Nancy Kassebaum Baker, first woman elected to Senate without spouse's seat, dies at 94

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office, has died at age 94, according to CBS News. Her son Bill Kassebaum told CBS News that she died and later told The Associated Press she died of natural causes, per Fox News.

Kassebaum Baker represented Kansas in the Senate across three terms, from her election in 1978 through 1997. Her entry into electoral politics came after a career in radio station management and a year on the staff of Kansas Senator James Pearson. She had also served on the school board in Maize, a Wichita suburb.

Born July 29, 1932, she was the daughter of Alf Landon, the Kansas oilman and Republican presidential nominee in 1936 who lost overwhelmingly to incumbent Franklin Roosevelt. Her father later became an elder statesman in Republican circles, living to age 100 and dying in 1987. A lecture series bearing his name at Kansas State University drew presidents and foreign leaders.

When she decided to run for Senate, Kassebaum Baker reasoned that "a woman with a background different from a man might be appealing" to voters tiring of politics, according to CBS News. Pundits estimated a Senate race would cost the then-substantial sum of one million dollars, yet she spent less than twelve thousand dollars in the first quarter of 1978. Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she won the Republican primary with less than 31 percent of the vote in a nine-candidate field that included three state senators and a prominent Wichita businessman. That November, she defeated former two-term Democratic congressman Bill Roy with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

Her political independence emerged immediately. Months into her term, she refused to endorse a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, saying "We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution," per CBS News. In the 1990s, she supported an assault weapons ban championed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. That vote, she said, generated the angriest mail of her Senate career. Despite this heresy in conservative circles, she never polarized Kansas conservatives the way other moderate Republicans did, according to CBS News.

Kassebaum Baker remained highly popular in her state, winning re-election in 1984 with 76 percent of the vote and in 1990 with 74 percent, per Fox News. By the time she announced her retirement in 1996, she was one of eight women serving in the Senate and the only woman chairing a Senate committee, the Labor and Human Resources panel. In 1996, she told reporters she planned to return to a ranch and 90-year-old farmhouse in Kansas' Flint Hills to care for her grandchildren. She had four children with her first husband, Phil Kassebaum, including Bill, who served a term in the Kansas House. Her marriage to Phil Kassebaum ended in divorce in 1979.

In December 1996, she married former Senator Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican. According to CBS News, it was the first time a man and a woman who had both served in the Senate had married. Baker had served three terms in the Senate from 1967 to 1985, then became President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. His first wife, Joy, had died in 1993 after a long battle with cancer. Howard Baker died in 2014, having served as President George W. Bush's ambassador to Japan from 2001 onward. Kassebaum Baker accompanied him to Tokyo for the four-year posting, becoming, per Bill Kassebaum, an important figure in the Asian nation. Before departure, she reflected: "All I can say is, I will miss the Kansas prairie."

After leaving the Senate, public service continued. She served on a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform under President Clinton and on a British commission focused on Africa in 2004-05. A landmark 1996 health insurance law, passed while she was still in the Senate, bore her name alongside that of Democratic Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.

Later in life, as the Republican Party moved rightward, Kassebaum Baker increasingly broke with it. She endorsed Democratic candidates for Kansas governor and U.S. senator, including Democratic Governor Laura Kelly in both campaigns, according to CBS News. She did so despite the fact that Laura Kelly's 2022 Republican opponent, then-state Attorney General Derek Schmidt, had worked on Kassebaum Baker's own Senate staff. Following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, she called for President Donald Trump's impeachment, telling KMBC television: "This just has gone too far."

Bill Kassebaum described his mother as someone with "an independent voice that was willing to do what was right for Kansas and the country," often at the cost of breaking with her party. "She was also willing to talk to her constituents, even when they didn't agree, and openly discuss her votes and stances," he said, per CBS News. In another statement to Fox News, he said: "She loved Kansas. She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the U.S. Senate. 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."

Kassebaum Baker earned a political science degree from the University of Kansas and a master's degree in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in the mid-1950s. She had seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. When Topeka briefly considered naming a new highway after her, she demurred: "Oh, goodness. Absolutely not, no."