Howard Baker says that when he first agreed to become vice-chair of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, “I thought all the flap about Watergate was a Democratic dirty trick.” He soon realized that he was wrong. “I was absolutely stunned,” he says. The Tennessee Republican then set aside partisanship, famously focusing the committee on the question: What did the president know, and when did he know it? “I had to put my head down and follow the facts wherever they would take me,” he says.
Baker, 82, learned the need to move beyond partisan politics soon after arriving in the Senate in 1967, when he was trying to pass the Clean Air Act of 1970, which he cosponsored with Edmund Muskie, a Maine Democrat. “Muskie and I were not close, but we became mutually protective because of criticism leveled at us,” Baker says. “We were both very partisan, but we were willing to submerge our partisan interests [for] a common goal.”
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