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ByConnieCass The Associated Press WASHINGTON Howard Baker's question sliced to the core of Watergate: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Repeated over and again in the senator's mild Ten- nessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up. Baker's famous question has been dusted off for po- tential White House scan- dals big and small ever since. Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP's elder states- men, died Thursday at his Tennessee home of compli- cations from a stroke suf- fered days earlier, accord- ing to an email distrib- uted at the law firm where Baker was senior counsel. He was 88. Baker emerged as an un- likely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973. When chosen as vice chairman — and there- fore leading Republican — of the Senate special com- mittee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allega- tions couldn't possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House's "mole" in the in- vestigation of the break-in at Democratic headquar- ters and other crimes per- petrated in service to Nix- on's re-election. "I believed that it was a political ploy of the Dem- ocrats, that it would come to nothing," Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. "But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked." He said Watergate be- came "the greatest disillu- sionment" of his political career. Baker's intense but re- strained style of interro- gating former White House aides played well on cam- era. A youthful-looking, side-burned 47-year-old, his brainy charm inspired a raft of love notes sent to his Senate office; a wom- en's magazine proclaimed him "studly." He was men- tioned frequently as presi- dential material. By the time Nixon re- signed in 1974, Baker was a household name with a reputation for fairness and smarts that stuck throughout a long politi- cal career. Howard Henry Baker Jr. had a fine political pedi- gree — his father was a con- gressman from Huntsville, Tenn., and his father-in-law a prominent senator from Illinois. Over the years, his name would be knocked about for big Washington jobs including vice presi- dential candidate, Supreme Court justice and CIA direc- tor. But his focus remained on the Senate and, at times, the White House. In 18 years as a moder- ate Republican senator, he was known for plain speak- ing and plain dealing. He had a talent for brokering compromise, leading some to dub him "the Great Con- ciliator." "Senator Baker truly earned his nickname: the Great Conciliator. I know he will be remembered with fondness by mem- bers of both political par- ties," Sen. Mitch McCon- nell of Kentucky said on the Senate floor Thursday, an- nouncing Baker's death to the chamber. Tennessee Sen. La- mar Alexander, who once worked as an assistant to Baker, called him "Tennes- see's favorite son" and "an indispensable friend." "He built our state's two- party political system and inspired three generations to try to build a better state and country," Alexan- der said in a news release Thursday. Baker was minority leader when the Reagan landslide swept Republi- cans into control of the chamber in 1980 Reagan, and he became the first Re- publican majority leader in decades. Putting aside his own reservations about Rea- gan's economic proposals, Baker played a key role in passage of legislation syn- onymous with the "Rea- gan Revolution" — ma- jor tax and spending cuts combined with a military buildup. Baker considered his years as Senate majority leader, 1981 to 1985, the high point of his career. He called it "the second-best job in town, only second to the presidency." He made a fleeting bid for that best job in 1980, and left the Senate with an eye to another presidential run in 1988. Instead, he ended up in the White House as Reagan's chief of staff. Reagan needed him to put things in order after ousting chief of staff Don- ald Regan amid scandal over the administration's secret moves to trade arms for hostages in Iran and di- vert the profits to Nicara- guan rebels — another of history's what-did-the-pres- ident-know moments. Baker recalled marshal- ing all his reasons for refus- ing the offer, but he couldn't turn down Reagan. "I guess I am a pushover for presi- dents," he said. The Reagan White House weathered Iran-Contra. But Baker lost his last chance at the presidency. "I have seen it up close and personal and I am con- vinced that I could do that job," he said. "But that boat never came to dock." During much of the 1980s and '90s, Baker grap- pled with the illness of his wife, Joy, daughter of Ever- ett Dirksen, a former GOP Senate leader. She died in 1993 after an 11-year battle with cancer. The couple had two children. In 1996, Baker married Kansas Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum. It was the first time two people who had served in the Senate mar- ried. President George H.W. Bush sent Baker to Moscow in 1991 to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before a summit; George W. Bush named him ambassa- dor to Japan in 2001. An accomplished ama- teur photographer, Baker carried a camera wherever he went. But he didn't take any photos during the Wa- tergate hearings. "I felt that it was beneath the dignity of the event," he said years later. "It turned out the event had no dignity and I should have taken pic- tures." 1925-2014 Sen. Baker, face of Watergate inquiry, dies THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Fred D. Thompson, Chief Minority Counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, le , talks with Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn. during the Watergate hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington in May 1973. Baker, who asked what President Richard Nixon knew about Watergate, has died. He was 88. By Martha Irvine The Associated Press CHICAGO Good thing she doesn't need a password to get into heaven. That's what Donna Spinner often mut- ters when she tries to re- member the growing list of letter-number-and-sym- bol codes she's had to cre- ate to access her various on- line accounts. "At my age, it just gets too confusing," says the 72-year-old grandmother who lives outside Decatur, Illinois. But this is far from just a senior moment. Frustration over passwords is as com- mon across the age brackets as the little reminder notes on which people often write them. "We are in the midst of an era I call the 'tyranny of the password,'" says Thomas Way, a computer science professor at Villa- nova University. "We're due for a revolu- tion." One could argue that the revolution is already well underway, with passwords destined to go the way of the floppy disc and dial-up Inter- net. Already, there are mul- tiple services that generate and store your passwords so you don't have to remember them. Beyond that, biomet- ric technology is emerging, using thumbprints and face recognition to help us get into our accounts and our devices. Some new iPhones use the technology, for in- stance, as do a few retailers, whose employees log into workcomputerswithatouch of the hand. Still, many people cling to the password, the devil we know — even though the passwords we end up cre- ating, the ones we CAN re- member, often aren't very secure at all. Look at any list of the most common passwords making the rounds on the Internet and you'll find anything from "abc123," "letmein" and "il- oveyou" to — you guessed it — use of the word "pass- word" as a password. Bill Lidinsky, director of security and forensics at the School of Applied Tech- nology at the Illinois Insti- tute of Technology, has seen it all — and often demon- strates in his college classes just how easy it is to use readily available software to figure out many pass- words. "I crack my students' passwords all the time," Li- dinsky says, "sometimes in seconds." Even so, a good password doesn'tnecessarilyhavetobe maddeningly complicated, says Keith Palmgren, a cy- bersecurity expert in Texas. "Whoever coined the phrase 'complex password' did us a disservice," says Palmgren, an instructor at the SANS Institute, a re- search and education or- ganization that focuses on high-tech security. He's teaching a course on passwords to other tech professionals later this summer and plans to tell them that the focus should be on unpredictability and length — the more charac- ters, the better. But it doesn't have to be something you can't re- member. If a site allows long passwords and spe- cial characters, Palmgren suggests using an entire sentence as a password, in- cluding spaces and punctu- ation, if possible: "This sen- tence is an example." He also suggests plug- ging in various types of passwords on a website de- veloped by California-based Gibson Research Corp. to see how long it could take to crack each type of pass- word: https://www.grc. com/haystack.htm According to the site, it could take centuries to un- cover some passwords, but seconds for others. Lidinsky recommends using a "simple mental al- gorithm," including those that use a space, if a site allows that. As an exam- ple, he says one might try "Ama95 zon" for an Amazon account, and "Yah95 oo" for a Yahoo! account, and so on. (But choose your own com- bination.) There are other ways around the password head- ache. Some people have taken to using password gener- ators, which create and store passwords for vari- ous sites you use. Gener- ally, all the user has to re- member is a master pass- word to unlock a generator program and then it plugs in the passwords to which- ever account is being used. There are numerous pass- word managers like this, in- cluding LastPass and Dash- lane and 1Password. Some wonder whether it's wise to trust services like this. "But sooner or later, you have to trust somebody," says Palmgren, who uses a password manager himself. Other solutions are sur- facing, too. Researchers at the Uni- versity of York in England are developing a new au- thentication system called Facelock that asks you to identify familiar faces to get into an account or device. The Canadian govern- ment, meanwhile, has part- nered with a company called SecureKey Technologies, which allows citizens of that country to log onto gov- ernment sites, such as the country's tax bureau, using a username and password from partner financial insti- tutions, including TD Bank. Because SecureKey serves as the go-between, the system's developers say thebankuser- name and password are not ultimately shared with the government site. Nor does the bank receive any infor- mation about which govern- ment site the user is access- ing. SecureKey is now work- ing with the U.S. Postal Ser- vice to provide American citizens with similar ac- cess to federal health ben- efits, student loan informa- tion and retirement benefit information. Ultimately, experts say, reducing the stress of on- line security — and decreas- ing reliance on passwords — will rest on what's known as "multi-factor identifica- tion." SECURITY Need to recall too many passwords? You're not alone THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Hands type on a computer keyboard in Los Angeles. Frustration over passwords is as common across the age brackets. Select"Subscribe"tabinlowerrightcorner Complete information for automatic weekly delivery to your email inbox That's it! 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