Heidi Alexander: “to be specific, 51 years ago, the United Citizens for Nixon-Agnew descended upon the city of Indianapolis, IN, a city to…”

“to be specific, 51 years ago, the United Citizens for Nixon-Agnew descended upon the city of Indianapolis, IN, a city to which a young man named Richard Lugar had been elected mayor. That was my first opportunity to meet former Senator Richard Lugar, who died a few days ago. He became Richard Nixon's favorite mayor. He persuaded the suburban areas around Indianapolis and the city itself to do something almost no city in America has been able to do--Nashville did it; Miami did it; Louisville did it; and Indianapolis did it. It was to have a unified government--to get rid of 60 different municipal governments and form one. No one was very surprised when Richard Lugar was able to accomplish something, because he had been marked from the beginning as being a young man of extraordinary ability. At Denison, where he went to college, he became a Rhodes Scholar. He studied at Oxford. He became a Navy intelligence officer. Later on in the sixties--and I have mentioned 1968 as the year in which we met him for the first time--as mayor, he was able to deal not only with the unification of Indianapolis but with the difficult racial times that occurred all over America during the late 1960s. Nobody was surprised when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1974. He was defeated in the Watergate sweep that wiped out a large number of promising young candidates, which I had a little personal experience with in Tennessee. Yet no one was surprised when he came back in 1976 and won.…”