will be a bridge to connect with voters, particularly those who have faced the same kinds of financial struggles that his family did.
Though somewhat baffled by the attention to his single status, Graham acknowledges that he’s been dealing with curious questions for years.
“Some people try to use it against me and kind of say nasty things — I’m like so over that,” he told CNN. “I’m comfortable with who I am. I think there’s nothing in the Constitution that says single people need not apply.”
In the new e-book, Graham skims lightly over his bachelor tales, but notes that he entered the most “carefree” time of his life while serving in the Air Force in Europe.
“I was in my twenties, a kid from a mill town in South Carolina, living in an exciting moment in history, traveling to cities that seemed unbelievably exotic to me,” he writes in the new memoir.
Reflecting on those years in an interview with CNN, Graham said it was “the first time I really had a chance to be away from responsibility.”
He describes two serious relationships during that time overseas — one with a fellow Air Force JAG corps officer named Carol (“a great lawyer and even better person”) — and the second with Sylvia, the Lufthansa flight attendant.
“The relationship became serious quickly,” he writes of Sylvia. “At one point, I thought I would propose, or at least I entertained the idea. It wasn’t to be, though. She was responsible for an aging mother in Vienna, and I was South Carolina boy, who needed to go home.”
(Sylvia went on to marry a doctor, he says, and they lost touch).
Graham has joked that the country is “due” for a single president and promised to be the candidate for all the “single people out there” — as well as the married people who are having a tough time with their spouses.
“Marriage is a wonderful thing,” Graham said in an interview with CNN. “If you’re married with kids and have got a great marriage — that’s a blessing from God. But it’s OK to be single. My goal is to tell every single person — you too can grow up to be president.”
With all the questions on the campaign trail, the South Carolina Republican has also taken to dispensing advice to single women: “Choose wisely … Pick a good man if that’s what you want to do. But don’t be in a hurry.”
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