He was the author of two major constitutional amendments as well as legislation that dramatically improved women’s rights in classrooms and on athletic fields.
By Laurence I. Barrett March 14 at 9:51 AM Former senator Birch Bayh, the author of two major constitutional amendments as well as legislation that dramatically improved women’s rights in classrooms and on athletic fields, died March 14 at his home in Easton, Md. He was 91.In three terms on Capitol Hill, the liberal Democrat from conservative Indiana became one of his era’s most productive legislators and wiliest political adversaries, particularly in clashes over U.S.
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., left, and Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., in 1980. Then serendipity struck — twice. The constitutional amendment subcommittee’s chairman died, and no one wanted what seemed a ticket to obscurity. Mr. Bayh volunteered. John Kennedy’s assassination three months later, in November 1963, elevated the job’s status dramatically.
ERA and Title IX Next Mr. Bayh co-authored what would have been the 27th Amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment, prescribing equal treatment of women in all fields. Congress approved it in 1972. Sensing that the measure might sink because of opposition in state legislatures — ultimately, it did — Mr. Bayh produced Title IX of the 1972 education act. It banned gender discrimination in schools receiving federal support.
Feminism, Mr. Bayh acknowledged, was a taste he had acquired with the help of his first wife and political partner, Marvella Hern Bayh. “From time, to time,” he reminisced in 2004, “she would remind me what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world. Without her, I would not have been in a leadership role” on women’s issues.
Oklahoma’s gladiator, though only a freshman at Oklahoma State, was Marvella Hern. Their love-at-first-sight encounter did not distract her. She walked off with the national prize, plus his fraternity pin. But the Bayhs practiced retail politics relentlessly. “I’d rather shake hands than eat,” he liked to say. At one debate, the challenger rattled the incumbent, who advocated a military response to Communist Cuba, by accusing him of being a “warmonger.” Capehart seized Mr. Bayh by the lapels and exclaimed, “Don’t try to get away!”
Two of the five people aboard died. The Bayhs suffered relatively minor injuries, but Kennedy’s back was broken. “Anybody alive up there?” Mr. Bayh called from the ground. “I’m alive,” Kennedy croaked. Mr. Bayh took the lead in rallying the opposition. With a few allies, he built a case against Haynsworth, in part by casting doubt on his ethics. Haynsworth had participated in a case involving a company in which he owned stock. Writing in the New York Times in 1970, journalist Robert Sherrill observed that “Bayh is a master of the gentlemanly shiv.”
Marvella Bayh succumbed to a recurrence of cancer in 1979. Two years later, Mr. Bayh married Katherine “Kitty” Halpin, a director of news information for ABC News. In addition to his wife, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Evan Bayh; a son from his second marriage, Christopher Bayh; and four grandchildren.
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