Nancy Josephine Kassebaum Baker (née Landon; born July 29, 1932[1]) is a retired American politician from Kansas who served as a member of the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997.

[a] In her three terms in the Senate, Kassebaum demonstrated a political independence that made her a key figure in building bi-partisan coalitions in foreign affairs and domestic policy.

[1] As chair of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, she played a limited role in legislation to sanction the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

The legislation which was enacted in 1986, over a presidential veto, was drafted by Senators Lugar, Roth, McConnell, and Dole, although later in life, Kassebaum claimed credit for it.

She graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1954, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, and where she met her first husband, John Philip Kassebaum.

The unexpected announcement of a rare open seat immediately drew a flood of candidates into the 1978 Republican primary, including two highly respected state senators, three successful businessmen, three others, and Nancy Kassebaum.

From the start of her Senate tenure, Kassebaum defied stereotypes,[8] voting moderate to liberal on most social issues, but conservative on federal spending and government mandates.

[9] She helped lead an unsuccessful bi-partisan effort to curb soaring federal deficits in the early years of the Reagan administration.

[12] In 1981, Kassebaum became chair of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, and entered the growing controversy surrounding the policy of apartheid — racial segregation and discrimination — in South Africa.

[17] In March 1982, Kassebaum headed a U.S. delegation[18] to observe national elections in El Salvador, where the U.S.-backed military junta was battling leftist guerrillas, while being unable to control human rights abuses by government forces and far-right paramilitary groups.

[22] She repeatedly urged the Reagan administration to set a clear policy for a political solution[23][24][25] to the civil war, while avoiding deeper U.S. military involvement in the region.

[26] When Republicans won control of Congress in the 1994 elections, Kassebaum became chair of the Senate Labor Committee, with broad jurisdiction over federal domestic policy.

[28][29] In a year of heated debate, Kassebaum found herself at times opposing amendments from fellow Republicans, including her Kansas colleague, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole,[30] and pressuring Kennedy and Democrats to reach compromises.

[32] In her last months in the Senate, Kassebaum also won passage of a new law preserving a beautiful tract of Kansas tallgrass prairie in the national park system.

[37] Kassebaum voted for the successful Supreme Court nominations of Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.

[40] Kassebaum voted in favor of the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 (as well as to override President Reagan's veto).

Senator Kassebaum also served on the Board of Directors of the National Committee on US-China Relations, the African Law Institute Council-ABA, and the International Medical Corps.

[46] In 2000, Kassebaum was appointed as Co-Chair of The Presidential Appointee Initiative Advisory Board, a Brookings Institution commission that delivered reform recommendations to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

Kassebaum was recognized for her work with Baker in Japan, including organizing a regional conference in Tokyo to combat human trafficking in Asia in 2004.

[49] In 2018, she, alongside other incumbent and former Republican politicians, endorsed Laura Kelly, the Democratic candidate and eventual victor, in the 2018 Kansas gubernatorial election.