Sen. Richard Lugar (R) Elected 1976, 5th term up 2006
Born:	Apr. 4, 1932, Indianapolis
Home:	Indianapolis
Education:	Denison U., B.A. 1954, Rhodes Scholar, Oxford U., M.A. 1956
Religion:	Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Charlene)
Elected  Office:	Indianapolis Bd. of Schl. Commissioners, 1964-67; Indianapolis Mayor, 1968-75.
Military Career:	Navy, 1957-60.
Professional Career:	Mgr., family farm; V.P. & Treas., Thomas L. Green & Co., 1960-67; Prof., U. of Indianapolis, 1976.
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Richard Lugar, still running 5K races at the annual Dick Lugar Run and Walk in Indianapolis, has a career in public life going back to the late 1950s, when as a young Navy officer he prepared intelligence briefings for Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke and briefed President Eisenhower over closed-circuit television. Now he is the first Indiana senator ever elected to a fourth or fifth term and a powerful voice on foreign policy. Lugar grew up in Indianapolis, near his family's farm and food machinery firm, which was founded in 1893. He was an Eagle Scout, straight-A student and Rhodes scholar. After the service Lugar returned to the family business, was elected to the school board in 1964, then was elected mayor of Indianapolis in 1967, at 35. As mayor, he consolidated the city and county into Unigov, which brought in tax resources and suburban voters, keeping the city both solvent and Republican (until 1999, when a Democrat was finally elected mayor). In the late 1960s, Lugar bucked fashion and called for fewer rather than more federal programs and became known as Richard Nixon's favorite mayor. This was not a political asset in 1974, when Lugar ran against Senator Birch Bayh, father of his current junior colleague, and lost 51%-46%. But in the more favorable climate of 1976 and against a weaker Democratic incumbent, Vance Hartke, Lugar won 59%-40%.

Throughout his public life, Lugar's strength has been that he has followed where his stubborn convictions and his considerable intellect led, regardless of political risk or reward: He has plenty of accomplishments but also some disappointments to show for it. His lone course has served him well in Indiana, but has had mixed results in the Senate and in the national arena. He is a conservative on some, but not all, of the hot-button issues of today's conservative activists; he is solidly anti-abortion but voted for background checks at gun shows in 1999. He was an internationalist even in the mid- 1990s when the president's attention to foreign issues was episodic and some Republicans were opposing Bill Clinton's foreign interventions. Lugar started off in the Senate leading the 1978 filibuster to defeat the AFL-CIO's labor law reform bill, although unions were then big in Indiana. He strongly supported NAFTA in 1993, in a Midwest manufacturing state where many thought foreigners were taking their jobs. He ran for president in 1996 on his own platform and without any concessions to the political shorthand or the TV sensibility of the day, but his candidacy made little impact. Lugar based his campaign on "nuclear security and fiscal sanity"--deterring nuclear terrorism and backing a 17% national sales tax. But he got little coverage, and finished 7th in Iowa and 5th in New Hampshire and soon left the race.

Lugar's great interest is foreign policy. In January 2003, he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, a post he also held from January 1985 to January 1987. Then he quickly took command over a committee sharply divided between Jesse Helms and liberal Democrats. Lugar was in the middle, backing Contra aid and favoring sanctions on South Africa. He took the lead on the Philippines, quickly concluding that Ferdinand Marcos's 1986 election "victory" over Corazon Aquino was fraudulent and, at a decisive point, called on Marcos to leave office. Helms had allowed him to become chairman in 1985, despite his lower seniority, because of a campaign promise in 1984 to take the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee. But after Republicans lost their Senate majority in 1986, Helms said he was no longer bound by his promise and invoked seniority; Lugar took the issue to the Republican Conference, but lost a vote there. So Helms was ranking minority member from 1987 to 1995 and 2001 to 2003 and chairman from 1995 to 2001, while Lugar waited. Helms left Lugar off conference committees and seldom communicated with Lugar; Lugar led the fight to ratify the Chemical Weapons Agreement over Helms' opposition in April 1997, and won. Lugar has favored the arms control treaties about which many conservatives have been skeptical--INF in 1988, START I in 1992, START II in 1996. He supported NATO expansion and U.S. payment of U.N. dues. But in October 1999, he joined other Republicans in voting against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, arguing that the U.S. must keep testing to maintain its nuclear arsenal.

His greatest achievement was passage in 1991 of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threats Reduction program to pay Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to dismantle and destroy their nuclear weapons and some chemical and biological weapons as well, to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile powers or terrorists. Lugar was frustrated in 2001 and 2002 when State Department officials held up some Nunn-Lugar spending because they refused to certify that Russia was being open about its biological weapons; as part of his negotiations with the administration on the Iraq war resolution, Nunn got a provision in the defense authorization bill suspending the certification requirement for three years. Lugar has gotten some notice for this work--he and Nunn have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and an Indianapolis TV station filmed a documentary of him inspecting weapons in Russia--but probably not enough. After September 11, he has called for a Nunn-Lugar approach to prevent chemical and biological weapons throughout the world from falling into the hands of terrorists. "Every nation that has weapons and materials of mass destruction must account for what it has, safely secure what it has (spending its own money or obtaining international technical and financial resources to do so) and pledge that no other nation, cell or cause will be allowed access or use." This is one of his first priorities as Foreign Relations chairman.

In the 1990s, Lugar kept a vigilant eye on Iraq. Starting in August 1990, he called for an end to Saddam Hussein's regime and said that Saddam might have to be killed and U.S. ground troops needed to accomplish that. But he has not necessarily been a team player for the Bush administration. In summer 2002, he and then-Chairman Joseph Biden conducted hearings on Iraq to which the administration declined to send witnesses. In September 2002 he and Biden, unhappy with the White House's broad resolution authorizing military action in Iraq, drafted their own resolution, which limited the authorization geographically and required the administration either to obtain a U.N. resolution or to certify to Congress that its efforts at the U.N. had failed. This was not what Bush wanted, and in early October he circumvented the committee and got agreement on a resolution with geographical limits with House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Democratic Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Lugar that his draft would weaken his negotiating position at the U.N., and Lugar dropped his separate resolution; the agreement on Nunn-Lugar evidently came at this time.

As chairman, Lugar seemed likely to have a similar arms-length relationship with the administration, and he seems much more comfortable with positions taken by Powell than with those taken by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (whom he dealt with when Rumsfeld was head of the federal poverty program and he was mayor of Indianapolis). "I don't want to alarm the Republican right," said Biden in late 2001, "but there is very little that Dick Lugar and I disagree on. He is the most informed Republican in Congress on foreign affairs, and if I can't be chairman there is no one who I would rather have be chairman." An anonymous conservative took another view: "Lugar will be dreadful. He is a conventionally minded apparatchik of the establishment." Lugar planned to start off as chairman in 2003, as he did in 1985, with three months of wide-ranging hearings on foreign policy problems. But there may come points of conflict. Lugar complained in late 2002 that he had not been briefed on the administration's plans for postwar Iraq. After North Korea announced it had a nuclear bomb, Lugar said the administration should keep up a dialogue with the North Koreans, while Powell was saying just the opposite. He also argued that the administration should engage with the government of Iran. There may be disagreement on Latin America as well: Lugar opposed the appointment of Otto Reich as assistant secretary for Latin America.

To become chairman of Foreign Relations, Lugar gave up the chairmanship of Agriculture, which he had held from 1995 to 2001. He likes to point out that he was the only working farmer on the committee--his 604 acres, thanks to Unigov, is inside the city of Indianapolis--and he played a key role in the 1996 passage of the Freedom to Farm Act, which purported to phase out over seven years the farm subsidies of which he had long been a critic. But low crop prices starting in 1998 resulted in disaster relief payments that kept in place something very much like the old subsidy system. In October 2001 he opposed the House farm bill with its big increases for farmers of historically subsidized crops, and proposed his own bill, guaranteeing up to 80% of income of qualified farmers, but at far less cost. Lugar's argument against traditional farm policy is intellectually strong. "American agricultural policy distorts food prices, frustrates innovatio, limits product diversity and subsidizes a select group of farmers at enormous public cost. Its inherent protectionist qualities confound American efforts to reduce protectionism abroad and gain access to new markets." But with key Senate races in states with historically subsidized farmers, the argument was politically very weak in spring 2002, when the Senate passed a farm bill similar to the House's and George W. Bush signed it. In 2003, Lugar left the chairmanship to Thad Cochran of Mississippi, whose cotton farmers were well taken care of in the 2002 bill and who supports traditional farm legislation.

Lugar has used his Agriculture seat for other causes. With Indianapolis Congresswoman Julia Carson, he passed in May 2000 a law allowing mothers to enroll in the CHIPS health program when they sign up for Women with Infant Children funds. With Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, he fought in fall 2000 to increase the deduction for donations of food by businesses and farmers to organizations that feed the hungry. He and Ohio Rep. John Boehner sponsored a law to allow farmers to income-average and fully deduct health insurance. Other Lugar causes include opposition to gambling (he co-sponsored the National Gambling Impact Study Commission), free trade, allowing future trading on individual stocks, and deregulating the derivatives markets. On local matters, he wrote on personal stationery a letter opposing a route for I-69 that would go across Mann Road near his farm. "I believe this would be a tragic public policy and environmental error."

In Indiana, Lugar has remained vastly popular. His most recent victory margins have been 68%-32% in 1988, 67%-31% in 1994 and 67%-32% in 2000--pretty monotonous. The last was won against a respectable opponent, who raised little money; Lugar nevertheless agreed to meet in three Lincoln-Douglas style debates.

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DC Office
306 HSOB 20510, 202-224-4814; Fax: 202-228-0360; Web site: lugar.senate.gov

State Offices
Evansville, 812-465-6313; Ft. Wayne,260-422-1505; Indianapolis,317-226-5555; Jeffersonville,812-288-3377; Valparaiso,219-548-8035.

Committees

• Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry: Forestry, Conservation & Rural Revitalization; Research, Nutrition & General Legislation.
• Foreign Relations (Chmn.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	5	0	13	12	74	100	70	95	90	94	--
2001	15	--	0	13	--	--	81	100	92	--	80

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	26%	--	73%		35%	--	64%
Social	22%	--	73%		0%	--	62%
Foreign	7%	--	72%		0%	--	76%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Expand Patients' Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Permit ANWR Development Y 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts Y		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution N  8. Overseas Military Abortions N  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court Y 10. Trade Promotion Authority Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2000 general	Richard Lugar (R)	1,427,944	67%	$4,251,603
	David L. Johnson (D)	683,273	32%	$1,179,029
	Other	33,992	1%
2000 primary	Richard Lugar (R)	unopposed
1994 general	Richard Lugar (R)	1,039,625	67%	$4,688,326
	James Jontz (D)	470,799	31%	$472,788
	Other	33,144	2%
Prior winning percentages: 1988 (68%); 1982 (54%); 1976 (59%)