Nation: He's Proud He's a Politician

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But Howard Baker faces long odds in his presidential bid

"I'm proud of Joe because he is a politician and I'm proud that I'm a politician." Thus Senator Howard Baker, 53, sounded one of his main campaign themes last week at a dinner given by New York's Nassau County Republican Chairman Joseph Margiotta. Hands in his pockets, exuding an easy sincerity, the Senate minority leader gave an apt demonstration of the down-home-style politics that he hopes will carry him to the presidency. Last week he became the ninth Republican to declare his candidacy.

In making his formal announcement in the Senate Caucus Room, Baker stressed the need for a "President who knows Washington well enough to change Washington," because "surely we cannot withstand still more Washington inexperience." He billed himself as the candidate "who can win in the South and in the North, on the farms and in the cities, with the whites and with the black Americans, with the old and the young." He talked tough about the Soviets. Approval of SALT, he declared, would "guarantee to the Soviet Union the margin for error that used to be ours." He said the nation must have a President who will "face up to the realities of a Soviet foreign policy that probes every weakness and fills every vacuum."

Baker has politics bred into his bones. Born in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, a pocket of Republicanism since the Civil War, he is the third generation of his family to go into politics. (His grandmother succeeded her husband as sheriff; his stepmother followed his father into Congress.) After graduating from the University of Tennessee College of Law, he became a spellbinding courtroom attorney. Following an unsuccessful attempt in 1964, Baker was elected to the Senate two years later. He demonstrated his independence by opposing his own father-in-law, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, on Dirksen's effort to block the U.S. Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote decision. Baker was twice re-elected with large pluralities.

Watergate, which ruined so many Republican reputations, added luster to his. As a member of the Senate Watergate committee, he appeared daily on television, sharply probing the President's men with courtroom techniques. Occasionally, his pronouncements lighted up the murky scene. "There are animals crashing around in the forest," he once remarked. "I can hear them, but I can't see them." Though some critics grumbled that he was too friendly with the Nixon White House early in the hearings, he emerged as a national figure and a front runner for Vice President on the 1976 Republican ticket. But Gerald Ford chose Senator Robert Dole, much to Baker's disappointment. Rumor had it that Baker was rejected at least in part because of the alcohol problems of his wife Joy, who had stopped drinking six months earlier.