I’d called Lugar to see if he’d be willing to talk about Bayh over the air on a radio show I hosted at the time.
Lugar couldn’t make the scheduling work—he had a speech to give at the same time my show ran—but he agreed to record some comments.
What Lugar said about Bayh was gracious. He said Bayh was one of the great senators not just in Indiana’s history, but in America’s history. Lugar lauded Bayh for being the only lawmaker in U.S. history to author two constitutional amendments and for being the father of Title IX.
He said Bayh was a giant.
The thing that seems remarkable about Lugar’s praise now is that the two men had a history. They ran against each for the U.S. Senate seat Bayh held in 1974.
That was an election year fraught with free-flowing partisan rage and resentments. The Watergate scandal had reached its climax with the resignation of President Richard Nixon and his subsequent pardon by his successor, President Gerald Ford.
Americans felt hurt.
Betrayed.
Angry.
Bayh and Lugar could have given free rein to that anger when they campaigned against each other.
But they didn’t.
That’s because they respected each other.
And they respected their country.
They knew that, once the votes were counted, we all would have to find ways to live together. They also knew that responsible leadership involved helping find ways to do that rather than seeking out wedge issues to drive us farther and farther apart by making us angrier and angrier.
At the end of that interview on the day Birch Bayh died, Dick Lugar lingered on the phone with me for a moment.
“You know, John,” Lugar said, his voice wistful, “in all the years Birch and I knew each other, we never exchanged a cross word.”
That phone call was the last time I ever spoke with Dick Lugar.
Somehow, it always seemed fitting that our last conversation was about greatness, about respect—and about the ways a shared love of country can triumph over many lesser political differences.
A little more than six weeks later, Lugar died, too, taking with him, it sometimes seems, some fundamental part of the American spirit with him.
I’ve been thinking about that phone call with him—and about his kindness, courtesy and generosity.
About how Dick Lugar was a great man who also was a decent man.
But it wasn’t just Lugar.
I find myself thinking also about a far more distant chat I had with the man Lugar lauded, Birch Bayh.
That talk came during the waning days of the 1990 Indiana secretary of state race. Then Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut, a Republican, was on his way to losing that campaign, a bitter pill for a man who’d won four straight mayoral elections in Indiana’s largest city.
Bayh’s response to Hudnut’s impending loss was compassionate.
Bayh said that almost all political careers end in defeat. What mattered, he said, speaking softly, were not the wins and losses, but the people one helped along the way—the ways that a leader encouraged people to make their communities, their states and their country better, kinder places.
Bayh lost his last campaign to office. It hurt him, he said, because no one likes to lose.
But he added that, as time went on, he thought more about the good he’d been able to do when he was in office than he did about that final sting of defeat.
He hoped, he concluded, that Bill Hudnut would come to take satisfaction in the people he’d helped when he had the chance, rather than linger on any loss at the ballot box.
Birch Bayh and Richard Lugar were Indiana’s two U.S. senators from 1977 to 1981. Reasonable people can and do argue about which one of them was the finest senator in the state’s history, but there’s no serious dispute about who belongs in the top two.
They were very different men, but they were alike in at least two important ways.
They were both tough enough to be kind.
And strong enough to be generous.
At one point, they helped us find the best in ourselves.
Maybe remembering them can help us find it once again.
