From 2005 to 2011, Baker was a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a nonprofit that provides international election support. From 2005 to his death, Baker served as Senior Counsel to the law firm of his father and his grandfather, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz. Baker was an accomplished lifelong photographer. His photographs have often been exhibited and were published in "National Geographic", "Life", and in the books "Howard Baker's Washington" (1982), "Big South Fork Country" (1993), and "Scott's Gulf: The Bridgestone/Firestone Centennial Wilderness " (2000). In 1993, he received the International Award of the American Society of Photographers, and in 1994, he was elected into the Hall of Fame of the Photo Marketing Association. Baker died at the age of 88 from complications of a stroke that he had suffered a week earlier. He was in his native Huntsville, Tennessee, with his wife, Nancy, by his side. Baker, a Presbyterian, was married twice. His first wife, Joy Dirksen, with whom he had two daughters, was herself the daughter of former Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen (R). After his first wife died of cancer in 1993, he remarried in 1996 to fellow U.S. Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, who also happened to be the daughter of a Republican politician, Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon, the unsuccessful Republican nominee for President in 1936 against Democratic incumbent Franklin Roosevelt.