Richard Lugar

Life & Legacy

Richard Green Lugar ( LOO-gər; April 4, 1932 – April 28, 2019) was an American politician who served as a United States senator from Indiana from 1977 to 2013. He was a member of the Republican Party.
Born in Indianapolis, Lugar graduated from Denison University and the University of Oxford. He served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967 before he was elected to two terms as mayor of Indianapolis, serving from 1968 to 1976. During his tenure as mayor, Lugar served as the president of the National League of Cities in 1971 and gave the keynote address at the 1972 Republican National Convention.
In 1974, Lugar ran his first campaign for the U.S. Senate, losing to Democratic incumbent Birch Bayh. He ran again in 1976, defeating Democratic incumbent Vance Hartke. Lugar continued to be reelected until 2012, when he was defeated by Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock in the Republican primary by 21 points, who subsequently lost in the general election to Democrat Joe Donnelly, ending his 36-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. Lugar ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in the 1996 primaries but lack of success led to his withdrawal early in the campaign.
During Lugar's tenure, he served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1985 to 1987 and from 2003 to 2007, serving as the ranking member of the committee from 2007 until his departure in 2013. Lugar also twice served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, from 1995 to 2001 and briefly again in part of 2001. Much of Lugar's work in the Senate was toward the dismantling of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons around the world, co-sponsoring his most notable piece of legislation with Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn: the Nunn–Lugar Act.
Following his service in the Senate, Lugar created a nonprofit organization that specializes in the policy areas he pursued while in office.