Richard Green "Dick" Lugar (born April 4, 1932) is the senior United States Senator from Indiana. He is a Republican.
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lugar attended the public schools of Indianapolis. 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.
Lugar served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967, and then as Mayor of Indianapolis from 1968 to 1975. He 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 Indiana's other 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 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) 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).
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Last updated: 05-14-2005 14:14:09
