Senator Richard Lugar, a leading US voice on foreign policy for decades and a onetime presidential candidate known for his civility and bipartisan ways, has died at a medical center in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 87. Lugar died of chronic inflammatory polyneuropathy, according to a statement from the Lugar Center in Washington, a global policy institute which he founded in 2013.
A soft-spoken Republican moderate, Lugar was twice chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and built a reputation as one of Washington's most influential foreign-policy voices during the record six terms he represented Indiana in the Senate. That reputation was burnished by his willingness to work across party lines, most famously when he joined Democratic senator Sam Nunn in 1991 to forge what became known as the Nunn-Lugar program to help former Soviet republics dismantle their nuclear arsenals.
President Barack Obama awarded Lugar the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for his "decency (and) his commitment to bipartisan problem-solving." He is survived by his wife Charlene, whom he married in 1956, and by four sons.
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