No place like home even after slipping off senatorial slippers
Staff writer
Nancy Kassebaum doesn’t get out much these days.
She will be 93 in July and is no longer able to drive or walk for long periods.
“The thing I miss the most, to tell you the truth, is not being able to have the car,” she said.
Still, Kansas’ first female senator continues to hold her independence dear, living largely by herself in a ranch house near Burdick.
Her home, with its memoir-laden bookshelves and framed political cartoons (more than one depicts Kassebaum as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz), speaks to a long and illustrious political career.
So, too, does the mail on her dining table, addressed in neat block capitals to “Senator Kassebaum.”
Kassebaum reflected Sunday on Kansas, her political career, and the state of the Republican Party.
“I really love it here myself,” she said. “I always have. It doesn’t grow up very much.”
Though Kassebaum was raised in reasonably-sized Topeka, she long has appreciated small-town values.
“When I campaigned for Senate,” she said, “the first thing I did was to get in the car and go around and stop by the little communities.”
She bemoaned how much modern campaigns focus on virtual advertising.
“We’ve lost that touch with the very people that need to get involved,” she said. “Running for politics isn’t really fun unless you like people.”
Kassebaum, a voracious reader of journalism and biographies, liked to stop by local newspaper offices when she first arrived at a town.
She recalled visiting the Marion County Record decades ago: Joan and Bill Meyer, Kassebaum said, “ran a wonderful paper, with a place that anybody running for office would want to stop.”
As a senator, Kassebaum was known for crossing party lines with regard to foreign and domestic policy.
Despite being a red-state Republican with a number of family members in the GOP (her father, Alf Landon, was a Kansas governor and Republican presidential nominee), she went left on a number of issues while in the Senate.
These included the right to choose and health care reform.
She recalled with pride her time on the Foreign Relations Committee, where she visited South Africa and successfully pressured the leader of her own party, President Ronald Reagan, into sanctioning the apartheid government.
Later, she led a delegation to El Salvador during the country’s civil war.
Kassebaum backed the right-wing government against leftist guerrillas but supported restricting aid until certain human rights abuses had stopped.
“I think if I got recognition at all, it was [for] the ability to bring an understanding of how differences need to exist,” she said.
Kassebaum found some recognition Jan. 2, when she received the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, from President Joe Biden.
“The first woman to represent Kansas, Nancy Kassebaum was a force in the United States Senate,” the White House said in a release. “She stood up for what she believed in even if it meant standing alone, and she reached across the aisle to do what she believed was right.”
Kassebaum has known Biden since he first sought office in 1972.
“He was going to run for senator, and his wife had been killed in that car crash,” she recalled. “He asked several of us in the Senate at that time — I was new to the Senate — if we would come to Delaware and give a speech for him in a park. I remember saying sure, and I took the train up.”
Unable to make the trip to the White House to receive her award, Kassebaum asked the daughter of her second husband, Cynthia Baker, to pick up the medal.
“I didn’t realize how big it was,” Kassebaum said. “I’ve heard from a lot of my friends around the country. I joked with them: ‘You probably were wondering, how did she get that?’”
After growing up the daughter of a governor and spending her adult life as a political figure, you might expect Kassebaum to have grown weary of the scene. Not so.
“You don’t get away from it very far,” she said of politics.
Kassebaum reads a variety of newspapers every day and was animated speaking about the issues the U.S. faces today.
While she said bureaucracy in government was a serious problem, Kassebaum questioned the idea of creating a new department to help other departments run more efficiently, as President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have sought to do.
“It’s hard for me to think of Trump as a Republican,” she said. “He doesn’t speak to some of the issues that I wish he would focus on.”
The former senator endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and has praised Kansas’ Democratic governor Laura Kelly extensively.
“I personally think Governor Kelly has done an excellent job, and we’re very lucky to have someone who speaks with some knowledge and determination but with a calm voice,” she said. “She isn’t pounding the table.”
Asked whether she still considered herself a Republican, Kassebaum answered with a resounding yes.
“I grew up with a Republican family, and we talked politics at the dinner table. Or, as we’d say, dad talked,” Kassebaum said.
Trump has a knack for getting people out to the polls, she said, but Republicans “aren’t going in any worthy direction” with him at the helm.
Kassebaum holds an uncertainty in her heart about America’s future.
It feels fitting, considering the transitory state in which she resides.
The Sunflower State always has been a bit of a bellwether for America — if not politically, then culturally and geographically.
“We had a lot of people coming through Kansas, going on somewhere,” she said.
Kassebaum spoke about the need to create more community in the state, perhaps through more outdoor events in rural towns.
She sees togetherness as Kansans’ strong suit.
“They don’t get bitter,” she said. “They may not like it, they may say, ‘We’re not going to go do that.’ But they also get together on Sunday or a special day in church, and everybody laughs and jokes and carries on.”
As she carries out her days on the edge of Burdick, watching the snow drift by her window, reading the Wall Street Journal, it is interesting to think about Kassebaum’s legacy. What will she be seen as in future years?
A feminist trailblazer? A bipartisan legislator? A founder of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve? A politician? A Kansan?
What does she want her legacy to be?
Kassebaum kept things simple.
“Hopefully, just, you know, good will,” she said. “I feel very fortunate, and I love being right out here.”