Richard_Lugar

Richard Lugar

[loo-ger]

Richard Green "Dick" Lugar (born April 4, 1932) is the senior United States Senator from Indiana. He is a member of the Republican Party.

Family background

Lugar was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Bertha Green and Marvin Lugar. He attended the public schools of Indianapolis. During this time he attained the Boy Scouts' highest rank: Eagle Scout. Later, he became a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America. He graduated from Shortridge High School in 1950 and Phi Beta Kappa from Denison University in 1954, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi. He went on to attend Pembroke College, Oxford, England, as a Rhodes Scholar, and received a graduate degree in 1956. He served in the United States Navy from 1957 to 1960; one of his assignments was as an intelligence briefer for Admiral Arleigh Burke.

Lugar manages his family's 604-acre (2.4 km²) Marion County corn, soybean and tree farm. Before entering public life, he helped his brother Tom manage the family's food machinery manufacturing business in Indianapolis.

Sen. Lugar is member of the United Methodist Church. He married Charlene Smeltzer on September 8, 1956, and the couple has four sons

Entrance into politics

Lugar served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967. At the age of 35, he was elected mayor of Indianapolis in 1967 and began serving the first of two mayoral terms in 1968. A political cartoon of the time questioned how an Eagle Scout could survive in the world of politics. He is closely associated with the adoption of Unigov in 1970, which unified the governments of Indianapolis and Marion County. He was reelected mayor in 1971. During this time he became known as "Richard Nixon's favorite mayor" due to his support for devolving federal powers to local communities.

Senate career and presidential ambitions

Lugar unsuccessfully sought election to the U.S. Senate as the Republican nominee in 1974, losing to incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh. Two years later, he ran again, unseating incumbent Senator Vance Hartke in the 1976 election. He was reelected in 1982, 1988, 1994, in 2000, and again with over eighty-five percent of the vote in 2006. During the 1980 Republican National Convention, Lugar's name was floated as a potential Vice Presidential nominee for Presidential nominee Ronald Reagan . Lugar served as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 1984 Senate elections. In 2006 he ran without a Democratic Party challenger and earned over 87% of the vote, and won over three fourths of the vote in every county. In 1994, Lugar became the first Indiana senator to be re-elected for a fourth term. He is currently the eighth most senior senator.

Lugar ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1996, but his campaign failed to gain traction.

Lugar has been influential in gaining Senate ratification of treaties to reduce the world's use, production and stockpiling of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In 1991, he initiated a partnership with then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, a fellow Eagle Scout, with the objective of eliminating latent weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. To date, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program has deactivated more than 5,900 nuclear warheads.

As Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Lugar built bipartisan support for 1996 federal farm program reforms, ending 1930s-era federal production controls. He worked to initiate a biofuels research program to help increase U.S. dependency on ethanol and combustion fuels, and led initiatives to streamline the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reform the food stamp program, and preserve the federal school lunch program.

Lugar has received numerous awards, including Guardian of Small Business, the Spirit of Enterprise, Watchdog of the Treasury, and 34 honorary doctorate degrees.

Senator Lugar is a member of the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).

During the August recess of 2005, Lugar, who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went to Russia to inspect nuclear facilities there. He was detained for three hours at an airport in the city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains, where he was scheduled to depart for a meeting with the President and the Speaker of the House of Ukraine. He was released after a brief dialogue between U.S. and Russian officials and the Russians later apologized for this incident.

In April 2006, Lugar was selected by Time as one of America's 10 Best Senators.

As Pete Domenici is retiring and Ted Stevens's reelection campaign is predicted to be unsuccessful, Sen. Lugar may become the President pro tempore of the United States Senate in 2009 if the Republican party gains a majority in the 2008 elections.

2006 re-election campaign

Lugar was opposed by Steve Osborn, a Libertarian candidate in the 2006 election. The Democratic Party did not field a candidate. Lugar won the election with 87% of the vote, the highest percentage of the 2006 senate elections despite a Democratic take-over of Washington.

Stance on Iraq War

On June 25, 2007, Senator Lugar, who had been "a reliable vote for President Bush on the war," said that "Bush's Iraq strategy [is] not working and... the U.S. should downsize the military's role.

Lugar's blunt assessment has been viewed as significant in that it shows the growing impatience and dissatisfaction with President Bush's strategy in Iraq. Lugar's speech had particular resonance given his stature as one of the party's elder statesmen on foreign policy. After Lugar finished his remarks, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), a sharp critic of the war, praised Lugar's "thoughtful, sincere and honest" speech, which Durbin said was in "finest tradition of the U.S. Senate." Durbin urged his Senate colleagues to take a copy of Lugar's speech home over the Fourth of July break and study it before returning to work. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, in reaction to Lugar's speech: "When this war comes to an end, and it will come to an end, and the history books are written, and they will be written, I believe that Sen. Lugar's words yesterday could be remembered as a turning point in this intractable civil war in Iraq.

Two days later, on June 27, 2007, Lugar said that Congressional measures aimed at curtailing U.S. military involvement in Iraq, including "so-called timetables, benchmarks," have "no particular legal consequence," are "very partisan," and "will not work.