Howard Baker

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Howard Baker

Howard Henry Baker Jr. (born November 15, 1925 in Huntsville , Tennessee , † June 26, 2014 there ) was an American politician . He was a senator for the US state of Tennessee and chief of staff of the White House .

Life

Howard Baker was born in Huntsville in 1925 to Howard Henry Baker , who was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1951 to 1964, and Dora Ladd Baker. When he was eight years old, his mother died and his grandmother, Lillie Ladd Mauser, helped raise him and his younger sister. Three years later his father married Irene Bailey. Baker attended elementary and secondary school in Huntsville and, from 1941, the McCallie School in Chattanooga , a military preparatory school. He graduated in 1943 and served in the US Navy until 1946 . As a candidate for the Navy's V-12 officer training program, he studied electrical engineering at the University of the South at Sewanee and later at Tulane University in New Orleans . He had to work for the Navy during the semester break. After finishing his career in the Navy, he switched to law and graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1949 . In the same year he was admitted to the bar and started working for a law firm founded by his grandfather. He died on June 26, 2014 due to complications following a stroke .

Political career

Minority Leader

In addition to his legal profession, he also worked in business. He was chairman of First National Bank in Oneida and president of Colonial Natural Gas Co. in Wytheville ( Virginia ). Baker joined the Republican Party and went public for the first time in 1964 when the now vacant seat of the late Estes Kefauver had to be filled in the Senate . However, he lost the election to Ross Bass . In the Senate election two years later, however, Bass lost the Democratic primary against former Governor Frank G. Clement , who in turn was defeated by Baker in the elections. Baker was re-elected twice and served until January 3, 1985. From 1977 to 1981 he led the Republican faction in the Senate as a minority leader . In this position, which is extremely important, especially in terms of foreign policy, he had always filled his office with a view to general responsibility and by no means within narrow party-political limits, which brought him many opponents in his own party. Without his support, President Jimmy Carter would probably never have achieved the two-thirds majority necessary for the Panama Treaties. But he had strongly opposed Carter's Asian policy.

Watergate

Baker also made a name for himself as co-chairman of the Watergate Committee investigating the crimes of the Watergate Affair when he became a media star in weeks of televised interrogations. The lawyer with the calm voice was always objective. Baker became known with a sentence he said in public and which had been prepared for him by his adviser, the future Senator Fred Thompson :

"What did the President know and when did he know it?"

"What did the president know and when did he know?"

- Howard Baker

Majority Leader

In the 1980 presidential election , he announced his ambitions to run for election, but lost to Ronald Reagan in the primaries . After the elections, the Republicans regained a majority in the Senate for the first time in over 25 years and Baker became the Republican Party Majority Leader after two terms . In the years that followed, Baker and the parliamentary group supported the president on all important issues, but the Senate also maintained its independence by refusing to obey the president on various issues. This mainly concerned questions of armaments and the procedure in Central America. In 1984 he did not seek re-election and left the Senate in early 1985. In the same year he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

chief of staff

In February 1987, Baker was offered the leadership of the US intelligence agency CIA , which he refused. In the same month, the former Senator Tower's report on the Iran-Contra affair was published in Washington , in which Reagan was certified as a chaotic administration. As a result of these accusations, his chief of staff, Donald Regan, had to leave. On February 27, 1987, Howard Baker was appointed as his successor, which is why he at the same time waived an originally intended presidential candidacy in 1988.

ambassador

From 2001 to 2005, Howard Baker was also the United States Ambassador to Japan .

family

Howard Baker was married for the second time, again this time to the daughter of a prominent Republican. His first wife, Joy Dirksen, he married in December 1951. She was the daughter of former Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois , who led the Republican faction in the Senate under Kennedy and Johnson ( Senate Minority Leader ). They had two children together, Darek and Cynthia Dirksen. After she died of cancer, married Baker in December 1996, the former Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas , the daughter of the former governor of Kansas and presidential candidate in the 1936 election, Alf Landon .

literature

  • James Lee Annis: Howard Baker. Conciliator in an Age of Crisis. Madison Books, Lanham MD et al. 1995, ISBN 1-56833-032-4 .
  • US Congress. Senates. Tributes to the Honorable Howard Baker, Jr., of Tennessee in the United States Senate, Upon the Occasion of His Retirement from the Senate . 98th Cong., 2d sess., 1984. Washington: United States Government Printing Office , 1984.

Web links

Commons : Howard Baker  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Former senator, White House chief of staff Howard Baker dies
  2. ^ Former Senate GOP leader Howard Baker dies
  3. ↑ Biography ( Memento of the original from June 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , on the University of Tennessee website  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bakercenter.utk.edu
  4. ↑ Howard Baker dies at 88 tennessean.com, accessed June 27, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Baker, Howard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baker, Howard Henry Jr. (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Huntsville , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 2014
Place of death Huntsville , Tennessee