Nancy Kassebaum, a three-term moderate Republican from Kansas who was the first woman to chair a major standing committee in the U.S. Senate, died Friday in Manhattan, Kan. She was 94.
The death, at a hospice care facility, was confirmed by her son William Kassebaum.
As the leader of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources (now known as the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) from 1995 to 1997, Sen. Kassebaum won passage of legislation to ensure the portability of health insurance coverage when workers changed jobs. She and the bill’s Democratic co-sponsor, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, overcame months of opposition from Sen. Bob Dole, the majority leader and her close friend, fellow Republican, and fellow Kansan.
She had earlier played a role as Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of a 1986 bill to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. As chairperson of a subcommittee on African affairs, she met with the president, urging him to challenge the regime: “There is one person they might listen to, and that is President Reagan.” Instead, he warned of the threat of Marxist tyranny if apartheid fell. She joined 77 other senators as they overrode his veto.
Over her Senate career, which lasted from 1978 to 1997, her voting record was scored at 56% by the American Conservative Union and 37% by the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action. On most economic issues, she voted conservatively. But from her first run, she supported abortion rights, saying in a campaign debate, “Abortions are seldom the right moral choice, but I feel there should be a choice.”
In a 2013 interview for this obituary, she said that because of her views on abortion and her support for a ban on assault weapons, “I couldn’t get elected today” in Kansas. She was a critic of President Donald Trump’s since the 2016 campaign, and endorsed Kamala Harris against him in 2024. In recent years, she also endorsed Democratic candidates for governor and senator in Kansas.
She had no trouble winning her three terms, though, and was a heavy favorite to win again in 1996. But like many moderates, then and now, she had tired of the political strife in the capital.
In December 1995, after she announced her retirement, she told the New York Times: “The higher the decibel level gets, the more it’s like a boxing match. It’s really different from when I came here.”
A year later, in December 1996, shortly before her third and final term ended, she married former Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, an influential Republican politician who had served as majority leader and whose first wife died of cancer in 1993. For years, they lived at his home in Huntsville, Tenn., and on her ranch in Burdick, Kan., which she said in 2013 was so peaceful that “at night the only thing I hear is the coyotes.” Baker died in 2014, at 88.
Burdick is on the edge of the Flint Hills, and she said that, of all her achievements in Congress, she was proudest of the establishment of the 10,894-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in that region, as well as legislation limiting liability for manufacturers of general aviation aircraft, an important industry in Kansas.
Nancy Josephine Landon was born in Topeka, Kan., on July 29, 1932. Her father, Alfred Mossman Landon, an oilman known as Alf, was then running for the first of what would be two terms as a progressive Republican governor. Her mother, Theo (Cobb) Landon, was a pianist and harpist.
Nancy went to local public schools, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and earned a master’s degree in diplomatic history at the University of Michigan in 1956, the year she married John Philip Kassebaum, known as Phil, a law student there. They moved to Maize, Kan., outside Wichita, and had four children.
Politics had been the lifeblood of the Landon home as she grew up — all the more so after her father ran in 1936 as the Republican nominee against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Landon won only two states, Maine and Vermont, and eight electoral votes.) Often visited by leading Republicans, he remained a revered figure in Kansas until he died at 100 in 1987.
But before his daughter ran for the Senate in 1978, her political experience was limited. She had been elected to the local school board and served a year as a constituent services staff member for Sen. James Pearson.
When Pearson unexpectedly announced his retirement, she entered a wide-open, crowded Republican primary with eight other candidates. She was separated from her husband at the time — they divorced in 1979 — and ran as Nancy Landon Kassebaum.
She never denied the value of name recognition. “It has been said I am riding on the coattails of my dad,” she conceded while campaigning, “but I can’t think of any better coattails to run on.”
She won the primary with just over 30% of the vote, then defeated the Democratic candidate, Bill Roy, with 54% in the general election. She was reelected in 1984 and 1990, earning three-quarters of the vote both times.
In addition to her son William, she is survived by another son, John Jr.; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
The only woman in the Senate when she was first elected, she bridled at the kind of commentary on her clothing and hair that would never be directed toward her male colleagues. She occasionally complained that those colleagues did not take her seriously. But she had experienced the same thing at home.
“My dad was adamantly opposed” to her 1978 candidacy, she said in 2013. “I think it was because he’d thought I’d lose, but also because he could not imagine a woman in the Senate. It was especially hard for him to visualize it was his daughter.”
In 1995, she said that one thing she would not miss after leaving was being asked, “What’s it like to be a woman in the Senate?” By then, eight women were senators — so, she said, “it’s no longer a big deal.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
