Rep. Jim Kolbe, second from left, paid a visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, only months after U.S. troops helped topple the Taliban. As an Appropriations subcommittee chairman, Kolbe played a big foreign-policy role.

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Before the Congressional Page Program became a synonym for political scandal, Jim Kolbe often spoke about his experience as a page for Sen. Barry Goldwater in the late 1950s.

They were defining years for Kolbe: a time when he absorbed the culture of Capitol Hill, homing in on the political tenets that would later make him a popular representative for Southern Arizona.

During his nearly 30-year legislative career — first in the Arizona Senate and since 1985 in Congress — he earned a reputation as a moderate in a partisan world: fiscally conservative, socially liberal, a voice working from the center.

He pushed for Social Security reform long before it became a hot issue. His signature issue was international trade, and he helped craft the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But as Kolbe's legislative career comes to a close this week — Democrat Gabrielle Giffords will be sworn in to succeed him in Congress — his accomplishments are being measured against questions about his handling of sexually explicit messages sent to a former page by former Rep. Mark Foley.

Foley, a Florida Republican, retired in September after reports that he sent inappropriate messages to former pages, one of them appointed by Kolbe.

A House ethics committee report on the scandal showed that Kolbe's former page had sent him Foley's sexually explicit message in 2001. Kolbe denies ever reading the message.

There is also a pending federal inquiry about a camping trip Kolbe took to the Grand Canyon with two former pages in 1996.

Under such scrutiny, Kolbe retreated from the public eye in recent months, declining interview requests until late last week. At the height of the media scrutiny this fall, Kolbe was traveling in Europe, inaccessible to the public.

For his friends and political advisers, this has been a saddening end to a distinguished career. It's an ending that they certainly hope — and many believe — will not overshadow his service as a lawmaker.

"This should be a good time for him," said Toni Hellon, a departing state senator who managed several of his campaigns. "This should be a time when he is looking forward to the future. … Instead it's probably kind of a raw time for him.

"I know the kind of respect Jim Kolbe has for the page process. That's how he started. I know, I am absolutely sure, there is not anything Jim would ever do to make a page feel uncomfortable," Hellon said.

Kolbe, 64, was born in Evanston, Ill., but his family moved to Sonoita, south of Tucson, when he was 5. He grew up in Arizona, served as a page in Washington, D.C., for two years, then returned to Evanston to attend Northwestern University.

By the time he was a graduate student at Stanford in the mid-'60s, he was a politician in the making. To attorney John Munger, former GOP chairman for Arizona and Pima County who was a freshman at Stanford when he met Kolbe, "There was no question in my mind he was going to pursue political office."

Kolbe and Munger met in 1965 through the Stanford Young Republicans, of which Kolbe was president. It was a tough year for them. Goldwater had lost his presidential bid in a landslide, the Vietnam War was ramping up and Lyndon Johnson was pushing his Great Society.

"The country was leaning so far left," Munger said. But he saw Kolbe, even then, as a voice urging a return to center.

After Stanford, Kolbe served a tour of duty in Vietnam in the Navy, service he never exploited politically nor talked much about in public.

Then he returned to Illinois to work as an assistant to Gov. Richard Ogilvie.

His first stint as an elected representative began in 1977 as a state senator in Arizona.

Later, when Kolbe ran for Congress in Southeastern Arizona, his backing for abortion rights, among other issues, gave him a groundswell of support.

"Jim had championed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment while he was in the Legislature," said Vera Marie Badertscher, who ran his district office and managed his campaigns until 1990. "He was the only Republican to do so, and so he made a lot of friends among women Democrats."

But in the general election he lost to Democrat Jim McNulty by 1.6 percentage points. "I will never forget that number," Badertscher said.

She had been drawn to Kolbe because of his liberal social views, friendliness and interest. In the late '70s, she had just moved with her husband to Tucson from Scottsdale, and Kolbe, who didn't know her, took the time to tell her about schools and neighborhoods.

"I was very impressed with his groundedness," she said. "I thought 'This is somebody who knew what they believed in.' "

After the loss in 1982, although Kolbe never said it, Badertscher believes "Jim probably decided within 24 hours that he was going to run again."

In his next bid for office, Kolbe used McNulty's record to frame him as a liberal who was out of touch with the district. Kolbe also tapped into his Santa Cruz County childhood to pull rural, conservative Democrats.

It worked. Kolbe stormed back to beat McNulty in 1984 with 51 percent of the vote.

Among some politicians and reporters the fact that Kolbe was gay was long rumored, but it was viewed as irrelevant to his political career and so it was never reported.

His mainstream political opponents never brought it up, except in 1992 when he was opposed on the right by a religious conservative and on the left by an openly gay candidate, both of whom made veiled allusions to Kolbe's closeted orientation.

"It didn't appear to affect his job as congressman one way or the other," then-Arizona Daily Star Editor Stephen E. Auslander said in 1996 after Kolbe was forced to come out. "Public figures have a moral, if not legal, right to privacy. So long as his private life didn't affect his job it's his own business."

But Kolbe's privacy was swept away in 1996 when The Advocate, a magazine that caters to gay and lesbian readers, threatened to out him because he supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages made in other states. Kolbe said he supported the bill because it allowed states to determine their own definition of marriage.

In announcing that he was gay, thereby beating The Advocate to the punch, Kolbe made the point that his orientation had nothing to do with his work as a legislator.

"That I am a gay person has never affected the way that I legislate," he said then. "I am the same person, one who has spent many years struggling to relieve the tax burden for families, balance the budget for our children's future, and improve the quality of life that we cherish in Southern Arizona."

He lost a marginal number of voters, but the announcement had almost no effect on his popularity within the district. He won re-election going away with 69 percent of the vote, a percentage that he usually garnered each election.

What it did mark the start of, however, was a continued struggle to not be pigeonholed by his sexual orientation.

"Jim always saw himself as the congressman who happened to be gay, not as a gay congressman," said pollster Margaret Kenski, who did polling for Kolbe throughout his career.

"To me that wasn't an issue," his old friend Munger said.

How successful he was in convincing others in the GOP to see it that way is debatable.

When Kolbe spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention a number of delegates protested, holding a prayer vigil on the convention floor.

In a three-minute speech, Kolbe, then the only openly gay Republican, spoke about his top issue of free trade, never once mentioning his orientation.

As The Advocate noted in a 2000 article, the speech pleased no one. Gay activists wanted him to speak about gay rights while religious conservatives protested his appearance.

In the latter stages of his career, Kolbe gained political clout on the House Appropriations Committee. Through his career, Kolbe was the chairman of two subcommittees and oversaw the disbursement of foreign aid to war-torn and impoverished countries.

"He's left his fingerprints the world over," said Steve Huffman, a former state representative who Kolbe hoped would become his replacement.

But Hellon noted that Kolbe had wanted to be a U.S. trade representative. "I personally believe that Jim would likely have received an appointment to that," Hellon said. "But because he was the 'gay Republican' and because he was not down-the-line party platform, I think that's the price he paid."

Locally, Hellon said Kolbe was often at odds with the Pima County Republican Party's executive committee, which was much more right-leaning.

"It's not been a good match," she said. "Overall it was hard for them to look at him as the leader of the party down here just simply because many of them did not agree with him philosophically."

After the Foley page scandal, another controversy surfaced while Kolbe was planning his retirement. He was a finalist to head the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria until ethical questions arose about his taking the job.

As chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee, Kolbe had funded the organization. If he had received the job, he would have as a legislator allocated the funds that would have paid his salary after retirement.

Retiring amid questions has, at least temporarily, tarnished a distinguished service record.

"It should not have become part of the story," Hellon said of the questions about his connection to the Foley scandal. "But it did."

• NAFTA: Played a critical role in passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

• Social Security: Kolbe is a staunch supporter of allowing workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. In his retirement statement, Kolbe predicted that Congress will use his Social Security reform proposals as a standard in the future.

• Border: A supporter of guest-worker programs, Kolbe was critical of enforcement-only border security plans. Some border activists have criticized him for not doing enough to curb the deaths of border crossers.

• Environment: Helped create the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area and the San Pedro National Riparian Area.

• Gay marriage: He was forced to come out in 1996 because he supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize gay marriages made in other states. In 2004, he voted against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. His rationale for both votes was essentially the same: Defining marriage is a state's right.

• Foreign aid: He was chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, a position that allowed him to dispense billions of dollars in foreign aid to countries around the world.

• The penny: In a quixotic quest, he sought to eliminate the penny because it costs more to produce than its worth.