Transcription of speech by Senator Lugar to a public forum at the
University of New Hampshire on October 12, 1995, the day after the WMUR
Candidates Forum.  He spoke to approximately fifty to sixty students,
community members, and members of the press.  He spoke and answered
questions from the audience from 12:50 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.  
  In the speech Senator Lugar argues that the Presidential campaign should
focus more on foreign policy.  Among the other points he articulates in
the speech are:  that our economy has not matured and can still grow; that
dialogue among racial and ethnic groups in this country should be
improved; and the problems of the cities should be addressed. 

The Senator was introduced by Professor Ben Trout of the Political
Science Department. 

Transcribed from audiotape by Chris Schults and Mark Kuhn.
Recorded by Chris Schults.

Professor Trout:  This is a good turn out.  One of the good
fortunes that we have living in New Hampshire is an opportunity to
meet people, like Senator Lugar.  Senator Lugar has, uh, has been
someone whose career I have followed since I was a graduate student
at Indiana University.  He is going to speak about foreign policy,
but I'm sure he'll answer other kinds of questions.  Uh, he's one
of the most informed, responsible, sensible voices of foreign
policy and has been for a long time, uh, in Washington.  I'm not
going to say anything further, he'll be able to take that into
[inaudible].

Senator Richard Lugar: Thank you very much Professor Trout and I'm
truly indebted to each one you for coming by this afternoon.  Uh,
I do want to, uh, talk about the presidency, about the country, but
especially to engage your thoughts and questions.  Because I, I'm
eager to really to try to find out how as Americans we can all
succeed and push ahead.  That is the purpose of my campaign.  And
I start with the thoughts of Professor Trout's, that America's role
in the world is crucially important.  

We have enormous opportunities at this particular point in our
history.  And we are the preeminent power, in terms of a
combination of the military, diplomatic, scientific, the wealth we
have available, the entrepreneurship, and extraordinary
opportunities.  And I think we have a very substantial debate in
the country as to how we shall use them, or whether we shall use
them.

There are a great number of Americans who I hear, in both parties,
who are saying our shoulders are not that broad.  We don't want to
be the policemen of the world.  We don't want to be involved in
every dilemma in the world.  We'd be, really have affairs here at
home to deal with.  And to become engaged in all sorts of
situations beyond our borders is not only beyond our capacity, it
should be beyond our capacity not do that.  It is an America come
home sort of syndrome.  Uh, and I think that is, uh, unfortunate. 
Uh, you can make a case for that, that if the rest of the world
would leave us alone, if we did not have the rest of the world, if
we could preoccupy ourselves with our problems here, that we ought
to do that.  And clearly our politics in the country have moved in
that direction, for the last three years.  

Essentially, President Clinton campaigned on the thought that "It's
the economy stupid," the economy right here in America.  Not in
Russia, or China, or somewhere else.  And that this is where we
ought to focus.  And he has focused that way.

Now, I, I think the opportunity costs have to be examined.  In
other words, if your lucky, nothing will happen to you.  And, you
know, on that kind of a track. Uh, and it is very possible you may
simply luck out without miscues.  And the President had good luck
for a while.  The, the dilemma with that point of view is that you
miss the opportunity of American leadership to organize your, to
organize Asia or our hemisphere.  By that I mean calling meetings,
pulling leadership together, naming an appropriate agenda, trying
to think through assigned roles that we all play, if there is to be
a likelihood of peace and security for ourselves and for others in
the world.  Now that's the opportunity that we have.  And if we
don't play it, no one else does in the world right now.  And most
nations are dismayed that we are not playing.  

The leaders that come to my office ask, "When are you going to wake
up?"  Uh, "And if you don't," uh,  "We're gonna all have
difficulty, because none of us can pull it together, besides
America."  And in the midst of all of this, the President of the
United States has a unique responsibility.  That, that there are
members of Congress, there are governors, mayors, other people of
responsibility in this country, but no one else has the title of
Commander-in-chief or the opportunity to name an national security
team.  To try to, uh, extend America's leadership and our
possibilities.  And I, I suggest this is the major agenda for the
President.  Ought to be a very  important part of this campaign to
be President.

Who can best fulfill that role?  On the basis of experience,
imagination, consensus building, some idea of how the world works,
so it works better for us.  Uh, obviously I believe that I'm the
best qualified person to do that.  And I think that many other
candidates feel that is true also.  Uh, uh, in a sense they try to
finesse the issue by saying it isn't the issue.  That, that if in
fact you look at the top ten things that Americans are interested
in, foreign policy doesn't make the charts.  And, and I would
simply suggest, as, as an opportunity for our country, we have to
make certain it makes the charts.  

Now, my own view is that you can only get on this kind of
indifference for so long.  The rest of the world is a dangerous
place, and if you are not prepared to meet it, you'll have
problems.

Uh, I will not go into the entirety of the speech that I gave at
Ross Perot's forum in Dallas and the United We Stand group.  I took
advantage of that national forum to bring up a specific national
security issue that happens whether we take leadership or not. 
Specifically, we have left over, from the cold war, enough nuclear
material in the form of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, uh,
that we are spending eight hundred million dollars, as a nation,
protecting ourselves from this material each year.  That is,
keeping it locked up and closeted, so others can not use it.  

The dilemma is that the Russians have, as much if not more, of this
material. They do not have eight hundred million dollars for
security.  Uh, as a result, many of their laboratories are guarded,
but not guarded to the point that people don't make attempts every
day in the world, to spirit out material.

Uh, as I've pointed out, uh, in my speech, that they have been
successful on occasion in spiriting out material.  And in Prague,
uh, the Czech Republic last winter, six pounds of highly enriched
uranium showed up, uh, that had come out of Russia.  A pound of
plutonium came at a German sting operation.  We, we know of those
captures, as well as another half-a-dozen that our hearings
illuminated.  

Uh, a gentleman from the think tank put a can, about like this one
here [picking up a student's soda can], this same size on the
witness table.  And he pulled out from underneath the can a
cylindrical shaped, fifteen pounds of uranium.  That's, you know,
about the size of what it takes to spirit it out in a suitcase,
briefcase, or even your pocket.  Now he says "Not highly enriched
uranium, just plain old uranium."  Although he had, what we'd prob,
sort of a Geiger-Counter there and it was ticking.  And I asked him
whether the other witnesses were likely to suf, suffer injury, and
he said, "No, if you push it away three feet it will never touch
you."  The, the, the fact is that , um, the people that are trying,
because of economic reasons to get it out, may finally succeed.

One of the awesome problems of our, dilemma, time has been the
World Trade Center bombing.  Or more recently, the Oklahoma City. 
The Federal Building.  Uh, conjure up in your own imagination those
situations that, in which the perpetrators of the crime used about
two tons of regular fertilizer, garden variety fertilizer, laced
with some petroleum base created those explosions.  But if it had
just been a pineapple shaped, well machined piece of highly
enriched uranium, hundred pounds of it.  And if it had exploded, we
heard testimony for my committee that it would have taken off three
square miles of Oklahoma City.  Not just one side of the federal
building.  Uh, that is what we're facing.  A situation that's
beyond the imagination of most of our planners.

Now, we've been thinking of ICBM's coming fifty-five hundred miles
from sites in the former Soviet Union to our military installations
and cities.  We've now been underneath the bunkers there in Ukraine
where, under the Nunn-Lugar act, they are taking apart these
missiles.  Taking the warheads off of them.  And cheerfully, uh,
Russians or Ukraine types take us below and they show us pictures
of our cities that would have been obliterated.  Those were the
targets.  

And, and, and now ,you know I, the irony of history is that ,uh,
that probably is the least likely method of delivery.  More likely
method is somebody coming in on an aircraft, commercial aircraft,
uh, as a terrorist.  As a person who has an agenda; political,
religious, or sometimes nation's state agendas.  As far as we know,
uh, Libyans, still out there.  The Iranians tried to work up a
program.  The Iraqis ever get rid of the U.N. inspectors, well they
might have another go at it.  Pakistan hard at work.  Uh, this is
still a dangerous world.  It is a different kind of world.  

Now my point is that the President of the United States has to
exercise enough imagination, enough comprehension of what is going
on to make certain American security is taken care of.  That is the
first prerequisite of the office.  If that doesn't happen, none of
the rest of us go about our daily lives, in very much equanimity. 
Unless you are simply blind to what is going on in the world.  We
count on the President to do that.  If there is not trust that the
President is on top of it, or interested in it, or experienced
enough to handle it, we are in trouble.  And, and that is one of
the basic issues of this campaign.

Let me just say a, another basic issue of the campaign is the
problem that I talked about a bit last night, in the short time we
had.  We have dilemmas in the interior of America, our cities. 
These have been illuminated again by the Simpson trial, but that
didn't, wasn't required really to tell us, that, by and large,
dialogue between racial groups, blacks and whites in particular,
sometimes Hispanic Americans and others, in our cities is not going
well.  As a matter of fact, uh, we talk about the crime problem
generically.  The welfare problem likewise.  From antiseptically
all by itself, family disintegration.  The lack of dialogue between
racial groups.  Uh, by and large, we don't talk about cities,
because these are seen as intractable problems.  Almost beyond,
first of all, the ability of man to divine what to do and,
secondly, probably not appropriate for federal officials anyway. 
The, the whole thing comes down to formulas as money go to cities
as a pass through to governors who handle it all and block grants.
Should we be interested at all?  

I, I simply make the point that, uh, we are going to have to be
interested.  Very large percentage of us as Americans live in
cities and most of us not with a great deal of security, and
happiness about that.  It, it is not a new problem and I mentioned
last evening in Manchester, that I came upon the city of
Indianapolis in 1968 that had the classic symptoms of a large,
northern, industrial city.  An inner-city situation that was doing
poorly and going down rapidly.  A burgeoning set of suburbs, upon
which many people moved for out there.  There was not a great
demand in Indianapolis in 1968 for unity.  People were not leaping
to have dialogue about their racial differences. Uh, they were
unhappy about crime.  Extremely unhappy about the deterioration of
buildings and blight and that sort of thing.

Now when I came into that situation with a lot of other young
people, I was thirty-six and so were many of the people that came
with me.  Uh, we were business people.  Professionals.  People who
had grown up in Indianapolis and central Indiana.  We had no
political aspirations, we just simply wanted to live in peace.  We,
we wanted to have some assurance that we were not going to have a
civil war, perpetually, in that city.  And we were prepared to act
upon it.  

To make a long story short, our actions included uniting the city
of Indianapolis and its suburbs.  Indianapolis and Marian [sic?]
County, 388 square miles became one.  With one mayor, one council,
one budget.  All the money on the table.  All the issues on the
table.  Everybody in the dialogue.  Not symbolically, but actually
in terms of political power.

Uh, that I think is important to say.  I had to face the crime
problem then, the welfare problem, family disintegration, all of
it.  None of it new.  And I'm saying as a cand, a Presidential
candidate, I'm prepared to do that again.  On behalf of the nation. 
At a time that  not too many are into this agenda at all.  When it
is barely mentioned, except peripherally in terms of the symptoms
that we have.

Let me just say, as an overall thought, I believe a basic issue of
the campaign is the type of person that is going to be President. 
What kind of a person is he?  I'm making the claim that I'm a
straight shooter, a truth teller.  A person who has been in public
life for forty years in one form or another, and who has made a lot
of promises and kept them.  Who has made an appeal to people in my
own party, as well as to independents and to Democrats.  And the
last two elections in Indiana I got over two thirds of the vote. 
With most Republicans, a majority of independents, and a lot of
Democrats.  

The appeals I have made were for a broad consensus.  Which you need
to solve big issues.  As opposed to finding wedge issues.  Divisive
ways in which to divide up people race by race, or by gender, or by
location, or immigrant status, or any of the number of ways that
people have tried to sort of cherry pick this particular campaign. 
To find a constituency in an issue of differentiation.

Now quite to the contrary, our appeal has got to be one of
unification, of unity.  Of some purpose that brings Americans
along.  Something has got to happen in this country that gives us,
at least, some spur to be more than indifferent.  Whether it's the
things abroad, things in our cities, things in our daily lives.  As
opposed to escapists, people in denial.  Uh, so these are basic
issues that I've been trying to express.  

I've had a number of ideas along the way, and some you may want to
explore at greater length.  I'm concerned, as all of you are or
will be, that the fact that the wages and incomes of average
Americans have not changed in 20 years.  Not the last two, but the
last twenty.  Whole generation, average income identical in terms
of real dollars.  That is really strange.  And it has lead to
people, who ought to know better, talking about America as a mature
society.

Now, by mature, they, they usually discuss a, um, company or
industry that is aging, that has some how capped off its growth. 
Uh, uh, I am in that kind of an industry as an manufacturer of food
machinery, for baking equipment.  Uh, the people who are our
customers make cookies and crackers.  Cookies and crackers have not
changed in overall demand in this last century.  Occasionally,
there is an one percent increase in sales, this is what you call a
mature industry.  People are eating all the cookies and crackers
they can consume.  They change brands.  We're not that kind of a
country.  That, that denotes that this generation clearly will not
surpass the one before, or the one before that.  

The whole American dream has been that each generation had a better
shot at it.  And as parents, we have tried to provide educational
opportunities to make sure that was true.  And to make the
investment in infrastructure, to make certain that was true.  That
there are people coming along and discussing as if this was almost
a truism that those stages of America are over.  It's got to be
rejected.  I don't believe that for a minute, nor should you.  The
best the years of the country are clearly still to come, but they
will not occur without significant changes.

One I've, that I've suggested and had been espousing as a very
controversial item.  Is the end of all income taxes and the end of
the Internal Revenue Service.  Lock, stock, and barrel.  Root and
branch.  Gone.  And a shift to a tax on consumption, on spending. 
Uh, I'll not go through all the rigamarole of that unless you want
to hear it.  But I would simply say, the idea is to take taxation
off of savings and investment, growth aspects, entrepreneurship,
the job creation part of our economy.  And we've got to do that. 
We have to have a sizable investment pool.  A structure of interest
that is, that is in decline, not rising.  Exports that are far more
competitive without that income tax component in them.  A country
congenial for foreign capital to come in.  Not with great fear, but
understand that capital is scarce in the world.

These are concrete steps to change.  Wages levels that change the
static income picture that really shake up the order.  And make a
very large difference for young people coming into this situation
to say that we are not a mature society.  We are a dynamically
growing society.  We want it that way.  We want upside potential. 
Well, let me cease fire on my own part at this point and entertain
thoughts and questions that you may have on any subject that is on
your mind.