The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement — including his son Evan Bayh, who held his father’s old Senate seat from 1999-2011 and who previously served as governor of Indiana.
Birch Bayh, a Terre Haute, Ind., native, served as an MP with the United States Army in Allied-occupied Germany following World War II. He won a seat in the Indiana House of Representatives and quickly rose to speaker after Democrats unexpectedly won a majority during the Eisenhower recession of the late 1950s.