Howard Baker

Tennessee moderate whose Watergate question, what did the president know, framed the constitutional crisis.

Overview

Son of a congressman and son-in-law of Senator Everett Dirksen, Baker won election in 1966 as the first Republican senator from Tennessee since Reconstruction. As vice chairman and ranking Republican of the 1973 Watergate committee he pressed his famous question, converting televised hearings into a bipartisan constitutional inquiry. He became Senate minority leader in 1977 and majority leader in 1981, then served as White House chief of staff in Reagan's second term and ambassador to Japan in the 2000s, returning to Tennessee to mentor both parties, which honored him jointly at his death in 2014.