Howard H. Baker, Jr., a public biography

This dissertation provides a narrative analysis of the political career of former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker, Jr. Based principally upon findings from interviews, public papers, newspapers, and other primary sources, the study includes accounts of Mr. Baker's bids for Senate Republican Leader in 1969, 1971, and 1977, his campaign for the Presidency in 1980, and his failure to secure the nods for the position of Vice President in 1968, 1973, 1974, and 1976. Its focus, however, lies upon his legislative work and his role in the development of a statewide two-party system in his native Tennessee. It can be said without question that Baker defined the overriding issue of all Watergate investigations with his query, "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Equally evident from this treatise is Baker's role as the de facto architect of the coalition which emerged in the mid 1960s to challenge Democratic hegemony at the state level in Tennessee. With well-reasoned appeals to those groups disenchanted with those inBaker won a landslide victory in 1966 and even larger margins in 1972 and 1978. In the meantime, several younger Tennessee Republicans captured other onetime Democratic seats using much the same strategy.Much of Baker's success at the polls sprang from the perception that his outlook coincided sharply with the moderately conservative weltanschuung predominant within his constituency. Unlike many to his right, however, Baker believed his party could not be merely naysayers, but had a duty to offer alternatives to Democratic proposals for the alleviation of societal problems. Upon becoming Leader, he, following the pattern of Robert Taft, rallied his caucuses behind solutions utilizing the free-market approach. Well established by this time was his reputation as a problem-solver and a conciliator. Prior to 1977, he had played integral roles in the development of the Fair Housing Act, revenue sharing, the monumental antipollution bills of the early 1970s, the opening of the highway trust fund to mass transit programs, and legislation accelerating the reapportionment of state legislatures. Thereafter, he played equally significant, and sometimes determinative parts in the approval of the Panama Canal Treaties, the sale of jets to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the creation of the Department of Education, the Reagan economic program, the lifting of the arms embargo on Turkey, and the designation of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a federal holiday. Only Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Russell Long among the Democrats with whom he served has as broad a scope of accomplishment. Within his own caucus, his only equal was Everett Dirksen, his father-in-law.Thesis (Ph. D.