Mr. Lugar's wonderful life - presidential candidacy of Senator Richard Lugar

Indiana Senator Richard Lugar's personal office in the Hart Senate Office Building is softly lit and cluttered. Knickknacks cover his desk, souvenir mugs, pen stands, little brass elephants from one end to the other. A clock the shape of Indiana sits on a coffee table; a five-foot-tall stuffed Mickey Mouse sporting a Dick Lugar name tag leans against a bookshelf. It all has a familiar feel, as if you've wandered from the bustling halls of Congress into your grandparents' living room.

Lugar himself, 63, gentle, a little fussy, does little to dispel the feeling. Henry Foster's nomination, the latest nasty skirmish in an ongoing culture war, dominates talk radio and the headlines. "My view," Lugar says, "is the President, given the controversy surrounding Dr. Elders, should have tried to find the very best physician in the United States to use the forum that's provided . . . to talk about public-health measures." From his tone, it would be difficult to tell that Lugar was discussing anything more controversial than spring gardening: best, all things considered, to plant your lettuce by the third week in March.

"I've always tried to approach problems," he explains, "with the thought that a lot of people weren't going to agree with my position. But I was going to need their good will if I were going to make broad changes. To make big changes you need to have at least good will from people that understand that your motivation is to try to do the right thing, that you're not cutting corners morally or ethically, that you're not going to stridently beat down everybody who disagrees with you or intimidate them."

Lugar's studiously reassuring manner helps explain why he doesn't receive Strange New Respect -- the accolades reserved for conservatives who abandon their principles -- but receives an even stranger respect: Lugar voted with President Reagan more often than any other senator in the 1980s, maintains a healthy 82 per cent American Conservative Union rating, yet still garners admiring plugs from Al Hunt and the Washington Post. He demands respect. If Lugar's manner is grandfatherly, so is his conservatism. His worry about the dangers of the post - Cold War world and vision of rekindled wage growth through increased savings are throwbacks to old admonitions: Be careful. Get a good job. Save your money.

Lugar, the latest long-shot GOP presidential aspirant to announce his candidacy, was born in Indianapolis, where his father owned a farm and small business. His life could have been sketched by an unimaginative 1950s screenwriter. He became an Eagle Scout while attending Shortridge High School, where he earned straight A's. At Denison University, he became co-president of the student body with his future wife (still married, four sons, seven grandchildren). Lugar won a Rhodes Scholarship. After Oxford, he dutifully marched to the U.S. embassy and volunteered for active duty.

He served in the Navy from 1957 to 1960 as an intelligence officer on the staff of Admiral Arleigh Burke before returning to Indianapolis to help save the family business. Then the plot lines of It's a Wonderful Life begin to fade into Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Lugar ran for the local school board, where he supported voluntary desegregation and a variant of magnet schools. He won a race for mayor of Indianapolis in 1967, then parlayed his two widely acclaimed mayoral terms into a successful U.S. Senate bid in 1976.

Mayor Lugar pursued a good-government agenda, the foremost accomplishment of which was "Unigov." The outlying suburbs of Marion County were combined with the city proper into one governmental unit, the dream of many urban experts at the time. Unigov worked according to plan. The broader tax base provided funds for redevelopment, while the administrative efficiencies from governmental consolidation made it possible for Lugar to cut property-tax rates. The resulting influx of suburban, Republican voters, meanwhile, gave the GOP a virtual lock on the Indianapolis mayor's office.

Lugar became known as "Nixon's favorite mayor," and it didn't take long for the politicos around Lugar to realize they had a potential golden boy on their hands. "There's nothing that just happens in Indiana in the political or basketball arena," says Keith Bulen, a former national committeeman and longtime party activist. "I kept [Lugar] in the race for Vice President when I handled him at the national convention [in 1972]. I had him made a key-note speaker and we sent our entourage down. We had our cars and we threw our dinners for the national press group and our receptions for the national committee and the delegates and so forth. He was only mayor then, but we wanted to introduce him well. We've always continued that push."

Unseating incumbent Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1972, of course, wasn't a real possibility. But Lugar was on the list of potential replacements when Agnew resigned in 1973. His name surfaced again in 1980 when Reagan was picking a running-mate ("in the running clear up to the night we selected Bush," says Bulen, a deputy chairman of the Reagan campaign). In 1988 Lugar missed out again when George Bush selected junior Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, a move that must have seemed to Lugar associates like passing over Ward Cleaver in favor of the Beaver.