The courage to lead along
a yellow brick road of politics

It is perhaps fitting that one of the best tributes to our area’s most famous and widely respected residents came from a member of a rival political party.

“Nancy Kassebaum was a force in the United States Senate,” Joe Biden’s White House announced in honoring her with one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. “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.”

It took courage for her as a junior senator to insist to the reluctant leader of her own Republican Party, President Ronald Reagan, that the U.S. should sanction the apartheid government of South Africa — an action that helped finally bring an end to one of the world’s most reprehensible practices.

It took courage for her to insist on an end to human rights violations before the U.S. would send aid to El Salvador’s right-wing government in its civil war against leftist guerillas.

It took courage for her to be the first woman to represent Kansas in the Senate, the first woman to be a major Senate committee chairman, and for a time to be the only member of her gender in what until then had been an all-boys club.

More recently it took courage for her to call into question the bullying, science-denying, hate-filled, billionaire-boosting, recklessly spending, autocratic platforms of members of her own party who sought to succeed her in the state and national spotlight.

It even took courage for her years ago to initially seek office as the daughter of candidate Alf Landon, who had gone down to the biggest defeat in history when he ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt.

Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker, who died last week at age 94, espoused not only courage and traditional Republican values of fiscal responsibility but also now-often-forgotten Republican values, like those of her party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, and fellow Kansan Dwight Eisenhower for appreciating difference and welcoming compromise.

“If I got recognition at all,” she said in a Record interview last year, “it was [for] the ability to bring an understanding of how differences need to exist.”

Perhaps that’s why, after living in Topeka, near Wichita, in the nation’s capital, and even in Tokyo as wife of her second husband, fellow former senator and ambassador Howard Baker, she preferred bucolic Burdick.

Small towns are so small they can’t afford to exclude anyone or any views.

“They may not like it,” she told the Record. “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.”

In politics, that’s not true anymore, with campaigns no longer becoming the personal opportunities for meeting people that she loved and instead becoming remote-controlled wars of brief, broadcast slogans bankrolled by billionaires.

“We’ve lost touch with the very people we need to get involved,” she told the Record last year.

One of the biggest offenders, in her view and that of many others in and outside her party, is a fellow Republican, President Donald Trump.

“It’s hard for me to think of Trump as a Republican,” she told the Record. “He doesn’t speak to some of the issues that I wish he would focus on.”

Even many loyal MAGA supporters share similar concerns about Trump, but most lack her courage to voice them out loud.

If Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker taught us anything, it’s that our democracy requires engaged citizens who not only voraciously read, as she did even in her final years, but also are willing to speak out, risking condemnation but giving voice to causes they know in their hearts are right. Anything less is an abdication of a citizen’s responsibility.

Freedom isn’t free. It’s won not only on battlefields and in ballot boxes but also in daily life by those willing to seriously examine issues by getting all the facts, not just all the slogans, to express opinions in a productive yet collaborative and compromising manner, and even, as she did, to volunteer to accept roles of leadership for their communities.

America, Kansas, this region, and tiny Burdick have lost a diminutive giant. It’s up to the rest of us to continue her life’s work.

— ERIC MEYER