‘YOUR OLD MEN SHALL DREAM DREAMS’

[Third of four pieces from the 2008 presidential campaign.]

Birch Bayh came back to Indiana this week, and Karen and I went to see him again. The last time was Dec. 10, 1962. Karen was a 21-year-old student at Indiana University. I was 27, with the semi-mythical title of Sunday editor for the Vincennes, Indiana, Sun-Commercial. We were getting married in three weeks. Bayh was 34 and had just upset Indiana’s veteran senator, Homer Capehart, in the November election.

 We were interviewing both Bayh and Capehart, separately, to get their reflections on the just-ended campaign, which had taken place amid the Cuban missile crisis. It was a government-class project for Karen, and a Sunday feature story for me. Capehart had entertained us at a leisurely fried-chicken lunch on his farm near Washington, Indiana. The visit to Bayh in Terre Haute was more hurried—the moving van for Washington, D.C., was at the door, his wife Marvella served hot dogs in the living room, and their son Evan, 6, was underfoot and trying to unpack boxes.

 Looking back, the interviews were hardly the stuff of history. Capehart wryly conceded that the Democrats had outhustled the Republicans, and that Bayh’s campaign jingle had been “catchy”—“Hey, look him over, he’s your kind of guy. His first name is Birch, his last name is Bayh.”

 Bayh said he might have lost if the missile crisis had gone on longer—as it was, he scraped by with a margin of 30,944 votes out of more than 1.8 million cast. And he conceded that the Hoosier electorate was probably getting pretty sick of that jingle.

But for Karen and me, the project was swathed in the glamour of youth, love, and politics—our first joint venture. She got an A on her paper, I got my Sunday feature. Bayh went on to serve three Senate terms, during which he distinguished himself as a sponsor of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and legislation to give 18-year-olds the vote. He campaigned briefly for president in 1976, a bid put aside four years earlier during Marvella’s losing fight with breast cancer.

 Now, on a sunny fall morning, he was back home in Indiana, making some campaign stops for Barack Obama. Karen and I went to hear him at Franklin College.

 Bayh is 80 now, and the years have been good to him. He talks and walks more slowly, but the face of a political “comer” has weathered to that of an old Hoosier farmer. (He ran his family’s farm as a young man, but for years has been a Washington lawyer and lobbyist). He stayed behind the podium for about a minute, then came out to meet his college audience, shed his coat, and walked around like a professor prowling a classroom.

He said he was meeting Obama in Indianapolis the next day, but laughed at the idea of the younger man seeking his advice. “He talks to the real Senator Bayh,” he said—that’s Evan, former Indiana governor and now senator, who for a time was on Obama’s vice-presidential “short list.”

 His own advice for whoever wins this year’s election—“I don’t say this lightly, but they’d better pray.”

 Bayh did not quite escape the old man’s pitfall of telling one story too many, but the stories were good and one was aimed at the students present. He told, movingly, how he had rallied a bare majority of senators to defeat an unqualified Supreme Court nominee, in large part because Harvard law students had exhaustively researched the man’s dubious record. “We stopped that guy,” he said. Your work and your vote count, he told his audience.

 When he was finished taking questions, Karen and I chatted with him. He did not, of course, remember us, although he contrived somehow to not quite admit that fact. He did remember the house and the move to Washington. Karen had brought her old government term paper along, with its A grade and the prof’s comment: “A very fine job in all respects.” And Bayh sat down and signed the paper himself: “Still doing a great job, Karen! + + A”

 After the talk he walked over to the new Obama headquarters (climbing three flights of stairs to get to it). He told a few more stories, including one he hadn’t told Karen and me in 1962—how President Kennedy had phoned him after his narrow victory and called him “you old miracle worker.” As he spoke, the afternoon sun streamed in the window behind him, throwing the furrows of his face into shadow. For a moment, he looked 34 again.