Nancy Kassebaum Baker

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Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (born July 29, 1932) formerly represented the state of Kansas in the United States Senate, having served from 1978 to 1997. She was the daughter of Alf Landon, who was the Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the 1936 Republican candidate for president. Landon won only in Maine and Vermont, having also lost Kansas to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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

Baker, who went by Nancy Kassebaum while serving in the Senate, was the first woman to serve in the Senate having neither been elected to serve first in the House of Representatives, never having been elected to the political office of a spouse, never having won a special election to win a senate seat, nor having been appointed to fill out the remainder of a term from a husband after his death while in office or another senator. 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.

See also

• Women in the United States Senate

External links

• Congressional Biography
• Kassebaum, Nancy Landon. To Form a More Perfect Union 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

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Last updated on Monday March 10, 2008 at 16:32:03 PDT (GMT -0700)
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