Nancy Kassebaum Baker, first woman senator elected in own right, dies at 94

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office, died at 94 of natural causes, according to CBS News and Fox News reporting. Ms. Kassebaum Baker represented Kansas from 1978 to 1997, serving three terms. Born on July 29, 1932, she was the daughter of Alf Landon, an oilman from Independence, Kansas, and the unsuccessful 1936 Republican nominee for president. She 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. Before entering the Senate, she worked as a radio-station executive, spent a year in the 1970s on the staff of Kansas Sen. James Pearson, and served on the school board in Maize, a Wichita suburb. In 1978, she announced her candidacy with minimal campaign spending. Nine candidates crowded the Republican primary field, including three state senators and a prominent Wichita businessman. Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she won the GOP nomination with less than 31 percent of the vote and won the general election with almost 54 percent against former two-term Democratic congressman Bill Roy, per CBS News. She was re-elected in 1984 with 76 percent of the vote and in 1990 with 74 percent, according to CBS News. In the Senate, she demonstrated a willingness to depart from Republican consensus on several high-profile issues. Months after taking office, she refused to endorse an amendment requiring a balanced budget, stating, per CBS News, "We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution." In 1996, she supported an assault weapons ban championed by President Bill Clinton, a vote that inspired what she described as the angriest mail of her Senate career, according to CBS News. A 1996 health insurance law bore her name alongside that of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. When she announced her retirement in 1996, she was among eight women senators and the only one to chair a Senate committee, the Labor and Human Resources panel. According to CBS News, she had contemplated not seeking a third term but Republican leaders had prevailed upon her to run one more time. Howard Baker died in 2014, according to CBS News. She had four children with her first husband, Phil Kassebaum, whose marriage to her ended in divorce in 1979; one son, Bill, served a term in the Kansas House. After leaving the Senate, she served as a member of a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform under President Clinton and later on a British commission in Africa in 2004-05. When President George W. Bush named Howard Baker ambassador to Japan in 2001, she served a four-year posting as ambassador's spouse. In later years, she broke with the Republican Party as it became more conservative. According to CBS News, she endorsed Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly in both her campaigns, despite Kelly's 2022 opponent, then state Attorney General Derek Schmidt, having worked on her Senate staff. Following the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, she called for President Donald Trump's impeachment, telling Kansas City's KMBC, per Fox News, "This just has gone too far."