Profile of Richard Lugar on Famous Like Me

Richard Green Lugar

Office:	Senior Senator, Indiana
Political party:	Republican
Term of office:	January, 1977–Present
Preceded by:	Rupert Vance Hartke
Succeeded by:	Incumbent (2007)
Date of birth:	April 4, 1932
Place of birth:	Indianapolis, Indiana
Spouse:	Charlene Smeltzer Lugar

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

Family Background

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lugar attended the public schools of Indianapolis, during this time he attained the Boy Scout's highest ranking, the Eagle Scout. He graduated from Denison University in 1954, going on to attend Pembroke College in Oxford, England, as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving a graduate degree in 1956. He served in the United States Navy from 1957 to 1960.

Entrance into Politics

Lugar served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967. He was elected Mayor of Indianapolis in 1967. He is closely associated with the adoption of Unigov in 1970, which unified the government of Indianapolis with that of 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, and again in 2000, in the last by a two-thirds majority.

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 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 that were once aimed at the United States.

As Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Lugar built bipartisan support for 1996 federal farm program reforms, ending 1930s-era federal production controls. He initiated a biofuels research program to help decrease U.S. dependency on foreign oil, 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. He manages his family's 604 acre (2.4 km², 240 ha) Marion County corn, soybean and tree farm. Before entering public life, he helped run the family's food machinery manufacturing business in Indianapolis.

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

Special Situations

During the August Recess of 2005, along with Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Richard Lugar who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee went on a strategic trip to Russia to inspect the nuclear facilities there and were detained for three hours at a airport in the city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains during their departure for Ukraine, where they were scheduled to meet the President and the Speaker of the House of Ukraine. Later on, they were released after a brief dialogue between U.S. and Russian officials and the Russians later apologized for this incident.

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