US Senator Richard Lugar, a leading voice on foreign policy for decades and a onetime presidential candidate known for his civility and bipartisan ways, has died at a medical center in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 87.
Lugar died of chronic inflammatory polyneuropathy, said a statement from the Lugar Center in Washington, a global policy institute that he founded in 2013.
A soft-spoken Republican moderate, Lugar was twice chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and built a reputation as one of Washington’s most influential foreign-policy voices during the record six terms he represented Indiana in the senate.
Photo: AFP
That reputation was burnished by his willingness to work across party lines, most famously when he joined then-Democratic senator Sam Nunn in 1991 to forge what became known as the Nunn-Lugar program to help former Soviet republics dismantle their nuclear arsenals.
In a statement, US Vice President Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor, mourned the loss of “one of our greatest statesmen.”
“Senator Lugar’s contributions to the life of our nation are countless,” Pence said.
“America has lost a true statesman in Dick Lugar,” tweeted South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, another Indiana native and Democratic presidential aspirant.
“A great mayor, senator and mentor, he made the world safer, stood up for better foreign policy, and knew how to work across the aisle,” Buttigieg said.
Then-US president Barack Obama awarded Lugar the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for his “decency [and] his commitment to bipartisan problem-solving.”
“For thirty-six years, Richard Lugar proved that pragmatism and decency work — not only in Washington, but all over the world,” Obama said.
“Michelle and I send our warmest sympathies to his family and all those who had the privilege of knowing this American statesman,” he said.
Lugar was a leader in pressing South Africa to end apartheid, and earlier in the campaign to oust the authoritarian Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos — having to overcome opposition from then-US president Ronald Reagan on both issues.
Lugar sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, saying he wanted to see whether “serious talk” on the issues could prevail over “sound bites.”
However, the bookish Lugar — a Rhodes scholar who earned an honors degree from the University of Oxford in 1954 — wryly said that charisma was hardly his strong suit and he ultimately withdrew from the 1996 race.
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