Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker

Nancy Landon Kassebaum​ Baker
U.S. Senator from Kansas
In office January 3, 1995​ – January 3, 1997​
Preceded by	[Ted Kennedy]]​
Succeeded by	Jim Jeffords​
Born	July 29, 1932​ Topeka, Kansas
Political party	Republican Party
Spouse(s)	(1) John Philip Kassebaum (married 1956-1979, divorced) (2) Howard Baker (married 1996 to 2014, his death)
Children	Four children from first marriage
Alma mater	University of Kansas University of Michigan​

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​ Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (born July 29, 1932) is an American retired politician, who represented Kansas in the United States Senate for three terms from 1978 to 1997. Her father, Alf Landon, was the governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the failed Republican presidential nominee in the 1936 race against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Long divorced after twenty-three years of marriage from John Philip Kassebaum, whose name she used professionally, she married in 1996 the widowed Howard Baker, former U.S. Senator from Tennessee and a chief of staff to U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan at the height of the Iran-Contra affair. Kassebaum and Baker had been Senate colleagues from 1978 to 1985. Kassebaum holds the distinction of being the first woman ever elected to a full term in the Senate without a husband having previously served in Congress. ​ Kassebaum Baker was born in the capital city of Topeka while her father was running for his only term as governor. Her mother was the former Theo Cobb. After graduation from Topeka High School in 1950, she graduated from the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1954 and then obtained a master's degree in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

She and her first husband settled in Maize, Kansas, where she served on the school board and had four children.>​

​ Before her Senate years she worked in her family-owned Kassebaum Communications, which operated several radio stations in Kansas.assebaum also served on the Maize School Board. In 1975, Kassebaum and her husband were legally separated; their divorce became final in 1979. Kassebaum worked in Washington, D.C., as a caseworker for Senator James B. Pearson of Kansas in 1975, but returned to Kansas the following year.​

A Moderate Republican, often liberal in her Senate votes, Kassebaum Baker succeeded Senator James B. Pearson, also a Moderate Republican. From 1995 to 1997, with the Republican capture of the Senate, she was the chairman of the Labor Committee, a post relinquished by Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts after the Democrats lost what had seemed a permanent Senate majority in the 1994 mid-term elections She joined with Kennedy in passage of the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, her landmark legislation. Like current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, she was a strong opponent of apartheid in South Africa.

Though she had voted in 1991 to confirm the African-American Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court, Kassebaum Baker soon soured on the decisions of the judicial conservative Thomas and questioned whether he had sexually harassed accuser Anita Hill.