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Former GOP senator Richard Lugar dead at 87

WASHINGTON – Centrist Republican Richard Lugar, a soft-spoken foreign policy powerhouse who championed nuclear nonproliferation during 36 years in the U.S. Senate, died on Sunday at age 87.

The Lugar Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, said in statement that he died peacefully at the Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute in Virginia due to complications from CIDP, a chronic neurological disorder.

Lugar, a professorial Midwesterner known for his keen intellect and mild demeanor, served as mayor of Indianapolis from 1968 to 1975 before his long stint in the Senate from 1977 to 2013. He was the longest-serving senator ever from Indiana.

Lugar was an influential Republican voice on foreign policy. Lugar, a former Rhodes scholar and an avid runner into his 70s, served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also headed the Agriculture Committee. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1996.

His political career ended when he sought nomination for a seventh six-year Senate term in 2012 but was challenged by the Republican Party’s right and beaten by a candidate backed by the conservative tea party movement, which did not like Lugar’s willingness to make bipartisan compromises.

As a senator, Lugar sought to curb the spread of nuclear weapons globally. His greatest achievement, forged alongside centrist Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, was a law under which the United States paid for the dismantling and elimination of the nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union as well as chemical and biological arms.

The 1991 measure was intended to keep nuclear weapons in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan from falling into the hands of hostile countries or extremist groups. Under the program, about 7,600 nuclear warheads were deactivated, 2,300 missiles destroyed and 24 nuclear weapons storage sites secured by the time Lugar’s Senate career ended.

He was 80 years old and the senior most Republican in the Senate when he left the Senate in January 2013.

After leaving politics, he founded the Lugar Center, which is focused on global issues such as weapons proliferation, food supply, foreign aid and governance.

“Governance requires adaptation to shifting circumstances,” Lugar said in 2012 in his final speech on the Senate floor. “It often requires finding common ground with Americans who have a different vision than your own. It requires leaders who believe … that their first responsibility to their constituents is to apply their best judgment.”

He said Republicans “must be willing to suspend reflexive opposition that serves no purpose but to limit their own role in strategic questions and render cooperation impossible.”