[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 69 (Monday, April 29, 2019)]
[Senate]
[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.