WASHINGTON – He was appointed to take the place of his celebrated father. He went on to win a six-year term that spanned times of high national drama and difficult personal choices. But in the end, Lincoln D. Chafee never made the U.S. Senate seat his own.

He never seized control of a floor debate, never showed the horse trader’s sense of an adversary’s hopes and fears, never took easily to the campaign routines of glad hand, stump speech and money chase.

U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee watches returns in his private room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Warwick, where state Republicans were gathered.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

What Linc Chafee offered instead was a version of the citizen-senator that the Founding Fathers might have recognized. By the standard of the modern Congress, he always seemed wary of popular passions, free of partisan drive, content to weigh the arguments and cast a conscientious vote on the issue of the day.

More often than any Senate Republican, Chafee cast his vote in dissent from the party of his president – and did so on some of the great issues of his brief Senate tenure: the war in Iraq, the tax-cutting program of President Bush, the nomination of a conservative Republican to hold the swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Chafee began his service in 1999, Jonathan Stevens, a boyhood friend and longtime aide, made a forecast that the new senator would largely fulfill. Chafee would have a “graceful” way about him but “no need to be overbearing,” Stevens said. Beneath the hesitant, deferential manner, however, he said Chafee would show some steel.

Chafee needed all of his gumption to work in the dangerous middle ground of politics, a Republican in Democratic Rhode Island, a liberal in today’s conservative GOP.

Chafee’s most famous vote was also his proudest. “A key vote of our time,” he has called his “No” to the Senate resolution four years ago authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Chafee raised the lone Republican voice of dissent from the war measure, which won a big majority of Senate Democrats as well.

Such defiance of the party line certainly nettled Republican leaders in Washington. But by itself, Chafee’s comparatively liberal voting record would not have been enough to draw the GOP primary fight that began his undoing. Rhode Islanders were long accustomed to the moderate brand of Republicanism embodied by the late Sen. John H. Chafee. Like his father, Lincoln Chafee opposed conservative orthodoxy on taxes, abortion rights, environmental regulation and more.

It was a different trait – Chafee’s refusal to fit the political mold, his impulse to say the impolitic thing, however politely – that invited the costly and damaging fight with a fellow Republican, Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey.

It’s hard to imagine a more practiced politician casting a protest vote against the election of a sitting president of his own party, let alone announcing the heresy on Election Day.

But Chafee did just that when he announced a write-in vote for Mr. Bush’s father, the former president, in 2004. Chafee thus flouted a favorite admonition of his father on the advantages of good diplomatic relations with powerful peers: “Don’t insult the crocodile before you cross the stream.”

He also invited the primary fight that depleted his campaign war chest and took some of the political gleam off the golden Chafee name.

Independent analyst Jennifer Duffy once described the senator’s contrarian streak this way: “Chafee has almost no impulse, no reflex toward helping the party, toward fighting the Democrats. He doesn’t act like he wants to be a leader.”

But increasingly this year, Chafee has acted “like he wants to be in the Senate, vote his conscience, do what he can for Rhode Island,” added Duffy, who grew up in Rhode Island politics and tracks Senate races for the Cook Political Report in Washington, D.C.

Indeed, Chafee’s desire to stay in the Senate burned more visibly this season than ever before. Under the pressure of a fight for his political life, Chafee improved his skills with the basic tools of his trade -- touting his own attainments, attacking the opponent’s record, honing a sales pitch and repeating it a hundred times a day.

Chafee won the September primary going away, in part by attacking Laffey.

And increasingly as the fall wore on, he took the offensive against Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. In debates, TV ads and news conferences, Chafee criticized the former attorney general for declining years ago to prosecute a Roger Williams Hospital official accused by colleagues off skimming expense accounts. Whitehouse answered that he had imposed a financial sanction on the official, who was convicted this fall of criminal charges.

Chafee also pounded at the refrain that Sen. Hillary Clinton and other Whitehouse backers should apologize for their votes on the war, should declare that “Senator Chafee was right.” He seized on the changes in Whitehouse’s stance on troop withdrawals from Iraq – “flip-flopping” on the war, he called it.

But Chafee was still the same old Linc – open and direct to a fault on matters that practiced politicians know to keep buttoned down tight.

“We are so broke we are not polling,” Chafee blurted out in response to a reporter’s question last week. “We’re not broke. Let me correct that,” Chafee said, too late to contain the glimpse inside a hard-pressed campaign.

But money was a problem for Chafee, forcing him to reach into his family fortune to pay for advertising late in the campaign. Whitehouse, meanwhile, had avoided a damaging primary, piled up a significant cash advantage and settled on his own simple refrain: Linc Chafee, whatever his good points, was part off the Republican majority that stood with Mr. Bush.

In the end, Chafee’s improved campaign skills, the aid from his national party, the final surge of independent support for the son of that golden political family – all of it was too little and too late to offset the wave of anger at Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress.

Now, like the classic citizen-senator of an earlier time, Lincoln Chafee has ended his service and is returning home.