Just six months after the stock market crash that would bring America into the Great Depression, James Addison Baker III arrived at Baptist Hospital in Houston at 7:31 a.m. on April 28, 1930, the long-awaited son of James Addison Baker Jr. and his wife, the elegant society hostess Bonner Means Baker. In the spidery handwriting on his birth certificate, his father’s occupation was listed simply as “Lawher,” although in actuality he was not only a prominent attorney but a banker, a builder, a war hero, and a demanding taskmaster who would expect much from the son for whom he had waited through thirteen childless years of marriage.
Already the Depression raged, in Houston and across America. But when baby Jimmy—a big child, weighing in at more than eight pounds, three ounces—came home to the imposing Spanish-style house at 1216 Bissonnet Road that his father had commissioned for the family a few years earlier, he would encounter none of it. The street had recently been renamed for one of his father’s fellow World War I heroes, but was still known as Old Poor Farm Road and, in fact, the poorhouse was still there, a few miles away, besieged now with families seeking shelter. But the Bakers were insulated by wealth and color from the economic ravages of the time and the baby was welcomed home to a newly decorated nursery with a cook, a nanny, and a chauffeur to tend to him.
The world that Jimmy was born into had been shaped, to a remarkable degree, by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. He lived in a neighborhood of their design, in the shadow of a great new institution of higher learning that they had built and whose affairs they oversaw. He would grow up to play tennis and swim and hunt at clubs they had helped to found. The city of Houston that boomed around him was named for his great-grandfather’s friend, its buildings financed by the bank his family helped to run. The art museum and the city’s leading social-service charity were both started by his grandparents. When he got old enough to go to school, Jimmy would attend Houston’s most prestigious private academy; his father, naturally, was chairman of the board.
Jimmy would soon grow into a tall boy with a lean, athletic build, a shock of dark, curly hair, an easy disposition, and eyes that gleamed over a good joke. He was smart, crazy about sports, and an indifferent student at best. He saw no injustice he yearned to correct or wrongs to right. As a boy, he wanted nothing more than a rifle and a chance to hunt something; as a young man, he thought mainly of creating a home for his own growing brood. The diplomat who would come to see himself as a guardian of the free world grew up in a very small universe.
He had inherited a lot more than a name from his distinguished, demanding forebears. Eventually, it would be his turn to take a place in the law firm that they had built and that had built the family fortune and reputation along with it. He had known this was his course in life since he had known pretty much anything at all. Privilege was his birthright, but it came with formidable demands of duty and discipline. His mother made clear to her son the expectations that awaited him, the fourth James Addison Baker. “Jimmy,” she would say, “you have quite a legacy to live up to.” He would be raised to follow the family tradition more than any of the hordes of cousins he grew up with or the younger sister, named Bonner after their mother, who came along just eighteen months after he was born. “He was the hero son,” said his cousin Stewart Addison Baker. “He was the person who was expected to succeed in a grand way and I think even when he was a young man, it was assumed that he would fulfill those expectations.”
THERE IS NO UNDERSTANDING Baker without understanding his family. The Bakers of Texas had always been lawyers and they passed the profession down to their sons along with the name—and the burden of living up to it. The first James Addison Baker, Jimmy’s great-grandfather, born in 1821, had read law after serving as a schoolteacher near Huntsville, Alabama, hitting the books at night until he was admitted to practice at the age of twenty-two. By his early thirties, James Baker was young and ambitious and alone—his first wife, Caroline Hightower, died three years after they married. Just a few months after her death, he and his four brothers abandoned Alabama for Huntsville, Texas, the frontier namesake of their hometown. His late wife’s parents had already moved there, part of a wave of slave-holding settlers who embarked on “patriarchal migrations” from north Alabama, “with hundreds of Negroes and their flocks and chattel in heavy wagon trains,” as an early historian of the town wrote, coming to Texas “in search of cheap land now that the slave economy was exhausting the old states.”
By 1853, Baker had met and fallen in love with another Alabama transplant, Rowena Beverly Crawford. Crawford was seven years younger, the headmistress of the new town’s school, known as the Brick Academy, and in June of that year, Baker wrote to her father “to attain approbation of my suit” to marry her, acknowledging that while he was a “gentleman,” he brought neither wealth nor high connection to the match. “I am not one of fortune’s favorites, otherwise than in receiving the rewards of my own exertions,” he wrote. The Crawfords came from more distinguished stock, a plantation family that traced its arrival in the colonies to an ancestor who landed in Virginia in 1654 from Presbyterian Scotland. Nonetheless, Baker was granted permission and the two married in 1854. Their first son died a year after birth, as did two later daughters, but their second son, James Addison Baker Jr., came along in 1857, one of five children who would live to maturity.
By the time Baker settled there, Huntsville, Texas, was barely removed from its origins a few years earlier as a Native American trading post, fortuitously sited near a spring in the midst of a grove of oak trees surrounded by red-clay hills. It had been founded by two brothers from his hometown, Pleasant and Ephraim Gray, in 1835, when Baker was already a teenager. The Brick Academy where Rowena had taught was the town’s first chartered school and, soon after arriving, Baker sat on the committee that set up the first law school in the state of Texas. Huntsville was a “town of growing importance,” wrote one of its notable early residents, the New England missionary Melinda Rankin, in a memoir of Texas in the 1850s. Rankin, Rowena’s successor as headmistress of the Brick Academy, would have known the Bakers well and she saw the small settlement of émigrés from the Deep South among whom she had chosen to live as “rivalling in growth and prosperity other towns in the State of older standing,” a boom she attributed to its becoming “the seat of justice” for newly incorporated Walker County. Lawyers like Baker were much in demand down at the brand-new brick courthouse on the town square.
Still, when his son James Jr. was born, the town was barely more than a crossroads, and its official population stood at just 939 in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. The town’s most famous citizen was General Sam Houston, the legendary hero of the Texas Revolution, who became president of the briefly independent Republic of Texas and later the state’s governor and senator. He was also, according to family lore, Baker’s friend and fellow Mason.
In 1860, Baker was elected to the Texas state legislature meeting in Austin, but he resigned a year later. The Civil War had erupted by then and Baker, although already forty years old, signed up for a six-month enlistment with Huntsville volunteers fighting for the Confederacy. His family owned a number of slaves, according to county records, and he brought one of them to the war, a man named Bill, who cooked for Baker and his tent mates. They saw little action and Baker, while serving in the unit, ran for and was elected a judge for the district that included Houston, the booming new town seventy miles due south from Huntsville that bore his friend’s name.
Baker resigned from the army and went to Houston to take up his judgeship; he would keep the title and the connection to the city for the rest of his life. But with the Northern victory in 1865, Union troops occupied the courthouse and the Reconstruction governor of Texas removed Baker and other Confederate officials from their posts. Baker never forgot it. His short, bruising experience in elective office as a judge and in the legislature during the year when Texas voted to secede from the Union left him bitter about politics, an aversion that would grow through the years of postwar Republican rule in Texas and eventually be passed down to generations to come.
Judge Baker, as he was now known, soon began practicing law again in Huntsville, where he took on a sensational case, representing four white defendants arrested for murdering a freed black man in a dispute over a crop-sharing agreement. After three of the four were convicted, two of the defendants brandished hidden guns, opened fire at police officers, and escaped. When sympathetic white men in the area refused to form a posse to hunt them down, the Reconstruction governor declared martial law and sent in the state militia. Eventually the defendants were caught but they were later pardoned.
Beyond his representation of such men, little is known about Baker’s personal views on the subject of the bitter racial politics of the day, although he named his son born after the war Robert Lee Baker in honor of the South’s most famous general. Yet in one of Baker’s most notable cases as a lawyer, just three years after the Civil War, he represented Eliza Stoneum, a freed African American woman who was being deprived of her white common-law husband’s estate by his family and sued to be recognized as his lawful spouse and heir. In a moving decision, a white district judge reversed the original verdict against Stoneum, writing that a court is “a place where justice is administered” and concluding that “this old and faithful woman, the mother of the children of the deceased, after her forty-six years of toil” should not be deprived because she was believed to have “African blood in her veins.”
Just a few years later, in 1887, Judge Baker’s nephew Andy Baker, born in Huntsville at the tail end of the Civil War, had a son, Jesse, with an African American woman. Jesse, a farmer who took the Baker name, ended up having eleven sons and daughters of his own, making him patriarch of a vast African American branch of the Baker family whose existence may or may not have been known to Judge Baker.
Huntsville after the Civil War was no longer the center of business and opportunity it had seemed when Judge Baker first moved there as a young man. Bypassed by the railroad after the town leaders failed to offer a generous enough financial inducement, Huntsville was becoming a sleepy cul-de-sac after the war and, in 1867, was decimated by a yellow fever epidemic that killed more than 150 of its residents. By 1872, Judge Baker had decided to leave, and he moved to Houston to join a law firm formed just after the Civil War by Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts, both Confederate veterans like himself; their two-man shop specialized in work for banks and railroads. With his move, Gray & Botts became Gray, Botts & Baker, then a couple years later, after Gray left, Baker & Botts.
FOUNDED IN 1836, Houston had grown far more rapidly into a commercial center than Judge Baker’s adopted hometown to the north. But it was still a small place with an uncertain future, home to just nine thousand residents when Judge Baker moved there. An island of wooden buildings surrounded by cotton farms, the city was known for its “oceans of mud, and submerged suburbs, the home of the frog and the cradle of the musquito, the birthplace of fever,” as a newspaper put it at the time. Called the Magnolia City for its fragrant groves, it was smaller than the port town of Galveston, but the arrival of railroads was already transforming Houston into a vital transit point for timber, cotton, and other agricultural products. By the turn of the twentieth century, its population had nearly quintupled, overtaking Galveston to make Houston the largest city in Texas. The opening of a ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico in 1914, presided over by Judge Baker’s son, sealed the city’s rise as a major center of commerce and its emergence as a swaggering metropolis.
The out-of-state railroad companies that dominated Houston in its early days needed help navigating the populist laws of Texas, which is where Judge Baker and his firm came in. In the first decades of the firm’s existence, as much as half of its income came from railroads. “The law firm and the city literally grew up together,” according to a history of the firm. Jay Gould, the capitalist titan of the era, seized control of many smaller railroads and Baker & Botts became the Texas representation for his Missouri Pacific. After Gould was beaten out and several Texas lines were consolidated under Southern Pacific, the firm became the new combined company’s general counsel in 1893. The firm also represented many of the city’s other industries. “There is scarcely a great enterprise in Houston or the surrounding country in which we have not figured in some way,” wrote Clarence Wharton, the firm’s unofficial historian.
Judge Baker was determined to have his oldest son and namesake follow him into this thriving legal business. Jimmie, “a dashing handsome person with a twinkle in his eye,” attended Texas Military Institute, then joined Baker & Botts alongside his father. Genial and confident, sporting a thin mustache, often wearing a white summer suit and smoking a cigar, Jimmie read law at the firm, but found time outside of studying to join the Houston Light Guards, a uniformed company of the state’s National Guard formed by Confederate veterans after Reconstruction that became a favorite sideline of the city’s emerging business elite. Jimmie rose to captain in the militia, and for the rest of his life he would go by Captain Baker, never mind that it was purely an honorific and he never served in a genuine military outfit.
Captain Baker, grandfather of the future secretary of state, was a lively presence in Houston and a savvy manager of people. He charmed ladies and was said to be a riveting storyteller and a nimble dancer. He loved hunting, fishing, hiking, and playing cards. In 1882, he met Alice Graham of Waco, Texas, one of four daughters in a family with its own Scottish roots. They married the following January, on his twenty-sixth birthday, and nine months later came their first son, Frank Graham Baker, born on Alice’s nineteenth birthday. They were later joined by a daughter, Alice Graham Baker, and a second son, James Addison Baker Jr. By this point, Captain Baker had dropped his own Junior and gave the title to his son, even though the boy was the third James A. Baker. Later in life that James Baker would name his son James III, even though he really was the fourth to hold that name. In years to come, the family would explain the confusing numerology by joking that they never could count.
By 1887, Captain Baker made partner at the family law firm, which marked the occasion by renaming itself Baker, Botts & Baker. But successful as he was, Captain Baker was still in his father’s shadow at work and at home, where he and his growing family lived with his parents in a Greek Revival–style house. Eventually they would move into their own home, a grand Victorian pile with a turret at 1416 Main Street, and have three more children, for a total of six. A decade after Captain Baker made partner and the firm became a family business in the true sense of the word, Judge Baker died, on February 23, 1897, at the age of seventy-five. The old frontier lawyer was buried back in Huntsville in the Oakwood Cemetery not far from where Sam Houston was laid to rest.
Turn-of-the-century Houston was Captain Baker’s time, and he would come to dominate the city and its fledgling institutions more than any Baker before or since. As he built what became known again as Baker & Botts and later just Baker Botts into a powerhouse, Captain Baker operated as far more than simply a lawyer. Over the years, he served as a partner, vice president, or president of everything from an electric utility to an oil company. The merger of two financial institutions in 1912 produced the South Texas Commercial National Bank, the second largest in Houston. Captain Baker served as its president or chairman from 1914 until his death twenty-seven years later.
Burly and formidable as he grew older, Captain Baker was a founder by nature and inclination. He helped create many of the institutions that still shape Houston today. When the Houston Country Club opened, Baker was on the board—same for its rival, the River Oaks Country Club. He was president of the Houston Bar Association, a founder of the Houston Gas Company, and an organizer of the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railway. Together with his wife, he helped establish the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
Alice Baker was a force of her own, a pillar of liberal causes inspired by the good works of Progressive-era activists such as Jane Addams in Chicago and her Settlement House movement. She raised money to build a new wing for the Houston Tubercular Hospital, personally pouring the first shovel of concrete in the foundation. Appalled by what she had heard about the poor living conditions for immigrants in the city’s booming, squalid Second Ward, she invited a dozen women to her house in February 1907. The Houston Settlement Association was born in the Bakers’ elegant living room that day and it soon opened a community center, organized English classes, established a clinic for babies, offered playground activities, and provided day care for working mothers. “Residents of every section of the city should have a fair chance at proper living conditions and moral surroundings,” she said.
AT THE FIRM, one of Captain Baker’s most important clients was William Marsh Rice, the richest man in Houston and a major patron of the city. Rice’s untimely death in September 1900 resulted in what newspapers at the time described as “America’s most remarkable murder case” and “one of the most remarkable trials in all history.” It would, in the end, redraw the map of Houston and reshape the history of the Baker family.
Rice was a transplant from Massachusetts who arrived in Texas “a penniless youth without resources, friends or even acquaintances,” as a historian put it. But Rice made a fortune in almost every trade conceivable, from ranching and railroads to timber and cotton. Although he relocated to New York, he made plans to use his wealth to create a school in Houston in his name, the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art. But when Rice’s wife died in 1896, she left a will that sought to give part of her husband’s property to her own family along with various churches and charities. Furious, Rice instructed Captain Baker to contest the will, arguing that as a New York resident, he was not subject to Texas law.
The dispute remained unresolved four years later when Rice himself suddenly died in his Madison Avenue apartment in New York at age eighty-four. Captain Baker received a telegram notifying him of the death—and then a second telegram from Rice’s bankers warning that his client had died “under very suspicious circumstances.” Baker leaped into action, arranging for New York authorities to prevent the body from being cremated and rushing north. Arriving in New York, he was met, oddly enough, by Albert Patrick, a lawyer who had been working on the other side of the legal battle over the will of Rice’s wife but who now claimed to be acting on the dead man’s behalf. Tall and balding with a red beard, the thirty-four-year-old Patrick contended that Rice had died after eating nine bananas, five baked and four raw. He asserted that before his death, Rice had soured on Captain Baker and had a new will drawn up leaving Patrick in charge of the bulk of the $8 million estate, or roughly $245 million in today’s dollars. If that were not dubious enough, the morning after Rice’s death, Patrick sought to cash four checks made out to him, signed “W.M. Rice” and dated the day before the mogul perished, totaling $250,000.
Captain Baker and New York authorities investigated and determined that the checks and the new will were forgeries. Baker along with a prosecutor interrogated Charlie Jones, Rice’s valet, who confessed that he had helped Albert poison the magnate—in other words, the butler did it. Authorities later concluded that a towel bathed in chloroform had been held over Rice’s face, leading to his death. Patrick’s trial in 1902 was a sensation, the longest on record in New York City to that date, covered breathlessly by local newspapers and followed across the country. Captain Baker sat in the courtroom, serving as the foil for Patrick’s defense attorney, who described the Texan as a “wily, astute and crafty lawyer” who manipulated “the weak individual Jones” against his client. The jury was unmoved and convicted Patrick of first-degree murder, leading to a death sentence.
But the verdict was not universally accepted. Nearly 3,500 doctors signed a petition questioning the medical evidence that Rice was poisoned. Other notables of the day, including former president Grover Cleveland and Mark Twain, signed a statement on Patrick’s behalf. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called the case a “gross miscarriage of justice.” With two former senators taking on his appeal, Patrick won a commutation from one New York governor, reducing his death sentence to life in prison, and a full pardon from a subsequent governor, who freed him outright. A law professor who examined the case nearly a century later concluded that Patrick was guilty of forging the checks and the will, but probably not the murder; the idea of chloroform may have been the power of Captain Baker’s suggestion to the butler.
However Rice had actually died, Baker had secured the estate from being stolen and he soon put it to work developing the Rice Institute. He doubled the endowment to nearly $10 million by the time the school formally opened in 1912 on the anniversary of Rice’s death, serving seventy-seven male and female students in a single building in western Houston. Baker served as chairman of the board of trustees, a post he would hold for more than fifty years. The institute was later renamed Rice University and it eventually grew into one of the premier institutions in Texas. Baker tended to it so assiduously that he sent his own gardener to campus to plant oak trees and then, when walking by the saplings, would urge them on: “Damn it, grow.” Rice may have given the school his name, but The Houston Post called Captain Baker “the foster father of Rice Institute.”
The Rice trust that Baker controlled was also perhaps the largest source of capital available to developers putting up office buildings in downtown Houston, financing the construction of a modern metropolis as well as whole neighborhoods of comfortable Arts and Crafts bungalows around the institute Baker was nurturing from the “barren wasteland,” as Rice’s first president, lured south from Princeton, put it. He was now a banker, a lawyer, and an urban visionary. “Baker and his friends literally helped build the city,” according to a book chronicling the history of Baker Botts.
By 1922, Captain Baker was ready for a grand home of his own too, one that would announce his place in the emerging city. He paid about $125,000, or just under $2 million in today’s dollars, to buy The Oaks, a seven-acre property blocks from downtown Houston where skyscrapers would eventually rise. The imposing estate on the corner of Baldwin and Hadley Streets was filled with tall oak trees and a rose garden that Alice Graham Baker tended with the help of a half dozen gardeners. The three-story, dark-red-brick home, designed by the Houston architectural firm of Sanguinet and Staats, had an impressive foyer, marble fireplaces, a billiards room, an extensive household staff, and a set of stables for the horses. It would be the family seat for years to come.
Baker loved surrounding himself with his large clan and everyone was expected for Sunday dinner at The Oaks in the dark wood-paneled dining room. In later years, the grandchildren were convinced ghosts lived there, a fear the old Captain would do little to allay when he promised them a nickel if they ran around the room in the dark. At home as well as work, he was a forbidding figure; when riled, Captain Baker “could turn quickly from the affable uncle to the stern patriarch,” as the firm’s history put it. Preston Moore, one of his grandchildren, recalled him as a strict, intimidating man. “He was a tough taskmaster,” he remembered. Another grandson, Addison Baker Duncan, said the Captain would “scare you to death.”
Captain Baker certainly had very definitive ideas about what was expected of a Baker and he was not hesitant to make his expectations for the family clear. One of his rules was to avoid politics, an antipathy he inherited from his father, Judge Baker. When The Houston Post profiled Captain Baker a few years before his death, he was asked his secret for success. “Work hard, study and apply yourself closely, stay on the job and keep out of politics,” he had said.
CAPTAIN BAKER KNEW exactly what he wanted for his sons—all the benefits of the first-rate Eastern education he had never received, then a return to Texas to take up the law in Houston as he and his father had done. In the fall of 1899, he sent his oldest son, Graham Baker, to the Hill School, a strict Presbyterian boarding academy outside Philadelphia that was beginning to attract the sons of the South’s newly wealthy postwar magnates. Baker chose it, according to family lore, because it was the best he could find without looking at New England, where Texans were wary of sending their children for fear that they would “lose their Southern connection,” as Duncan put it.
But in February 1902, in the midst of his senior year, Graham was struck by pneumonia. A telegram summoning the Captain and his wife found him in New York City, in the midst of the sensational trial over William Marsh Rice’s death, and the Bakers rushed to the train to make it to their son in time. They were at his bedside when he died three days later, a tragedy of the pre-antibiotics era that made front-page news back in Houston, where he was mourned as “the idolized treasure of a happy household.” When he died, Graham Baker was eighteen years old and set to go to Princeton University that fall.
Instead, his younger brother James Jr. would go east a few years later in his place, taking up all the burden of his father’s expectations. The fact that Captain Baker and his wife would send James Jr. to the Hill School despite the memories of loss spoke to how much they still venerated it. Years later, Captain Baker would extol the place as a model for “the efficiency of its teaching,” the strict “discipline,” and “particularly, the wonderful moral influence thrown about the student body.”
After graduating, James Jr. headed to Princeton University, another favorite of the Southern elite where many of the Hill School graduates went. Known to friends as “Bake,” the transplant from Houston assembled the sort of résumé that the family back home expected of him—vice president of his freshman class, president of his sophomore class, manager of the musical clubs, a member of the Cap and Gown Club, circulation manager of The Daily Princetonian. In sports, he was a star at both pole-vaulting and wrestling. His was to be the last real class of the prewar era, a group that would soon find its future in the trenches of the Western Front but spent its four years in Princeton in genteel partying of the sort that F. Scott Fitzgerald, just a couple of years behind Baker, would portray in This Side of Paradise, his novel about a social-climbing Princeton man from the hinterlands who wooed and lost a beautiful debutante.
During a visit home to Houston, Baker attended a high school dance where he met a debutante of his own named Bonner Means. The daughter of John Coalter Means, a “not particularly successful” businessman trading in timber, oil, and cotton, and his wife, Stella Bonner Means, Bonner was just fifteen when she came upon Baker, but she would always describe their chance encounter as love at first sight.
History, and the demands of Baker’s position as the family scion, would make it a long courtship. First, Baker put off the wedding to graduate from Princeton in 1915, after which he went, per the Captain’s orders, to the University of Texas at Austin law school. A long career at the family firm beckoned, but Baker graduated in 1917, soon after the United States entered World War I. The law would wait. In August 1917, James Jr. finally married his sweetheart at Houston’s Christ Church, then honeymooned not very romantically at The Oaks, the family estate, ten months before he shipped off to Europe as an Army lieutenant to fight the Germans. His father, domineering but proud, advised him in a letter sending him off to the bloodiest war yet known to mankind to pay attention to the “bearing and deportment of a young officer,” urging him to “wear a neat white collar and cuffs and see that your trousers and coat are well pressed, your shoes neat and tidy.”
A member of the Ninetieth Infantry Division, known as the “Pride of Every Texan,” James Jr. would see for himself the full horrors of the war, serving in the trenches of Verdun, where more than 700,000 were killed or wounded in an epochal battle earlier in the war. At one point, he later told his son, when troops under his command were reluctant to clear out an enemy bunker, he went in himself and captured three German soldiers with only a .45 caliber revolver. His cousin Alice Gray’s husband Albert wrote after returning home to describe running into Baker, “bedraggled with mud” and wearing a trench helmet, a dirty private’s uniform, and a pistol. A captain in the battalion told him that Baker had “covered himself in glory.”
His unit fought under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, an open hellscape of bombed fields and deafening artillery rounds, then, after a short break, returned for forty-five days straight in the trenches, from which Baker was the only officer in his unit to survive uninjured. By the time the war was over, he had been promoted to captain and earned a post as an aide to a general, an assignment he considered “a snap,” as he put it in a letter to his sister, after the ordeal at the front. “There’s nothing to do except stick around with him, drink Moselle wine, and ride in his six-cylinder car,” he wrote. It was lost on no one in the family that his father was called Captain Baker even though he never served in the actual military, while James Jr. was a real captain cited for his valor in combat.
Returning to Houston after the war, James Jr. bowed to the inevitable and joined his father’s law firm in 1919, becoming a partner in 1927. Although he wanted nothing more than to be a trial attorney, his father did not want him to focus on the courtroom. He pressed his son to devote time to business as he did; James Jr. was soon on bank boards and making the city grow, supervising the building of subdivisions and managing Baker Botts as it expanded from a collection of solo practitioners into more of a collective enterprise.
As Houston grew, so did the firm. The late-nineteenth-century arrival of the railroads had made the city, and the lawyers at Baker Botts who served them (“Houston: Where Seventeen Railroads Meet the Sea,” as the city’s boosterish slogan of the era had it). But in the early twentieth century, it was the discovery of oil transforming Texas, starting with the 1901 eruption of a great gusher in a well at Spindletop in the southeast corner of the state that sent oil a hundred feet into the air and would not be capped for nine days. Wildcatters flocked to the region and with them came a wave of new service, supply, and manufacturing businesses, not to mention the accompanying speculators, gamblers, and prostitutes. In effect, it was the Texas equivalent of California’s gold rush a half century earlier, “with rotary drill bits and derricks instead of pick axes and gold pans,” as the Texas State Historical Association put it. Within a few years, the first offshore drilling began and by the 1920s Texas was the largest oil-producing state in the nation. The discovery of a giant field in East Texas in 1930 followed by additional finds in West Texas later in the decade accelerated the state’s emergence as an energy powerhouse.
By that point, Houston had surged to a population of nearly 300,000 and become a national destination, the “Chicago of the South,” as the city’s promoters dubbed it. Now largely under James Jr.’s leadership, the firm expanded along with its hometown, serving newfound energy giants such as Texaco, Sinclair Oil, Atlantic Refining, Continental Oil, and Standard Oil. Captain Baker had a worthy heir in his son. “He was a central figure in the coming of age of both his law firm and his city,” as the firm’s history put it.
THE NEXT JAMES ADDISON BAKER, namesake of these formidable lawyers and the future secretary of state, was born a princeling of the newfound Houston aristocracy. For thirteen years, his parents had tried to have a baby without success, leading eventually to a train trip to Baltimore for his mother to have an unspecified “procedure.” Having almost given up, the Bakers took a trip to Hawaii, a long journey in those days. When they returned, Bonner Baker discovered she was pregnant.
As a boy, Jimmy spent Sunday dinners and Tuesday afternoons with his grandfather at The Oaks, surrounded by his flock of first cousins, five of whom were born within a few years of each other. When his mother needed food for dinner, she sent Jimmy with Beatrice Green, his nanny, to Jetts Grocery on nearby Montrose Boulevard, where they would order a chicken and the owner would go out back where he kept live birds, pick one out, wring its neck, and then pluck its feathers off.
Jimmy’s early years were a round of basketball and football and, especially, tennis. Each morning, Green woke him up and got him ready for school. Then after the last class, she took him over to the Houston Country Club. He started tennis lessons early and became addicted. “He is a very, very competitive person,” said Preston Moore, his cousin and best friend throughout childhood. Once while playing tennis, another young boy hit Jimmy in the hip with an errant ball. “He said, ‘Watch this,’ ” and sent one back across the net, giving the other boy a black eye, Moore recalled.
In Depression-era Houston, the initial impact of the nation’s economic collapse was tempered by the burgeoning oil business, but soon enough the advent of cotton compresses resulted in lower worker pay as crop prices fell. A wave of anti-immigrant sentiment washed over the city as white workers complained that Mexican migrants were taking their jobs. Texas was further ravaged by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the swirling windstorms and relentless droughts that eroded millions of acres of land and drove farmers out of business and toward the cities. When Houston’s two biggest banks teetered on the edge of collapse, the city’s leading businessman, Jesse Jones, stepped in to broker a deal to save them, bolstered by a 2 a.m. phone call he placed to Captain Baker. The captain’s support for the rescue plan “gave us real courage,” Jones said later, and brought the holdouts into the deal.
In his memoir, the future secretary of state never even mentioned the Depression, but he did remember how much his father and their friends hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration. Like many wealthy white Texans in that era, his parents were conservative Democrats who believed in limited government and low taxes, saw FDR as a class traitor and voted Republican at the national level. They hosted dinner parties serving pheasant under glass and assigned young Jimmy to memorize anti-Roosevelt poems, then had him come downstairs and recite for the guests. “They were all about WPA and the big government,” he recalled. His father’s philosophy was summed up in an interview he gave to a reporter in 1951 at the height of the Korean War. “Even if we win a military victory,” he said, “under our national policy we may lose the war and our individual freedom by undue regulation and by a bad fiscal and monetary policy of not balancing the national budget. The days of soak the rich are over. They have been soaked.”
In the home he had commissioned for his family in the new development he built near Rice Institute called Broadacres, James Baker Jr. had emerged as a figure every bit as formidable as the father who had dominated his own life. Jimmy remembered him as tough and inflexible, with “an austere demeanor.” His father, Jimmy said years later, “was a strict disciplinarian.” He set high expectations and insisted on his children living up to them—drilling into them the Five Ps mantra of prior preparation that would stick with his son for the rest of his life. “He was brought up in a demanding household,” said Preston Moore, his cousin. “They were stern disciplinarians.” Moore, as close as a brother to Jimmy, moved in with the family for a time after his own father died at the end of World War II; he and Jimmy went to bed at night together on the second-floor outdoor sleeping porch, a relic of those pre-air-conditioning days, falling asleep to the roar of the lions in the nearby zoo.
The senior Baker worked weekends, often bringing Jimmy into the Baker Botts office with him, and when his son finished a tennis match, he would make him stay on the court to keep practicing. The father did not shy away from corporal punishment, viewing it as a way to teach children to keep in line. If Jimmy did not wake up by 7 a.m. on a Saturday, his father would splash cold water on him. He would chastise Jimmy because his sister was doing better than he was in school. Jimmy’s friends “were a little bit afraid” of his dad, recalled one, Wallace Stedman Wilson. Together, they came up with a nickname for the old man: the Warden.
When a teenage Jimmy came home late one night with his friend Jimmy Bertron, he apologized for their tardiness, telling his father that they had had a flat tire. Suspicious, the father separated the boys, sending his son to the dining room and Bertron to the living room, then interrogated them separately to see if their stories matched, much like a prison boss might do with two inmates accused of stealing extra food.
When Jimmy was about fourteen or fifteen, he spent the night with a friend and they along with some other boys decided to have a little fun. They went out with a Benjamin pump air rifle and shot out some streetlights, only to be rounded up by police officers and taken to the local station. The officers called the boys’ parents and one by one they arrived to take their sons home. Not Jimmy’s dad. “He said, ‘Let him stay there for the night,’ ” Baker recalled decades later. “It didn’t surprise me. That’s the way he was.” Jimmy was the only one of the group to spend the night in jail. The Warden hoped to teach him a lesson.
HIS MOTHER WAS the protective one. As David Paton, a lifelong friend of Jimmy’s, put it, “The father was the person who was very much in command and Jimmy respected that. His mother was the melody to which he responded beautifully.”
Bonner Means Baker loved to read to Jimmy and was considered a witty storyteller; her son would inherit her facility for a good joke. Complimented years later on her skill at spinning a tale, she responded, “Darling, I had to be a good storyteller because we didn’t have movies or radio. We didn’t have anything and if you wanted a beau, you had to be able to—if you wanted to entertain friends, you had to really be able to tell a story.”
She was also the one Jimmy sought out for emotional support. He called her “Mamish” and thought of her as “doting” and “cuddly,” “warm” and “spirited.” Mamish would do almost anything to protect her children from what she saw as a hostile outside world, even if it meant unintentionally humiliating them in front of their schoolmates. Eight decades later, Baker would remember the indignity of the hot lunches she insisted on sending him at the Kinkaid School. Every day at midday he would have to go over to the side entrance of the school building to meet the family chauffeur to collect the black metal lunchbox of hot fried chicken, rice, and gravy that his mother had dispatched. There would be no bagged lunch like the other children. For a young boy trying to fit in, the whole exercise was mortifying. He dreaded it, but no matter how much he pleaded with his mother, she refused to stop. “It was demeaning,” he recalled, the memory still searing late in life. “It was so embarrassing.” Mamish, a perfectionist, had a strict sense of what she considered right and wrong and, especially, what was proper for the Bakers. She was, her son concluded, “sort of a Victorian.”
There were few other slights that stuck. Asked years later about the most traumatic experience of his childhood, Baker could only remember the time when he was playing with his black-and-white cocker spaniel, Gyp, and spotted an orange in the gutter. Jimmy tossed it for the dog to fetch, only to watch in horror as Gyp raced into the road and was run over right in front of him. “That just killed me,” he said later.
In the summer of 1941, when the grandson who would bear his name into the twenty-first century was just eleven years old, Captain Baker died at the age of eighty-four, having amassed a large estate and an even larger reputation. The funeral procession stretched two miles long as much of Houston turned out to pay respects. “Few men have had so much influence on Houston, its growth and development as had Captain Baker,” the Houston Chronicle wrote. “It would never have been the city it is without him.” Indeed, the Chronicle’s own headquarters was built with the help of financing from the Rice trust managed by Captain Baker. His “was no commonplace life,” noted a long tribute to him by the Philosophical Society of Texas, one of the many groups of which he had been an esteemed member. Captain Baker, it concluded, “was rarely endowed to make the most of the great transitions in which the old South became the new.”
A few months later, on December 7, 1941, Jimmy had just finished playing tennis at the River Oaks Country Club and was walking over to the main clubhouse when he overheard the radio in the caddy shack announce the news that Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor. He watched an uncle and cousin head off to the military, while his family planted a Victory Garden and limited their driving to ration gas.
Like much of the South before the war, the Texas that Baker grew up in was riven by bigotry, hatred, and organized violence against blacks. The state’s last recorded lynching took place in Texarkana in 1942, when Jimmy was twelve, the culmination of generations of Jim Crow repression. The only African Americans he knew, however, were on his family’s household staff—his nanny Beatrice Green and the nanny who came before her, Maybelle Cosby, plus the family chauffeur, Rufus Lockett, and the cook, Belle Jones, who fed them a steady diet of Southern home cooking, including delicacies such as pig’s feet that Baker’s father refused to eat. “It was segregated and that’s what he knew,” recalled Green, who remained close to the family well past her one-hundredth birthday.
Green said she never discussed race with Jimmy when he was growing up. “No one was talking politics,” she said. Preston Moore remembered riding a bus through the Southampton neighborhood not far from home one day when Jimmy was about twelve and discovering the rules of segregated seating when they unknowingly sat in the back. “The bus driver told us we couldn’t sit back there,” Moore said. But they stayed in their seats anyway. “That was the only political stand that I remember.”
Every summer during the war, Jimmy’s parents sent him off to camp and, in all the letters back and forth over the next four years that survived, not a single mention was made of the war or the latest from the front lines. The only reference was a passing mention of their Victory Garden and war shortages. “Of course, World War II was going on,” remembered Mike Kelley, another boy from the neighborhood who went to camp with Jimmy, “but we were in our early teens and weren’t terribly aware of that.”
During his summers away at Camp Rio Vista, Jimmy received regular reminders from his father about the man he was expected to be. “I hope you will try to get along with every boy in the Camp, no matter whether you like him at first or not,” his father wrote in the summer of 1941 when Jimmy was eleven. “I know you have been homesick a little of the time,” he added a few weeks later, “but that you are and will be too much of a man to show it or let this worry you to any extent.”
Jimmy got similar advice about the masculine requirements from his grandfather before he died. “I am very glad indeed to note the genuine interest each of you is taking in many of those games known as ‘Manly Sports,’ ” Captain Baker wrote Jimmy and his other grandsons. He urged them to get to know the names of the top baseball stars and leading players from other sports like tennis, football, and basketball. He sent each of them a $3 check to spend as they wished. “Please acknowledge receipt,” he added in lawyerly fashion, signing off, “With assurances of my abiding admiration and love for you, I am, now as always, Yours affectionately.” He signed “Grand-father” over a typewritten “James A. Baker.”
In 1944, even as American troops were landing at Normandy and liberating Europe, Jimmy spent part of the summer at the St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin. He saw the Mississippi River for the first time on the train ride up north. He learned combat training, unarmed defense, and jiujitsu as well as how to use .30 caliber machine guns, 60 mm mortars, and .50 caliber machine guns. He proudly sent home three targets he shot with a rifle at fifty yards, all in or near the bull’s-eye. By the end of camp, he weighed 124 pounds, a full fifteen pounds more than when he arrived.
He then headed west, riding a train by himself from Wisconsin all the way out to Wyoming, where his father had planned a grand adventure for them. They were headed into the backcountry near Yellowstone Park for nearly a month to hunt elk; Jimmy would even get to miss the first two weeks of school, an unheard-of dispensation from his father. Both Bakers already loved hunting and it was one thing they cherished doing together. His father had first taken Jimmy out shooting when he was only six years old. “His mother thought that was too early,” remembered Beatrice Green, “but he loved it.” Later, his father regularly drove him sixty miles west of Houston to the Eagle Lake Rod & Gun Club, where they spent early morning hours shooting ducks and dodging alligators that sometimes tried to take their birds. The club, founded in 1920 with his father and grandfather among the original members, was a bastion of Houston’s elite, its membership of bankers and oilmen and lawyers capped at sixty, with individual slots handed down from generation to generation. Jimmy’s mother hated it. After one too many predawn mornings and a particularly icy dunk in the lake when his father tipped over their boat, she refused to go any longer, telling James Jr., “You have a son now, take him.” The two went so often that one time when Jimmy was around twelve, his nearsighted father had him drive all the way down. Eventually, he got to know the lake so well he no longer needed the guides.
But even by Texas standards, this Wyoming trip would be a major undertaking. Neither James Jr. nor his teenage son had ever hunted big game. Before they left, Baker bought two .30 caliber hunting rifles, one for himself and one for Jimmy. The two Baker women, mother and daughter, were left behind at the Valley Ranch in Cody, Wyoming, while Jimmy and his father met up with the hunting party, a distinguished group that had been put together by the elder Baker’s Princeton roommate, William Spencer, and that included a general and the governor of Wyoming, Lester Hunt, who later became the inspiration for one of the main characters in Allen Drury’s classic political novel Advise and Consent. Jimmy was the only boy.
They rode twenty-six hours on horseback into the wilderness, stopping along the way in unspoiled mountain meadows filled with elk. They made camp on Open Creek near the headwaters of the Yellowstone and Jimmy and his father shared a tent. Every morning, after Jimmy’s father had taken his customary ice-cold dip in the stream as a substitute for the freezing showers he took at home, they rode out to hunt. Once, his father watched two big bulls fight—then shot the winner. “Boy, that wasn’t fair,” he told his dad. In the end, though, it was Jimmy who bagged an impressively large elk—the biggest of the whole hunt. The trip to the West, free from the constraints of their Houston life, solidified Jimmy’s relationship with his father, who was raising him in the Baker family tradition of rugged play matched by professional excellence.
Back at the Kinkaid School, the private coed academy where his father was chairman of the board, Jimmy played on the varsity basketball team and on a six-member football squad as backup quarterback. When he turned fourteen that year of the Wyoming adventure, his parents gave him a Cushman motor scooter so he could ride to school in the morning and then to the River Oaks Country Club in the afternoon to play tennis with a Russian pro, Andrew Jitkoff, with whom he grew so close that he was “like a second father to me.”
But Kinkaid could only take him so far. The Warden had bigger plans for him.