[fieldmarshaldj]

Baker was at the vanguard of the early GOP alignment in TN in the ‘60s, taking advantage of a brutally ugly internecine Democrat battle that continued for 2 years. When Sen. Estes Kefauver unexpectedly died at the age of 60 in 1963, Gov. Frank Clement positioned himself to succeed him (although he didn’t outright have himself appointed). Clement appointed an old-timer Dem apparatchik, Hub Walters, to occupy the seat until the 1964 special.

Clement thought he’d waltz right into the seat, but 5-term Congressman Ross Bass upended him in a surprise in the primary for the remaining two years of the term.

Howard Baker, Jr., son of a recently deceased Congressman, could’ve run for his dad’s seat in 1964 (which his stepmother was occupying) and held it for perpetuity, but he opted for the risky move of running statewide. At that time, no Republican had ever won a popular election for the Senate (and not since 1920 had a Republican won the Governorship). He fared well against Bass, who won the special in November (because of the anti-GOP backlash, and LBJ carried TN).

Ex-Gov. Clement, however, never really stopped running, and carried on against Bass for the next two years straight. This time around, Clement narrowly upended Bass in the primary. He likely believed he was going to be ensconced in the seat for the next 30 years (he was just 46 at the time), but TN was moving to the GOP (absent JFK’s assassination, there’s a good chance the GOP would’ve captured both Senate seats with Baker and Dan Kuykendall). Clement ended up faltering badly for the fall campaign after going all in to win the nomination, and with LBJ massively unpopular by 1966, Baker scored the upset. As for Clement, 3 years later on the brink of declaring for the Governorship again for 1970, he died in a car crash in 1969, he was only 49.

It’s curious I never had much of an opinion of Baker by the time he retired in 1985 (since he honestly believed he would be the 1988 Presidential nominee after his failed attempt in 1980, and wanted to be free to run while not in the Senate). Of course, I was still a yoot lib at that time (1984), soon to change by 1986. Although he was not a Conservative, he and the TN GOP of that time tended to be the bulwark of integrity against the corrupt, good ole boy Democrat hegemony still deeply enshrined in our state, so that was in his favor (even Lamar! was considered that as well).

If he was serving into the ‘90s or the ‘00s (since he would’ve been able to keep the seat as long as he had wanted), I would likely have soured on him as I became more politically aware. I’d have preferred more of Sen. Bill Brock, who was considered the more hard-charging Conservative of the ‘70s (who alas lost to the execrable Jim Sasser in 1976 in a revenge of the Gorebots, Sr. in this instance).

Love him or hate him, he did play a substantial role in moving the state towards the GOP supermajority we have today.

[BlackElk]

Met the man just once but once was enough. It was at a meeting of the Young Republican National Executive Committee function where we were expected to line up and shake his hand. One cannot wage war on every issue and so I showed up and shook his hand as a social "obligation." I then went straight back to my hotel room and to a long hot shower to get rid of that feeling of uncleanness that resulted from contact with Howard Baker.

I know that, as to the dead, if we cannot say something nice, we should say nothing at all. Just can't help it.

Your description of Baker as a force for integrity surprises. I had always thought of him as being in the second tier of GOP corruption. Lowell Weicker occupied the entire first tier of GOP corruption. Familiarity in that case certainly breeds contempt on the part of even former Connecticut folks like me.

To me, the major significance of Howard Baker's death is that it will be one less vote for LAMAR!!! Alexander now and one less for Corker later.

[Theodore R.]

Good analysis, dj, but I am surprised that you were ever on the leftist side. Surely it wasn’t fascination of Brezhnev.

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

It’s curious I never had much of an opinion of Baker by the time he retired in 1985 (since he honestly believed he would be the 1988 Presidential nominee after his failed attempt in 1980, and wanted to be free to run while not in the Senate).

Interestingly, he pretty much gave up another presidential run to become Reagan's Chief of Staff for his last two years.

[cdcdawg]

Well said. The Democrat stranglehold on this state was severe until the 60s and 70s. The levels of corruption in the Democrat Party in this state are legendary. The change that took place from the mid 1960s through the 80s was so severe that now even our Democrats have to be pretty conservative to get elected anywhere but in Memphis or Nashville.

Baker was a moderate, and it’s long past time for Lamar to go, but they were a huge improvement on what Tennessee politics had been producing.