Nancy Kassebaum Baker, pioneering Kansas senator, dies at 94

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the former Kansas senator and Republican moderate, has died at 94. Her career broke barriers for women and embodied bipartisan public service.

In Short

• Served three Senate terms and represented Kansas for 18 years
• She was respected for working across party lines on major legislation
• A 1996 health insurance law bore her name alongside Ted Kennedy

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a former US senator from Kansas who became the first woman elected to the Senate without following a spouse into office, has died at the age of 94. She died of natural causes on Friday, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

Remembered as a moderate, independent-minded Republican, Kassebaum Baker served three terms in the US Senate after first being elected in 1978. She remained a widely respected figure in Kansas after leaving office in early 1997 and continued to take on public service roles in the years that followed.

"She loved Kansas. She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the US Senate," Bill Kassebaum told The Associated Press. "She was an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party."

Her modest demeanour helped her connect with voters across political lines, even as she shared the moderate and progressive Republican views of her father, former Kansas governor Alf Landon, the party's unsuccessful 1936 presidential nominee. She later married former senator Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, in 1996. He died in 2014.

Kassebaum Baker remained an icon in Kansas and was known for working with colleagues across political divisions. A 1996 health insurance law carried her name along with that of liberal Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. When she announced her retirement, she was one of eight women in the Senate and the only one chairing a Senate committee, the Labour and Human Resources panel.

She was part of a shrinking group of moderate-to-liberal Republicans and supported, among other measures, an assault weapons ban backed by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Even so, she did not alienate Kansas conservatives in the way some other Republican moderates did. She projected little interest in the trappings of power and, on retiring, said, "I'd rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day."

Born on July 29, 1932, while her father was campaigning for his first term as governor, she studied political science at the University of Kansas and later earned a master's degree in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan. She worked as a radio-station executive, spent a year in the 1970s on the staff of Kansas senator James Pearson, and served on the school board in the Wichita suburb of Maize. She had four children with her first husband, Phil Kassebaum, including Bill Kassebaum, who later served a term in the Kansas House. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1979.

When she decided to run for the Senate, Kassebaum Baker believed that "a woman with a background different from a man might be appealing" to voters tired of politics. At a time when commentators estimated that a Senate race would need the then-large-for-Kansas sum of USD 1 million, she spent less than USD 12,000 in the first quarter of 1978 and said she saw herself as "at the bottom of the totem pole".

She still emerged from a crowded nine-candidate Republican primary, which included three state senators and a prominent Wichita businessman, winning the nomination with less than 31 per cent of the vote. Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she went on to defeat former two-term Democratic congressman Bill Roy with almost 54 per cent of the vote in the general election.

Her moderate politics became clear early in her Senate career when, only months later, she refused to back an amendment to the US Constitution requiring a balanced budget. "We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution," she said. During her early years in office, her father continued to cast a long political shadow. Though he had lost heavily to Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, he later became an elder statesman in the Republican Party, and a lecture series named after him at Kansas State University drew presidents and foreign leaders.

Kassebaum Baker's own popularity grew further over time. She was re-elected in 1984 with 76 per cent of the vote and again in 1990 with 74 per cent. But she often frustrated conservative activists despite her appeal with voters, and she said her vote for the assault weapons ban brought the angriest mail of her career.

She had considered not seeking a third term, but Republican leaders persuaded her to run again. When she chose not to seek re-election in 1996, she said she would return to a ranch and a 90-year-old farmhouse in Kansas' Flint Hills and babysit her grandchildren. She had seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. When there was brief talk of naming a new highway in Topeka after her, she responded, "Oh, goodness. Absolutely not - no."

Her relationship with Howard Baker was kept largely private, and talk of a possible marriage surfaced only in mid-1996 in a Washington Post report. They married in December that year, becoming the first man and woman who had both served in the Senate to wed. Howard Baker had served three terms from 1967 to 1985 and later became President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. His first wife, Joy, had died in 1993 after a long battle with cancer.

After their marriage, Kassebaum Baker continued in public life, including service on a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform under Clinton and on a British commission in Africa in 2004-05. When President George W. Bush appointed Howard Baker ambassador to Japan in 2001, she joined him for the four-year posting and became an important public figure there. Before leaving for Tokyo, she told a reporter, "All I can say is, I will miss the Kansas prairie."

In later years, she broke with the Republican Party as it moved further to the right, backing Democratic candidates for Kansas governor and US senator, including Governor Laura Kelly in both her campaigns, even though Kelly's 2022 Republican rival, then state Attorney General Derek Schmidt, had worked on Kassebaum Baker's Senate staff. In 2021, she also said President Donald Trump should be impeached after his supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying his 2020 defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. "This just has gone too far," she told Kansas City's KMBC.

Kassebaum Baker's career spanned elected office, bipartisan lawmaking and public service after retirement, and she remained closely identified with Kansas throughout. For many in the state and beyond, she was a centrist Republican who built a long Senate career while keeping a deliberately low-key style.

With PTI Inputs

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