By Michael Grunwald

Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page W08

There were no breathless murmurs of anticipation. A hush did not fall upon the Senate chamber. The senators kept chatting and gripping each other's arms in the way that senators do. Nobody really seemed to notice when the senior senator from Florida, a chubby-cheeked 65-year-old Democrat named Bob Graham, rose last October 9 to add his voice to the debate about the war in Iraq.

Everybody knew that Graham was a sober, conscientious, unfailingly courteous grandfather who couldn't light up a room with a barrel of Iraqi crude and a Zippo. The Almanac of American Politics had described him as "careful, methodical, thorough, hardworking, reliable" -- it might as well have added "zzzzzzz." He was known as one of those mild-mannered moderates who don't rock boats or make enemies or generate buzz, who respect the dignity of their august institution and the opinions of their distinguished colleagues.

"I appreciate the thoughtful remarks of the senator from Connecticut and the senator from Arizona," Graham began. He wore a plain gray suit and one of his trademark Florida ties, with Mrs. Grundyish glasses perched at the end of his nose. The Florida reporters in the gallery braced for a typical Bob Graham speech: high-minded, long-winded and entirely devoid of quotable sound bites.

And then he started yelling about terror and danger and death.

"We are not talking about a threat 90 days from now!" Graham roared. "We are not talking about a threat that may come a year from now if nuclear material is made available!" His cherubic face turned purple. He gesticulated like a manic third-base coach, jabbing his fingers, pumping his fists, sweeping his hands across the lectern. "I am talking about a threat that could happen THIS AFTERNOON!"

Bob Graham as a modern-day Paul Revere? Bob Graham as a screaming-banshee Chicken Little? "I'd never seen Bob like that," recalls his best friend in the Senate, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. At his golf club in Miami Lakes, Fla., Graham was notorious for his plodding pace, for analyzing and reanalyzing every putt from every angle. He had a similar reputation as the Democratic chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, where he was dissed behind his back as the Tortoise for his earnest six-part questions and incessant requests for meetings.

In more than three decades in public office -- including two terms as governor and three as senator -- he had earned respect for his honesty and integrity, but had rarely made a national splash. His main claim to fame was his bizarre habit of scribbling the dullest conceivable minutiae of his life -- the chocolate Slim-Fast he drank, the red shorts he changed into, the Jim Carrey video he rewound -- in little notebooks that he color-coded by season. (He even recorded in his notebooks the time he spent recording in his notebooks.) And even those daily logs were oddly devoid of feeling. Once on a trade mission to Brazil, when Graham's plane had a mechanical crisis, he had meticulously recorded: "2:39 p.m. -- pilot announces hydraulic failure, must make emergency landing."

But now, suddenly, Graham was preaching like a prophet of doom, hectoring his colleagues that Americans were dangerously vulnerable to terrorist attacks, that militant groups like Hezbollah could be even deadlier than al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, that war in Iraq would only increase the threat at home. And then he went further: "If you believe that the American people are not going to be at additional threat, then, frankly, my friends -- to use a blunt term -- blood is going to be on your hands."

Bob Graham said the Senate would have blood on its hands?

"I was like, Whoa! No way Uncle Bob said that!" marvels William E. Graham, the senator's nephew and the CEO of the Graham Companies, the family's real estate firm. Paul Anderson, the senator's communications director, had helped prepare Graham's floor remarks, and he knew he hadn't written anything about blood on anyone's hands. "I was completely speechless," Anderson says. Several former Graham aides frantically e-mailed one another transcripts, with "Wow" in the subject line. "We were all asking each other: Is this our Bob Graham?" says Margaret Kempel, who used to run Graham's South Florida office. "He's never been a freakout guy."

Suddenly, Bob Graham has become a freakout guy. In fact, assuming he continues to recover from January surgery to replace a valve in his heart, he plans to run for president as a kind of freakout candidate, a red-alert politician for a freakout nation. He rails about "hardened assassins" living among us, plotting attacks on American soil.

He fumes about dramatic intelligence failures, massive security gaps, "modern Armageddon." He frets about seaports and airports, nuclear plants and chemical plants. "It would be relatively easy," he says, "for a terrorist to poison a water utility and kill thousands of people." He hasn't screamed much since the blood-on-your-hands speech -- and he's been particularly measured since his own brush with mortality -- but he now peppers his methodical geekspeak with words like "outrageous" and "scandalous" and "inexcusable." As this article went to press, Hussein's fall had not provoked any new attacks in America, but Graham still insists that the risk to Americans from terrorism is as high as ever. "The gun," he warns, "is still loaded."

There is a theory that Graham's scary new persona was born of opportunism, that he has seized on terrorism as a hot-button issue to ride to the White House -- just as then-Sen. John F. Kennedy exploited a dubious "missile gap" in 1960. Graham was the only presidential candidate to vote against war in Iraq, prompting speculation that he was maneuvering to run as a dove in a Democratic primary. "It sounds like a classic case of campaign fever," sniffs a Bush administration official.

But if Graham is a dove, he's an extremely rare bird. He supported the first Gulf War, and only opposed the second one because he had a long list of countries he believed were more dangerous than Iraq, and didn't want to jack up the risk of terrorism for a low-priority target. He hints that he could support military action against known terrorists -- al Qaeda in Yemen, Hezbollah in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, and even Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. His message is simple: There are many people with the ability and desire to kill Americans, so we'd better kill them first. "We've taken the pressure off al Qaeda," he complains. "We haven't done anything about Hezbollah. We need to take the fight to the terrorists."

In fact, few people who have followed Graham's career -- and few people who have seen the same classified material that he has -- think politics has much to do with his preachings. They say Bob Graham is no Jack Kennedy -- and the threat of terrorism is no made-up missile gap. "The thing is, he's a serious man, not a showboat, and he's absolutely right to be concerned," says Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who worked closely with Graham on the intelligence committee.

House intelligence committee Chairman Porter Goss of Florida, another Republican, says he can't understand why Graham's dire warnings haven't gotten more attention: "Bob Graham is not a grandstander. He's one of the most responsible people I know. He's sounding the alarm, loud and clear, and no one seems to be listening."

In this edgy era of duct tape, sleeper cells and Cipro, the alternative to the opportunist-demagogue theory of Bob Graham's transformation is much more disturbing: Maybe the former Senate intelligence chairman is genuinely convinced that something awful is going to happen.

"Bob is a responsible guy; if he says something, it's true," says Buddy Shorstein, his former chief of staff and one of his best friends. "I'll tell you, that's what scares the hell out of me."

Daniel Robert Graham was born into politics on November 9, 1936, less than a week after his father was elected to the Florida Senate. There was an accidental quality to both events.

The Graham family patriarch, Ernest "Cap" Graham, was a tough and gruff pioneer, a demanding man of few words and fewer printable words. He was trained as a mining engineer in Michigan, ran copper and gold mines in Montana and South Dakota, then served as an Army captain in World War I before moving to Florida to start up an experimental sugar plantation in the forbidding saw grass marshes of the Everglades. After the waterlogged farm went bust in the Depression, his bosses let him keep their swampland at the western frontier of Miami, and he converted it into a dairy. But Cap had a problem. The nearby town of Hialeah was controlled by the thuggish Hyde-Slayton Gang, and his drivers kept getting arrested and "fined" by corrupt cops during milk runs to local Piggly Wiggly stores. So Cap ran for the Senate, and promised to clean up the Hialeah mess.

It was a gutsy move. Bill Graham, Bob's older half-brother, recalls picking up the phone one night to hear a man growl that his dad would be dead by noon. The harassment just got Cap angrier, though. Years later, the gang's leader, Red Slayton, sent Cap a letter from the state penitentiary, apologizing that he would be unavailable to vote for his reelection, but calling him the only honest politician he'd ever met: "You said you'd run me out of town and throw me in jail, and you kept your word."

Cap had three children with his first wife, a schoolteacher named Florence Morris, before she died of cancer in 1934. According to family lore, he had insisted that he didn't want more kids before marrying Hilda Simmons, another young schoolteacher, whom he had met on a Greyhound bus. He was over 50; he had a business to run; he was launching a political career. Bob happened anyway. "A happy accident for me," Bob says today. "My mom used to say I got my political affliction going to rallies in the womb."

He grew up in a coral-rock homestead built in the sweltering sloughs of the Everglades; after the hurricanes of 1947, he had to scurry upstairs as the house flooded and poisonous snakes invaded the property. As a boy, Bob drove tractors, loaded manure and raised a prize-winning heifer.

But he was also a politician's son, passing out chocolate milk at speeches during his father's unsuccessful race for governor in 1944, winning the title of Dade County's "Best All-Around Boy" from the Miami Herald, serving as president of Miami High's student body. Bill remembers him announcing as a boy that he would be governor someday. At the University of Florida -- where he was elected president of his fraternity and chancellor of the student honor court -- he made the same vow to a tall brunette named Adele Khoury, who ended up marrying him anyway. Soon Graham had risen from his rural roots to Harvard Law School, and was preparing to follow his father into public service.

Graham likes to emphasize his Florida cracker heritage, spinning yarns about his foul-mouthed father running quail hunters off his land, reminiscing about the annual cattle procession down Graham Dairy Road. He mispronounces "nuclear" the same way President Bush does, and uses "cotton" as a verb, as in, "Dad didn't cotton to quail hunters."

But it's worth noting that his family was one of South Florida's most upwardly mobile. Cap's oldest son, Philip, preceded Bob at Harvard Law by two decades, clerked for the legendary Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and planned a political career of his own. Instead, after marrying a woman named Katharine Meyer, Philip took over her father's newspaper and became an influential member of the Kennedy-era media elite before committing suicide in 1963. Cap's second son, Bill, made his mark in the business world. He converted five square miles of his father's pastureland at the fringes of the Everglades into a master-planned suburb called Miami Lakes, building a real estate empire that made the Grahams rich and financed Bob's early campaigns.

Philip Graham's newspaper, of course, was The Washington Post; his widow, the late Katharine Graham, became one of America's most successful businesswomen; one of their sons, Donald Graham, now runs The Washington Post Co. and is a passive shareholder in the Graham Companies. So there is a family connection between The Post and Bob Graham. Donald Graham is friendly with Bob, and Katharine Graham shepherded him around Washington power circles after his election to the Senate.

She mentioned Bob only once in her autobiography, Personal History, recounting how he spit on her when he was 3, but she did note that his political success was "a strange fulfillment of both his father's and Phil's ambitions." In any case, Donald Graham has pledged that The Post will treat his half-uncle like any other politician.

After his graduation from Harvard Law, Bob returned to Miami Lakes to do some lawyering for the family firm, then won a seat in the state legislature in 1966.

D. Robert Graham, as he called himself back then, was part of a vanguard of South Florida progressives sympathetic to civil rights, public education and the environment. After jumping to the state Senate in 1970, he became the leader of a liberal cadre known as the Doghouse Democrats, because they were always in the doghouse of Democratic leader Dempsey Barron and his conservative Pork Chop Gang.

"Bob would jump up and deliver these impassioned soliloquies," says Miami Herald Executive Editor Tom Fiedler, who was a young political reporter in Tallahassee at the time. "Then Dempsey would roll his eyes and bang his gavel, and that would be that."

Rumors started spreading around Tallahassee that a frustrated Graham might enter the 1978 governor's race. One of Graham's fellow Doghouse Democrats, Jack Gordon, asked Graham if the rumors were true. "Bob said: I'm going to be 40. If I'm going to do this, I've got to do it now," Gordon recalls. "I was a little taken aback." It was hard to see why Graham was in such a rush -- unless he had plans for much higher office someday.

Really, though, the race seemed more like political suicide than political maneuvering. The Democratic field already included the current lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state, plus a former governor and Jacksonville's mayor, all better known than Graham. And no South Florida politician had ever made it to the governor's mansion; Cap had come closest, placing third in a primary, prompting a Herald columnist to write that a South Floridian might actually win on a cold day in hell.

One night, Graham confided to Fiedler that he wanted to run, and asked him to be his press secretary.

"I was thinking: You poor, well-meaning, deluded guy," recalls Fiedler, who politely declined the offer. "I mean, it was obvious that Bob was going down in flames."

D. Robert Graham, the multimillionaire Miami liberal, certainly would have gone down in flames.

Instead, Graham ran as just plain Bob, a husband and father of four daughters, a nice young man whose family raised cows and built houses, a genial centrist who got along with everyone. He also had a brilliant gimmick: He spent 100 full days working ordinary jobs with ordinary Floridians. He worked as a cop, a mechanic, a bellboy, a trucker, a pooper-scooper, a steelworker. He fed nursing-home invalids, shaved psychiatric patients, hauled fertilizer, cleaned bedpans, built mobile homes, prepared Cuban sandwiches. He also spent a day in a Jacksonville poultry factory, prompting the Democratic front-runner, Robert Shevin, to grouse that Floridians didn't want a chicken-plucker as governor. Which prompted one of Graham's factory co-workers to chuck a rubber chicken at Slevin outside a Jacksonville debate.

The workdays totally transformed Graham's campaign, turning the little-known long shot into the people's choice. They also transformed Graham. "You know, as a boy, Bob lived way out in the country, all by himself. He was shy!" Adele says. "The workdays made him much more confident around people."

The gimmick really worked because Graham really worked. He wasn't just slumming. "He didn't just show up, make a speech, shake a bunch of hands, pose for pictures and then leave," a Palm Beach Post reporter explained. Graham also wrote a richly detailed campaign book called Workdays, featuring a cover photo of the disheveled candidate dripping in sweat, working as a lumberjack. The book is full of vivid anecdotes, from the violent marital dispute Graham observed on patrol with the Tallahassee police to his awkward run-in with Shevin's wife after carrying luggage up to her penthouse suite in an Orlando hotel. ("There was no tip," he wrote.)

Workdays is also a remarkable window into Graham's political education. He learned as a mechanic that Florida auto inspections were a joke. He learned at a nursing home that orderlies earned only $17 a day. He learned as a parking attendant that tiny curb cuts changed the lives of disabled workers. "Bob learned how real people struggle every day," says Charlie Reed, another former Graham chief of staff who is now a close friend. "It helped him connect policy to the real world." Today, Graham still does workdays; on his 385th, as a radio talk-show host, he let slip that he was thinking about running for president.

It snowed in Tallahassee the day of Graham's 1979 gubernatorial inauguration -- the cold day in hell after all. And in his early months in office, the old Pork Chop Gang blocked just about every initiative Graham proposed; one newspaper dubbed him "Governor Jell-O." But his popularity soon rebounded, due in large part to a single policy: He started killing people. The death penalty thrust Graham into the national spotlight for the first time. It also prompted pointed questions about his political motives -- questions that resurfaced only when he became the Cassandra of the war on terrorism.

In May 1979, Graham sent a murderer named John Spenkelink to the electric chair, America's first involuntary execution in more than a decade. Graham had voted for capital punishment as a legislator, but many Floridians had doubted that he'd actually fire up Old Sparky.

But Graham proceeded in his cool, almost robotic way, never betraying any inner turmoil. In his book about Florida's death row, Among the Lowest of the Dead, The Washington Post's David Von Drehle wrote that on the day of the execution -- as protesters outside chanted, "Bloodsucker! Bloodsucker!" -- Graham summoned his frantic speechwriter, who assumed that the governor had changed his mind at the last minute. Instead, Graham stoically asked him to please draft a response to a constituent who had written Graham a letter to express outrage . . . that her son had been forced to pay fees to play in his school band.

The death penalty was by far the hottest issue in Florida then, and nicknames like "Bloody Bob" and "Governor Death" only enhanced Graham's standing. Von Drehle noted that Graham did seem to approve more executions and grant fewer clemencies during his reelection campaign, and even some Graham admirers suspect that politics helped send men to the chair. "I think he made a deal with the devil on the death penalty," Fiedler says. "He figured, whatever good he wanted to achieve in politics would be lost if he didn't give the people what they wanted. He was probably right."

Still, he never gloated about executions or mentioned them in ads. He now says he simply believes that some crimes demand the ultimate sanction, and that capital punishment is a deterrent: "We had, what, 20-plus executions? Any time you sign a death warrant on another human being, you do it with a great deal of sadness." In fact, Graham had 16 executions, an odd fact for such a detail-oriented man to forget.

Today, Graham is one of the most popular politicians in Florida history. He's known as a successful governor, an excellent consensus-builder, an unusually nice man for a politician. He's never lost an election. He's never been embroiled in a scandal. He's enjoyed support from environmentalists and sugar barons, Cubans and Jews, retirees and college students. Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton and Al Gore all considered him as a running mate. Al Cardenas, former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, complains that half the state's top GOP fundraisers raise money for Graham as well. "He's a very decent man," Cardenas concedes. "He's got real integrity."

He's deeply in love with his 10 grandkids, who call Adele and him -- warn the consultants! -- Deedle and Doodle. And he's got a sense of humor. He's played a corpse in a dinner theater and sung with Jimmy Buffett at a media dinner. When humorist Dave Barry asked him about America's "accordion-repair crisis," Graham promptly pledged to prepare anti-dumping orders against Liechtenstein, and warned that "I don't know whether the actual use of nuclear weapons is called for, but I do think we need a credible military threat."

Regardless of his likability, Graham has not been a prominent Washington player since joining the Senate in 1987. He's worked hard on Medicare, immigration, drug interdiction and other key Florida issues, and he helped drive an $8 billion Everglades restoration plan, but his legislative record is pretty thin.

His one foray into national politics -- leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the 1994 election cycle -- ended with the Democrats losing the Senate. And while his peers respect his intelligence, diligence and willingness to work across party lines, some of them think he's a bit of a dork. He wears a tie with the state of Florida on it every single day, although he's planning to drop the habit once he starts his presidential campaign. And his stump speeches can be pedantic snoozers. Gore campaign aides still joke about a disastrous stemwinder Graham delivered at Nashville's Wildhorse Saloon; he lost the crowd early, droned on anyway, and killed any slim chance he might have had to join the ticket.

Then there are the notebooks.

Graham was mocked relentlessly as an obsessive-compulsive in 2000 after he showed one to Time magazine, which introduced America to such mundane entries as: "8:45-9:35 -- Kitchen, family room. Eat breakfast, branola cereal with peach." Graham is genuinely puzzled why his notebooks have become a Beltway punch line. He sees them as low-tech Palm Pilots, indispensable for recording constituent concerns and keeping track of his day-to-day doings -- just as his dad used to jot down which fence needed mending and which cow seemed weak. "I could make a better case that this is eccentric," he says, pointing to his Florida tie. Unprompted, he hands over his current notebook, proving if nothing else that the jokes have not persuaded him to adjust his all-the-facts style:

"7:15 -- Awake at 3STTH. [That's his Capitol Hill townhouse.]

"7:15-7:35 -- read 'John Adams' on the importance of an independent judiciary -- dress in dark grey suit

"8:00 -- Kitchen -- eat breakfast (Smart Start cereal and raisins)."

Graham's notebook on September 11, 2001, did not record what he ate for breakfast. It did not even record whom he met for breakfast, but that's because the meeting was supposed to be highly classified. His mystery guest was Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, the shadowy director of Pakistan's intelligence service who would be fired a few weeks later for his cozy relationship with the Taliban. But this was still the last hour of the Era of Before. Graham's log began: "8:05 -- Issues re Afghanistan."

Graham wasn't even supposed to be on the intelligence committee at the time, much less the chairman. Senators are only supposed to serve eight years on the committee, and Graham was in his ninth. After the 2000 elections, Democrats were left with no one else with intelligence experience to be their ranking member, so Minority Leader Tom Daschle granted Graham an extension.

In June, James Jeffords of Vermont tipped the Senate to the Democrats, and Graham took over the committee. His first foreign trip as chairman, a late-August journey with House intelligence Chairman Goss and Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, focused almost entirely on terrorism. It ended in Pakistan, where Gen. Ahmed's intelligence agents briefed them on the growing threat of al Qaeda while they peered across the Khyber Pass at a then-obscure section of Afghanistan. It was called Tora Bora. The trio also visited Ahmed's compound and urged him to do more to help capture Osama bin Laden. The general hadn't said much, but the group had agreed to discuss the issue more when he visited Washington.

So on September 11, they all reconvened in a top-secret conference room on the fourth floor of the U.S. Capitol. According to Graham's copious notes, they discussed "poppy cultivation" before they discussed terrorism. But then the Americans pressed Ahmed even harder to crack down on al Qaeda. "Ahmed kept explaining why from his perspective that was very difficult to do," Kyl recalls. Graham's notes recount the general's take on the Taliban's mind-set -- "focused on hereafter, whether their current life will assure eternal glory" -- before the discussion drifted to Pakistani nuclear policy:

"deterrence, not 'bomb for bomb.' not expanding. why? policy, economic restraints, moratorium on testing."

And then:

"9:04 -- Tim gives note on 2 planes crash into World Trade Center, NYC."

And then? Graham finished his notes about nuclear policy.

"Pak.-India. from parity in 1965 . . . "

The meeting broke up, and Graham walked out to the East Lawn of the Capitol. "The first stage was one of befuddlement," he acknowledges. "That was probably the worst possible place to be, if that fourth plane was headed towards us."

Graham then headed to his hideaway office near the Senate floor, and asked a staffer to call the cloakroom to see if there would be votes that morning. But the U.S. Capitol Police were already evacuating the building. The Era of After had begun.

Before September 11, Graham spent 10 hours a week on intelligence work, and terrorism was one of his top priorities. He had tried to push the CIA to focus much harder on human intelligence, but nobody had paid much attention. After September 11, intelligence took over his life, and terrorism was his only priority. He and Goss headed up a high-profile House-Senate investigation into intelligence failures, and issued a surprisingly harsh, bipartisan report. He became a mini-celebrity on the Sunday talk-show circuit, making two dozen appearances last year, more than any other member of Congress. He still sounded responsible and measured -- in truth, he often sounded a bit boring -- but he was increasingly worried by his briefings.

"It's sobering stuff," Goss says. "We hear about people who want to do lethal damage, and they're already here. They're virtually everywhere."

Eleanor Hill, staff director for the September 11 investigation, says Graham grew more and more agitated after hundreds of hours studying raw intelligence.

"He thought about all this deeply and carefully, and he reached some very disturbing conclusions," Hill says. "When you see the actual threats we're dealing with, it's pretty frightening. You realize how many zealots there are who want to do horrendous things to us, and you realize how vulnerable we are."

In fact, some of Graham's confidants say he was deeply affected by the strain of his intelligence work. "It really got to him," his brother Bill says. "I've never seen him so down. One day, he asked me: Bill, how do you relieve your stress when you're really uptight?" Goss had his own problems. He says he suffered from exhaustion while obsessing about al Qaeda, and suggests that Graham's congenital heart problems may have been exacerbated by stress as well. "I'm not a doctor, but it certainly doesn't surprise me that we both had health problems last year," Goss says. "You can't imagine how hard it was."

Even Adele Graham says her husband, while steady on the surface, was privately haunted by the specter of another attack. "I could see the stress and strain on Bob," she says. "That was a scary time . . . I think it took a toll on him." Adele insisted that he get a full physical before announcing his candidacy, which may have saved his life.

These days, Graham is trying to project presidential vigor after his post-operative convalescence, and he betrays no hints of inner turmoil. "I think I'm freer of anxiety than most people," he says. "I tend to be a fatalist." He hasn't bought duct tape. He hasn't even tested his congressionally issued gas mask.

But in his matter-of-fact manner, he continues to make chilling statements about radioactive "dirty" bombs, nuclear proliferation and the countless variety of unsecured American targets. A few grams of anthrax in a few envelopes emptied his office building for three months; what would a few tons of anthrax in a shipping container do? Terrorists have tried to attack Washington before; why wouldn't they try again? There are thousands of reservoirs and lakes that supply water to Americans; how hard could it be to poison one? There are "significant" numbers of Islamic militants inside the country; what's to stop them from blowing themselves up?

"I tell people: As you go about your day, look at all the vulnerabilities in your community, your workplace, your home," he says. "Drive under a bridge. Walk into a building . . . My point is it's impossible to secure our homeland without doing away with our liberties."

That's the cheery message Graham has been sharing with his friends. He's encouraged some of them to read The Age of Sacred Terror, a frightening book about the rise of militant Islam. "He's got me scared for my children and grandchildren," says his neighbor and former campaign manager Aaron Podhurst. Arva Moore Parks, a Miami historian and a close friend of the Grahams, says she's never seen Bob so worried. "I wonder: What's got him so frightened? What does he know that I don't know?"

Somewhere deep inside Port Everglades, a gate is open. There is not much inside the gate, just a few hundred empty cargo containers. There is not much outside the gate, just a secure section of Fort Lauderdale's bustling port. But that gate is supposed to be locked. And it is now Sgt. Mike Kallman's job to notice mini-discrepancies like open gates. "I'm not comfortable with this," he says, calling into his radio to grill an underling at the Broward County Sheriff's Office. "I'm all about vigilance."

Of all the things that frighten Bob Graham, seaports frighten him the most. More than 3 million cruise-ship passengers passed through Port Everglades in 2001, and no one knows exactly who they were. More than 2,000 ships unloaded containers at the port, and no one knows exactly what was in them. Port Everglades handles most of South Florida's fuel, but until September 11, port security focused almost exclusively on drugs. It was an open port, and motorists often cut through en route to the beach.

"It's a new world now," says Richard Kolbusz, a U.S. Customs Service official at the port. "We've overhauled every single thing we do. And you know what? We still could be vulnerable."

Graham has been concerned about ports since 1997, when he spent his 326th workday at Tampa's port and was stunned by its porous security. Containers were never screened. Random cars drove right up to ships. Graham persuaded President Clinton to appoint a commission, and began pushing legislation to harden ports. But terrorism was only a secondary issue for Graham back then; he was mostly concerned with drug trafficking and smuggling.

It was only after September 11 that he began to focus on the multiple terrorism nightmares that could converge at ports: cruises hijacked, terrorists smuggled into the country, suicide attacks on a port's massive petroleum tanks, radioactive dirty bombs or even atomic bombs smuggled into the country in containers. Last January, Graham spent his 375th workday inspecting containers at Port Everglades, and he asked a lot of worst-case-scenario questions.

"Thousands of containers come into the U.S. every day," he says. "If someone slips a dirty bomb with a geopositioning device and a means of detonation in with some golf shirts, there's less than a 3 percent chance of that box being inspected. There's a 97 percent chance that terrorists could blow it up."

Have a nice day!

Graham's seaport bill finally passed last year, repositioned as an anti-terrorism measure. And on a recent tour of Port Everglades, security officials showed that the port has gone to impressive lengths to harden itself since September 11. They wanted most of the details to be withheld, but here's an example: There are now three checkpoints where anyone entering the port must show official ID, and three chase cars waiting with their engines running 24 hours a day in case someone blows through a checkpoint. But the officials all emphasized that while their efforts might prompt terrorists to choose a softer target, there's only so much they can do to stop determined enemies who are willing to commit suicide.

Kallman would not give the details of a recent analysis of a potential "catastrophic event" at the port, except to say that it would reverse long-standing population trends in fast-growing South Florida. "We've raised the bar," says Capt. James Watson, who supervises Coast Guard operations at the port. "But you take a scenario where someone's willing to blow himself up, that's a very scary scenario. The senator's right."

It is a stomach-churning experience to talk to terrorism experts about Graham's prognosis of doom, because most of them think another dramatic attack is practically inevitable in the relatively near future. "Graham's absolutely right: We're incredibly vulnerable, and the next one will make September 11 look like kid's play," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and Central Asia. "Everyone in the anti-terrorism community is convinced that it's just a matter of when, not if," says Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterintelligence chief.

Graham is by no means the only Cassandra in Washington. Shelby and Goss are just as worried. Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet have all issued scary warnings of further attacks. Former senator and terrorism analyst Gary Hart can make Graham sound like a cockeyed optimist, and he might run for president, too.

But life goes on, even on orange alert. It isn't perfectly normal life -- at least not in Washington or New York -- but honestly, does terrorism really overwhelm your existence? Do you really spend more time worrying about al Qaeda than you spend worrying about your leaky faucet or your meddling boss or your kid's soccer schedule? Are you planning to move out of Washington? If you believe the experts, it might be a rational thing to do. But most people don't function that way.

Even before September 11, it was no secret that terrorists posed a serious risk to Americans. They had already tried to blow up the World Trade Center and had successfully destroyed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Authorities had even foiled an al Qaeda plot to fly planes into buildings. But bureaucratic reports full of ghastly premonitions gathered dust, and the attacks ultimately came as a gruesome shock. After September 11, of course, commentators promptly declared that the age of denial was over, but everyone knows that simply wasn't true. Denial is still a powerful force on a planet where everyone eventually dies. Americans are obviously more conscious of their vulnerabilities now, and the concept of deterrence that kept the Cold War from going hot is clearly less relevant to conflicts with zealots who welcome their own demise. But most Americans prefer not to spend their days thinking about apocalyptic attacks. It's no fun. So after September 11, that job fell to people like Bob Graham.

In his time on the intelligence committee -- he finally rotated off this year -- Graham saw a lot of classified material that the public has not seen. He learned many specific things that the public does not know. But none of that supersecret skinny seems to explain why Graham has become such an alarmist.

"I don't think it's anything special that he knows," Cannistraro says. "I think he's just using common sense." Goss says most big intelligence secrets end up in the newspaper anyway. "Bob isn't concerned because he knows more than you," Goss says. "Bob is concerned because he used to spend 24 hours a day thinking: What can go wrong? If I was a terrorist, what could I exploit? It wears on you."

So it could be that Graham's constant focus on vulnerabilities produced exaggerated fears of terrorism. Ex-senator Bob Kerrey, a Graham admirer who now runs New School University in New York, agrees with Graham that America is almost infinitely vulnerable, but he's not nearly as worried about more attacks. "Why aren't they happening?" he asks. "Maybe people don't hate us as much as we think!"

Kerrey works a few blocks from Ground Zero, and he's sick of buy-duct-tape-or-die newscasts, sick of his friends avoiding the city because of terrorism alerts. "Oh, gimme a break," he says. "I think America needs to regain its nerve about terrorism. You're much more likely to die of food poisoning."

It must be said, however, that Kerrey's Americans-gone-wimpy theory is not widely held, and that Kerrey concedes he might not subscribe to it if he were still serving in the Senate. More common is the Americans-gone-oblivious theory: Graham and other officials whose job has required them to focus on vulnerabilities are simply unable to enjoy the day-to-day denial available to most Americans. Kyl actually argues that America is so inescapably vulnerable that Graham's pronouncements of doom are practically meaningless. "It does not take a genius to predict more attacks in the United States," says Kyl. "We all know that. I'd like to see him predict how it's going to happen."

It was March 19, D-Day in Iraq. President Bush had given Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of Baghdad, and 43 of those hours had passed. In an interview in his Capitol hideaway, Graham was calmly explaining that it makes sense to expect the worst. "In terms of the potential for Americans to get killed on American soil, I can't think of a time in our history when we've been as exposed as we'll be in a few hours," he said with a blank expression.

If Graham's bleak assessment of American vulnerability is disturbingly uncontroversial, his outraged finger-pointing at President Bush is highly controversial. Graham admired Bush's response to September 11, when he vowed to hunt down terrorists and destroy their training camps. Graham even defended Bush from criticism that he should have done more to prevent the attacks. But for more than a year, Graham has been baffled by Bush's intense focus on Iraq. He saw no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with September 11, and no evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Americans. "Saddam is evil, but he's not the most dangerous evil," Graham said that day in March, unaware that the war had already begun. "Iraq's not in the top 10."

Last October, two days before his blood-on-your-hands moment, Graham had persuaded the CIA to say in a declassified letter what it had said in classified briefings: A war in Iraq would increase the chances of a terrorist attack on American soil. CIA officials even quantified the risk at about 75 percent. "But the Bush administration has done nothing to reduce the threat!" he said, his voice finally rising. "They've been stunningly passive. Their only focus is Iraq."

This, Graham says, is what turned him into a freakout guy. "I just don't seem to be freaking out the right people," he grumbles. America's military success in Iraq has not made Graham feel any more sympathetic to Bush or his war effort. And it hasn't made Graham feel any safer. "You can drive across country on threadbare tires and maybe they won't blow out the first time," he says. "That doesn't mean you should drive back on the same tires." The most dangerous sources of evil, he says, are still unconquered, still undaunted and angrier than ever.

This, Graham says, is why he decided to run for president. (He says Bush's domestic focus on huge tax cuts played a role as well, but Graham's friends all agree that national security drove his decision to run.)

Graham argues that the Bush administration has shifted resources from al Qaeda and Afghanistan to Hussein and Iraq, downgrading the war on terrorism abroad to a scattershot manhunt while increasing the risk of terrorism at home. Graham also believes that Bush has ignored the threat of Hezbollah, which runs terrorist training camps in Syria and Syrian-controlled areas of southern Lebanon. Graham charges that Bush eased the pressure on Syria, a member of the United Nations Security Council, in order to mute its opposition to war in Iraq, and he was not appeased when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly accused Syria of smuggling night-vision goggles to Iraqi forces.

"I've never heard him talk about Syria supporting the training camps that will graduate the next generation of terrorists," Graham says. "I think that's a much greater threat than goggles." Graham also accuses the administration of going soft on Saudi Arabia, an ally that Graham hints may have had financial links to the September 11 hijackers.

In general, Graham wants America to go on the offensive almost everywhere in the Middle East -- even as he argues that Iraq was not a proper target. He doesn't think Bush is doing enough on terrorism defense, either -- he says seaport security, for example, has been woefully underfunded in the president's budget -- but he doesn't really think defense is the answer. He thinks the answer is what Bush said was going to be the answer after September 11, the so-called Bush Doctrine: Go after the terrorists and the states that harbor them. "This battle is going to be won on offense," Graham says.

The obvious criticism of Graham resembles dovish criticisms of Bush: Can the United States really police the world? Wouldn't military action in Arab countries like Syria and Lebanon provoke more anti-Americanism and more attacks? "Yes, probably," Graham says. "But at least we'd be going after the real problem: terrorism." He simply thinks the war in Iraq has made the problem worse, not better.

"The probability of terrorism is much more serious today than it was a year ago," Graham says. "We're not pursuing it with the kind of aggressiveness we'd use if we were really fighting a war."

This is the point where many Republicans start to sniff politics. The war on terrorism, they say, is as aggressive as ever, as the recent capture of reputed September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed showed. They acknowledge that Hezbollah has a frightening U.S. presence, but say the group is more of a threat to Israel than to the United States. They argue that Hussein's ouster has liberated millions of Iraqis, spreading seeds of freedom throughout the Middle East. They point out that the Bush administration, after toppling Hussein, has started talking tough with Syria after all. And they wonder: Is America really looking for a president who says he is willing to take the war on terrorism, as Graham proposed in an interview, "to the streets of Cairo"? If the regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia are not to Graham's liking, with what does he propose to replace them?

"This isn't the Bob Graham I know," says Florida Congressman Mark Foley, a Republican who hopes to succeed Graham in the Senate. "He's always been a cautious guy, never overreacting, usually plain vanilla. And now he's accusing President Bush of sleepwalking? That's just ridiculous."

So far, insiders have not taken Graham's presidential bid too seriously. He got a late start, and the double-bypass surgery that left a cow valve in his heart was not Graham's choice for a campaign kickoff. He's never been overly telegenic, and his hyperdetailed notebook entries have fueled perceptions that he's just too weird for prime time. Before Bush's State of the Union address this year, CNN listed every Democratic member of Congress who was even thinking about running -- including Sens. Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd -- but forgot Graham. Many observers suspect that if he ever does make a presidential ticket it would be as a running mate, given Florida's current status as the ultimate swing state. It's hard to picture a President Doodle.

But Graham points out that he has been underestimated before. He remembers the brutal day in 1977, not long after he commissioned a statewide poll for his governor's race, when he found out that he had only 3 percent name recognition and 1 percent popular support. He then reported to a workday with a marine services crew; while swabbing down a $700,000 yacht, it occurred to him that there might be better uses for the $700,000 he was planning to spend on his campaign. But he was 40, and if he was going to do it, he was going to do it then.

"My life has been a progression, with a run for president being a logical conclusion," he says. "What I had lacked before September 11 was the ingredient of passion."

He pauses. His droopy jaw hardens ever so slightly.

"Now I have the passion."

Michael Grunwald, a Post reporter, is on leave to write a book about the Everglades. He'll be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.