Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the first woman elected to a full U.S. Senate term without a husband who had already served in Congress, died Aug. 21 at 94. The Kansas Republican died of natural causes in hospice care in Manhattan, Kansas, her son Bill Kassebaum said.
She served three terms, from 1978 to 1997, nearly two decades of a career built on two things that rarely go together in Washington. She could cut deals with almost anyone, and she refused to fall in line when she disagreed with her own party. Both traits show up in the way people remember her.
The 1996 law that still carries her name
Her name sits on a law she wrote with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and one of the most liberal members of the chamber. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 capped how long a group health plan could exclude a pre-existing condition, and credited workers for coverage they already had. President Bill Clinton signed it on the South Lawn of the White House.
The pairing said a lot about how she worked. A Kansas Republican and a Kennedy from Massachusetts do not sound like natural partners. She chaired the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources from 1995 – the second woman to lead a standing Senate committee, after Hattie Caraway, and the first to lead a major one.
The only woman in the room
When she was sworn in at the end of December 1978, she was the lone woman in the entire Senate. She stayed the only one until Florida Republican Paula Hawkins arrived in early 1981.
She pushed against the smaller rules too. In 1993, annoyed by an unwritten code about what women could wear on the Senate floor, she and Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski wore trousers to a weekend session and told female staffers to do the same. Pantsuits became normal after that.
Born into Kansas politics
She was born Nancy Josephine Landon on July 29, 1932, in Topeka. Her father was Alf Landon, governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the Republican nominee for president in 1936. He lived to 100, dying in 1987, and still cast a long political shadow over her first years in office.
She earned a political science degree from the University of Kansas and a master’s in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan. Before Washington, her public record amounted to a seat on the school board in Maize, a small town outside Wichita, and a job as an executive at a family radio company. She had also spent a year as a caseworker for Kansas Sen. James Pearson.
A nine-way primary and a long shot
The seat she won was Pearson’s, and he was stepping down. Nine candidates crowded the 1978 Republican primary, including two state senators and a Wichita hotel developer. Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she won the nomination with 30.6 percent of the vote.
In November she beat former Democratic congressman Bill Roy with nearly 54 percent. Kansas voters kept sending her back by wide margins after that. She took 76 percent in 1984 and 74 percent in 1990.
The independent streak
Early in her first term, she declined to back a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. “We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution,” she said. That instinct followed her for 18 years.
She broke with most Republicans on gun control and abortion, supporting an assault weapons ban that Clinton championed and backing abortion rights at home. After the 1994 Republican wave, she joined the majorities that stripped welfare provisions from the GOP bill: a mandatory family cap, and a move to deny aid to unmarried teenage mothers.
She was not a reliable liberal, either. She voted against Democratic minimum-wage amendments, and against requiring businesses to offer unpaid family and medical leave. That mix is part of why Kansas conservatives never turned on her the way they turned on other moderates in the party.
Voters seemed to trust that she was not chasing power. “I’d rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day,” she said around the time she retired.
A Washington power couple
In December 1996 she married Howard H. Baker Jr., the former Senate Republican leader from Tennessee who later served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. It was the first time a man and a woman who had both served in the Senate got married.
She had announced her retirement the year before, in November 1995. She wanted to spend time on other things, she said, “including the challenge of being a grandmother.” When President George W. Bush named Baker ambassador to Japan in 2001, she went with him to Tokyo, where he served until 2005. He died in 2014. She kept a ranch in the Flint Hills of Morris County, Kansas.
Leaving the party behind
As the Republican Party moved right, she moved the other way. Late in life she endorsed Democrats, including Laura Kelly for Kansas governor and Kamala Harris for president. After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, she called for Donald Trump’s impeachment.
On January 2, 2025, President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. The citation praised her for standing up for what she believed in “even if it meant standing alone,” naming abortion rights and health care. She did not attend; the medal was accepted by Howard Baker’s daughter Cynthia.
Tributes from home
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, whom Kassebaum Baker endorsed twice, put it plainly. “Kansas lost part of its soul when Nancy Kassebaum died,” she said in a statement. “No one worked harder, or smarter, to make our world a better place.”
Sen. Jerry Moran said he campaigned for her in western Kansas during that first race in 1978. “She was never afraid to challenge me in our conversations, but she was always a friend and encourager,” he said. Rep. Derek Schmidt, who worked on her staff for five years, said she introduced “this kid from a small Southeast Kansas town” to a career he had not known was possible.
A life that outlasted much of her family
She had four children from her first marriage to John Philip Kassebaum, whom she wed in 1956 and divorced in 1979. Her son Bill served in the Kansas House of Representatives. She outlived two of her children. Her son Richard, a documentary filmmaker, died in 2008 at 48, and her daughter Linda died in 2020 at 61.
A private memorial service will be held later. In place of flowers, the family asked for donations to the Kansas 4-H Foundation or the Capper Foundation. Her son described her as “an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party.”
