The Man Who Keeps Asking Why

With a courtly yet uncompromising style, Senator Howard Henry Baker Jr., 47, has emerged as one of the Watergate committee's toughest examiners.

Sometimes the Tennessee Republican belabors witnesses with rapid-fire questions. More often, however, the Senator cajoles the witnesses with sympathy and understanding, as he did last week to elicit more details about John W.

Dean III's meetings with President Nixon. Indeed, Baker's style as committee vice chairman has so impressed his colleagues that he has become one of the Republicans' new luminaries looking to 1976--and one of the few to benefit from the Watergate scandal.

More than any other committee member, Baker has probed for the motives of those involved in Watergate.

Of Convicted Conspirator Bernard Barker, the Senator demanded: "What on earth would motivate you at your station in life to do something that surely you knew was illegal?" Then, as Barker cited his own brand of blind patriotism as explanation, Baker exclaimed before the hushed committee:

"Why? ... Why? ... Why?" Later Baker said: "I'm not trying to establish the moral culpability but trying to find out what causes a man to do this, so that we can write legislation to keep it from happening again."

Much to nearly everyone's surprise.

Baker himself became a figure in the testimony last week. Dean recalled that White House staffers looked on the Senator as a potential friend. They asked him for a voice in the selection of the committee's minority counsel but were rebuffed. Later, on Feb. 22, he advised Nixon privately to abandon his stand on Executive privilege, at least for the Watergate hearings. On several occasions, Baker had flatly denied that there were any Watergate-related contacts between himself and the President since Feb. 7, when the committee was formed. Later he admitted that he had indeed met with the President and explained that he had kept it secret for fear that publicity might diminish the chances of getting the President to change his stand on Executive privilege. Asked how it felt to be described by White House operatives as a man who could be influenced, the Senator replied: "It doesn't bother me one damn bit because it didn't happen."

That incident aside. Baker's performance has drawn praise from Democrats as well as Republicans. He has been careful not to leak any secret testimony, and has stoutly maintained the rights of the three-man Republican minority. He comes to each session thoroughly briefed --by two of his own staff whom he assigned to the Watergate affair and by the committee's minority counsel, Fred Thompson. Explains Baker: "I try to get a picture of who the man is, how he relates and what I'd like to inquire about."

In the wooded hills of eastern Tennessee, Baker is known to friends and kinfolk as Howard Henry, to distinguish him from his father, who was simply called Howard. The elder Baker served 13 years in Congress until his death in 1964. Since the early 1820s there have been Bakers in that part of Appalachia, where coal mining, lumbering, dairy farming -- and poverty -- are a way of life Young Baker was strongly influenced by his maternal grandmother, known as Mother Ladd, who succeeded her late husband in 1927 as sheriff of Roane County. She gained notoriety for cap turing two armed bootleggers singlehanded. Now 93, she boasts: "Howard Henry is just like me."

Sweet Smell. A schoolmate recollects: "At eight or nine, when most boys were talkin' fishin', huntin' and playin' hooky, Howard Henry was talkin' jurisprudence and double jeopardy." He graduated from the University of Tennessee College of Law in 1949, then joined the law firm founded by his paternal grandfather in 1885. Young Baker quickly earned a reputation as a shrewd cross-examiner in courtroom exchanges. His natural proclivities for politics were cemented by his marriage to Joy Dirksen, only child of the late, grandiloquent Senator from Illinois.

They have two children -- Darek, 20, and Cynthia, 17.

Defeated for the U.S. Senate in 1964, Baker was elected in 1966 -- with campaigning help from President Nixon -- and re-elected with 63% of the vote last year. Although eastern Tennessee is traditionally Republican, he is the state's first popularly elected Republican Senator. In the Senate he is counted as a moderate and thoroughly pragmatic conservative. He supported the 18-year-old vote and the civil rights bill of 1968, but strongly opposed forced busing to desegregate schools and reduction of the oil-depletion allowance.

The temperate Baker drinks only an occasional gin and tonic and tolerates neither profanity nor off-color humor. During the hearings he has dieted off 25 lbs. and now weighs a trim 155. He plays golf and tennis avidly and frequently canoes on the Little Tennessee River or hikes in the nearby hills. His favorite pastime, however, is photography, and both his $150,000 rambling home in tiny Huntsville, Tenn.

(pop. 375), and the handsome stone house he rents in Northwest Washington have darkrooms where he develops his own film. Says Baker: "He who retreats to the darkroom knows himself darn well. The solitude is good for you; it's a good antidote to public life."

In that solitude, Baker probably also contemplates his future as a politician.

In public he turns aside questions about it by recalling the day during his freshman year in the Senate when New Hampshire's crusty Norris Cotton asked: "Can you smell the sweet smell of white marble?" No, said Baker, chuckling at the quaint image. Replied Cotton: "When you're here long enough, you will and you'll like it. From that moment on, you won't be worth a damn."

Baker now admits: "I could detect a faint trace of that smell three or four years ago--but I don't now." In 1969 and 1971 he brashly challenged Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania for the Republican Senate leadership and lost; now he cautiously shrugs aside pointed teasing by colleagues in the Senate cloakroom that his work on the Watergate committee is a prelude to a bigger role.

Nonetheless--as he is well aware--it was just such investigating committees that helped launch the national careers of Estes Kefauver, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon.

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