Nancy Kassebaum dies at age 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. 

Her son, William Kassebaum, confirmed her death Aug. 21 at a hospice care facility in Manhattan, Kan.

“Kansas lost part of its soul when Nancy Kassebaum died,” Gov. Laura Kelly said.

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.

When she took office, she was the only woman in the U.S. Senate and merely the 14th 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.). 

The act 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. 

Kassebaum 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.”