Birch Evans Bayh Jr. (; January 22, 1928 – March 14, 2019) was an American politician from Indiana who served as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives representing Vigo County, Indiana, from 1954 to 1962 and as a member of the United States Senate for three terms from 1963 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the first person to date since James Madison, and the only non–Founding Father, to have authored more than one constitutional amendment. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the United States Electoral College.
Bayh authored Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which bans sexism in higher education institutions that receive federal funding. He also authored the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, and co-authored the Bayh–Dole Act, which deals with intellectual property that arises from federal-government–funded research. Bayh voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court of the United States. He led the Senate opposition to the nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, two of Richard Nixon's unsuccessful Supreme Court nominees. Bayh intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, but declined to run after his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, but dropped out of the campaign after disappointing finishes in the first set of primaries and caucuses.
Bayh won re-election in 1968 and 1974, but lost his 1980 bid for a fourth term to Dan Quayle, who later became Vice President of the United States under President of the United States George H. W. Bush from Texas. After leaving the Senate, he remained active in the political and legal world. His son, Evan Bayh, served as the 46th Governor of Indiana and held his father's former U.S. Senate seat from 1999 to 2011.
Early life Youth and education Bayh was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of Leah Ward (née Hollingsworth), a teacher, and Birch Bayh, an intercollegiate coach and athletic director. His ancestry included ancestors who were German, English, Scotch-Irish, and Scottish. Bayh spent summers on his grandparents' farm in Shirkieville, Indiana, where he later lived. As a student at New Goshen (Fayette Township) High School, young Birch took part in speaking contests, played baseball and basketball, and won the Indiana 4-H Tomato Championship.Cruikshank, Kate. The Art of Leadership; A Companion to an Exhibition from the Senatorial Papers of Birch Bayh . (Indiana University Libraries, 2007)
From 1946 to 1948, Bayh served as a Military Police Corps with the United States Army in occupied Germany following World War II. He excelled in sports, competing as a Golden Gloves boxer in college and taking part in two Major League Baseball tryouts. Bayh graduated from the Purdue University School of Agriculture in 1951, where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega social fraternity and senior class president. In 1951, he won Alpha Tau Omega's highest individual collegiate award, the Thomas Arkle Clark Award. He married Marvella Hern in August 1952, and took courses at Indiana State University in Terre Haute for two years while also running the family farm.
Indiana legislature and 1962 U.S. Senate campaign
Bayh's political career began at age 26 with his election to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1954, where he served two years as Speaker and four years as Democratic Floor Leader. At the time, Bayh was the youngest Speaker in Indiana state history. While he served in the legislature, Bayh studied law at Indiana University's School of Law, received his LL.B. in 1960, and was admitted to the Indiana Bar in 1961.
At age 34, Bayh was elected to the United States Senate in the 1962 United States Senate elections, defeating 18-year incumbent Homer E. Capehart. Capehart was outspoken on the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles being placed in Cuba, and was buoyed by the Cuban Missile Crisis of that October. Bayh's disadvantage was dramatized in the opening scene of the 2000 film Thirteen Days, as President John F. Kennedy rattles a newspaper and asks an aide, "You see this goddamn Capehart stuff?" and the aide responds, "Bayh's going to lose".
Bayh's success was attributed to a vigorous campaign of 300 speeches between Labor Day and the election, and a catchy campaign jingle that taught voters the correct pronunciation of his last name:
For more than four decades — throughout his entire career in politics — Bayh continued to manage the growing of corn and soybeans on his family farm.
United States Senator
Drafter of constitutional amendments As a freshman senator, Bayh was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. While his service on the Environment and Public Works Committee allowed him to assist Hoosiers with various problems, Bayh's work on the subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee had the most lasting effect.
Bayh was serving on the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in August 1963 when its chairman, Estes Kefauver, died of a heart attack. Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland planned to terminate the subcommittee to save money, but Bayh offered to serve as chairman and pay for its staff out of his Senate office budget. Thus, Bayh assumed the Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee chairmanship less than a year into his first term. As chairman, Bayh was the principal architect of two constitutional amendments.
Presidential disability and succession After President Dwight D. Eisenhower's health issues in the 1950s, Congress began studying the Constitution's dangerously weak and vague provisions for presidential disability and vice presidential succession. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought a new urgency to the matter. Bayh introduced an amendment on December 12, 1963, which was studied and then re-introduced and passed in 1965 with Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The resulting Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1967, created a process for a peaceful transition of power in the case of death, disability, or resignation of the president, and a method of selecting a vice president when a vacancy occurs in that office. It has since been invoked six times, most notably in the 1973 vice presidential and 1974 presidential succession of Gerald Ford.
In 1968, Bayh wrote One Heartbeat Away, a book about the passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. In the foreword, Lyndon Johnson describes the accomplishment as, "He initiated and brought to fruition the first major alteration of Presidential and Vice-Presidential succession procedures since the ratification of the Constitution". The book's preface is by former president Eisenhower, who wrote about the sixteen times there had been a vacancy in the office of vice president and the measures taken to authorize Vice President Richard Nixon to act in his stead during the illnesses he experienced as president.
Lowering the voting age to 18
As a state legislator in the 1950s, Bayh unsuccessfully worked to lower the voting age in Indiana. He continued his effort in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he also met opposition. In 1970, a new provision was added to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, lowering the voting age to 18 in all federal, state, and local elections. Then with the 1971 Oregon v. Mitchell decision, the Supreme Court ruled that state and local elections did not have to abide by the lowered voting age, although there would have to be dual elections in the 47 states where the lower federal voting age was not valid. Faced with another constitutional crisis, Bayh's subcommittee quickly began hearings on an amendment to lower the voting age to 18. What became the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed through Congress within weeks of the Supreme Court's decision, and was ratified by the states within months. As such, Senator Bayh is the only person since the Founding Fathers to have drafted more than one amendment to the United States Constitution.
1964 plane crash On June 19, 1964, Bayh, his wife, U.S. Senate member Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts and legislative aide Edward Moss were on a small plane that crashed near Springfield, Massachusetts. The group was flying from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (then known as Washington National Airport) to the Massachusetts Democratic party's convention, where Bayh was to be the keynote speaker. U.S. Senate members Bayh and Kennedy were delayed by a vote which passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It had been held up by a filibuster. At approximately 11 p.m., the plane descended through heavy fog and crashed into an apple orchard. Bayh suffered muscular trauma and his wife fractured two vertebrae, but were able to walk out of the wreckage. Kennedy was seriously injured, fracturing three vertebrae, breaking ribs and puncturing a lung, while Moss and the pilot, Edwin J. Zimny, suffered fatal injuries. Thrown to the front of the plane, Kennedy could not move from his waist down and could not reply to Bayh's calling, "Is there anybody alive up there? Is anybody alive?" Bayh smelled gas and thought the plane might catch fire and explode, so he went back into the fuselage to check for survivors. At this point, Kennedy called out, "I'm alive, Birch!" and Bayh pulled Kennedy out of the plane to safety. Bayh went back again to check on Moss and Zimny, but they were unresponsive. Bayh and his wife then walked to the road to call for help.
In 1980, Bayh endorsed President Jimmy Carter for reelection, a decision that rankled the staff of Ted Kennedy, who was challenging Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy's campaign adviser Bob Shrum called Bayh "a son of a bitch" in front of Kennedy, but as Shrum wrote in his memoir, "Kennedy was disappointed in Bayh, but he didn't want to hear anyone bitching about him. Bayh, he said, had a pass, and always would".
Women's rights
Equal Rights Amendment The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to establish equal rights for men and women under the Constitution of the United States, was first introduced in 1923 and then in every subsequent Congress for the next fifty years, with little to no success.