Neil A. Lewis

His death was announced by the Lugar Center, a Washington think tank he established after leaving office. It said the cause was complications of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a nervous system disorder.

Lugar, who had two stints as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had an impact on a wide range of foreign issues, but his most notable accomplishment was indisputably as the co-creator of a program to help destroy surplus stocks of nuclear weapons around the world.

The project was emblematic of his approach to legislating: It represented an ability to take a long view about complex issues, ran counter to the inclinations of many of his fellow Republicans and was built on a foundation of bipartisan cooperation. It was presented jointly with Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was based on the novel concept of providing U.S. funds to destroy obsolete nuclear missiles and materials elsewhere in the world. At the time, the countries of the former Soviet Union said they could not afford the costs of the destruction and were not even providing sufficient resources to properly guard the weapons’ storage areas.

The idea was first proposed during the term of President George H.W. Bush, who opposed it, along with many others. It took almost a decade, but Lugar succeeded in persuading Congress, and especially skeptical fellow Republicans, of the need for such a program.

He was also Congress’ leading voice on treaties to ban or limit nuclear weapons, and his judgment on any such proposals was often crucial to whether one could be enacted.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan chose Lugar to lead an official U.S. delegation to monitor a pivotal election in the Philippines. President Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s longtime rule, appeared to win the vote, turning back a tide of demonstrations in favor of democracy that had forced him to hold the election. The Reagan administration was on the verge of recognizing that result.

But Lugar insisted that widespread fraud had occurred and that Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated opposition politician, should have been declared the winner. He personally exhorted the president about the election irregularities he had witnessed and persuaded him to block any immediate recognition of a Marcos victory. Aquino was eventually declared the victor.

His independence frequently annoyed many Republicans, both in Washington and Indiana, especially later in 1986, when he helped lead a successful effort in Congress to override Reagan’s veto of legislation imposing trade and economic sanctions on the white-led government of South Africa over its policies of apartheid.

Lugar has been frequently compared by historians and congressional scholars to former Sens. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Henry Jackson of Washington, all of whom had exercised outsize influence in foreign affairs.

But unlike them — and, indeed, unlike most senators — Lugar was known for his extraordinary modesty. The occasion of roll-call votes typically presents the spectacle of senators lingering on the floor to socialize. In contrast, Lugar would cast his vote quickly after entering and, waving to a senator or two, just as quickly depart.

Lugar was a critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But unlike Fulbright’s forceful criticism of the Vietnam War, Lugar’s opposition to the Iraq conflict, both the invasion itself and the conduct of the war afterward, was tendered in more moderate terms.

Viewed in light of the current renewed competition with Russia, what Nunn and Lugar managed to accomplish in the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was nothing short of remarkable. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist estimated on the 20th anniversary of the program, in 2011, that it had deactivated over 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads, and destroyed more than 1,400 land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Security was upgraded at nuclear weapons sites, at a time when the greatest fear was that a terror group would take advantage of the chaos in Russia or one of the former Soviet states and buy or steal a weapon. New jobs were found for the Soviet Union’s nuclear scientists and weapons-developers, in an effort to keep them from being tempted to sell their services.

In 2005, Lugar took a young senator, Barack Obama of Illinois, on his first trip as a new member of the foreign relations committee to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, to examine dismantled weapons and sites. Obama later credited that trip with fueling a commitment to further reduce the size of the U.S. arsenal after he was elected president three years later.

But while Lugar sometimes compared his efforts to those of George Marshall, the creator of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, in the last years of his life the former Indiana senator watched his effort begin to wilt. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russians began to resent the U.S. funding of the disarmament effort, and some Russians saw in it a Washington plot to further weaken their own country. Putin set the country on the course of nuclear modernization, and Lugar, over a dinner several years ago, lamented that Obama had not been more aggressive in dismantling parts of the U.S. arsenal that he considered no longer necessary.

Lugar was briefly chairman of the Agriculture Committee, but he proved to be an unorthodox farm state senator: He sought to reduce traditional farm subsidies as part of a larger overhaul of federal agriculture policy to allow farmers greater freedom in organizing their businesses.

Richard Green Lugar was born in Indianapolis on April 4, 1932, to a farming family with generations of roots in Indiana.

His early life and career were marked by the most traditional signposts of American success. He was an Eagle Scout and president of both his Shortridge High School and Denison University senior classes. He got along so well with his college class’ co-president, Charlene Smeltzer, who was known as Char, that they married after graduating. She survives him.

He then became a Rhodes Scholar, and during his studies at Oxford, he visited the U.S. Embassy in London in 1957 to enlist in the Navy.

After his return to the United States, Lugar was commissioned a second lieutenant and became a briefer for Adm. Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, who had been a hero of World War II and was renowned as a guileful player in Washington politics. Friends said that this was Lugar’s most significant exposure to geopolitical thinking, and probably the single greatest source of his fascination with foreign policy.

After a few years back in Indiana running a machine business, Lugar was elected to the Indianapolis school board. His old high school was by then 90% African American, and he pushed through a plan to make it one of the nation’s first integrated magnet schools for the college-bound. Shortridge High soon became evenly divided between black and white students.

But the plan proved highly unpopular politically and was reversed in little more than a year, and in a subsequent campaign for school board president Lugar was defeated — his first electoral setback.

He rebounded, however. In 1967, at age 35, he was elected mayor of Indianapolis. In his two terms, he helped conceive and enact a plan to unify Indianapolis with surrounding Marion County in all forms of government except for the schools.

With his eyes on higher office, Lugar sought to unseat one of the state’s incumbent Democratic senators, Birch Bayh, in 1974. (Bayh died in March.) He lost, but two years later he succeeded in ousting Indiana’s other Democratic incumbent, Vance Hartke.

Reelected five times, Lugar was always able to campaign as a true son of Indiana, as someone who still operated a large soybean farm there. He had no Democratic opponent in his last successful reelection race, in 2006.

But six years later he became a target for the unforgiving conservatives of his party’s Tea Party wing and was defeated in the Republican primary by Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. It was apparent that many Republican primary voters had lost patience with Lugar’s moderate stances on issues and especially his outspoken faith in the need for cooperation with Democrats.

What was more, attention to foreign relations has traditionally brought few political dividends to senators. And in his case, he held an expansive, internationalist view of world affairs that many party conservatives came to disdain.

The narrative of the Tea Party as an effective spoiler in Republican politics but without wider appeal played out after his primary defeat. Mourdock was defeated in the general election by Democrat Joe Donnelly, in part because of Mourdock’s statement that he opposed abortion in cases of rape, saying that any resulting pregnancies were “something that God intended to happen.”

Besides his wife, Lugar’s survivors include four sons, Mark, Robert, John and David; a sister, Anne (Lugar) Johnson; 13 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.

After his defeat, Lugar sat down with family and longtime aides to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Dan Diller, a Lugar speechwriter for many years, said that Lugar had made it immediately plain that he would not become a lobbyist, the path of many former lawmakers.

Out of those discussions came the idea for the Lugar Center. In the ensuing years, the center sponsored studies of the issues he had dealt with for so long as a senator: world hunger, education and nuclear proliferation.

Lugar had been among the most scholarly and courtly of lawmakers, but those characteristics perhaps contributed to his reputation as an unremarkable orator. In “Richard G. Lugar: Statesman of the Senate” (2012), an otherwise highly admiring biography, John T. Shaw, a journalist, wrote that while Lugar had never been uncomfortable in addressing groups, he was nevertheless “a wooden speaker who is not always adept at gauging his audience and ascertaining the level of detail they are able or willing to absorb.”

An exception may have been in 2008, when he accepted an award for ethics in government. He spoke then with passion about his belief in the need for compromise and bipartisanship. At a time when the Senate was becoming increasingly polarized along party and ideological lines, he argued that senators had a duty to seek consensus across such boundaries — to avoid unnecessary inflammatory rhetoric and accept that those of the other party also love their country.

Bipartisanship, he said, was not simply moderation or willingness to reach compromises but the only sensible way to govern over the long term. The problem with heavy reliance on opposing the other party, he said, was “whatever is won today through division is usually lost tomorrow.”

“The relationships that are destroyed and the ill will that is created make subsequent achievements that much more difficult,” he said. Polarization, he added, “deepens cynicism, sharpens political vendettas and depletes the national reserve of goodwill that is critical to our survival in hard times.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/obituaries/richard-lugar-dead.html" id="044171e4-eba1-3d41-a89a-e038eabda1bc">The New York Times</a>.

Richard Lugar, Longtime Indiana GOP Senator, Dies at 87

Richard G. Lugar, who represented Indiana in the Senate for 36 years and whose mastery of foreign affairs made him one of only a handful of senators in modern history to exercise substantial influence on the nation’s international relations, died Sunday in Annandale, Virginia. He was 87.

Her daughter, Johanna Wald, confirmed her death and said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Wald was a pioneer for women in law, rising from a working-class Irish family to enter the legal profession at a time when women were a rare presence. She eventually became the first woman to serve on — and preside over — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, one of the most influential appeals courts in the country. Her career spanned a generational change that propelled women into visible and prominent roles, including on the Supreme Court, a job for which she was once in consideration.

Her path to prominence showed the obstacles women faced in the mid-20th century. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1951; when she began, three years earlier, Harvard Law School did not even entertain applications from women. She became a law clerk for Jerome Frank, a prominent appeals court judge in New York, and worked briefly for some of Washington’s most prominent lawyers before leaving the workplace for 10 years to be at home with her family. She raised five children with her husband, Robert Wald, a Yale Law School classmate who established a thriving Washington law practice. He died in 2010.

She described her choice without complaint or regret. “I didn’t feel any terrible sense of isolation or loss,” she said of leaving the workplace. “I just assumed I would go back.”

In a 2006 interview, she described the question of whether motherhood is a real or fulfilling job as a false debate. “In my view, how you pursue your life as a parent and careerist is a question of individual personality,” she said.

“I did not want to go back to work until my kids were in regular school,” she said, though she added that “I respect other women’s choices to go back earlier.”

She first became pregnant in the early 1950s while working at Arnold &amp; Porter, then a small firm formed by a few of Washington’s top lawyers. She hid her condition for a time because she feared that it would reinforce a negative view of hiring women. “I was afraid they might say, ‘You take your first woman associate and in three months, she’s pregnant,'” she said.

For several weeks, she did her legal research across the street from the firm at a private library because, she said, she often collapsed in exhaustion over her books and just napped.

After her decade at home, she went back to work, initially part time. She jointly wrote a book about bail in the United States and served on several commissions to improve legal services and juvenile justice. In the beginning of that period, her youngest child was not yet in school and she worked during his nap times and late at night. On weekends, she recalled, her husband took full responsibility for the children so she could work without interruption.

She became a trial lawyer for the Legal Services Corp. and, after holding several other posts, was named assistant attorney general for legislative affairs by President Jimmy Carter, who later nominated her to the appeals court.

Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, described Wald as an iconic figure in the sweep of American law. “It’s hard to think of a more exuberant pioneer in this arena,” he said. She excelled as a judge both in the United States and abroad, he said, and “fought for human rights and civil liberties everywhere long after many activists would have laid down their pens.”

Patricia Ann McGowan Wald was born Sept. 16, 1928, in Torrington, Connecticut, the only child of Margaret O’Keefe and Joseph McGowan. In describing her childhood for oral history projects, she said she grew up in a crowded Irish-American household with an extended family of mostly women after her father left home when she was 2. While her mother and an aunt often worked as secretaries, the rest of the household revolved around episodic factory work at the Torrington Co.

Her family, she said, took great pride in her academic success and made it clear they did not expect her to end up on the factory floor. She went away to Connecticut College — the school that offered the greatest financial aid — but spent her summers on the assembly line greasing ball bearings and fabricating sewing needles. The workers were on strike during her last summer there so she worked for the union.

Everyone at home would chip in, she said, to see that she had decent clothes for school. “At one point, we had eight people in the house and only two were working, my grandfather and an aunt, and they were carrying the rest of us, as a family does,” she said.

She recalled that some of her girlfriends from wealthier families were not encouraged to become professionals because their parents well understood the obstacles. But she benefited from her family’s lack of sophistication about the odds against her success. “They were like, ‘Go for it,'” she said.

She joined the Court of Appeals in Washington in 1979. She was its first female member, but was soon joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would go on to become the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

The appeals court was known as a liberal bench, but after Ronald Reagan’s election, it became notably more conservative with new appointees, including Robert H. Bork, Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia.

After that, much of her tenure on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit coincided with a contentious period in which conservative and liberal judges squared off against each other regularly. Although the court’s docket is heavy with cases involving the important but typically dry area of federal regulation, its judges often deal in the nation’s most controversial issues. Throughout her career, Wald was considered liberal and held a view of the Constitution as an engine of social progress.

She participated in more than 800 cases, including an opinion she wrote striking down the gag rule, a federal regulation that barred doctors who accepted federal payments from discussing abortion with their patients. Her decision was overturned in 1991 by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court in a related case, Rust v. Sullivan. President Bill Clinton settled the issue by eliminating the rule shortly after taking office in 1993.

She also ruled that the State Department had systematically discriminated against women, thus setting in motion major changes in federal employment. Wald also dissented from the majority in a three-judge ruling that resulted in the dismissal of all criminal charges against former Reagan national security official Oliver North stemming from the Iran-Contra scandal.

She once clashed with Bork over the constitutionality of a Washington statute that prohibited protesters from being within 500 feet of an embassy but allowed favorable demonstrators to be inside that perimeter. Bork wrote for the majority upholding the law, but her dissenting argument that it violated the principle that any restrictions on political speech had to be content-neutral was later upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1986, she became the appeals court’s chief judge, a largely administrative post that depends on seniority. She would have been the first female chief judge of any federal court but for a brief stint by Florence Allen, who was named a chief judge as a ceremonial tribute in 1958 just before she retired.

Wald’s name was among those mentioned when a spot opened up on the Supreme Court during the Clinton administration. She had also been in consideration for attorney general.

Within days of her retirement from the appeals court, she arrived in The Hague as a judge on the Yugoslav tribunal. After nearly a year of graphic testimony, she wrote the landmark judgment in the Krstic case, which found for the first time that the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica constituted genocide.

In her second major trial, she ruled that the numerous rapes at the Omarska detention camp were part of the war crimes that women there had suffered. Sitting as an appeals court judge in another case, she overturned the conviction of three military officials. While many thought the defendants guilty, she ruled that the evidence and eyewitness accounts were insufficient. Her decision dismayed some, but the ruling was generally regarded as an enhancement of the court’s legitimacy.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She is survived by five children — Douglas, Frederica, Johanna, Sarah and Thomas Wald — and by 10 grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/obituaries/patricia-wald-dead.html" id="0c644165-67a6-3fbe-a3d0-6284f9d9d93c">The New York Times</a>.

Patricia M. Wald, the first woman to serve as chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and later wrote seminal rulings while serving in The Hague on the international court for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, died Saturday at her home in Washington. She was 90.

Patricia Wald, First Woman to Preside Over D.C. Appeals Court, Dies at 90

This article originally appeared in <a id="044171e4-eba1-3d41-a89a-e038eabda1bc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/obituaries/richard-lugar-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Richard Lugar, longtime Indiana GOP senator, dies at 87

His death was announced by the Lugar Center, which said the cause was complications of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a nervous system disorder.

But unlike them — and, indeed, unlike most senators — Lugar was known for his modesty. The occasion of roll-call votes typically presents the spectacle of senators lingering on the floor to socialize. In contrast, Lugar would cast his vote quickly after entering and, waving to a senator or two, just as quickly depart.

He was among the most scholarly and courtly of lawmakers, but those characteristics perhaps contributed to his reputation as an unremarkable orator. In “Richard G. Lugar: Statesman of the Senate” (2012), an otherwise highly admiring biography, John T. Shaw, a journalist, wrote that while Lugar had never been uncomfortable in addressing groups, he was nevertheless “a wooden speaker who is not always adept at gauging his audience and ascertaining the level of detail they are able or willing to absorb.”

An exception may have been in 2008, when he accepted an award for ethics in government. He spoke then with passion about his belief in the need for compromise and bipartisanship. At a time when the Senate was becoming increasingly polarized along party and ideological lines, he argued that senators had a duty to seek consensus across such boundaries.

“The relationships that are destroyed and the ill will that is created make subsequent achievements that much more difficult,’’ he said. Polarization, he added, “deepens cynicism, sharpens political vendettas and depletes the national reserve of good will that is critical to our survival in hard times.’’ He said lawmakers were obliged to avoid unnecessary inflammatory rhetoric and accept that those of the other party also love their country.

His early life and career were marked by the most traditional signposts of American success. He was an Eagle Scout and president of both his Shortridge High School and Denison University senior classes. He got along so well with his college class’s co-president, Charlene Smeltzer, who was known as Char, that they married after graduating. She survives him.

He then became a Rhodes Scholar, and during his studies at Oxford, he visited the American embassy in London in 1957 to enlist in the Navy.

After his return to the United States, Lugar was commissioned a second lieutenant and eventually became a briefer for Adm. Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, who had been a hero of World War II and was renowned as a guileful player in Washington politics. Friends said that this was Lugar’s most significant exposure to geopolitical thinking on a global scale, and probably the single greatest source of his fascination with foreign policy.

After a few years back in Indiana running a machine business, he was elected to the Indianapolis school board. His old high school by then was 90% African American, and he pushed through a plan to make it one of the nation’s first integrated magnet schools for college-bound young people. Shortridge High soon became evenly divided between black and white students. But the plan proved highly unpopular politically and was reversed in little more than a year, and in a subsequent campaign for school board president, he was defeated — his first electoral setback.

He rebounded, however. In 1967, at age 35, Lugar was elected mayor of Indianapolis. In his two terms, he helped conceive of and push through a plan to unify Indianapolis with surrounding Marion County in all forms of government except for the schools.

With his eyes on the Senate, Lugar sought to unseat a Democratic incumbent, Birch Bayh, in 1974. He lost, but two years later he succeeded in ousting Indiana’s other Democratic incumbent, Vance Hartke. Reelected five times, Lugar was always able to campaign as a true son of Indiana, as someone who still operated a large soybean farm there. He had no Democratic opponent in his last successful reelection race, in 2006.

But six years later, he became a target for the unforgiving conservatives of his party’s Tea Party wing and was defeated in the Republican primary by Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. It was apparent that many Republican primary voters had lost patience with Lugar’s moderate stances on some issues and especially his outspoken faith in the need for cooperation with Democrats.

After his defeat, Lugar sat down with family and longtime aides to figure out what to do with the remainder of his life. Dan Diller, a Lugar speechwriter for many years, said that Lugar had made it immediately plain that he would not become a lobbyist, the path of many ex-lawmakers.

Out of those discussions came the idea for the Lugar Center, a Washington think tank. In the ensuing years, the Lugar Center sponsored studies of the issues he had dealt with for so long as a senator: world hunger, education and nuclear proliferation.

Richard Lugar, longtime Indiana Gop senator, dies at 87

<h1>Her daughter, Johanna Wald, confirmed her death and said the cause was pancreatic cancer.</h1>

Wald was a pioneer for women in law, rising from a working-class Irish family to enter the legal profession at a time when women were a rare presence. She eventually became the first woman to serve on — and preside over — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely regarded as the second most influential court in the country. Her career spanned a generational change that propelled women into visible and prominent roles, including on the Supreme Court, a job for which she was once in consideration.

Her path to becoming an important progressive voice in American jurisprudence showed the obstacles women faced in the mid-20th century. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1951; when she began, three years earlier, Harvard Law School did not even entertain applications from women. She became a law clerk for Jerome Frank, a prominent appeals court judge in New York, and worked briefly for some of Washington’s most prominent lawyers before leaving the workplace for 10 years to be at home with her family. She raised five children with her husband, Robert Wald, a Yale Law School classmate who established a thriving Washington law practice. He died in 2010.

She once clashed with Bork over the constitutionality of a Washington statute that prohibited protesters from being within 500 feet of an embassy but allowed favorable demonstrators to be inside that perimeter. Bork wrote for the majority upholding the law, but her dissenting argument that it violated the principle that any restrictions on political speech had to be content-neutral was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Finzer v. Barr.

Patricia Wald, who broke barrier on D.C. Appeals court, dies at 90

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