Howard Baker Jr., a former Republican senator from Tennessee and one-time Senate Majority Leader known as the "Great Conciliator," died at his Tennessee home on Thursday of complications from a stroke. He was 88.
Baker became a household name in the 1970s when he served as vice chairman and the leading Republican of the Senate special committee that investigated the Watergate scandal. A Richard Nixon ally, he "believed it was a political ploy by the Democrats, that it would come to nothing," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked." During a hearing, he asked one of the most famous lines from the case: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
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Baker's first wife, Joy, died in 1993 from cancer. He married Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) in 1996, the first time two people who had served in the Senate married. One of his hobbies was photography, and he brought his camera everywhere he went except one place: the Watergate hearings. "I felt that it was beneath the dignity of the event," he said. "It turned out the event had no dignity and I should have taken pictures."
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