Nancy Kassebaum, Pioneering Female Senator, Dies At 94

Nancy Kassebaum, a pioneering three-term female senator from Kansas who was one of the architects of bipartisan health care reform in the 1990s, has died.

Kassebaum, also known in her later years as Nancy Kassebaum Baker because of her marriage to former Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), was 94. The New York Times reported that her son, William Kassebaum, confirmed her death Friday at a hospice care facility in Manhattan, Kansas.

"Kansas lost part of its soul when Nancy Kassebaum died," Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement.

The daughter of the 1936 Republican presidential nominee, Kassebaum in 1978 became the first woman ever elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate without succeeding her husband in Washington. Before arriving in Washington at the end of that year, Kassebaum had only been elected to one public office, a school board in a suburb of Wichita.

"If ever there was a dark horse in the political stables, Nancy Landon Kassebaum would seem to qualify," the Topeka Capital-Journal wrote of her at the end of 1978. "And so, suddenly, she became one of the brightest stars in the GOP firmament when in rapid succession she emerged triumphant from a nine-way primary fight and soundly whipped the toughest Senate candidate the Democrats could find."

When she took office, she was the only woman in the U.S. Senate and merely the 14^th in Senate history. (Of the 13 that preceded her, only three had served as much as a full year.)

During her three Senate terms, she rose to chair of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, the first woman since Hattie Caraway (D-Ark.) in the 1930s to chair a standing Senate committee.

She was best known for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, also known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act after her and her co-sponsor, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). It was designed to make it possible for workers to retain their insurance coverage when they changed jobs or lost them, as well as protecting the privacy of an individual’s healthcare information. President Bill Clinton signed the legislation in August 1996.

Closely allied with fellow Kansas Republican Bob Dole during her tenure, Kassebaum was regarded as a centrist who worked comfortably with senators of both parties. Though a conservative on defense and economic issues who wanted to shrink the federal government, she supported abortion rights, opposed apartheid in South Africa and backed the failed Equal Rights Amendment.

“Nancy Kassebaum does not speak in a loud voice,” Dole said in June 1996 as both were set to exit the Senate. “She does not clamor for media attention. But as all senators know, while her voice may be quiet, her will is strong.”

Shortly before her retirement, she married Baker, the former Tennessee senator who had served as Senate majority leader and also as White House chief of staff. She subsequently accompanied him to Japan when he became the American ambassador.

But Kassebaum never left her native Kansas behind, maintaining a farm there.

“At one time,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) wrote of her in 2013, “a Kansas newspaper claimed, ‘the only thing more popular than Nancy is wheat.’ For Nancy, it was never about being first. It was about serving the people. And Kansas couldn’t have asked for anyone better.”

Nancy Josephine Landon was born July 29, 1932, in Topeka, the daughter of Alfred “Alf” Landon and Theo Cobb Landon. Her father, a successful oilman, was elected governor of Kansas shortly after her birth and went on to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1936. That did not work out well.

Her father became something of a punchline after suffering an overwhelming defeat to Democratic incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who drew more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Landon won Maine and Vermont but that was it, as he lost the electoral vote, 523-8. It remains the most-decisive Electoral College shellacking in the last two centuries.

When he died in 1987 at the age of 100, the Washington Post said of his famous defeat: “Landon reacted calmly. He went duck hunting. He served out his term as governor and retired from electoral politics."

Kassebaum later said she got her political education at the dinner table.

“We talked world affairs and politics and so forth,” she said in 2017 for the Women of the Senate Oral History Project. “It was my dad that did the talking, but we all were there listening. And Mother was always very supportive of my doing things.”

She graduated from the University of Kansas and then earned a master’s degree in diplomatic history at the University of Michigan. Afterward, though, she returned to Kansas with her husband, attorney Philip Kassebaum. She worked for Kassebaum Communications, a family business, gave birth to four children and served on the Maize School Board.

In 1975, she split from her husband and moved with her children to Washington, D.C. Kassebaum found a job working in the office of Kansas Sen. James B. Pearson, who was known as a progressive Republican.

When Pearson announced his retirement, she entered the crowded 1978 race to succeed him.

“My father did not want me to run,” she said in 2022. “I think he thought I would lose. My mother, who cared not very much about politics, said, ‘Yes, I think you should.'”

Adopting the slogan “a fresh face, a trusted Kansas name,” she entered the Republican primary a decided underdog with little to make her stand out in a crowded race besides the Landon family connection. "It has been said I am riding on the coattails of my dad, but I can't think of any better coattails to ride on,” she said.

But Kassebaum proved to be a formidable candidate, eclipsing two state senators and six others in the primary to set up a race against former Democratic Rep. William Roy in the fall.

The press, not very used to covering female candidates at that point, sometimes seemed at a loss to understand her candidacy.

“She doesn't lack stamina, nor charm, nor wit, nor articulation, nor guts as she criss-crosses Kansas seeking to convince voters they should elect her the first woman U.S. Senator in Kansas history," the Topeka Capital-Journal wrote of her shortly before the election. "Beneath the disarming, pleasant demeanor is a strong-willed determination to explain her qualifications and the approach she would follow in curing the national ailments which have either beset Kansas already, or are spreading to the state."

Ultimately, she won rather easily, beating Roy by more than 10 percentage points. In 1984 and 1990, she scored lopsided reelection victories, drawing more than 70 percent of the vote both times.

When she arrived, Kassebaum was unique in Washington.

In 1978, the only two women in the Senate had been Minnesota’s Muriel Humphrey and Alabama’s Maryon Allen, who were finishing up the terms to which their late husbands, Hubert Humphrey and James Allen, had been elected. Only Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith, a GOP senator from 1948 to 1972, had been elected to a full term in the Senate without directly replacing her husband, but she had previously succeeded her husband, Rep. Clyde Harold Smith, in the House.

Kassebaum would be joined in 1981 by Florida Republican Paula Hawkins (for one term) and in 1987 by Mikulski. It wasn’t until 1992 that multiple women were elected to the Senate in the same election. A few months after that, Kassebaum was part of a small rebellion against Senate rules that required women to wear dresses or skirts on the Senate floor.

“When I was first elected to represent Maryland in the Senate,” Mikulski wrote in 2013, “I was the only Democratic woman and Nancy was the only Republican woman to serve in that chamber. In those days, because there were so few of us, there was pressure for us to act like celebrities instead of senators. Not only did Nancy resist that pressure — it didn’t even cross her mind.”

Once established in Washington, Kassebaum worked on international issues.

“I was pretty involved with the Foreign Relations Committee,” she said in her 2017 oral history. “I cared a lot about issues dealing with arms control issues and so forth. I was asked to lead a U.S. group to the first election in El Salvador.”

In 1986, Kassebaum and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) led Republican efforts to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was one of the rare instances when a president's veto on a foreign policy matter was set aside.

On domestic issues, she made her biggest impact on the nation's health care policies.

Early in his presidency, Clinton had tried and failed to enact sprawling legislation that would provide universal health care. But after Republicans gained control of the Senate in November 1994, Kassebaum worked with Kennedy to craft legislation that was nowhere near as broad as Clinton's but which attempted to fix some elements of the healthcare system.

Their bill was enacted.

“The central theme was if you had insurance and you lost your job or were changing jobs, you couldn’t be denied because of a prior health condition,” she said in her 2017 oral history. The legislation led to detailed privacy regulations created by the Department of Health and Human Services designed to keep patient information confidential.

Kassebaum said some of her constituents were appalled she was working with Kennedy, perhaps the Senate’s best-known liberal.

“I used to joke with him, Kansans think I’m working with the Wicked Witch of the East, you know,” she said in 2017. “How could you work with Ted Kennedy? Well, I could in that issue, and it wasn’t that we agreed on many other things necessarily, but he was a good legislator when he cared about it.”

During her time in the Senate, she advocated returning certain functions of the federal government to the states, but carefully and thoughtfully. “The federal government is not our only problem, and shrinking it — while important — will not alone solve our ills,” she said in her farewell Senate speech in 1996.

In that farewell speech, Kassebaum also warned of the dangers that new technologies posed to the well-being of American democracy.

"While all of us have more information," she said, "it is not clear that we are making better decisions. If our democracy has become more direct and interactive for many Americans, it also has become less reflective for us all. This trend toward 'instant democracy' weakens the ability of our institutions of government at all levels to, as [James] Madison put it, 'refine and enlarge the public views.'"

Shortly before she left office, Kassebaum married Baker, a widower, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Washington. The officiant was the Rev. John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri.

“I had not anticipated nor had I ever thought of marrying again, and there I did,” she said in her 2017 oral history. They split time between Kansas and Tennessee and also spent four years in Japan, when he was President George W. Bush's ambassador there. Baker died in June 2014 at the age of 88.

In her later years, she bemoaned that civility and bipartisan cooperation had broken down in the U.S. Senate.

“How can we have a dialogue today if it isn’t even possible in the United States Senate?” Kassebaum said in a 2022 appearance at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. “We cannot have people who are just going to be this way or that way. It’s the Democrats here and the Republicans here.”

She also lamented that her brand of conservatism had gone out of favor.

“I know full well I could not be reelected today,” she said.

In January 2025, President Joe Biden awarded Kassebaum a Presidential Citizens Medal, along with her former Senate colleagues Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), among others.

"She stood up for what she believed in even if it meant standing alone," the White House said of her, "and she reached across the aisle to do what she believed was right."