Remembering Senator Richard Lugar, an old-school Republican

RICHARD LUGAR, who died on April 28th, was not a colourful senator. One federal bureaucrat joked that Mr Lugar “maintained that childhood capability of walking into an empty room and blending right in.” “Dick was looked upon as being one smart dude,” said Rex Early, who ran one of Mr Lugar’s campaigns. But “would I want to go fishing with him? Probably not.” Deprived of potential fishing buddies, Mr Lugar had to settle for making the world safer.

He helped override Ronald Reagan’s veto of a bill imposing hefty sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa. He bucked Reagan again by publicly stating that Ferdinand Marcos owed his 1986 re-election in the Philippines to fraud. Reagan initially backed Marcos, but soon withdrew support, leading to Marcos’s exile. During Mr Lugar’s second stint chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he had doubts about the second Iraq war.