He was, of course, lost without her, alone with four sons and a new home designed by the wife who would never move in to it. The boys had never seen him cry before. But now they did. When his partners at the law firm offered him a bigger office, he turned it down, unable to muster much interest in the work he had done his whole adult life. “He would go to the window and stand and just stare out of the window,” remembered Beatrice Green, his childhood nanny who was still working for his mother. At thirty-nine years old, nothing seemed to make sense anymore.
In a daze, Baker turned to two friends to get him through the funeral and reception and all the details that consume the days after the death of a spouse. “In line with our telephone conversation of this morning, I have agreed to let you and Fran Lummis run my life until I decide to fire you, and you have likewise agreed to fire me should you have the inclination,” he wrote Dossy Allday a week after Mary Stuart’s death. “I am still swamped trying to clear up my personal affairs, get the kids into a routine, etc.,” he wrote his mother a week later.
Few understood what Baker was going through more viscerally than his friend George Bush. The loss of his own three-year-old daughter, Robin, to leukemia had just about destroyed him. He had dealt with it by throwing himself into business. Baker, he decided, needed to do the same.
In this case, the business would be politics. If Baker would not run for Bush’s soon-to-be-vacated House seat, then he should help his friend with his campaign for the Senate.
“Bake, you need to take your mind off your grief,” Bush told him. “Help me run for the Senate.”
“George, that’s great, but there are two things,” he replied. “Number one, I don’t know anything about politics. And number two, I’m a Democrat.”
“Well, we can take care of that latter problem,” Bush replied.
Baker agreed to serve as chairman for Bush’s campaign in Harris County, the sprawling jurisdiction that included the city of Houston. Bush was once again angling for the seat of Ralph Yarborough, who beat him in 1964 and had since become a leader of the antiwar left. With Richard Nixon now in the White House and seeking to consolidate the gains that his so-called Southern Strategy had made for Republicans in the once monolithically Democratic South, Bush had the promise of more help from the national party this time around and anticipated a classic left-right matchup in one of the most conservative states in the nation.
What Bush did not expect was to lose Yarborough as an opponent. In the Democratic primary, the incumbent was beaten by Lloyd Bentsen, a former three-term congressman who was far more conservative than Yarborough. Suddenly, Bush’s entire campaign strategy had been rendered inoperative. Instead of running against a firebrand liberal, he now faced a centrist of roughly similar temperament and ideology who carried none of Bush’s New England outsider baggage. Bentsen, like Bush, had served as a pilot in World War II and, like Bush, was shot down—in his case, twice. Raised on a ranch, he had married a fashion model and after six years in the House started an insurance business that made him a small fortune. Bentsen was as Texas as they came, with a patrician bearing, a deep baritone voice, and an unmistakably Lone Star drawl.
As Baker dived into his campaign duties for Bush, what engaged him was the competition rather than any struggle of ideas. He had no grand views about policy or politics. He was a conservative but hardly an activist. Given a choice between a safer, more cautious solution to a problem and a bolder, more radical one, he would opt for restraint. In a gauzy sort of way, he thought government should be limited and taxes should be low, just as many Texans did, but that did not translate into a sweeping belief system. If Bush was not especially strong on what he would eventually call “the vision thing,” neither was his friend. They seemed more like products of Eisenhower’s optimistic America than Nixon’s divided, angry nation. When it came to politics, Baker approached it like an engineer, not an architect.
A myth would develop that Baker turned to politics because of Mary Stuart’s death. But, tired of his legal work, he had already been exploring the race for Bush’s House seat before that. His family tragedy did not propel him into politics; it delayed his entry. Now the Bush campaign provided a welcome escape from the misery at home. In addition to mourning his wife, Baker was grappling with his father’s deteriorating health. And his sister Bonner had become increasingly ill herself. A talented painter and writer who had excelled at Smith College, Bonner at some point during her years on campus suffered what was later described as a nervous breakdown. After recovering enough to graduate with honors, she married Donald Moffitt, a reporter for The Houston Post, yet continued to experience what were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic episodes. Shortly after Mary Stuart’s death, Bonner and Donald divorced. The accumulation of family struggles wore on Baker.
“Jimmy, dear, it just doesn’t seem possible that one person should have to shoulder so much tragedy,” one friend wrote him. “I guess we none of us know and appreciate when we are really well off.”
Baker moved his family into the new house a couple months after Mary Stuart died and sought to make life as normal as possible. But he found little sustained help. One housekeeper after another quit, adding to the upheaval. Baker did not open up to his sons or to his friends. He plopped down in his chair after work and drank a few more martinis than he used to. “If I was ever going to become an alcoholic, that’s when I would have done it,” he reflected later. He often visited Mary Stuart’s grave. Once he took an out-of-town friend to the cemetery, only to discover that the gate had been locked while they were inside. By chance, they found a hacksaw and cut their way out.
Baker knew his reticence had a cost, and, left alone at night with his grieving boys, he relived his actions from those days of crisis. He felt guilty and defensive. Shortly after her death, Baker tried to explain to Mary Stuart’s parents in a letter why he had not told them how grim her condition really was:
I hope you don’t feel that my lack of candor with you concerning Mary Stuart’s illness was the wrong approach. As I have said before, my primary concern was that she enjoy whatever time she had, that she have peace of mind, and not have to live under the dreadful cloud that she would have had she known the truth. It was for this reason that I did not discuss with a single person the serious nature of her illness. I was terribly afraid that if I did she might be able to read it in their expressions, attitudes, etc. I believe and hope that it was the right decision and take comfort from the fact that her letter to me indicates that it was.
BAKER THREW HIMSELF into the Senate race, learning the basics of fundraising, policy positions, scheduling, and voter turnout. It was an education for a rookie operative. He proved a quick study.
Predictably enough, Bush found it hard to gain traction against the courtly Lloyd Bentsen. “Bush and Bentsen seemed so alike they could easily have passed for close relations, right down to mutual memberships in the River Oaks Country Club,” Texas Monthly observed. “Both candidates presented themselves to the public as Christian family men who took long walks in the park with their children and dogs, and helped their wives with the dishes.”
With registered Republicans still far outnumbered in Texas, Bush labored to present an alternative compelling enough to peel off Democrats. Indeed, Bentsen ran slightly to the right of Bush, chiding him over votes for gun control and fair housing, while retaining the Democrats’ traditional support among minorities and liberals. A last-minute infusion of cash from Nixon’s political operation did not help and neither did Bush’s vague program, summed up in his slogan that year: “I can do more for Texas.” On Election Day in November 1970, Bentsen prevailed with 53 percent of the vote; with 47 percent, Bush had fared somewhat better than he did in 1964 but still fell short.
A bright spot was his home district of Harris County, which he carried with 60 percent, thanks in part to Baker’s help. Baker was disappointed for his friend. “I truly don’t know what George’s plans are right now, but I would not be surprised to see him take a position in the Executive Branch,” he told his in-laws.
For his part, Bush saw elective office in Baker’s future. “Right now I can’t decide whether to head up the Baker for Mayor Committee or the Baker for Congress Committee,” Bush wrote him shortly after the election. “I do hope that you will consider running for something someday. You’d be a great candidate and an even greater public servant.”
Soon after the election, Mary Stuart’s family came for Christmas and New Year’s. Her father seemed distant, perhaps still resentful of Baker’s secrecy during the cancer. “How sad I was to leave,” Rosemary McHenry, Mary Stuart’s mother, wrote Baker afterward. “You looked so alone and lonely when we said good night and good bye. Why doesn’t granddaddy understand?”
The first holiday season without Mary Stuart was almost impossibly hard. Baker’s sister Bonner, meanwhile, was discharged from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, only to have to go back three or four days later. At the same time, his mother developed a clot in a vein, cutting the circulation to her right arm, and she too had to check in to a hospital. And his father continued to head downhill with his Parkinson’s. It seemed like 1971 would be another tough year.
The kids were struggling too. Mike, then fourteen, was suspended from school for three days for cutting a science class and being thrown out of an English class on the same day. Then he sneaked out of the house one night. “Needless to say, I am plenty burned up and he is not going to be going anywhere for a long time,” Baker told Jamie. Mike then got caught driving the family Honda and was ticketed by the police. He wrote his father a letter because he could not summon the courage to tell him in person. “I don’t know why I did it dad,” he wrote. “I was crazy I guess. Please don’t yell at me Dad! Signed your foolish son, Mike.”
Dealing with his own grief, Baker had little idea how to help his boys deal with theirs. They were acting out, constantly getting into trouble, fighting with one another, making life miserable for the housekeeper. Baker found his kids to be worlds apart from what he had been at their age. This was the 1970s and the youth rebellion had found its way into their cloistered country-club world. One day he discovered marijuana in one of the boy’s rooms and tried it. He got nothing out of it. “I don’t think he really knew any of us very well,” Jamie reflected years later. “And I’m pretty sure that we didn’t know him very well at that point.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, Baker went to the Republican National Convention in Miami with Bush, his first exposure to national politics on one of its biggest stages. As Baker had predicted, Bush had been brought onto the Nixon team after sacrificing his safe House seat to make the Senate campaign. His consolation prize was the ambassadorship to the United Nations, a post that gave him a fire-hose introduction to international diplomacy and a lifelong Rolodex of friends from around the world. Back in Texas, Baker continued to dabble in politics, becoming finance chairman for the Texas Republican Party and taking on the tough assignment of raising money in the state during Nixon’s reelection bid (“like pulling teeth,” he would later recall of the task).
Reunited in Miami, the two made the rounds of parties and fundraisers and meetings with members of Nixon’s cabinet. The gathering was marked by raucous antiwar protests, and Baker was somewhat unnerved by the turbulence. “I had a little trouble at last night’s session with demonstrators rocking the car, shouting obscenities, etc and got caught in the tear gas once I left the car,” he told Mary Stuart’s parents.
After Nixon’s landslide reelection victory that fall, Baker began hunting for a political appointment, aided by Bush from his new perch in New York. When a seat opened up on the Fifth United States Circuit Court of Appeals, just one rung below the Supreme Court, Bush urged Senator John Tower to recommend Baker to the president. “He has stature, integrity, great character and conviction and could, in my opinion, end up on the Supreme Court—should you recommend him for the Circuit Bench,” Bush wrote. “He’s that broad-gauged.” Baker was passed over.
Home offered only more frustrations. Without their mother, the boys struggled with school, with drugs, with their father, and with each other. Over the course of a couple years, Mike wrecked three cars. Jamie, who in an act of rebellion voted for George McGovern in 1972 and made sure his father knew it, was sent home from the Hill School two days early for smoking in his room and jeopardized his graduation with poor grades. He was rejected by Princeton and Stanford before being accepted to Claremont College. Twelve-year-old Johnny and a couple of his pals chopped down three trees on someone else’s property to create a “commando fort,” costing his chagrined father $231.
“Things are about the same around here—bedlam,” Baker told Mary Stuart’s mother at one point. He lectured the boys about their grades and their behavior, but he recognized that he may have had something to do with their troubles. “He has had a pretty tough teenage due in no small part to the loss of his mother in that critical time in his life,” he wrote about Jamie. “In addition, I feel that I may have short-changed him, what with all of the other demands on my time and attention.”
The demands were hardly letting up. His sister Bonner’s depression worsened and the family found a residential facility for her. “I know I have turned out wrong and it’s nobody’s fault but mine,” she wrote Baker. “I don’t know what happened exactly but I got mixed up.”
Then on May 21, 1973, Baker got a phone call from St. Anthony Center. His father had had a heart attack and died at age eighty. By the end, the elder Baker had been having trouble recognizing anyone. He thought his wife was his mother. He could not feed himself. A World War I hero who had lived in the shadow of his own father, the patriarchal Captain Baker, James A. Baker Jr. had never veered from the path of duty and obligation that he had been prescribed. In the end, as is often true in such cases, grief mixed with relief. “You are right that his death came as a release from a long and debilitating illness,” Baker told one mourner. Still, for Baker, it was another loss, this time of the dominant figure in his life, the man who steered him through every step of his upbringing, his education, and his career. He had hardly even known of his son’s burgeoning interest in politics and would not have approved if he had. But Baker would no longer have to answer to his father. The Warden was gone.
AMID ALL THE TURMOIL, Baker began dating again. “I’m pretty sure that every woman in town was aiming at him,” Barbara Bush remembered. But as it happened, he found a fresh start close to home: Susan Winston, the wife of his hunting buddy Jimbo Winston and the close friend of Mary Stuart. Susan, of course, had been the one who came to his house to retrieve Mary Stuart’s posthumous farewell letter and beyond that had become, as Baker put it, “one of those casserole ladies who would show up” with food for the bereft family in the weeks after the funeral. Since then, Susan and Jimbo had finally divorced over his drinking. Now she and Baker, still young and both left unexpectedly alone with children, found a friendship rooted in mutual tragedy evolving into a midlife romance.
She was the daughter of John Travis “Jack” Garrett, a rancher who grew rice and raised cattle near Danbury, Texas, and Mary Blackshear Farish, a young widow whose first husband died in a plane crash. Jack Garrett was a formidable figure, nicknamed “Whispering Jack” because “his voice was like an amplified foghorn,” Susan said, and could be heard in the next county over. Mary Garrett was an inveterate volunteer, starting a clothing center for the needy, serving as chair of a county child welfare unit, and devoting time to other causes.
Susan was the oldest of their four children, all of whom had been put to work on the ranch—hardly an upbringing comparable to Jimmy Baker’s pampered youth in Houston. The boys were expected to wake up at 5:30 a.m., the girls at 6:30. They were all sometimes farmed out to neighbors to pick cotton, dragging heavy sacks for 50 cents per hundred pounds. Every year, Pappy, as Susan called her father, gave each child a calf to raise. Susan groomed heifers and bulls, presenting them at cattle shows. Once she made it all the way to the State Fair. Theirs was a religious Catholic household where mass was not to be missed. It was also a Republican family in a Democratic state. Eventually, her parents moved to Houston and she graduated from the Kinkaid School, years after Baker attended, then studied at the University of Texas at Austin.
When she met Jimbo Winston, she had thought he was “a drop-dead handsome dynamo and former Marine who could charm the birds out of the trees.” Her friends warned her to stay away. She considered herself a “little church mouse” who was gingerly walking through life. But he opened up different worlds to her. And so they married. Together they had three children: Elizabeth, James IV (nicknamed Bo), and William. Her friends, however, were right. Jimbo was the life of the party—marriage and family did not mean he felt any need to change. His drinking grew worse. Twice, she packed her bags and left, only to return upon promises of change. But he never did change, not for long. One evening when Elizabeth, then eight, upset her, Susan screamed and chased her daughter around the house. Later that night, filled with remorse, she broke down in sobs and prayed. And she left Jimbo for good.
Now, she leaned on Baker and he leaned on her. Soon they were inseparable. “Dad saw someone who could really help him with the four Baker boys, who were devastated by Mary Stuart’s death,” said Will Winston. “And Mom saw stability in her husband where previously she didn’t have any of that.” Still, Baker’s mother needled him for a year to ask Susan to marry him before he finally did.
They eloped in secret on the morning of August 6, 1973, his mother’s birthday. He was forty-three; she was thirty-four. The rector at St. Martin’s would not marry them because Susan was divorced, so they found a Presbyterian minister instead. Then they took both of their mothers to lunch and broke the news to them.
Only later did they announce the new marriage to their shocked children. “Guess what we did?” they asked after picking up Johnny and Doug from the airport as they returned home from a visit to Mary Stuart’s parents. Then the newlyweds headed off for a Texas-style honeymoon, driving down to Rockpile Ranch, where there was still no house. They stayed two nights in a tent before moving on to the coast to go boating in a sixteen-foot Boston whaler.
Susan and her three children moved into the house on Green Tree Road. With only three bedrooms, it was already crowded enough with Baker and his four boys. Now with seven children, four of them in middle school, the house was beyond jammed. Elizabeth slept on a chaise on the landing on the stairwell for months, while the porch and garage were converted into bedrooms. Those living at home attended four different schools, requiring four different carpools, not to mention myriad trips to doctors, sports games, and social occasions. The kitchen was covered in charts about who was using the station wagon when. The laundry machine seemed to run day and night. Just keeping groceries in the house was a challenge.
As the new bride and groom saw it, the merger of their families made sense. The Baker children and the Winston children were close in age and had grown up together. Baker was Bo’s godfather. They hung out at each other’s house so much it was “sort of a communal type thing,” as Bo recalled. At one point, when they were maybe six years old, Johnny Baker asked Elizabeth Winston to marry him; she turned him down because she wanted to marry his brother Doug.
But while The Brady Bunch on television was presenting the happy union of six fictional children from two families in the California suburbs to an ABC prime-time audience in 1973, the union of seven real-life children from two families in Houston that same year was in actuality a dark affair, filled with anger, resentment, conflict, and lots of drugs. “We had been a very happy posse before,” Elizabeth recalled. “Maybe the tragedies made it difficult for us to come together right away.” Announcing the marriage as a fait accompli only made matters worse. “When you have seven children that had that much trauma,” tension was inevitable, Susan later concluded.
No one was more upset than Johnny, by then thirteen years old. He vowed to break up the new marriage. He beat up his new step-siblings, broke a pool cue over his brother Doug’s head, and descended into narcotic fugues. Convinced that his father was replacing his dead mother, he felt betrayed. “I asked him, ‘You’re never going to get married again?’ ‘No, I’m never going to get married again,’ ” Johnny recalled. “And then he was married three and a half years later. I was bitter. I was pissed off. I didn’t understand what was going on. And I was going to break them up. My drug use was a direct result of that.”
He may have been the most extreme case, but not the only one. “My grades suffered. My behavior suffered,” said Doug. “And obviously in pure retrospect, it was me just going, ‘Help.’ It was a marriage that obviously both the parents needed and all the kids needed, but not all the kids realized it or wanted it at that time.”
One person who did not object to the new marriage, paradoxically, was Jimbo Winston. Baker had even asked permission to propose to his friend’s ex-wife. “Jimbo knew that he was not a good father and he wanted his children to have a good father,” Elizabeth Winston said. As her brother Bo put it, “I think Dad was incredibly relieved when he found out that Mom and Jimmy were getting married. Incredibly relieved. Because he knew his kids would be taken care of.”
After nearly a year of drama and drugs and family counseling, Jim and Susan Baker decided to escape their “house apes,” as Susan called them ruefully, with a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa, a getaway they would call their “hunting-moon.” Baker had always wanted to try a safari. When he started to plan it, he got the name of a legendary guide and hunting lodge from none other than Jimbo Winston.
On Winston’s advice, Baker booked twenty-three nights at the Victoria Falls Hotel in what was then known as Rhodesia and later Zimbabwe. He also secured the services of John Dugmore, who had served as a guide for many big-name tourists, including European royalty, and helped Hollywood make such films as Clark Gable’s Mogambo, John Wayne’s Hatari!, and William Holden’s The Lion. Dugmore offered Baker an exhilarating adventure. Emerging from a clearing one day, they found themselves being charged by a buffalo. Dugmore fired a single shot right between the eyes and took down the animal just seven yards from Baker. Baker shipped home $3,000 worth of trophies and later had a series of heads and horns mounted and skins turned into rugs, including a large carpet made out of wildebeest.
Shortly after they returned to Texas came the devastating, though not entirely surprising, news that Jimbo Winston had suddenly died. Baker had been with him briefly the night before. The cause of death was determined to be acute pancreatitis and cirrhosis. “Whatever it was, of course, was brought on by his refusal to ever admit to his alcoholism or to permit himself to be treated,” Baker wrote a friend. “It was such a waste of a life that could have been so productive.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1973, Baker flew to Washington for a job interview. He had never spent a single day of his post-military career employed anywhere other than his Texas law firm and he had only Bush’s word for what a second act in public service might be like. But with so many things in his life starting over, he finally seemed ready to make the leap to politics.
Prodded by Bush, Baker had been searching for an appointment from Nixon ever since he had begun raising money for the Republican Party during the previous year’s presidential campaign. While he had not gotten the federal judgeship, he did get an interview to run the powerful Civil Division at the Justice Department. He flew up from Texas and prepared to meet Richard Kleindienst, the attorney general. But their interview was scheduled for April 30, 1973, the very day of the massive government shakeup in which Nixon fired his lawyer, John Dean, and accepted the resignations of his top two White House advisers, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, in hopes of finally containing the damage from the rapidly expanding Watergate scandal. Kleindienst was pushed out too because of his close ties to figures implicated in Watergate. Baker got a call from the White House telling him his interview had been postponed. He was later offered a consolation prize as assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I said, ‘Thank you very much, but that’s not what I think I want to do,’ ” he recalled.
As the full extent of the Watergate cover-up became clear over the next year and a half, Baker was often relieved that he had not chosen to join the imploding government, and he watched with dismay as his friend George Bush was uncomfortably trapped in the middle of it. In 1973, after his reelection, Nixon had tapped Bush to become chairman of the Republican National Committee, a job that Bush had been reluctant to take, given the scandals, although he felt he had no choice but to accept. Caught between his sense of loyalty and his sense of integrity, Bush for months stuck staunchly by Nixon, predicting that the Watergate investigation would not touch the president. But when the so-called “smoking gun” tape that recorded Nixon ordering aides to have the CIA impede the FBI investigation was revealed, Bush knew it was over. At a cabinet meeting where other advisers urged Nixon to stand firm, Bush told the president it was time to resign. On August 9, 1974, he did.
Replacing Nixon was his vice president, Gerald Ford, appointed only a year before to fill the post vacated by Spiro Agnew after his own corruption scandal. Like Bush, Ford hailed from the more moderate wing of the party and the two had competed for the vice presidential appointment when Agnew was forced to leave office. Now, once again, Bush was aiming for vice president, this time hoping Ford would choose him, although he had now been passed over twice by Nixon.
Baker joined others in lobbying the new Ford White House to pick his friend. “Age geography foreign affairs experience admiration of Republican Party officials respect of all who knew him in Congress and above all his reputation for honesty and intergrity [sic] argue for George Bush as your vice president,” Baker wrote in a telegram to the White House. Baker was once again working on a Bush campaign, as it were. He spoke to reporters, touting his friend’s qualifications, even if he suspected the appointment was not meant to be. On talking points he drafted for an interview with ABC News about Bush, Baker scratched the likely verdict at the bottom of the page: “Always bridesmaid.”
Sure enough, Ford passed over Bush and another former congressman, Donald Rumsfeld, in favor of Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican former governor of New York. “Dear Bake—Yesterday was an enormous personal disappointment,” Bush wrote Baker. He had made the finals but in some ways, he added, “the defeat was more intense” as a result.
“Too bad about George,” Baker wrote Mary Stuart’s parents. “I know he was deeply disappointed, but as I told him last night, it’s better to have been recognized as the number two choice than not to have been in the running at all, particularly when you are only fifty years old and have been in public life for only eight years.”
The two runners-up did well. Rumsfeld became Ford’s White House chief of staff and Bush was offered his choice of ambassadorships. He bypassed prominent postings in Britain and France in favor of China, where the United States had just begun opening diplomatic relations in one of Nixon’s most significant achievements. Bush and his family picked up and moved to Beijing, then still called Peking in the West, for a seminal experience in his political career.
Even from China, Bush was looking out for Baker, urging the new Ford administration to find a job for him. “In spite of Princeton education he is bright, able community leader from Great Texas family,” Bush joked in a cable to Rumsfeld, himself a Princeton graduate. “He has political credentials that would help.” The White House wrote an evaluation of Baker, noting in his file that “Geo Bush referred.” Baker was given the second-highest rating on personal, professional, and educational qualifications.
Then, one of Bush’s political friends in Washington made a well-timed visit to China. Rogers Morton, a towering man well over six and a half feet tall who had befriended Bush when they were both young Republican members of the House, stopped in to see the ambassador. Morton, known universally as Rog, was the younger son of a patrician Kentucky family that dated its lineage back to the Revolutionary War general George Clark. Bitten by the campaign bug early in life, he had moved to Maryland, gone into politics, and preceded Bush as chairman of the Republican National Committee before serving as Nixon’s secretary of the interior. Now he had been named Ford’s commerce secretary. To find a number two, Morton sought out Bush. Did he know of anyone?
He sure did. Soon, Baker was in Washington again, interviewing with Morton. Writing from China, Bush encouraged Baker, noting that the Commerce post was a “high level job” and pointing out that he would start out with something most Washington newcomers did not—the chance to attend cabinet meetings when the secretary was unavailable. Finally, one day in the spring of 1975, the Bakers were driving back from Rockpile Ranch when Baker stopped on the highway at a Stuckey’s restaurant to check in with his office and learned that Morton was trying to reach him. When Baker called him back on the pay phone, Morton came on the line and formally asked Baker to join him in Washington as his undersecretary, the second-highest job at the department. Baker thanked Morton, but asked for time to consult with his wife. When Morton pushed for an answer, Baker said yes.
Morton’s decision, however, still had to be cleared by the Ford White House, where Baker, despite Bush’s advocacy, was an unknown. Rumsfeld wanted to pick a California ally of Ronald Reagan, the hero of the Republican right, to help defuse a potential primary challenge to Ford in 1976. But Morton pushed back, even going directly to the president to make his case for Baker, and ultimately Rumsfeld backed off. On a Saturday in June, Rumsfeld met with Ford and Dick Cheney, his deputy chief of staff, in the Oval Office and surrendered. “We talked about the Under Secretary of Commerce and indicated that Baker, the lawyer from Houston, probably is the right way to go,” Rumsfeld wrote afterward. “Rog Morton likes him, he’s a southerner, John Tower’s very high on him and he should be a good choice.”
From China, Bush congratulated Baker. “I am absolutely elated,” he said. He quickly suggested two people to hire and proposed the Bakers move into the Bushes’ house in Washington. “If you aren’t careful I’ll try to mastermind your life.”
Baker was formally nominated on July 22, 1975. On August 1, he was handed a note: “You were confirmed by Senate 9:05 am Eastern daily time.” Ten days later, with his “thundering herd” of children on hand, he was sworn in. At the age of forty-five, Baker did not know it yet, but he was about to begin his life’s work.
BAKER WAS NEVER introspective. He kept no diary and left no record that survives of how he felt to be moving on from Houston and the burden of so much family history. Until now, he had been a good Texan and a good son. He had never done anything other than what was expected of him, even when he had chafed at the constraints of a corporate lawyer’s life. His escape was hunting and still more work. Now family tragedy, a country-club friendship, and the national disaster of Watergate had combined to offer him a different way out.
Less than a year into his new job, he was asked to address his son Mike’s commencement from Northwest Academy in Houston. Much of the speech was boilerplate graduation advice. But at one point, Baker spoke with uncharacteristic sweep about the state of the world after Vietnam and Watergate and the tumult of recent years. It had the ring of a personal truth.
We in this country have been going through a long, dark night of self-criticism. We have been telling ourselves that America has tried to run the world, that it is corrupt, that many of our institutions have failed us and need to be “dismantled” under the guise of “reform.” Confession may be good for the soul, but there comes a time when too much confession makes us weaker rather than stronger.
Sure we make mistakes, but who in this world doesn’t?
For Baker, the long dark night was coming to an end. He was ready to take the next step.