Richard G. Lugar, Statesman of the Senate: Crafting Foreign Policy from Capitol Hill

13 The Statesman of the Senate

13 The Statesman of the Senate I The question of what constitutes excellence and statesmanship in the U.S. Senate has intrigued scholars, journalists and, not surprisingly, senators for almost as long as the upper chamber has been in existence. Senator John F. Kennedy led one notable attempt to identify the great senators of the past, an exercise that compelled him to think deeply about what constitutes senatorial excellence. Kennedy chaired a panel of senators in the mid-1950s to identify the five most outstanding former senatorswhoselikenesseswouldbeplacedinvacantportraitspaces in the Senate Reception Room in the Capitol. Kennedy’s commission struggled to define what made a senator great. Was it legislative accomplishments or could it include efforts to defeat misguided legislation? Was personal integrity a requirement or simply a hoped-for attribute? Did the senator need to be involved in national issues or could impressive accomplishments in state or regional issues suffice? How important was earning the esteem of colleagues?1 Near the end of his panel’s deliberations, Kennedy mused that the “value of a Senator is not so easily determined as the value of a car or a hog, or even that of a public utility bond or a ballplayer.” There were, Kennedysaid,“nostandardteststoapplytoaSenator,noDunn&Bradstreetrating ,noscoutingreports.Histalentsmayvarywithhistime,his contribution may be limited by his politics.”2 The Kennedy commission decided to judge senators for “acts of statesmanship transcending party x The Statesman of the Senate 219 andStatelines”andtodefinestatesmanshiptoinclude“leadershipinnational thought and constitutional interpretation as well as legislation.”3 But Kennedy acknowledged that the question of what constitutes statesmanship is a complicated one. He observed that he knew “of no man elected to the Senate in all its history who was not a ‘politician’ whether or not he was also a ‘statesman.’”4 The standard definition of a statesman is a person who shows wisdom , skill, and vision in conducting a state’s affairs. A well-known English proverb says the difference between a politician and a statesman is that the former looks to the next election while the latter looks to the next generation.5 Richard Lugar entered the Senate in January 1977 as an ambitious politicianandhas,intheeyesof many,achievedthestatusof statesman. He has been able to keep a careful eye on the next election while also thinking about the problems that confront the next generation. Lugar is widely respected and admired among his colleagues and congressional scholars, but it is more difficult to judge how effective Lugar has been in the Senate. In assessing Richard Lugar’s impact on foreign policy from Capitol Hill a few caveats are in order. First, this book has not attempted to explorehisimpactonIndianapolitics .Lugarhasbeenadominantpolitical force in his state since the mid-1970s, and he made sizeable contributions to the revitalization of Indianapolis before then, when he served as mayor. Lugar’s Indiana record and legacy deserve serious study, but that has not been the subject of this book. The senator has also been a leader on agricultural policy during his Senate career. He chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee from 1995 to 2001 and has been a member of the committee since he entered the Senate. In this book, I’ve considered several international aspects of his work on agriculture but have not focused on his influence on American agricultural policy. That also is the subject of another book. Finally, this book has focused primarily on Lugar’s work on foreign policy since 2006, when I began to interview him regularly and closely follow his work. Many of the issues Lugar has worked on over these years will be central to his congressional legacy, such as arms control, the Nunn-Lugar program, energy reforms, and tackling the global food Richard G. Lugar, Statesman of the Senate 220 crisis. While this book does not claim to be a comprehensive assessment of Lugar’s long and consequential career, I believe it examines issuesthatLugarcaresdeeplyaboutanddescribestheessentialqualities of Lugar’s work in the Senate. II When evaluating Richard Lugar’s influence on American foreign policy from Capitol Hill, one should begin with his considerable legislative legacy. After all, the main job of legislators is to write laws and to move bills through Congress. There is little doubt that Lugar’s central legislative accomplishment is the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Lugar and Nunn developed a plan to begin safeguarding and then dismantling weapons of mass destruction in the Soviet Union as it was collapsing in 1991. Seeking to secure...