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[Pages S2477-S2478]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Remembering Richard G Lugar
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, to be specific, 51 years ago, the
United Citizens for Nixon-Agnew descended upon the city of
Indianapolis, IN, a city to which a young man named Richard Lugar had
been elected mayor. That was my first opportunity to meet former
Senator Richard Lugar, who died a few days ago.
He became Richard Nixon's favorite mayor. He persuaded the suburban
areas around Indianapolis and the city itself to do something almost no
city in America has been able to do--Nashville did it; Miami did it;
Louisville did it; and Indianapolis did it. It was to have a unified
government--to get rid of 60 different municipal governments and form
one. No one was very surprised when Richard Lugar was able to
accomplish something, because he had been marked from the beginning as
being a young man of extraordinary ability.
At Denison, where he went to college, he became a Rhodes Scholar. He
studied at Oxford. He became a Navy intelligence officer. Later on in
the sixties--and I have mentioned 1968 as the year in which we met him
for the first time--as mayor, he was able to deal not only with the
unification of Indianapolis but with the difficult racial times that
occurred all over America during the late 1960s.
Nobody was surprised when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1974. He was
defeated in the Watergate sweep that wiped out a large number of
promising young candidates, which I had a little personal experience
with in Tennessee. Yet no one was surprised when he came back in 1976
and won.
As soon as he was elected, he organized the other Republican Senators
who had been elected that year to vote for Howard Baker, Jr., for the
Republican leader of the Senate in January 1977. Senator Baker won that
race by one vote. You can imagine that Senator Baker had a very high
opinion of Senator Richard Lugar, and they became close friends.
I first really worked with him in 1980 when I was the Governor of
Tennessee. Senator Baker wanted to run for President, so he summoned to
Nashville, to meet in my office, Senator Lugar and his young aide,
Mitch Daniels--later, the Governor of Indiana and now the president of
Purdue University--as well as Warren Rudman, the Senator from New
Hampshire, and his young aide, Tom Rath. I admired Dick Lugar then, and
I admired him throughout the rest of his career. It was a privilege to
serve with him on the Foreign Relations Committee while he was the
chairman of it when I was elected to the U.S. Senate.
I noticed that unlike all of us Senators, when Richard Lugar had
something to say, he had something to say, so people actually listened
to him. We
[[Page S2478]]
have a tradition in the Republican caucus in which we have Thursday
lunches that are hosted by various members of our caucus. I have served
something from the town in which Jack Daniel's is made--not the whiskey
but the food. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith served some Mississippi food
last week before the recess. We will go around the room in the order in
which we have come in, and everyone will stand up and say something.
Well, we all say something, but what was different about Richard Lugar
was, during those Thursday lunches, he actually had something to say.
He was intelligent and thoughtful. He studied. He was never flamboyant.
He was not into symbolic votes. He dominated Indiana politics for 36
years, and he had the respect of virtually anyone whom he ever met.
Not many Senators in our history have the opportunity to do what he
did with former Senator Nunn and the Nunn-Lugar law, which was to
basically dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons--take out the
explosive parts of them and render them useless as instruments of war
for the future. He continued to work for a safe world and played a
major role in the New START treaty in 2010.
There will be many memorials and many speeches and many compliments
paid to Senator Lugar. President Obama awarded him the Presidential
Medal of Freedom--the highest civilian honor in our country. I will
remember him for his quiet, unassuming, highly intelligent, thoughtful
style of leadership. The world is better and safer because of Richard
Lugar's life in public service. He was always a gentleman, always
principled. He was a model for what all of us should hope for in our
public officials. He was a good friend for many years.
I and Honey, my wife, and our family send our sympathy and our
respect for the life of Richard Lugar to Char and his family.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
