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Dick Lugar is an unwavering advocate of U.S. leadership in the world, strong national security, free-trade and economic growth.

This fifth generation Hoosier is the most senior Republican in the U.S. Senate and longest serving U.S. Senator in Indiana history.

He is the Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee and a member and former chairman of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and won a sixth term in 2006 with 87 percent of the vote, his fourth consecutive victory by a two-thirds majority.

Born in Indianapolis, Lugar is the oldest of three children, an Eagle Scout, and graduated first in his class at both Shortridge High School in Indianapolis and Denison University in Granville, Ohio. While at Denison, he was co-president of the student government with his future wife, Charlene Smeltzer.

In 1954, he went to Pembroke College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he received an honors degree in politics, philosophy and economics. After finishing Oxford, Lugar went to the U.S. Embassy in London, volunteered for the United States Navy in 1956, and served as an officer. He ultimately served as the intelligence briefer for Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations. Upon leaving the Navy in 1960, Lugar returned to Indianapolis where he and his brother Tom managed the family's food machinery manufacturing business.

Lugar was then elected to the Indianapolis School Board in 1963, where he worked for voluntary public school desegregation and promoted the Shortridge Plan, a forerunner of the magnet school concept. In 1967, he was elected Mayor of Indianapolis. As a two-term mayor (1968-75), he envisioned the unification of the city and surrounding Marion County into one government. Lugar's plan, Unigov, revitalized the downtown area and set Indianapolis on a path of uninterrupted economic growth.

Lugar has gained wide recognition as a leader on national security policy. Foremost among his initiatives is the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lugar saw the grave proliferation risk presented by the Soviet Union's vast arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Working with former Senator Sam Nunn (a Democrat from Georgia), Lugar created an ambitious program to safeguard and dismantle weapons of mass destruction cooperatively in the former Soviet Union.