Less than two weeks later, a second interview left me amazed. Lugar, a former Rhodes Scholar and mayor of Indianapolis who died Sunday at 87, had clearly mastered his brief, speaking authoritatively about tensions with the Soviet Union, the Central America wars, apartheid South Africa and any other topic that was posed.
Over the years, he grew in stature, establishing a reputation as an independent voice willing to buck his party and one of the country’s pre-eminent leaders on foreign policy, especially efforts to restrain nuclear weapons. He was an internationalist who believed in U.S. leadership, the web of post-World War II alliances, and in talking to Russia — even in the present difficult days.
I last saw him in March, at a conference on “America’s Role in the World” at the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. Over dinner on the night before it started, he spoke fondly of continuing to oversee the 604-acre soybean and corn farm in Indiana that his father bought in the 1930s. The conversation became darker but no less animated when it segued to the arms control system that he worked decades to help build and which President Donald Trump seems to be abandoning.
Lugar told conference attendees the next day that he worried that Trump had no plan on that and other central foreign policy issues. There was no enmity in his voice, just deep concern for the nation and the world.
One of Lugar’s most heralded contributions was the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that he pushed through Congress with Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Over the years, it has provided millions of U.S. dollars to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and related technology inherited by the former Soviet states of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In time, the assistance was expanded to cover non-Soviet countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, China and South Africa.
The concept of having the United States pay to destroy an adversary’s weapons was so controversial that it met opposition from Lugar’s own Republican Party. One of his closest foreign policy partners, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., told the conference attendees in March that voting for the program was his toughest vote ever. “You think that was popular in southern Indiana, giving money to the Russians? ... They thought I was nuts,” Hamilton said as Lugar, seated nearby, grinned.
But it was worth it: More than 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads were deactivated, and more than 1,400 ballistic missiles that could be launched by land or submarine were destroyed. It reduced the chances that terrorists could buy or steal a weapon and provided jobs for Soviet nuclear scientists who otherwise might have gone to work for Iran or another state eager to develop a nuclear program.
Lugar played a key role in securing Senate approval for several arms control treaties, including the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty that Trump recently abrogated because of Russian violations, the 1997 pact banning chemical weapons and the 2010 New START Treaty that will expire in 2021 if Russia and the United States do not agree to extend it.
Lugar called the INF withdrawal a “gravely misguided” decision that “will not make us safer, it will rob us of leverage essential to our own security and power.” And after having opposed many in his own party to ensure passage of New START treaty, he urged Trump to extend it until 2026 as the treaty allows.
But the administration doesn’t appear to be listening.
Even though Lugar — who mentored President Barack Obama on arms control when he was still a senator — and Nunn were invited to the White House by Vice President Mike Pence for talks before Trump’s 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Lugar was not impressed by the summit outcome. “There has been no victory won there,” he said.
But, then again, Lugar had stood up to presidents before. In 1986, he led the successful effort to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of legislation imposing economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa. That same year, I accompanied him to the Philippines where he monitored the election between President Ferdinand Marcos, a longtime U.S. ally, and his challenger Corazon Aquino. Lugar concluded there was widespread fraud and persuaded Reagan against recognizing Marcos as the victor.
Lugar was a Republican, for sure, and even made a short-lived bid for president in 1996. But in 2012 the Tea Party faction ended his tenure as Indiana’s longest-serving senator, judging his moderation and bipartisanship a liability.
Undeterred, Lugar spent the past few years pleading, along with Hamilton, for a return to a less polarized polity that would seek constructive outcomes to problems like climate change and feeding the world.
Even while afflicted by a nervous system disorder that eventually caused his death, Lugar displayed his mental acuity and grace in one of his last public appearances, just after the conference, when Indiana University celebrated the donation of his personal and professional papers to the institution.
The 800 boxes of documents will be a trove for those who want to study how public policy was once crafted, and could be again.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.