"I think and hope and believe that the Japanese government and the people of Japan will be happy and content with the progress of justice in this case and that it will not become a great issue in the future." -- Howard Baker
Howard Baker (born Howard Wilson Baker, Jr.) (April 5, 1905 — July 1990) was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic.
Baker was born in Philadelphia. He did graduate work in English at Stanford University, where he befriended Yvor Winters and was co-editor of the literary magazine Gyroscope. After getting his master's degree, he moved to Paris to pursue his studies at the Sorbonne. There he married the novelist Dorothy Baker and met and was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, who helped him to publish his first work, the autobiographical novel Orange Valley (1931). After returning to the United States in 1931, he took a position teaching English at Berkeley. From 1937 to 1943 he taught English at Harvard. Besides collaborations with his wife, his writings include the poetry collections Letter from the Country (1941) and Ode to the Sea (1954), as well as a collection of essays on ancient Greek culture, Persephone's Cave: Cultural Accumulations of the Early Greeks (1979).
"Any time the United States government turns over an American citizen, including military personnel, to the government of another country, it is in our nature to want to make sure that they receive the best treatment, the fairest treatment, and the most humane treatment.""Demography is changing us as we are older societies, we're living longer. How the generations balance each other out, how that affects education and health care.""I intend to travel to Okinawa and to visit with Okinawa officials and the citizens of Okinawa at an early date. I will send my best analysis of that situation, including the local attitudes, back to Washington, to the government there.""It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.""The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts. And there was a considerable challenge to that here and understandably so.""We must examine then the concerns of the Government of Japan about the language of the treaty itself - of SOFA - and of the interim and further arrangements that have been made since 1995, and see whether or not we need to make any changes. Those are decisions I cannot make."
The papers of Dorothy and Howard Baker, 1926-1990 (33 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries