Lugar Now the Man in the Middle

In the Great Rolodex Reshuffle that takes place in this town after every election, one man’s card has been moved to the front of the stack.

It belongs to Sen. Richard G. Lugar, the 70-year-old Indiana Republican whose views are suddenly being sought by the White House and foreign emissaries.

Lugar is due to take over next month as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vowing to make it a more potent platform from which to advise, assist and nudge the Bush administration. As a respected foreign policy expert in a narrowly divided Senate, Lugar is positioned to wield tremendous clout.

Centrists are hoping the moderate, multilateralist Lugar will align himself with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to temper the influence of the administration’s hard-liners.

“He’ll be a strong voice on the Powell side of that equation,” said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who was also a leader on foreign policy. “He needs to balance the role of being a partner and a critic.”

Lugar, said fellow Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat, has “literally been preparing his entire life for this assignment. He’ll help take some of the rough edges off the Bush administration.”

The senator, however, demurred, describing himself in a recent interview as a “friend of the family” who has good ties with all members of the fractious administration.

Though he is close to Powell, Lugar pointedly reminisced about times past, when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz -- one of the administration’s most prominent hawks -- enlightened him about the Philippines, and when, as mayor of Indianapolis, Lugar was chummy with then-Rep. Donald H. Rumsfeld of Illinois. With a chuckle, Lugar waved off a question on the tension between the war hawks and the diplomacy-minded Powell.

“The interest of the country is that all of these folks pull together,” Lugar said. “At the end of the day, they do not want to be perceived as warring....To the extent that they want to visit with me or I can be helpful, I’m going to be.”

But “helpful” does not mean “rubber stamp.” Lugar pointed out that “a friend of the family can say, essentially, ‘This really isn’t good enough.’ ”

Indeed, the 27-year Senate veteran said his first project will be to turn up the heat on a problem he thinks the administration has placed on the back burner: Who runs Iraq if the U.S. succeeds in ousting Saddam Hussein?

Mindful of Lugar’s new status, Washington’s most powerful already have begun paying their respects. Wolfowitz stopped by Lugar’s office on his way back from Turkey to brief the senator for more than an hour on efforts to win logistical support for a war on Iraq. Powell telephoned from Colombia to swap notes on Mexico.

The staid Lugar -- anything but a sound-bite man -- is suddenly getting top billing on the television talk shows.

He weighed in on Iraqi weapons inspections on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” that the administration should start negotiating with North Korea.

Journalists from more than two dozen countries are lining up to interview him on every major world issue. Others, too, are paying court, as recent visits by the foreign ministers of Mexico and Russia attest.

On Capitol Hill, Lugar is widely respected for his intellect and command of foreign policy -- a subject that, in the post-Cold-War era, has been shunned by most members of Congress as something removed from the workaday concerns of their constituents and irrelevant to their reelection prospects.

One sign of that shift is the diminished prestige of the Foreign Relations Committee itself, which was a sought-after assignment for senior senators more than a generation ago when it was a bastion of opposition to the Vietnam War.

Now, fewer senior members want to join, in part because Senate rules force them to choose between that panel and such other elite committees as Appropriations and Finance.

Lugar recently tried to win a change in Senate rules that would make it easier to attract senior members, but the effort died.

With the GOP having regained a Senate majority in last month’s midterm elections, Lugar will take over as chairman from Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.); the senior Republican on the committee, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), retired.

Lugar will be bolstered by one of the Senate’s rising stars, Charles Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who shares Lugar’s internationalist instincts. Biden, who has worked closely with Lugar, will stay on as the ranking Democrat.

Lugar is a throwback to a more bipartisan era of the Senate, when moderate Republicans were not an endangered species. A key question is whether he will be able to sustain that bipartisan approach in the face of the Senate’s narrow partisan division and the administration’s bent against compromise.

“I think he has very good prospects of making the committee a coherent, bipartisan, collaborative body to a degree that has not been witnessed in decades,” said Alton Frye, a veteran Washington watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations.

When the 108th Congress convenes in January, Lugar’s first order of business will be to hold hearings on the future of Iraq.

The former Rhodes scholar wants to make sure the administration has carefully thought through the huge task of what it would take to run a potentially hostile nation the size of France. He wants to persuade the public that such a big commitment of American lives and treasure is not being undertaken lightly. And he wants to engage a detached Senate on the key foreign policy issues he sees as most vital to U.S. security: Iraq, Afghanistan and the international efforts to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Afghanistan looms as a model of what can happen when an administration that scorned U.S. involvement in “nation-building” found itself forced to build a country out of rubble, Lugar said.

“The military improvised brilliantly,” he said. “Ever since, we’ve been trying to figure out how that country can be a success, and who else will help....The improvised quality of this situation is a problem.”

Lugar plans to apply his newfound clout to the disarmament and nonproliferation issues that have been his passion since he and former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) launched the Nunn-Lugar program 11 years ago that sought to destroy the Soviet nuclear arsenals made obsolete by the end of the Cold War.

“Iraq is indeed an acute problem, but it is one proliferation problem among many,” Lugar said last fall. “We must pursue the containment and elimination of weapons of mass destruction on a global basis with the same intensity that has characterized our debate on Iraq.”

Lugar was tenacious on the need to liquidate weapons of mass destruction for a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks made his views seem mainstream. He named a lengthy agenda of items he is determined to pursue, including making sure that Russian programs to destroy chemical weapons succeed.

“This man has stamina of extraordinary degree, and it helps him prevail on a lot of issues,” said Frye, who argued unsuccessfully against NATO expansion while Lugar backed it.

One question is whether Lugar will challenge the administration -- and to what effect.

On one hand, his record is rife with evidence of his willingness to stand up to members of his own party. He defied President Reagan on U.S. policy toward the Philippines and South Africa; he feuded openly and repeatedly with Helms over issues from the United Nations to foreign aid.

Just last week, Lugar contradicted President Bush’s position on North Korea, saying the U.S. should continue food aid and negotiations with the Communist regime. Bush has refused to negotiate until North Korea scraps its nuclear weapons program.

But Lugar’s career has also been pockmarked by failure. He ran for president and Senate majority leader, but both campaigns flopped -- largely under the weight of a ponderous seriousness and lackluster style, particularly on the stump. He lost a power struggle with Helms that kept Lugar from the senior GOP position on Foreign Relations until the North Carolinan retired this year. Lugar was once passed over for the GOP vice presidential nomination.

This fall, he and Biden were able to slightly narrow Bush’s resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, but in the end the president got most of the powers Lugar had sought to curtail.

“He is always touted as having disagreements, but he rarely wins,” said one conservative Republican who asked not to be named. “For a guy who’s as successful as he is at getting himself elected, I don’t think he’s particularly astute” within the Senate.

Lugar’s career challenges the view that American politics has deteriorated into all style and no substance. He is arguably one of the most stilted speakers in the Senate. He can infuriate Republicans back home when he shows up at a big political event -- and then proceeds to give a dense speech on nuclear nonproliferation to an audience that would rather talk tax cuts.

“He’s not a back-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy,” said one foreign policy expert who asked not to be named.

That’s exactly what endears Lugar to his allies.

“This is going to be very exciting,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may not control any purse strings, but it is hardly irrelevant on security issues important to America. “Yeah, they’ve got clout. You control money, you control nominations, you control treaties, and you control the microphone,” he said. “That’s a lot of power in Washington.”