GOP giant dies
Ex-senator was foreign policy expert
INDIANAPOLIS — Former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican foreign policy sage known for leading efforts to help the former Soviet states dismantle and secure much of their nuclear arsenal, but whose reputation for working with Democrats cost him his final campaign, died Sunday. He was 87.
Lugar (photo) died at the Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute in Virginia from complications related to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIPD, a rare neurological disorder, the Lugar Center in Washington said in a statement announcing his death.
The statement said his wife, four sons, and their families were with him “throughout his short illness at the hospital.”
A soft-spoken and thoughtful former Rhodes scholar, Lugar dominated Indiana politics during his 36 years in the U.S. Senate.
That popularity gave him the freedom to concentrate largely on foreign policy and national security matters — a focus highlighted by his collaboration with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia on a program under which the U.S. paid to dismantle and secure thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles in the former Soviet states after the Cold War ended.
“Every stockpile represents a theft opportunity for terrorists and a temptation for security personnel who might seek to profit by selling weapons on the black market,” Lugar said in 2005. “We do not want the question posed the day after an attack on an American military base.”
He served for decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, twice as chairman, where he helped steer arms reduction pacts for Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; supported an expansion of NATO, and favored aid to Nicaragua’s Contras.
“The world is safer from nuclear danger because of him. And so many of us, while falling far short of the standards he set, are vastly better people because of him,” said Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who spent more than a decade as chief of staff to Lugar.
Lugar tried to translate his foreign policy expertise into a 1996 presidential run, where his slogan was “nuclear security and fiscal sanity.” But his campaign for the GOP nomination went badly from the start.
His kickoff rally began just hours after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and he struggled to build name recognition and support.
He withdrew a year into the race after failing to win a single convention delegate, but not before eerily foreshadowing the threat of terrorism that would happen on Sept. 11, 2001.
Three of his television ads depicted mushroom clouds and warned of the growing danger of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorist groups.
Lugar’s time as a Washington foreign policy expert was the highlight of a political career that began with his election to the Indianapolis school board in the early 1960s. It was there that he caught the eye of city GOP leaders, who encouraged him to run for mayor in 1967.
He first ran for Senate in 1974, narrowly losing to Sen. Birch Bayh in a Democratic landslide after the Watergate scandal.
He ran again two years later andea` sily unseated three-term Democratic Sen. Vance Hartke, launching a Capitol Hill career that made him Indiana’s longestserving senator.
His foreign policy work didn’t sit well with everyone. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ousted him as the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee in 1986 as being “too internationalist.”
Born April 4, 1932, in Indianapolis, Lugar became an Eagle Scout and graduated at the top of his classes at both Indianapolis Shortridge High School and at Denison University in Ohio.
At Denison, he played cello and was the student body co-president with his future wife, Charlene.
They married in 1956.