As Lugar is honored with a new statue, Franklin College documentary team remembers his civility

In April 2018, almost a year to the day before he died, former U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, visited the campus of Franklin College to watch an hour-long documentary about his life.

“Richard Lugar: Reason’s Quiet Warrior” had been created by students from the Pulliam School of Journalism, and after airing on WFYI, it would go on to be nominated for a regional Emmy. Through interviews with friends, family, colleagues and the man himself, it painted a portrait of the Eagle Scout, lifelong Rotarian, school-board commissioner, Indianapolis mayor and U.S. senator as unassuming, dignified to the point of formality, ambitious, but with an enduringly idealistic vision of public service.

“Donald Trump took office in 2016, and we were really starting to see that shift, such a shift into division,” says Shelby Thomas, then Shelby Mullis, a Franklin College sophomore on the documentary team. “To talk to somebody who was all about bipartisanship, who made so many changes and had such a big impact … To be able to talk to him—it was so interesting.”

Lugar soon will be honored with a statue to stand in the center of Richard G. Lugar Plaza, the two-acre space between East Washington Street and the City-County Building in downtown Indianapolis. Its unveiling happens at 10 a.m. Tuesday, several blocks away at Bicentennial Unity Plaza, on Pennsylvania Street at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will deliver remarks.

For Thomas, the timing of this latest memorial is also appropriate, just months before a bitterly partisan presidential election. She wracked her brain to think of something contentious Lugar might have said during her several trips to Washington, D.C., to help interview him and could not.

“I don’t remember his comments about the political climate of that time, but I think it’s because he was not one who … he was not one to shame,” she said. “Whatever he said was very tame if he said anything at all.”

While Lugar is remembered as the two-term Indy mayor who envisioned Unigov, as Indiana’s longest-serving congressman and as one of the men behind the Nunn-Lugar program to reduce nuclear weapons, the young journalists who briefly worked with him—while also working at the Indiana Statehouse with TheStatehouseFile.com—were struck by his tone.

Then Franklin College freshman Erica Irish served as a transcriptionist and researcher on the documentary, listening to all the team’s recorded interviews with Lugar and even hunting down his writings from his high-school newspaper—spending a long time with his words.

“To me, Lugar most exemplified the power of communication in building consensus,” she says. “He spoke at many points in his life about the necessity of staying in the room with—and listening to—the people who disagree with you. We can’t write each other off simply because of policy disagreements. Without disagreement and debate, policy will never serve everyone.”

Clayton Taylor of WFYI and John Krull, director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of The Statehouse File, served as co-executive producers of the documentary. Krull also was writer and narrator. Joel Cramer, J.D., a Franklin professor of journalism, was field producer for the 11-student team.

“’Reason’s Quiet Warrior’ presented several gifts,” says Krull. “The first, of course, was that it provided on video a complete telling of Richard Lugar’s story. But the greater gift was the impact it made on the students who worked on it. In addition to enhancing their skills, it gave them a much broader understanding of the ways the world works.”

After graduating from Franklin and working a stint in daily newspapers, Thomas landed in the office of Gov. Eric J. Holcomb as deputy director for drug prevention, treatment and enforcement.

“I think obviously The Statehouse File was my introduction to government and politics. Prior, I could tell you who the governor was … But it wasn’t until The Statehouse File—it really taught me the basics,” Thomas said. “But it was these really personal experiences I got that solidified my interest in public service.

“To be able to hear from Lugar himself all of those times we interviewed him, it just really solidified—that’s the type of public servant you want be.”

Colleen Steffen is the executive editor of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. She worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 13 years and is now in her 10th year teaching college journalists.