Jimmy Baker got off the train in Pennsylvania after a long ride from Texas in the fall of 1946. Following his father’s footsteps, Jimmy was arriving in Pottstown to spend his final two years before college at the Hill School, the elite boarding school that James Baker Jr. had attended after his brother Graham’s tragic death there at the turn of the century. A generation and two world wars later, not all that much had changed. The Hill, as it was known, was still strict, Presbyterian, all boys, and decidedly old-fashioned.
Jimmy was hardly a natural fit. “It was the first time I ever saw anybody in cowboy boots,” marveled his new roommate, William Barnabas McHenry, whose illustrious forebears went back to the Revolutionary War and, before that, to a castle in Ireland. Barney, as he was known, had never experienced anyone like Baker, who bragged of the elk he had shot in the wilds of Wyoming and was unsure of what to make of the spartan prep school. Yet Baker accommodated himself to his new surroundings, demonstrating an ability to shed his skin that would prove useful later in life. “He became un-Texan very quickly,” McHenry said. But when he went back home, “he became very Texan again. The accent returned.”
Founded in 1851, the Hill School boasted that it was the first school in the nation where the students lived on campus with faculty members. In the spirit of reconciliation, it had adopted both blue and gray as its colors after the Civil War. By the time Jimmy arrived, the legendary headmaster James I. Wendell, a silver-medal Olympic hurdler, had been in charge for years, fashioning the institution in his own image as a school that valued athleticism as well as scholarship. Baker found himself in a small campus in a small town. It was all white and all boys. The students wore coats and ties to class, and the main excitement of the year was the annual football contest against archrival Lawrenceville. “There was no friction,” McHenry said. “There were no girls. There was no protest—nothing to protest against.” Nothing much to do, either. The Hill had a heavily chaperoned dance in junior and senior years, but otherwise lights went out at 10 p.m. “Pottstown, Pennsylvania’s not exactly the center of the universe,” McHenry noted. “Where could you go? What could you do?”
Jimmy found himself lost at first. Life at the Hill was constricting. He was unhappy. Salvation came on the tennis court. By his second year, he was named captain of the team. He made friends, who predictably called him “Tex.” The student newspaper, the Hill School News, dubbed him “ ‘Smiling’ Jim” and even undertook to report on his love life. “Jim mused over the female situation for quite a while,” it said, “but came to the conclusion that his attentions were divided among many.”
He was not an academic star. The Hill required much more work than Kinkaid did. Jimmy struggled with French and was in danger of failing geometry. On a paper about Shakespeare, a teacher noted, “Your subject and at times your generalizations were so big that it is hard to find much of value here. Besides you had a tendency here to wander and to be wordy.”
Back home in Houston, from his desk at the firm, his father did not think much of Jimmy’s work ethic. “He is a fine boy with plenty of ability and, I am afraid, a strong lack of inclination to do any hard work except under pressure,” he wrote to one of Jimmy’s teachers. At times, his father had a hard time restraining himself. “I am sorry you thought my last letter was rough,” he wrote to his son. “It wasn’t nearly as rough as the letter I wrote you yesterday but did not send when your mother phoned me that she had finally received a reply from you. This will not be nearly as rough as I am afraid I am going to have to be if you don’t remove that French condition by maintaining a passing grade.”
Not content to leave the matter to his son’s haphazard academic record, the elder Baker began lobbying Princeton, his alma mater, more than a year in advance to admit the young man, while frankly acknowledging his shortcomings. “Jimmy has always passed without difficulty,” Baker wrote a Princeton official, “but so far has never made any particularly high grades.”
The son, grandson, and great-grandson of lawyers, Jimmy now set his sights on breaking out of the family pattern. He thought about becoming a doctor and spent a summer at St. Joseph’s Infirmary, Houston’s first hospital. His job was to hold the vomit tray and, if that were not enough to knock the romance out of medicine for him, he found himself horrified at the sight of blood. “For someone who likes to hunt,” he discovered, “I’m a little squeamish.”
So he applied to Princeton, once again heading down the path set for him by the Warden.
WHEN JIMMY BAKER ARRIVED at Princeton in the fall of 1948, one of the first things he did was to join a student organization with a provocative name—the Right Wing Club. This was no sign of his future politics. The club was so named because its members used their right arms to lift their beers, of which there was no shortage. “When I got to Princeton, I just went nuts having so much fun, I damn near flunked out,” he recalled years later. “The freedom was more than I could handle.”
For the first time in his life, Baker felt liberated. When Jimmy became a teenager, his father had offered him $1,000 if he would refrain from smoking or drinking until he was twenty-one years old, huge money in that era. But Jimmy turned it down. The Warden was not going to college with him.
Those early days at Princeton were wild ones. Baker was willing to do almost anything. When a fellow freshman who also loved to party feared that he was about to be drummed out of school, he roamed the dormitory halls begging anyone to break his fingers on the theory that the injury would give him an excuse to get out of final exams. Everyone said no—everyone, that is, except Jimmy Baker. As long as the other student really wanted him to do it, Baker was game. The other freshman put his hand on a wooden chair. “Obviously we were having a few pops,” Baker said. “I took a fire poker and went whack and I broke his fingers.”
Living on a $75-a-month allowance from his father, Baker spent the first half of his first year in Campbell Hall, rooming with three friends from the Hill School, David Paton, Barney McHenry, and James Detmer. Baker and his roommates were assigned a suite with two small bedrooms with a sitting room where Detmer kept an upright piano. Baker and Paton shared one of the bedrooms, Baker taking the bottom of a rickety bunk bed and Paton the top. “If he was out to party or whatever, he didn’t stand climbing to the second deck as well as I did,” Paton explained. Halfway through the year, a suite opened in 1879 Hall. The only dormitory on the east side of campus and once home to the office Woodrow Wilson used while university president, it was normally barred to freshmen. Baker and his friends were assigned a corner suite on the second floor. All four would remain there together for the next three years until Detmer left during senior year to join the military.
Arriving just three years after World War II, Baker’s cohort at Princeton saw itself as the “first normal post-war class.” With the draft now suspended, they were “anticipating an education and a future unmarred by the prospect of any immediate national or world crisis,” as the Nassau Herald yearbook put it. Theirs was the largest class in Princeton history and, while homogenous by later standards, it was more diverse than many of its predecessors, with the largest share of public high school students (37 percent) and the widest national distribution that the university had yet seen. The members of the Class of 1952 were abandoning some of the traditions that had shackled their prewar predecessors. Freshmen were supposed to wear black caps known as “dinks,” but a poll that fall found that only 20 percent of the class were obeying, despite the risk of retaliation from sophomores.
Still, it was a genetically conservative campus. The yearbook described President Harry Truman’s win in 1948 as “a somewhat upsetting presidential election.” The world had changed since the war, but Princeton had not done as much as other schools to change with it. There were no women among its students and it had been the last of the Ivy League schools to admit African Americans. Indeed, Princeton had only graduated its first black students the year before Baker arrived, more than three quarters of a century after Harvard and Yale did, and it still had no African Americans on its faculty. The school had also tried to limit Jewish admissions. Nearly one out of every five members of the incoming class was, like Baker, the son of a Princeton alumnus and more than half were either Presbyterian, as Baker was then, or Episcopalian, as he would become later in life.
Princeton did not seem as foreign to Baker as might have been expected. Of all the Ivy League schools, Princeton was considered the most Southern. There were twenty Houstonians in the Class of 1952 along with Baker. His father and other relatives had gone there. He may have been called Tex by the Easterners from time to time but, with his ready stock of jokes, sharp tongue, and prep school background, they did not pick on him, and the nickname that stuck was “Bake,” the same name his friend George H. W. Bush would prefer to call him years later. Bake quickly became co-captain of the freshman tennis team and a popular fixture on campus. “Princeton was known as the elite school,” recalled Frank Carlucci, a classmate who went on to serve as secretary of defense in the Bush cabinet with Baker. “He moved easily in those circles. A good cultural background and first-rate mind.”
Yet Baker did not use his first-rate mind to much advantage with his professors. In his first semester, he took the basics—English, French, history, geology, and politics—and his grades proved uninspired. His average for the first term was a middling 3.88 on a seven-point scale in which a one was the best. Baker did not worry about it too much. “There wasn’t an awful lot of talk about academics, at least not in our group anyway,” said Barney McHenry.
The future secretary of the treasury scored a meager 5-plus in economics. “I am greatly disappointed that you have flunked an important economics exam,” his father wrote him. “There is no reason why, with proper application, you should flunk any of them. If I were you, I would not make any trips away from Princeton, except for tennis, until you are through with your examinations this June.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1949, Baker’s parents got him a job with an oil driller in East Texas run by his mother’s brother, Coalter Means, a wildcatter in every sense of the term. His uncle was known as Uncle To in the family ever since a younger brother had been unable to pronounce his real name. On the rig, he was known as Drill Stem. He was brash and lived a fast life and “didn’t pay much attention to the law,” as Baker remembered later. He drove a Cadillac, racing it around Texas. When he got pulled over for speeding and taken to a local courthouse, he would peel off large bills to pay his fine on the spot. The opposite of the Warden in so many ways, he considered Jimmy the son he never had.
For a young Princeton student, summer on the oil rig in the tiny town of Woodville, about a hundred miles northeast of Houston, was a radical break. From early in the morning until sunset, he worked as a roustabout, helping the roughnecks man the pipes and drills. Newcomers like him, called boll weevils, underwent an initiation, and he was no different just because he was the boss’s nephew. The first job the roughnecks gave him was bailing out the rat hole, where the next piece of drill pipe was stored. With all the drilling mud, the rat hole collected liquid. The roughnecks gave Jimmy a little can tied to a string and had him drop it down into the hole and pull it out repeatedly as the water filled in whatever he took out. “It took me about a couple hours to catch on,” Baker recalled years later.
Fortunately for him, a welder nicknamed Smooth took him under his wing. When Jimmy did get into a minor altercation with another worker, Smooth backed him up. “Jimmy, you tell old John that Smooth said to take a flying leap at his ass,” he instructed.
The days were hot and sweaty. Every morning Jimmy brought a black lunch kit lined with wax paper and ate the same thing the others did—cold rice and gravy with a big white onion washed down with plenty of coffee. At the end of the day, exhausted and drained by the heat, he retired with the other workers to a boardinghouse, where they drank a cold beer, ate a little supper, and collapsed into bed. He netted about $10 a day.
His parents were a little shocked by his appearance when they visited but satisfied that he was learning the value of real work. “I have thought of you constantly since we left you at the oil well,” his mother wrote after returning home. “It is with a great deal of love and pride that I recall your face—so covered with black grease and red clay that only the whites of your eyes were visible.” His father wrote separately: “We both feel that you have been very courageous to take your present job and that, while the experience is hard, it will be of great benefit and you will never regret it.”
Baker would later say that summer matured him more than any other experience to that point. Not all of the lessons he learned would earn his parents’ approval. Once, he brought home a friend from the rig and set him up on a date, only finding out later that the friend was married. Bonner Baker was not happy when she heard about it, to say the least.
RETURNING TO PRINCETON for sophomore year, Baker and his three roommates reunited. Beer was their staple on Saturday nights followed by a milk punch concoction on Sunday mornings. It was hardly the Jazz Age, but the boys reveled in what they took to be Gatsbyesque levels of dissipation. “Scott Fitzgerald was our hero,” Barney McHenry said. The roommates took the train to New York on weekends for still more partying, or sometimes McHenry drove them in the black Chevrolet he kept against school rules and named FitzRandolph after the wrought-iron FitzRandolph Gate that served as the university’s official entrance on Nassau Street. Once, the police stopped Baker and some friends hitchhiking to Trenton. “They picked us up and took us to the Princeton jail, which was almost a colonial-times-type jail,” Baker said. “It was a real dump and I had to spend the night.” This time, his father could not come to bail him out even if he had wanted to.
The social whirl in New York—balls, coming-out parties, and the like—exposed Baker to a different world, one where, as he put it scornfully, some families dressed in tuxedoes for dinner at home. For a tobacco-chewing Texan, even a wealthy one, it was more than a little alien. The tycoons of Long Island were not at all impressed with his family name and did not care a bit about his position back home. They had never heard of Captain Baker or even been to Houston for that matter. “I’ve really been cruising with some of the ‘upper crust,’ and some of the homes (estates) would put The Oaks to shame,” he wrote home to his parents. “The only really good thing I can say for it all is that at least I’m learning how to act at terrifically formal dinners and dances. The people, though, at these affairs are all so stuffy, social-minded and supercilious that they make me think about home and how friendly people are, and I wouldn’t switch ways of life with any of them. Some of the people, of course, are very nice, but I can’t help thinking how lucky I am to live the life I lead. Nothing like us good ole upper middles!”
On campus, Baker spent time not devoted to partying on sports. As much as he liked tennis, Baker dropped off the team in sophomore year, in part because of the stiff competition and in part to take up rugby, which held particular appeal because the team went to Bermuda for spring break. While on the island in the spring of 1950, Baker went to a party on the beach, where he met Mary Stuart McHenry, the daughter of an insurance salesman from Dayton, Ohio, who was studying at Finch College, a small finishing school on the Upper East Side in New York City. No relation to his McHenry roommate, she was eighteen, attractive, and full of life. They kissed on the beach. Baker fell hard.
“I’ve got the screaming A-Bomb hots for you,” Baker wrote to her from Princeton as soon as he returned. A few weeks later, he switched his nuclear-era vernacular to make the same point. “Mary Stuart, I’ve known I had a bad case of the H-bombs for you for quite a while, but tonight I found out just how bad a case—and it’s much worse than I suspected before,” he wrote. “I just kept wishing that you were here; all night I wished.” After adding, “I’m mad for you,” he stopped and looked at what he wrote. “I just reread this and it doesn’t quite live up to our motto of ‘Don’t Get Serious,’ but I don’t guess you can change the way things are—at least I can’t. All love to you, Jimmy.”
By chance, Mary Stuart’s roommate at Finch was Patricia Honea Schutts, a cousin of Baker’s. “She was absolutely crazy and devoted to Jimmy from day one,” Schutts recalled. Mary Stuart soon was taking the train down to campus from New York for long weekends. “It was just a wonderful love affair,” David Paton, Baker’s roommate, remembered. “She was this very simple, pretty, unaffected, cheerful girl who just adored him, and I think that simplicity and that uncomplicated love was something that was just unusual for him. He’d been dating people in the Houston area for years—and often pretty girls with fast snaps and probably more educated than Mary Stuart, at least reflected that education more. She had just a certain simplicity, charming and real. She was very real.”
Princeton, then and later, was a tribal environment and the end of sophomore year was the time to apply to the selective eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, known as “The Street,” in an admission process called “Bicker.” The seventeen eating clubs delineated campus pecking order and dominated social life. They later served as a lifelong professional network. Applicants were subjected to a grueling series of ten interviews, judged not just on their own merits but on family stature and the friends they hung out with; for some, the process was validation, for others, a humiliation.
The class that rebelled against the dinks decided to do the same against Bicker. The vast majority of sophomores Baker’s year signed a petition declaring that every member of the class should receive at least one offer from an eating club. No one was to be left behind. “We argued that if a classmate was good enough to be admitted to Princeton, he should be good enough for its eating clubs,” said Don Oberdorfer, a classmate who would later cover Baker as a diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post. The clubs resisted and, seeking compromise, the school administration proposed creating an eighteenth nonselective club that would take the rejects. The sophomores dismissed the idea and, when the clubs defied them by passing over twenty-six applicants, the rest of the class stood firm until places were eventually found for all of them—the first time that would happen in school history, effectively ending the practice of excluding some students. The Daily Princetonian student newspaper trumpeted the victory with a banner headline larger than any in its seventy-five-year history to that point: “ALL SOPHS GET BIDS!”
There is little record of Baker being a leader in this effort, but he and his friends made a similar stand of their own. Along with David Paton and about a half dozen friends, Baker formed what was called an “ironbound,” meaning that if a club wanted to sign up any single member of the group, it would have to take them all. It worked. Baker and his friends received an offer early in the process from the Ivy Club, the oldest and most patrician of the eating clubs, once described by Scott Fitzgerald as “detached and breathlessly aristocratic.” Not bad for a Texas kid from the good ole upper middles. “Ivy was the snobbish club,” said Richard Riordan, a transfer student who later in life became mayor of Los Angeles, “although I would have gladly accepted it had they offered it to me.” Still, Riordan knew Baker and thought he was no snob. “He treated everyone equally, the big shots and the little shots.”
THAT SUMMER OF 1950, as Baker spent another couple months as a rough-edged Texas roustabout, the “unmarred future” that his Princeton class had looked forward to was shattered when the United States found itself back at war. The Stalinist government of North Korea, a Communist enclave that had emerged after the Japanese occupiers were pushed out at the end of World War II, had invaded South Korea and President Truman sent American troops to defend its ally as part of a United Nations force. They would not be “normal postwar” graduates after all.
The nuclear era was no longer the abstraction it had seemed when Baker was writing his first love letters to Mary Stuart McHenry and listening to Princeton’s most famous resident, Albert Einstein, lecture on world peace with his “long uncombed gray hair” and clothes “like a tramp,” as Baker wrote home. The draft was soon reinstated and while college students were supposed to be exempt for the next year, many Princeton students feared what was to come as they returned to campus that fall of Baker’s junior year. “Everybody had to scurry around because you wanted to get a safe harbor,” said Barney McHenry. “At least you wanted to graduate, anyway.”
By Christmas, Baker was anxious. It seemed that all of his friends had already received their draft classifications, while he was still waiting. A couple of them had been called up by the Marines. Back home in Houston for the holiday, he went to the local draft board to find his classification. “They told me it had been sent to Princeton the day I left and that I’m 1-A!” he wrote Mary Stuart, referring to the most eligible category. “That was quite a shock ’cause I was hoping for a 2-A,” he continued, “but they said that they’re having to change 2-A’s to 1-A now ’cause they’ve got to take so many men. Now if I want to get in something beside the infantry I’ll have to enlist before I get my physical notice which I’ll get in either Feb or March. My one out it seems might be the Army Air Force. They might let me finish school this year but I don’t know.”
As nervous as everyone was, there were no protests against the war. “Nobody questioned it,” Riordan said. It was a time of rising tension, from the Communist takeover of China to the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the atom bomb to the advent of McCarthyism, but the Princeton students remained in their bubble, where the intense focus was on a campaign to end mandatory Sunday chapel attendance. “In Princeton, the number one characteristic of the year was a remarkable normalcy,” The Daily Princetonian editorialized in June 1951.
Baker remained socially prolific. He became president of the 21 Club, another drinking organization. “The efforts of Jim Baker and an all Junior ’21’ Club kept party spirit alive throughout the Fall,” the yearbook reported. Baker, a history major by now, also finally buckled down in academics, and even earned a top grade of 1 in a history class, the only one he would receive in all four years at Princeton. He took an interest in Russia, which until then he knew about mainly from his tennis pro back in Houston whose family had been run out of the country by the Bolshevik Revolution. Inspired by Professor Cyril Black, who had spent part of World War II as a State Department officer and eventually was part of a delegation to the Soviet Union, Baker decided to write his junior paper on the brief transitional government of Alexander Kerensky. After the war, Black introduced Russian history to the Princeton curriculum for the first time and Baker found it riveting. Black was certain that the two Cold War adversaries would eventually get over their animosity.
For his senior thesis, Baker made a point of seeking out Professor Walter Hall, who had been his father’s thesis adviser four decades earlier. Once described as “probably the most popular teacher of Princeton undergraduates in the first half of this century,” Hall was known for his fancy vests and knickerbockers, an ever-present pipe, and an unorthodox teaching style. He sometimes stood on his desk during a lecture and once taught a class in his underwear. By the point when Baker studied with him, Hall was in his last year of teaching and dependent on hearing aids that made a constant buzzing sound, so everyone called him Buzzer.
Baker picked a topic that would prove meaningful in shaping his views of politics and diplomacy, the conflict between two towering figures of Britain’s Labour Party: Aneurin Bevan, who had just stepped down as health minister after helping to launch the National Health Service, and Ernest Bevin, who had just resigned as foreign secretary after working with the Americans to form institutions of the Cold War such as NATO.
The paper was a challenge he dreaded. “Things look darker around here with every passing day,” he told Mary Stuart in January 1952. “Right now I plan to get pitifully drunk on the Saturday night of my last exam, spend Sunday recuperating, and put in 8 days—starting Monday—on my thesis.” He planted himself in a green carrel in Firestone Library and got to work. The resulting 150-page paper, titled “Two Sides of the Conflict: Bevin vs. Bevan,” was largely a straightforward history of the clash between Bevin, a Bristol truck driver who had risen through the trade unions to become labor minister in Winston Churchill’s wartime unity government and foreign secretary under Clement Attlee, and Bevan, an ardent socialist who represented the left wing in Parliament.
Reading between the lines, the paper could be seen as a road map of the fundamental tension that would define Baker’s own time on the public stage. He described Bevin as a pragmatist and “expert negotiator” who was accused of sacrificing the values of the party and as a result developed “a genuine dislike of these dreamers,” as Baker put it. “In spite of all the socialist activity and trade union agitation that was going on around him,” he wrote, “Bevin never became lost in the idealistic. He was always very practical.” In words that could have described himself later in life, Baker added: “Bevin was not interested in theories, but in practicalities. He knew that when men were unemployed they wanted bread and work, not an oration on the coming revolution. Bevin believed in solving the problems of the present before tackling the problems of the future. The solution of the immediate difficulty outweighed consideration of the long-term goal.” By contrast, the Bevan wing with its emphasis on purity and push for a broader welfare state struck Baker as impractical in the extreme as the West faced the larger existential crisis of the Cold War. “One is left with the impression that these left-wingers resolve a planetary crisis by a discussion on the advantages of free false teeth,” he wrote dismissively.
Baker graduated on June 17, 1952, after spending much of his final months at Princeton trying to figure out how to avoid getting drafted to serve in the Korean War. Eventually, rather than wait for the draft, Baker decided to sign up, which would give him more choice in where he would be deployed. An inner ear problem kept him out of the Navy and Air Force and an interview with a Central Intelligence Agency recruiter during a campus visit did not go well.
“One of the questions they asked me was would you have any problems jumping out of an airplane with a parachute behind enemy lines?” he remembered.
The answer was a definite yes. “I said, ‘This interview is over.’ ” So he opted for the Marine Corps.
BAKER ARRIVED at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, that August. Afraid that being known as James A. Baker III would seem “sissified” among the tough young men surrounding him, he put down his name as James A. Baker Jr., as if that would solve the problem.
He had spent the two previous summers while still an undergraduate in Marine camps, the first in San Diego, where he made good enough marks that he was chosen as the bearer of the guidon, the unit pennant, until he mouthed off to a drill instructor and was sent back into the ranks. “I get a little big for my britches and they take it away from me and taught me a lesson,” Baker said.
Commissioned as a junior officer at Quantico, he spent the next five months in basic training. His hunting experience made him a good rifle shot. “Did an excellent job in carrying the good orders he gave for a nite attack,” his captain wrote on an evaluation. “The weather was unfavorable for a nite attack, but Lt. Baker led his squad to within 10 yards of the enemy and was not discovered until he gave the order to assault the position.”
At the end of the course, Baker was told he would be sent into the infantry as a platoon leader, but being in charge of forty-four men seemed distinctly unappealing. Instead, he asked to become an naval gunfire spotter. It could be a dangerous job—spotters were often in the first wave of an amphibious landing—but intended or not, the assignment got him out of the Korean War. Of the sixty members of his basic training class who signed up for artillery, fifty-nine were sent to Fort Sill in Oklahoma and from there to Korea. Some of them never made it home. Baker, the sixtieth member of the class, was dispatched to the naval gunfire school at Little Creek, Virginia, and then assigned to the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune before being deployed to the USS Monrovia, a troop transport patrolling the Mediterranean Sea. “I fought the Korean War on the French Riviera,” Baker became fond of saying later in life.
Before shipping out, Baker and Mary Stuart had a few days together in Washington. Walking down the street in his uniform in January 1953, Baker was stopped by a stranger who thanked him for his service and offered tickets to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration the next day. The young couple watched as the famed general was sworn in and warned in his inaugural address about a worldwide “time of tempest.” They found themselves in seats for the inaugural parade within sight of the White House as the new president and first lady waved to massive crowds from a white Cadillac with the top down on an unexpectedly sunny day. It was the closest Baker had ever been to the executive mansion.
His ship set sail three months later at 10 a.m. on April 22 and while it was nowhere near a war zone, life on the Monrovia had physical hazards all its own for a young man who grew queasy on boats and airplanes. “I was sick the entire time,” he remembered. Baker shared a single compartment with a dozen other officers, each of them taking turns with two washbasins and one shower—which was better, at least, than the enlisted men had it, stacked like cordwood in the lower holds. “But I can see where this looking out and seeing nothing but sea and other ships for 2 or 3 weeks at a time will get very boring,” he wrote to his parents.
Baker’s assignment was to work with NATO forces. During a training exercise, he was assigned to adjust fire from a Turkish destroyer and a Greek destroyer, only to find himself unable to communicate with either since no one spoke English. “It was a disaster,” he said, an inauspicious debut in international diplomacy.
He spent nearly a week on the Greek island of Zante as part of a relief operation after a deadly earthquake. The island was “shattered, split wide open and sowed with death” by waves “like those which Homer described overtaking the Ionian king, Ulysses, on his way home to ancient Ithaca,” reported Life magazine, which had a photographer accompanying the Marines. Baker and the others delivered food, water, and tents, set up aid stations, inoculated survivors against typhus and typhoid, repaired roads and a power plant, and, most haunting of all, burned or buried hundreds of bodies. For a young man from a sheltered background, the experience was searing. “I don’t think the devastation could have been much worse if it had been caused by an atomic bomb,” Baker told his parents.
Still, Baker’s ship managed to stop in some of the most picturesque places in the Mediterranean and the Marines were allowed to explore as long as they were back on board by 2 a.m. After Zante, he found himself in Naples, where he took three days of liberty to see his parents, who traveled to meet him there. “It bolstered my sagging spirits considerably,” he told them later. He did not get to see Mary Stuart, but the two had gotten engaged at a posh New York hotel before the Marine deployment. In Florence, he bought silver ashtrays at $10 each as gifts for his ushers at the upcoming wedding, proud of negotiating a 10 percent discount.
By the time his Mediterranean tour was over, so was the Korean War. Like many young men of his generation, Baker had not questioned the wisdom of the American intervention in Korea. He had spent little time thinking about the geopolitical logic behind investing American lives in a grinding conflict in Asia that risked escalation with the Soviet Union or China. To the extent he thought about it at all in those terms, he considered Korea a necessary front in the Cold War, part of a broader mission to contain the spread of Communism, and he shared the sentiment that, as he put it, “these sorry bastard Chinese were screwing us around.”
After returning from the Mediterranean, Baker headed to Ohio, to marry Mary Stuart. The ceremony was held on November 7, 1953, at Dayton’s Christ Episcopal Church. It was not a modest affair. Mary Stuart wore a gown of ivory satin and a full-length veil of Point de Rose lace arranged in mantilla fashion, while carrying a bouquet of lilies. Baker wore a morning suit. She had nine bridesmaids. He had ten groomsmen, including David Paton as his best man. She was twenty-two; he was twenty-three. Afterward, the newlyweds honeymooned in Bermuda, where he had first caught the screaming A-bomb hots for the young woman from Finch College.
ONCE AGAIN, Baker’s father would be the driving force in determining what came next. Uninterested in staying in the military, Baker began considering law school. His father had always told him that he did not have to become a lawyer just because everyone else in his family with the same name had, but it was clear the elder Baker thought it was the course that the fourth James Addison Baker should pursue.
The Warden got his way. Baker, while maintaining he was not sure he would practice law once he got out, prepared his applications. With a Princeton degree, he might have set his sights on Harvard Law School or one of the other top national schools. But that was not the path his father had chosen for him. Baker was told to apply instead to his father’s alma mater, the University of Texas School of Law. The elder Baker argued that it would be better to learn in the state where he would practice and make contacts that would serve him well in the working world. A compliant Baker arrived at the Austin campus in the fall of 1954.
But it was not enough to go to the same law school his father had—the Warden insisted that his son pledge the same fraternity too. Never mind that Baker was now twenty-four years old and married with a baby on the way and two years of the Marine Corps under his belt. He signed up for Phi Delta Theta as ordered and gamely endured hazing rituals administered by undergraduates. “I did it for my dad and I went through hell,” he said years later. “I had these young kids that were five and six years younger than I was telling me, ‘Sit on that ice block in burlap,’ and they would drop raw eggs down my throat. I did all that for my dad. He wanted me to do it.”
In the midst of this, Mary Stuart gave birth to their first son, James Addison Baker IV, on October 9. They called him Jamie. Two years later, another boy came along, Stuart McHenry Baker, whom they called Mike. Baker’s father gave him an allowance of $90 a month, which together with $160 from the G.I. Bill was hardly enough to care for a family of three, much less four. “But he was smart enough to know that that kept me focused on the job at hand and it did,” Baker recalled. “I saw so many of my contemporaries who grew up with me under the same circumstances, good opportunities and never lacking anything—they were ruined by having too much money too soon.”
This time, Jimmy bore down on his classes, diligently writing out long, detailed briefs about the cases they studied each night. He was put to the test right from the start. During the first week or so of his property class, the professor picked Baker out of a large class.
“Mr. Baker, Mr. James Addison Baker the Third,” the professor called out. “Would you give us the case of Ghen vs. Rich?”
Baker was as nervous as he had ever been, but he stood up and managed to recount the details of an 1881 case about who owned a harpooned finback whale that washed up on a Massachusetts beach, the whaler who killed it or the owner of the land where it ended up. (The court sided with the whaler.)
As he headed toward graduation in 1957, near the top 10 percent of his class, Baker had assumed he would go to work at the family firm. The problem was that Baker Botts now had an anti-nepotism policy, meaning that relatives of its current partners and employees were not supposed to be hired. Baker’s father thought he could finesse that. “You got good grades and your name is James A. Baker,” he told his son.
But his father came home that night with bad news. The firm had rejected his request for an exception to the nepotism policy. Baker was crushed. “Everything I had ever known in my life was Baker Botts and it had always been held up to me as the firm,” the younger Baker later reflected. It would be years before he realized that the rejection was a blessing in disguise. Had he succeeded, everyone would have assumed it was because of his name, and if he had failed, everyone would have tut-tutted that he had nothing going for him but his lineage.
For the moment, however, all he knew was that he had disappointed his father. “I was devastated,” he said, “absolutely devastated.”