To Absent Friends
Memories flowed like the river
Sunday Morning, April 14
Son Zach and I are just back from an extraordinary weekend in Knoxville. We were not there for the big Orange & White Game over at Neyland Stadium, down by the river, but for a sweet celebration up on Cumberland Avenue.
We were there for the dedication of the Howard H. Baker Jr., School of Public Policy and Public Affairs. Next year would have been Senator Baker’s hundredth birthday, and, this summer, he will have been gone ten years. This weekend thus became a festive time of remembering for the Baker family with the former Baker staff, convening once again from the four corners of America to say his famous name, recall early campaigns and policy work over the decades, and to embrace each other again.
In their own careers these men and women had followed Baker at the important moments of his storied career - from his earliest campaigns in the 1960s to the hard policy work in the nation’s capital. Some of the hundreds there were Lamar Alexander, Jim Haslam, Bill Haslam, Victor Ashe, A.B. Culvahouse, Tom Griscom, Patrick Butler, Dan Crippen, Rob Mosbacher, the pilot Lonnie Strunk, Emily Reynolds, Tom Ingram, the Baker law partners Don Stansberry and Fred Marcum from Huntsville, Tennessee, north of Knoxville that Baker often called “the center of the known universe.”
Yet some important others, who were also integral to Baker’s career, were not present on this weekend of remembrance: Joy Dirksen Baker, Ron McMahan, Bill Hamby, Howard Liebengood, Lewis Donelson, Fred Thompson, Don Sundquist. Death has taken all these, but fond memories of their roles in Baker’s career filled the rooms and flowed like a river.
It had been Baker’s dream that on this Knoxville campus, where he had been a young student in the Law School in the 1940s, a policy institute would someday be formed to accommodate teaching and research in the practice of public policy and leadership. This was always fitting, given the arc of Baker’s own career (U.S Senator and leader of the Senate, President Reagan’s chief of staff through the difficult times, then the U.S. Ambassador to Japan) and, in particular, how he personally went about his own job in each of those roles. He became an exemplar of civility and moderation, in uniting strong advocates around the important policy work of the nation.
“The other fellow might be right,” Baker often said, quoting his own father, the long-serving Second District Congressman Howard Baker Sr. The point was to seek wisdom, on whatever side of an argument it could be found.
Now, the University of Tennessee has formally established the Baker School with the authority to grant degrees to young scholars perfecting their own visions for public leadership within the Baker legacy and framework. So, on Friday, the hierarchy of the university - President Randy Boyd, the Knoxville campus Chancellor Donde Plowman, trustees, two former Governors, and others - were in attendance to help solemnize the occasion.
All this happily occurs, of course, at a time of some darker turmoil in our national life. It’s a time when many who remember the Baker stories think especially of him and way as a superior model of good government - and one we especially need now. Over the decade since Baker left the scene, much in our political and policy realms has been done and undone.
To my ear, there was an even larger sense of passing especially present on this sunny Knoxville weekend, in the private conversations and bittersweet memories among the hundreds who had known Baker and his way the best. How his gaze seemed always focused on how to perfect the Union, sustaining the American experiment, rescuing the republic when required. This is now the promise and national opportunity of committed institutions like the Baker School.
A.B. Culvahouse, the early Baker staffer who went on to serve as the White House Counsel (and later as the U.S. Ambassador to Australia), gave UT’s fall commencement address in December. Chancellor Plowman, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday afternoon, recalled how Culvahouse had welcomed all the newly-minted graduates with the hopeful words:
“You are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
I've never ever been a Republican but I always admired Baker. Surely wish we had a few Republicans like him in the Senate and House today.
Proud to have been a Republican when they were people of honor.