Nancy Kassebaum Baker

Infobox Senator | name=Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker
nationality=American


jr/sr=United States Senator
state=Kansas
party=Republican
term_start=December 23, 1978
term_end=January 3, 1997
preceded=James B. Pearson
succeeded=Pat Roberts
date of birth= birth date and age |1932|7|29
place of birth=Topeka, Kansas
dead=alive
date of death=
place of death=
spouse=Howard Baker
religion=Episcopalian Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (born July 29, 1932) represented the State of Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997. She is the daughter of Alf Landon, who was Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the 1936 Republican nominee for president. Landon won only in Maine and Vermont, having also lost Kansas to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1954, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She received a graduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1956.

Baker, who went by Nancy Kassebaum while serving in the Senate, set a number of firsts due to her sex. She was the first female senator who was never elected to the political office of a husband, nor was appointed to fill out a deceased husband's term. She was also the first woman to represent Kansas in the Senate.

She defeated eight other Republicans in the 1978 primary elections to replace retiring Republican James B. Pearson and then defeated former Democratic Congressman Bill Roy (who lost a previous election bid to Kansas' senior senator, Bob Dole, in 1974) in the general election. She was re-elected to her Senate seat in 1984 and 1990, but did not seek re-election in 1996.

Kassebaum, a moderate to liberal Republican, has often been noted for her health care legislation co-sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat.

She is an Advisory Board member for the Partnership for a Secure America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.

Since 1996 she has been married to former U.S. Senator Howard Baker, Jr. of Tennessee.

Her son, Bill Kassebaum, is a former member of the Kansas House of Representatives. Her other son, filmmaker Richard Kassebaum, died of a brain tumor August 27, 2008 at the age of 47.

See also

*Women in the United States Senate

External links

* [http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=K000017 Congressional Biography]

* Kassebaum, Nancy Landon. "To Form a More Perfect Union" [http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0360-4918 Presidential Studies Quarterly] 18 (Spring 1988): 241-49.

* Marshall-White, Eleanor (1991). "Catalysts for Change: Interpretive Biographies of Shirley St. Hill Chisholm, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Nancy Landon Kassebaum", Vantage Press, ISBN 0-533-09130-6