‘Injured Wren’ Sticks to Her Guns : Kassebaum Led Sanctions Fight

On June 12, when the South African government announced a new crackdown on dissidents, Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) decided that U.S. sanctions against South Africa had become “inevitable.”

Her switch reflected years of frustration in her quiet efforts to persuade the Reagan Administration to toughen its stance on South Africa. More important, it was one of the first clear indications that the Republican-led Senate was ready to break with the President on the issue of sanctions.

Kassebaum, chairman of a Senate Foreign Relation Committee’s subcommittee on African affairs, became “one of the first on our side” to weigh in against the White House on sanctions, an Administration aide said.

“Because of her, it is hard to argue that this is nothing more than a partisan issue,” said Mark Helmke, an aide to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.). “She carries a hell of a lot more weight than some of the blowhards out there (on the Senate floor).”

Was ‘Citizen Legislator’

The issue has focused attention on the soft-spoken, fragile-looking woman the Kansas City Star likened to an “injured wren” when she ran for the Senate in 1978.

She campaigned as a “citizen legislator” whose only experience in elected office had been as president of the school board in Maize, Kan. But she had instant name recognition as the daughter of Alf Landon, the former Kansas governor and presidential candidate in 1936, often called the “grand old man” of the Republican Party.

With politics a constant topic of conversation when she was growing up, Kassebaum would seem to have had an intense education in the subject. She noted, however, that her father never thought much of the idea of women in the Senate. “Of course, he denies it now,” she added.

Today, she is a political force on her own, widely spoken of as a potential contender for her party’s 1988 vice presidential nomination. Her leadership on South Africa would help Kassebaum beat “one of the standard raps against a lot of women,” which is that they lack foreign policy experience, said Kathleen Kleeman, a Rutgers University research associate on women in politics.

Kassebaum said her name comes up only “when they’re talking about a woman “ running mate, and added, “I’ve said I’m not interested.”

Kassebaum is openly disdainful of what she perceives as efforts to display her as a token woman. In 1984, rather than appear among the party’s lineup of female stars at the nationally televised opening night of the Republican National Convention, she attended an Abilene county fair. She told a Kansas reporter she did not want “to be treated as a bauble on a tree.”

The 54-year-old senator has built her political reputation on such bluntness and independence. Despite her basic conservatism, she has not hesitated to oppose the Administration on issues that range from higher taxes, which she said are necessary to reduce the deficit, to opposing Reagan’s nomination of Daniel A. Manion as a federal appeals court judge.

At the same time, she comes across as thoughtful and earnest. “You have to respect her, even when you come to a different conclusion,” said Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.).

“She has an open mind and she’s willing to listen,” added Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who described Kassebaum as “independent in spirit.”

Criticized on Compromises

At times, however, her critics say, she is too anxious to look for compromise, too willing to seek out the middle of the road.

Despite her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, for example, she lost the endorsement of the Kansas Women’s Political Caucus several years ago when she refused to demand extension of the deadline for ratifying the amendment.

And while she has been harshly critical of the Pretoria government, she has more than $200,000 invested in a dozen blue-chip companies that do business in South Africa. An aide said Kassebaum believes that continuing U.S. business involvement can be “a force for some progress and good in South Africa.”

The bill that was approved Friday includes somewhat harsher sanctions than the legislation Kassebaum drafted. She complained that it “lost some of the merits . . . became somewhat blurred.”

Nonetheless, she was among the earliest and most dogged of those seeking to reshape U.S. policy in South Africa. The day Lugar was elected chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1984, for example, Kassebaum asked him to sign a letter urging President Reagan to get tougher with the white minority government. The letter, intended as a “friendly warning shot . . . focused Lugar on the issue at a very early time,” a Kassebaum aide said.

“She is unrelenting, and it’s hard to argue with her,” Helmke, the Lugar aide, said. “She’s going to stand there and say in her quiet, forceful fashion, ‘I’m right.’ ”

Kassebaum said she is not making any plans for a political career beyond the end of her second term in 1990, when she has indicated she will retire from the Senate.

“Nope,” she said late one night this week, as a weary Senate continued its marathon debate on South Africa. “I’m certainly not, and there are days I really long for my farm in Kansas--like today.”