Former Republican senator Richard Lugar has died at the age of 87.
Lugar was Indiana’s longest-serving senator and an influential foreign policy expert, playing a significant role in nuclear disarmament of former Soviet states after the Cold War.
He succumbed on Sunday to a neurological disorder.
Longest serving Indiana senator
The Lugar Center said in a statement that Lugar died from complications arising from chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIPD. The former senator is being remembered as a giant of Indiana politics who exerted an influence that belied his quiet demeanor throughout a 36-year career.
Lugar served in the Senate from 1977 to 2013, a six-term stint during which he loomed large over Indiana politics and American foreign policy through his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which he served for decades. Lugar was chairman of the committee twice.
He put most of his energy into foreign policy work, which included a cross-party collaborative effort with Democratic Senator Sam Nunn on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which led to thousands of nuclear weapons in former Soviet states being disarmed and secured. The program eliminated thousands of Soviet warheads, including all stockpiles in Kazhakstan, Ukraine and Belarus.
Lugar attempted to leverage his foreign policy expertise in a failed presidential run in 1996.
Giant of Hoosier politics
Lugar’s long career in Indiana politics began with two terms as mayor of Indianapolis, from 1968 to 1975. He was credited with solidifying the city and its suburbs into a Republican stronghold that kept Democrats out of the mayor’s office for three decades, and he earned the title of “Richard Nixon’s favorite mayor” for his support of returning federal programs back to local auspices.
He first ran for Senate in 1974, but lost to Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh (D). He ran again successfully in 1976 against Senator Vince Hartke (D), winning the seat he would hold for almost forty years.
Throughout his career, the former Rhodes Scholar built a reputation for bipartisanship and independence from his party, notably breaking with president Ronald Reagan twice. Lugar’s intervention shifted America’s position with regard to a rigged election in the Philippines in 1986, a situation in which Reagan preferred to remain neutral, and Lugar also pushed for anti-apartheid sanctions in South Africa over Reagan’s veto.
Lugar’s foreign policy earned it’s share of criticism — he was denounced as too much of an “internationalist,” or what some today might call “globalist,” by a Republican colleague who assumed the Foreign Relations chairmanship in 1986 — and his willingness to cooperate with Democrats got him in trouble when he was finally unseated in 2012 amid accusations that he was too liberal to be a conservative. After years of being considered virtually invincible by Democrats, Lugar lost his primary race to the candidate who was ultimately defeated by Democrat Joe Donnelly.
The senator’s candidacy suffered due to perceptions that he was too liberal and because he had cultivated a good working relationship with Barack Obama, who favorably cited their collaborations as senators during his 2008 presidential campaign. Though Lugar was also criticized for his stances on issues including immigration and earmarks, which he acknowledged some would view as “heretical,” his long-time collorabrator defended him.
“Dick Lugar never compromised his principles in anything we did together, nor did I,” Nunn said at the time. “We found ways to work together because we examined the facts and let the facts have a bearing on the conclusions, and I’m afraid in today’s political world too often people start with the conclusions and then hunt facts to justify them.”
Impressive legacy
Lugar was born in Indianapolis in 1932. He was an Eagle Scout as a boy and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, as well as an officer in the Navy.
He is survived by his wife, Charlene, and his four sons, Mark, Bob, John and David.
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