Henry Kissinger had one question: Just who the hell is James A. Baker III anyway?
It was a fair question. Kissinger, after all, was the geopolitical grand wizard who had helped Richard Nixon open the door to China, bring about détente with the Soviet Union, and end the Vietnam War. He was now Gerald Ford’s secretary of state and, other than the president, the most important man in government. He was a global celebrity, recognized everywhere he went; even his romantic life was chronicled in the gossip pages. And Baker was, well, nobody, really.
It was the spring of 1976, less than a year into Baker’s time in Washington, when he found himself in the crosshairs of the world’s most prominent diplomat. As undersecretary of commerce in an administration heading into an election, Baker had drawn the appropriately low card in campaign assignments, a small fundraiser with Republican donors in remote Oklahoma. As far as Baker knew, no reporters were present when he took questions.
“Will Henry Kissinger be in the second Ford administration?” one of the donors asked as they milled around a swimming pool.
Baker offered a blunt answer. “I can’t conceive of that happening,” he said.
That was the answer conservatives wanted to hear. For all the rage of the left over the secret bombing of Cambodia and his encouragement of Nixon’s dark side, Kissinger at the moment was the bête noire of the Republican right, which saw him as the architect of appeasement to the Communists. As Ford faced a revolt within his own party led by Ronald Reagan, Kissinger was a political liability and it would benefit the incumbent president to establish some distance.
In those days, officials felt comfortable making relatively candid remarks in one part of the country without fear that they would ricochet around the world instantly. There was no internet, no social media. But even in 1976, Baker would discover, offhand comments could still make their way back to Washington, at least eventually. It took a day or so, but Baker’s prognostication was reported by the news wires, which then got noticed in the White House—and more importantly on the seventh floor of the State Department.
Kissinger was peeved. He did not know Baker and assumed “he probably was some right-wing Texan who was trying to placate” the conservatives, as Kissinger later put it. Baker quickly learned what happened when he irritated a legend. Kissinger made his unhappiness known to Dick Cheney at the White House. At an event in the Rose Garden soon afterward, the president’s secretary approached Baker and asked him to stop by Cheney’s office before leaving.
Cheney was thirty-five years old and, following Donald Rumsfeld’s promotion to defense secretary, had become the youngest man ever to serve as White House chief of staff. With the demeanor of a cool cowboy from Wyoming, the fierce intellect of a Yale dropout-turned-doctoral-candidate, and the discipline of a recovering drinker, Cheney had established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the White House despite his youth. The son of a New Deal government worker and a diner waitress, Cheney shared with Baker a frontier identity and a love of hunting and the outdoors that would form the basis for a lifelong friendship.
On this day, however, it fell to Cheney to play the disciplinarian. When Baker arrived in the chief of staff’s corner office, he found Cheney sitting at his desk. He looked up at Baker with a crooked smile that would eventually become famous.
“I understand you announced Henry’s resignation from government,” Cheney said.
“What are you talking about?” Baker asked. “I didn’t do any such thing.”
Cheney held up a dispatch ripped from the wire service machine of the type that sat in offices all around Washington, announcing the news in bursts of noise that formed the staccato backdrop of the city’s workday. “I got the wire copy right here,” he said.
As it dawned on him what Cheney was talking about, Baker assumed that his short career in public service was over. Kissinger was clearly furious. He would demand Baker’s head.
But Cheney was not about to make a capital crime out of the gaffe. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just go back and make it right with Henry.”
One thing Baker had learned in his years in the legal world was how to smooth over disputes and massage sizable egos. After Cheney’s remonstration in the White House, Baker went back to his office and called Kissinger. This was not even the first time he had gotten on the bad side of the famously prickly secretary of state. Not long before, the two had squared off over a line in a draft Ford speech complaining about cheap Chinese textile imports. Kissinger wanted the line out for fear of disrupting his diplomatic opening to China, but master infighter that he was, he did not bother arguing the matter during the drafting process and instead waited until Ford was already on Air Force One heading to the speech before calling the plane to convince the president to delete it. Tipped off, Baker then called the plane himself and convinced Cheney to urge the president to keep the sentence. In the end, Ford agreed and Baker had his first real introduction to White House intrigue. “Oh, so you’re Textile Baker,” Kissinger had grumbled when Baker later introduced himself on a State Department receiving line.
As he got Kissinger on the phone following the reports on the Oklahoma comment, Baker was determined to be contrite. “I am calling for two things,” he told the secretary of state. “To apologize for the way the story comes across and it is not my recollection that I ever said anything like that.” He added: “I want to make it clear to you that I admire you greatly.”
Kissinger brushed it off, but not without betraying a sense of bitterness. “Never mind,” he said. “It is getting to be a cottage industry.”
Baker noted that he had been asked the question about Kissinger staying in the cabinet several times on his trip. “It is an issue in that part of the country and I did not have the presence of mind nor perhaps the experience,” he said.
“Conceivably, some people ask because they want me to stay,” Kissinger said, although he knew better. “I don’t give a damn what any of you say.”
“I would like you to stay and I feel honestly about that and I am calling to apologize and get the story corrected,” Baker said.
With that, Kissinger let it go, but he never forgot. For Baker, it was an early lesson that politics at the highest levels was studded with land mines—and not all of them involved the opposition.
BAKER HAD ARRIVED in Washington less than a year earlier. The young Marine who had first seen the White House from the outside on a cold Eisenhower inauguration day now was a regular in the building. In a city full of ambition, where everyone saw himself as the next Kissinger or at least the next Bush, the corporate lawyer from Texas had somehow managed the impossible, going from obscure to insider in the blink of an eye.
From the start, Baker seemed to thrive. He and Susan and the kids who had not gone off to boarding school or college had moved into a rented house on leafy Chain Bridge Road and he threw himself in to work at the Commerce Department, a relative backwater but exciting nonetheless for the new guy from Texas.
His first break came with his boss. Rog Morton turned out to be not just a seasoned Washington hand, but a friend and mentor. Morton quickly started sending Baker to the White House for economic strategy meetings. Peter Roussel, an aide on the Ford staff, recalled another official leaning over after one of the policy sessions and saying, “What’s the deal with this Baker guy? He’s pretty impressive.”
Baker earned $40,000 a year, a pretty big comedown given that he had been pulling down more than $140,000 a year in pay and investment income, or something like $800,000 in today’s dollars. He arrived at the office before 8 a.m. most days and stayed for twelve hours. But he loved it. “This job is extremely fascinating and very challenging,” he told David Paton, his old friend from Princeton. “I had an interesting hour or so in the Oval Office on Russian grain a couple of weeks ago, and I am attending a number of Economic Policy Board meetings at the White House when my boss can’t go. Very heavy stuff for a lawyer from Houston, Texas!”
Less than two months after he started, the Houston Post was profiling Baker as a “man to watch” in Washington. “He’s a guy with an unlimited future,” the paper quoted an unnamed senior administration official as saying. At home, Susan saw a revitalized husband after the traumas of the last few years. “He was so excited about the ideas, the policy,” she said. “It just totally reenergized him.”
Baker had passed on Bush’s offer of moving into his house, which was fortuitous since Ford brought Bush back to Washington by the end of the year to take over as director of the CIA. It was not a switch that Baker advised; to win Senate confirmation to head the theoretically apolitical spy agency, Bush was forced by Democrats to disavow any aspirations to run for vice president on Ford’s ticket in 1976. “My feeling was that he shouldn’t be asked to forswear his political birthright in order to take the job,” Baker said. “His view was the president wants me to do it.” Bush blamed Rumsfeld, seeing it as a scheme to knock a potential rival out of the running. At least it meant that the Bushes and the Bakers were together in the same city again. They were soon back to weekend barbecues and tennis games.
As part of the same shakeup, Ford tapped the veteran Republican Elliot Richardson to take over as commerce secretary, but it took several months for him to extricate himself from the ambassadorship in London. All of a sudden, Baker was left to run the department in the interim, a de facto member of the cabinet overseeing tens of thousands of employees and key government functions ranging from the National Weather Service to the Patent and Trademark Office to the Census Bureau.
Once he arrived, Richardson soon took a liking to Baker too. An aristocratic New Englander, Richardson was on his fourth cabinet appointment—at the time a modern record—and had a penchant for surrounding himself with smart, hard-driving types, such as Baker and another bright young aide, Richard Darman, whom he brought with him to Commerce. Richardson, who had famously quit as Richard Nixon’s attorney general rather than carry out the Saturday Night Massacre to block the Watergate investigation, had a great eye for how to actually get things done in the capital and disdained the preening lightweights who flocked to it. Washington, he said once, was a city full of cocker spaniels who would rather be petted than wield power. “Maybe we hit it off because he knew I would rather wield power,” Baker would theorize later.
GERALD RUDOLPH FORD WAS the first president Baker would get to know up close. Down-to-earth and unaffected, Ford was a dutiful public servant who did his homework, played by the rules, and never aspired to the White House. His real ambition after twenty-five years as a congressman from Michigan was to serve as Speaker of the House, but he accepted when Nixon offered him the vice presidency following Spiro Agnew’s resignation. Less than one agonizing year later, when Nixon himself resigned in August 1974, Ford became the nation’s first commander in chief never to have been elected as either president or vice president.
In 1976, he faced the enormous challenge of selling himself to Americans to earn a four-year term of his own. “A Ford, not a Lincoln,” as he described himself, he was a self-effacing man, decent and plainspoken, a seeming antidote to the Machiavellian machinations of the Nixon era. But his decision to pardon Nixon shortly after assuming office had wiped out much of the goodwill that accompanied his ascension and the country’s deepening economic troubles erased whatever was left.
From the start, Ford struggled in the campaign. He had never run for anything larger than a House district in Michigan and had few loyalists in the party outside his home state. Ronald Reagan, the charismatic former actor and governor of California who was the champion of the emerging conservative movement, had decided to run in the Republican primaries against him and Ford’s team underestimated Reagan. “They thought he was nothing—this was going to be a cake walk,” said Stuart Spencer, one of Ford’s top strategists. Spencer knew better; he had worked for Reagan before and had a sense of how formidable he was.
Indeed, as the 1976 race began, Ford barely squeaked by Reagan in the crucial New Hampshire primary before rolling to victories in the next several contests, including Florida and Illinois. But with the help of the conservative senator Jesse Helms, Reagan ambushed Ford in North Carolina and suddenly momentum shifted. By spring, with his prospects increasingly in doubt, Ford asked Rog Morton to become campaign chairman and take charge of fending off Reagan. With his former boss running the campaign, Baker was now in the middle of it too.
The upcoming May 1 primary in Texas would be crucial and Baker, one of the few Texans in the administration, warned the White House that it was courting disaster by sending Kissinger out on a foreign tour that would kick off with a news conference that could trigger a Reaganite backlash. “If you want to win Texas,” Baker told Cheney in a phone call, “you can’t do this.” Impressed by Baker’s urgency, Cheney invited Baker over to the White House to make his case directly to the president. Shortly thereafter, he sat down in the Oval Office, telling Ford that he should sideline his own secretary of state. Still a novice in Washington, Baker seemed to be either heedless or unaware of how risky it might be to go up against Kissinger for a third time.
“Mr. President,” Baker would always remember saying, “I’m talking to you now as a Texan. This would be devastating in the lead-up to the primary.”
“Well, Jim,” Ford replied, “the thinking Republicans will understand my position on this.”
“Mr. President,” he retorted, “with respect to this issue, there are no thinking Republicans in Texas right now.”
Nonetheless, Kissinger went on his trip and had his news conference. Whether that had any political effect on Ford or not, Baker was right about the campaign’s precarious state in Texas. When the votes were counted on May 1, Reagan had walloped Ford by a two-to-one margin in the state, seizing all of Texas’s delegates. Increasingly, it was looking like Republicans were headed to their convention in Kansas City that summer with no clear nominee.
SHORTLY BEFORE the Texas primary, Ford’s close friend Jack Stiles had been killed in a car accident. Stiles had run Ford’s first race for Congress back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and for this presidential campaign he had been given a particularly sensitive job, rounding up delegates for Ford at the upcoming Republican convention. With the race now looking as though it might actually come down to the convention floor, the Ford campaign needed someone to replace him and fast. Morton lobbied for his former deputy. Cheney, impressed with Baker’s savvy about campaign politics as well as his performance at the Commerce Department, agreed.
Right before the voting in Texas, Baker accompanied Ford on a campaign swing to his home state, riding on Air Force One for the first time in his life. Partway through the flight back, the president asked Baker to take Stiles’s old job at the campaign. Baker felt he had no choice but to accept. Just like that, he had gone from an obscure Texas lawyer to delegate hunter for the president of the United States. Never mind that his only real experience in politics consisted of running a single county in a losing Senate race and raising some money.
That Baker was chosen was a reflection of not just his adept networking in the short time he had been in Washington but how decimated the Republican Party had been by Watergate. An entire generation of up-and-coming operatives had been essentially wiped out by their association with Nixon and the party was left to regroup with a new and untested cadre. “We basically had to build a campaign organization on the fly,” Cheney said. “We were all green, including the candidate.”
Baker came on board in May, just a week after his Air Force One flight. Reagan and Ford traded victories through the rest of the spring until the president took the last two key contests, in New Jersey and Ohio, on June 8. Ford then turned his attention to the states holding meetings that summer to choose convention delegates, only to embarrass himself by flying to Missouri to make a personal appeal to the state’s Republicans, who then handed nearly all of their at-large delegates to Reagan. Ford at that point still led overall with 963 delegates to 879 for Reagan, but he was short of the 1,130 needed to secure the nomination. The whole campaign would come down to how good Baker proved to be at his new job.
Baker loved hunting, but he had never hunted delegates before or done anything connected to the arcane and byzantine politics of a party nomination process. What he quickly found was that blunt force was not as useful as cajolery. Baker asked Ford’s aides to set aside twenty to thirty minutes a day for the president to make phone calls to key delegates. Baker had an advantage over the Reagan forces—he had the best-known building in the world, the White House, to use as an asset and he did not hesitate to employ it. He brought eight delegates from Pennsylvania to meet with Ford in the Oval Office. He brought uncommitted delegates from Virginia to see the president in the Blue Room. He gave away seats to state dinners for Australia’s visiting leader in July and Finland’s leader in August. He saved a particularly coveted invitation to a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II for Clarke Reed, the head of the Mississippi Republican Party and a prized catch. One county party chairman Baker invited from New York left a ten-minute meeting with Ford with a promise to look into his sewer district funding issues.
But Baker rejected those who asked for jobs in exchange for their votes and set aside a special folder where he saved seventeen of the crassest, most inappropriate requests in case he ever needed to prove that he did not make illicit trades for votes, the start of a career-long habit of filing away documents showing unethical proposals he had rebuffed. When one aide suggested bringing all of the uncommitted delegates for a supper and boat ride with the president, Baker refused—not because it would be trading on the presidency but because it could backfire. “To bring them up here in this fashion would make it almost impossible for them to vote for the president for fear of having been ‘bought,’ ” he wrote. It was a murky distinction Baker was drawing; somehow a state dinner was okay but a boat ride was not.
Beyond the direct approach, Baker recruited allies who could work on the targeted delegates. He also made sure the campaign stayed in touch with the delegates it already had. “The worst thing that can happen to a politician is not to have someone to talk to,” he wrote to campaign colleagues. “The next worst thing is not to know what is going on.”
But he came to hate the process. It was unseemly and grubby. He may not have been buying votes, but he found plenty of would-be sellers. “You’d have to go to pols of the lowest rank and beg,” he said later. “I had a guy ask me for $5,000 for his vote. I’d take people into the Oval Office to meet the president and they’d lecture him on what he was doing wrong. It was so demeaning.” So why, he was asked later, did he take the job then? Baker’s answer was simple: “Because the president asked me.” It was also not lost on him, newcomer to Washington that he was, that his new assignment came with voluminous time spent in the company of the president. In a city where access to power was a form of power all by itself, Baker suddenly had it.
Baker soon assembled a team of capable lieutenants, including a twenty-seven-year-old Republican operative named Paul Manafort, who managed a clutch of states and would later help run the convention floor. Baker and his team kept methodical lists and it quickly became apparent that theirs was a better, more reliable tally than that kept by the Reagan camp. “Jim was in charge of every detail and knew the precise state of play at any given moment,” Cheney remembered. Baker earned credibility with national political reporters when it turned out that his counts were accurate and those released by John Sears, Reagan’s campaign manager, were inflated or even fictional. That was another lesson that Baker would internalize for later in his career: Never lie to journalists.
In a contest as close as this, details mattered. So did perception. A little less than a month before the convention, on July 19, Sears claimed that Reagan had secured 1,140 delegates, or ten more than needed for a first-ballot victory, and added that “there is a great degree of softness in Mr. Ford’s strength.” Baker knew the latter was true; Reagan’s supporters were more fervent and committed. But he also knew that Sears’s numbers were wrong.
On Baker’s schedule for that week, an aide had written, “A substantial portion of Baker’s time this week should be spent with the press.” And so it was. Four days after Sears’s declaration, Baker countered by telling reporters that Ford had picked up fifteen delegates from Hawaii, giving him a total of 1,135—five more than required for victory.
Even with a lead now established, Baker dwelled on all sorts of nightmare scenarios that could snatch away the nomination from the president. He ordered up memos on credential challenges, platform amendment fights, and questions such as whether winning the nomination required an absolute majority or only a majority of those voting. He worried about the order of states announcing their votes in the roll call. If it were alphabetical, as was customary, Reagan’s strongest states would be stacked in the beginning and an early lead could cause a stampede to give him the nomination. Imagining another dangerous possibility, Baker asked an aide to examine whether Ford delegates who were secretly for Reagan could abstain or be absent on the first vote so as to force a second vote, when they would be free from their obligation to support the president and could switch to the challenger. “In my judgment,” said the memo sent in response, “it could work and deny the nomination to the President.”
THE WEATHER WAS glorious as Baker and the rest of the Ford team arrived at Kemper Arena in Kansas City for the start of the convention on August 16. Thanks to Baker, Ford seemed to have the edge. “ ‘Miracle Man’ Given Credit for Ford Drive,” read the headline of a profile in The New York Times, referring to the cheeky call sign the convention team had given Baker for their network of walkie-talkies. But Baker had not yet earned the title. He was anxious to win on the first ballot for fear that Ford would lose if it went beyond that.
“We had the incumbency, which is a plus, a strength, but Reagan in many ways had the heart and soul of the delegates,” remembered Stuart Spencer, the Ford strategist who had become a close ally of Baker’s on the campaign. “He was their guy.” Baker and Spencer were both well aware that many candidates over the years had arrived at conventions as front-runners only to eventually lose the nomination. But no sitting president had been denied a nomination he actually sought since Chester Arthur in 1884, and Ford was determined not to share his fate.
Desperately seeking the key to the final few delegates he needed, Reagan gambled on a bold gesture before the convention by preemptively naming a running mate, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, even though he had not actually secured the nomination. The hope was to lure away Drew Lewis, the Ford campaign chief in Pennsylvania and a close friend of Schweiker’s, with the idea that Lewis in turn would bring with him delegates from his crucial home state. Reagan also hoped to force Ford into naming his own running mate early on the theory that he would pick someone who would be unacceptable to many delegates. Ford had alienated many conservatives when he made the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller his vice president in 1974, a mistake he implicitly acknowledged by dumping him from the ticket in 1976 without naming a replacement.
But Reagan’s move backfired. Schweiker was also considered a liberal—his rating from the American Conservative Union for 1975 was just 9 percent, the same as that of Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, a close ally of organized labor. Rather than uniting the wings of the party, Reagan’s move turned off conservatives who thought their candidate had just sold them out. Most critically, it helped turn around the crucial Mississippi delegation, previously a Reagan redoubt. Until then, Baker’s courtship of Clarke Reed, the Mississippi party chief, had yielded no success, despite the invitation to the state dinner. The fast-talking, silver-haired owner of a Mississippi River barge company, Reed “looked the part” of a Southern gentleman “but didn’t act the part,” as a Reagan aide put it. Reed had equivocated without actually committing to Ford. Now the situation turned around and Reed’s thirty delegates were once more up for grabs. “I was really for Reagan, but I wasn’t after that,” Reed said of the ill-timed Schweiker choice. “How could you trust him?”
Reagan arrived at the convention still hoping to force Ford to name a running mate and his allies proposed a rule change on the floor requiring candidates to identify their pick for vice president. But Ford’s team beat back the effort with a vote of 1,180 to 1,069, proving his strength and all but locking up the nomination. “I think we got it, I think we got it,” Baker told his son John, who along with his brothers had come to Kansas City with their father. Baker was “very ecstatic,” remembered Doug Baker.
Before Ford could claim his prize, though, the Reagan camp made one more effort to disrupt the proceedings by proposing a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the party platform condemning agreements with the Soviet Union, a direct jab at Henry Kissinger. Angry and hurt, Kissinger insisted that Ford fight it and threatened to resign if he did not. Nelson Rockefeller and Brent Scowcroft, the president’s national security adviser, backed him up.
But Baker and Cheney advised Ford to let the measure pass, deeming it a waste of energy to fight a statement that had no binding effect. Noticing a lot of empty seats in the convention hall, Baker mentioned to Ford that Reagan supporters were more likely to be the ones who had stayed to vote, meaning the president could suffer an embarrassing loss if he forced the issue. Risking Kissinger’s wrath, Ford agreed with Baker and opted not to contest the plank. Afterward, Baker said the Reagan camp’s mistake was writing the policy plank in a way that Ford could swallow, however grudgingly. “I could see a two-word plank—‘Fire Kissinger’—and we would have had to fight it,” Baker said. “And if we had been beaten, we could have lost the whole thing.”
Momentum had finally turned to Ford for good. With Clarke Reed’s Mississippi delegation switching sides, Baker felt confident. “Everybody thinks this was the swing,” Baker recalled.
The roll call of the states was read and one after another the delegates reported almost exactly as Baker had forecast. Ford won on the first ballot with 1,187 votes to 1,070 for Reagan, in what would end up being the last seriously contested nominating convention. The Miracle Man had delivered.
As he savored the victory, Ford now faced the task of bringing the ruptured party back together. The immediate question was whether to offer the vice presidency to Reagan in a gesture of conciliation. Ford had grown personally embittered toward Reagan over the course of their contest, but he understood the strength that Reagan might add to the ticket. Ford was taken off the hook with word that Reagan did not want to be asked. So the president settled instead on Senator Bob Dole, a World War II hero from Kansas and former Republican Party chairman.
As he finished his acceptance speech in the convention hall, Ford reached out to his defeated rival and invited Reagan to the stage to speak as well. Reagan, in classic form, delivered a semi-spontaneous and enormously eloquent oration that thrilled the crowd. “The guy that comes in second is really the darling of the convention,” remembered Spencer. As William F. Buckley Jr., the éminence grise of the emerging conservative movement, put it, “Reagan was the dominating presence of the 1976 campaign, even though Ford was the formal victor.”
But for now, the nomination was won, the ticket was set, and Baker’s job was done. Or so he thought.
LEAVING THE CONVENTION, the president asked Baker to accompany him and the rest of his senior team to his vacation retreat in Vail, Colorado, where they would begin plotting out the general election campaign. But first there was an awkward piece of business: Rogers Morton, the campaign chairman and Baker’s patron, had to be replaced.
Morton was ailing with prostate cancer. He had also angered other Ford advisers with a particularly ill-timed article in The Washington Post during the endless primary battle with Reagan. Photographed with a row of liquor bottles behind him, Morton had popped off to reporters. Asked if he planned any strategy change after losing so many primaries to Reagan, Morton had said, “I’m not going to rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.”
Now, Ford’s White House team wanted him out. Dick Cheney and Stuart Spencer made the case for Baker to replace his mentor. “I thought he’d be good on Meet the Press,” Spencer said later. Ford agreed. “Jim Baker had demonstrated an outstanding organizational capability as our chief delegate hunter,” he wrote in his memoir.
Baker was reluctant. Morton had been a friend who had brought him to Washington in the first place and the last thing he wanted to do was to stab him in the back. Morton’s wife, Anne, even begged Baker not to take the job. Uncomfortable, Baker told her that if it was not him, it would be someone else, but that did not make it any easier. Eventually, he agreed to the assignment on the condition that Morton be allowed to keep the title of chairman emeritus. “That was one of the toughest things that I ever had to deal with,” he said later.
Suddenly, Baker was in charge of the president’s campaign. He was sent out for a news conference to announce his own appointment and preview the fall election. “I remember being scared to death,” he recalled. Events were moving so fast that Jamie Baker only learned that his father had become part of the Ford inner circle when he saw a newspaper with a picture of a familiar face next to the president at Vail.
But the Miracle Man would have to produce another one to keep Ford in the White House. Having pivoted to the right to fend off Ronald Reagan, Ford needed to repair his image with the broader cross section of American voters turned off by his pardon of Richard Nixon and the economic troubles of his tenure. Shortly after the Democratic National Convention, Ford and Bob Dole trailed the newly nominated ticket of former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia and the Minnesota senator Walter Mondale by 33 percentage points in a Gallup poll. Ford trimmed the deficit to 13 points by the end of the Republican convention, but there was a long hill still to climb.
This being the first presidential election after the campaign abuses revealed during the Watergate scandal, it was subject to new federal rules enacted to reform the system. Each of the two campaigns could spend $21.8 million. As in the primary, Baker again focused on how to maximize the advantages of incumbency so he did not need to use up as much of his budget building an infrastructure as the challenger did, leaving him able to spend half of Ford’s budget on advertising. “The candidate who makes the wisest use of dollars is going to win the election,” Baker told reporters in Vail.
Baker’s ascension drew largely positive reviews. “Blessed with good looks, wealth and personable manners, Baker, 46, seems almost a political natural,” Newsweek gushed. The magazine noted that some Republicans “would have preferred a bigger and better-known name at the head of the Ford campaign organization,” but quoted Cheney in his defense, saying, “Jim is one of those people who can take a dead organization and turn it around.”
ONCE BAKER TOOK OVER, the core group of advisers met at the White House every day at 7 a.m. in Cheney’s office. Joining them were Stuart Spencer; Robert Teeter, their pollster; and Doug Bailey or John Deardourff, the two main ad makers. The campaign strategy that Baker developed along with Cheney, Spencer, and the others was to cast the president not as a transformational figure but as a reliable, down-to-earth leader after a tumultuous few years for the country—not unlike Baker himself. The advisers wrote down the adjectives they wanted to stress during the race to November: compassionate, experienced, strong, honest, man of action, decisive.
But the challenge they faced in refashioning Ford’s image was enormous. A report by Teeter included ten pages of comments by voters taken from across the country. Only three out of hundreds were positive.
“He’s honest, but clumsy.”
“He’s an honest man, but he doesn’t have the capability to be president.”
“He’s honest compared to Nixon, but I don’t think he’s favorable to women or equality and I don’t think he’s for labor.”
“And these, remember, were the positive comments,” said Malcolm MacDougall, who worked for Bailey and Deardourff on the ads. In the negative category, Ford was called a “boob,” “inept,” “a big Zero,” “befuddled,” “in over his head,” “dopey,” or, as one man in his thirties put it, “an oatmeal man.”
Worse yet, personal exposure to Ford did not seem to help. Usually, when candidates traveled to a city or town, their approval ratings went up. Ford’s went down. “We actually quantified the fact that when he went someplace, he had a negative impact on perceptions of himself,” said Mary Lukens, one of the pollsters who worked with Teeter. Out of this finding came a decision to keep Ford at the White House as much as possible, both to avoid undercutting his own campaign and to underscore the view of him as president. This Rose Garden strategy, as it was called, grated on Ford. It was “a little bit insulting to the president,” Lukens said, “but hey, you work with what you’ve got.” Spencer was blunter in explaining to Ford why they needed to do it this way. “You’re a lousy fucking candidate,” he told the president. “You’ve got to stay here.”
Baker worshipped preparation, but no amount of preparation could prevent every potential surprise, especially in politics. Baker saw that firsthand that fall after Rolling Stone reported that Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz had made shockingly offensive remarks about black Americans. “I’ll tell you what coloreds want,” Butz had said. “It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit. That’s all!”
Butz, a holdover from the Nixon administration who grew up in Indiana guiding horse-drawn plows, had made the comments on an airplane leaving the Republican convention in Kansas City that summer to a small group that included John Dean, the former White House counsel who had turned on Richard Nixon during Watergate. Dean, who had just completed a prison term for his role in Watergate, had been assigned by Rolling Stone to write a dispatch from the convention and in it he quoted the remarks without identifying the unnamed cabinet officer who made them. It was quickly clear that Butz was the offending party. Butz apologized but Ford was under pressure to fire him. Baker, Spencer, and Cheney initially leaned toward keeping Butz and riding out the storm, but as the blowback grew worse they concluded that he would have to go. Betty Ford in particular was appalled and ultimately her husband accepted Butz’s resignation. “Cheney and I slept in his office that night trying to get the whole thing put together,” Spencer said.
While getting their own house in order, Baker and his team prepared to face a Democratic challenger who had already upended the political system. Carter, an obscure peanut farmer and one-term governor of Georgia who would turn fifty-two by Election Day, had come out of nowhere to capture the Democratic nomination by outpacing a field of far better-known national figures. With a wide, toothy grin, a down-home country demeanor, a post-Watergate vow to “never lie to you,” and exactly 1 percent in the polls when he kicked off his campaign, Carter planted himself in Iowa for months. The strategy worked and he leveraged a surprise win in the caucuses into enough momentum to roll through the subsequent Democratic primaries.
Ford did not know much about Carter and viewed him warily. While impressed by the challenger’s quick mind and ability to articulate, Ford saw Carter “as cold and arrogant, even egotistical, and I was convinced he played fast and loose with the facts.” But Carter had the advantage of running as the anti-Nixon. While Ford had restored a sense of decency to the White House, he was still a Republican who had pardoned his tarnished predecessor. The party’s post-Watergate brand was so bad that the president’s campaign “avoided the word ‘Republican’ like a disease,” as Malcolm MacDougall, the ad man, put it.
Carter was running as the outsider who would clean up Washington. Just as important, he was a Southerner who could rally a region that had been trending Republican in recent years. “With a Southerner leading the ticket, southern states cannot be counted on to abandon their traditional party,” a Ford campaign memo sent to Cheney concluded. “This bloc of electoral votes combined with the northern industrial states, which tend to favor any Democrat, will leave very little left for the Republican nominee.” On top of that, Carter was hammering away at Ford over the troubled economy, citing a “misery index” that combined the inflation and unemployment rates to illustrate how much everyday Americans were being left behind. At its peak under Ford, the index reached nearly 20 percent.
Facing a double-digit deficit in the polls, Baker and his team decided to gamble as no president had ever done before. They agreed to meet Carter for three televised debates, the first held in a presidential election since the famed 1960 showdowns between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the first ever involving an incumbent. Traditionally, sitting presidents had been reluctant to share a stage for fear of making a costly mistake in front of millions of people and elevating a challenger’s stature. But this particular incumbent was heading into Labor Day weekend trailing by 15 percentage points, so it was a risk that seemed worth taking.
All three debates would be gentlemanly encounters, especially by the toxic standards of decades to come. The two candidates addressed each other with respect, disagreed politely, and largely avoided anything that might be considered a low blow. The first of the debates, in Philadelphia on September 23, was notable mainly for an odd snafu when the sound suddenly cut out in the middle of the discussion. It took twenty-seven long minutes to restore while Ford and Carter simply stood unmoving at their podiums, “almost like robots,” as Carter later put it, waiting for the debate to resume.
Still, the next day, Baker and the other advisers found themselves satisfied that Ford had won. In a meeting, they reviewed the overnight poll numbers, which showed that 36 percent of Americans thought the president did better compared with 32 percent who chose the challenger. Gallup confirmed a debate bounce; Ford had pared Carter’s lead to 8 percentage points.
The key moment of all three debates came in the second face-off, held on October 6 at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. Max Frankel of The New York Times asked Ford whether the Helsinki human rights accord signed by his administration was effectively “an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.”
Ford bridled at the assertion. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” he said.
Frankel, stunned, tried to give Ford a chance to take it back or at least explain it. “Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence and occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it’s a Communist zone?” he asked.
“I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union,” Ford replied. “I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous. It has its own territorial integrity. And the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
In the holding room, Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, felt queasy as his “heart sank into my shoes.” He told Stuart Spencer they had a problem. The Soviet Union had more than 200,000 troops in Poland; it was simply not credible to argue that Moscow did not dominate its neighbor. “Cheney and I were spastic,” Spencer recalled. After the debate, they headed back to the house where Ford was staying and found Henry Kissinger already there, praising the president for the “wonderful job” he had done. “Dick and I say, ‘Goddamn, what are you talking about, Henry?’ ” Ford chose to believe Kissinger.
But at the hotel where Baker and Scowcroft were left to handle the media storm, it was instantly clear how bad the situation really was. The first question thrown at them was how many Soviet army divisions were stationed in Poland. Baker and Scowcroft “perspired heavily” as they sought to deflect the growing criticism. If nothing else, it was, as Scowcroft said later, “a bonding experience.” On the Carter plane back to Atlanta, Stuart Eizenstat, an aide to the Democratic challenger, recalled, “there was an air of exhilaration.”
Ford refused to believe that he had made a mistake and the initial polls backed him up, showing that more viewers thought he had won the debate. But as the networks and newspapers focused on the Poland gaffe, public opinion quickly shifted. “The data had totally flipped,” Mary Lukens said. Republican allies called in a panic. On Air Force One, Cheney and Spencer badgered Ford to take back his comment, angering the president. “We came within two inches of getting canned,” Spencer said.
Ultimately it would take several clarifications by Ford to put the issue to rest, but the damage had been done. The president looked out of touch and had turned off at least some of the Polish Americans and other immigrants who were key constituencies in battleground states. For the next five or six days, he lost momentum instead of closing in the polls.
THE ISSUE THAT barely came up at the debates at all was probably just as decisive, if not more so. Ford’s pardon of Nixon was mentioned only in passing and Carter made no effort to hang it around the president’s neck. Ford was asked just one question about Watergate in all three debates. “We had anticipated more,” Baker said. “It was a negative. He pardoned a guy who was a criminal.”
Paradoxically, because Carter did not raise Watergate in the most watched moments of the campaign, that made it harder for Ford to address the issue and put it to rest. He and his team did not want to raise it themselves. “How did we handle it?” asked Spencer. “We ignored it.” With good reason, they thought. “To take the pardon issue on is to say, ‘Okay, let’s everybody talk about the pardon,’ ” said Doug Bailey. “Well, you’re not going to win that discussion. You’re just not going to win that debate.” But the campaign’s polls showed that 7 percent of Republicans would not vote for Ford because of the pardon, never mind independents or Democrats. It was the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, always hanging over everything,” as Baker put it.
Still, the debates helped lift Ford as did a series of ads portraying the president as a likable Everyman who was restoring the country’s pride. “We have come from a point where many people in this country were just writing us off,” Baker said in late October on Issues and Answers, the Sunday talk show on ABC. “We had no chance. It was over and done with back there in late August. We have come from twenty-three points back to a situation now where it is a real horse race and up for grabs.”
Even so, Ford was having trouble rallying conservatives to his side and grew increasingly aggravated that Ronald Reagan was not helping out. Reagan made only a perfunctory effort on Ford’s behalf and declined to campaign for the president in areas where he was popular. Some of Ford’s advisers were convinced that more active campaigning by Reagan might have made the difference in Texas and Mississippi, which by themselves would have been enough to keep Ford in the White House. Spencer, who had worked for Reagan before the 1976 campaign, later faulted himself for not figuring out a way to pressure his old boss into doing more. Ford was bitter afterward. “If he had traveled down to some of the southern states where he had tremendous popularity, I think we would have won,” Ford said. “It’s not his nature to help someone else. He believed in winning on his own.”
Then again, Ford was not helping himself as much as he could. Under Baker’s direction, the campaign was businesslike but hardly inspirational. He was selling integrity and Midwestern decency without articulating a grander vision that would stir voters. “Not one of the president’s speeches had offered a program for the future,” concluded Malcolm MacDougall, the ad man. “Not one of our two hundred ads and commercials had so much as hinted at what he might do for America in the next four years.”
With time running out, Baker and the Ford team debated a more provocative approach. Doug Bailey made a nearly five-minute commercial called the “Cherry Bomb” ad featuring the ditty that had become the theme song of the campaign—I’m feeling good about America, I’m feeling good about me—along with street interviews of voters talking about how Ford had restored their faith in the country. The images shifted to Ford giving a speech when a cherry bomb suddenly went off with a bang; the president flinched but kept going. The ad then showed him riding in a car through Dallas, standing up through a sunroof as bystanders cheered. The unseen narrator made reference to John Kennedy’s assassination in the same city thirteen years earlier.
Neither the cherry bombs of a misguided prankster nor all the memories of recent years can keep the people and their president apart. When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there’s a change that’s come over America. After a decade of tension, the people and their president are back together again.
Bailey thought it was worth airing. “If you know or are 90 percent certain that you’re going to lose and you have a way that is perfectly legitimate to raise the issues—raise the bar—raise the issues in such a dramatic way that it scares people into, ‘Wait a minute, what am I about to do with my vote,’ do you run such a commercial or don’t you?” Bailey recalled.
But when he showed it to the campaign team, Baker objected vigorously. “Just all hell broke loose—‘oh, we can’t do that, we can’t do that,’ ” Bailey said. Baker called the ad “nutty, absolutely screwy. You can’t make a reference to Dallas that way without losing the state of Texas.” Bailey thought they were going to lose Texas anyway, but Baker won the argument. The ad never aired.
Still, as Ford scratched for any advantage in those final days, Baker was not above using tough tactics. In Plains, the tiny dust mote of a town Carter hailed from, a ready-made racial controversy provided a small opportunity. An eccentric African American minister, Rev. Clennon King of the nondenominational Divine Mission Church in Albany, Georgia, about thirty miles away, chose the dwindling days of October to try to desegregate the Plains First Baptist Church, the all-white parish where Carter had worshipped for years. King was a complicated character with political aspirations. He had run for president in 1960 on the Afro-American Party ticket, tried to win asylum from Jamaica two years later citing persecution in the United States, was later arrested and spent four years in prison for failing to provide child support, and threatened to run against Carter for governor in 1970 as a Republican.
When Reverend King showed up at the Plains church on Sunday, October 31, just two days before the election, he was turned away and the services were canceled. Carter had previously pushed the church leadership to end its discriminatory policy but now it was being used against him. As Ford’s campaign head, Baker signed telegrams to four hundred black ministers around the country assailing Carter. “If the former Georgia Governor and life-long member of the Plains Baptist Church cannot influence the decisions and opinions of his own church, can we expect him to influence the issues and opinions of the United States Congress?”
Carter was incensed and his campaign publicized the telegrams, turning the attack against Ford by energizing black voters. Baker later denied encouraging King to disrupt the church but said it was a mistake to send the telegrams. Carter, convinced the Republicans were behind the whole episode, never forgot it. Years later, after he and Baker had worked together on a number of issues, Carter still brought it up in an interview. “I resented one thing he did,” he recalled. “That was the only thing I ever experienced with Baker that was not pleasant.”
THE ELECTION ARRIVED on a cool, dry day in Washington as the Ford team gathered to monitor the results. Baker, Cheney, and the others presented Ford with early projections in the Oval Office at 5 p.m., but the election was too close to call. Ford studied the numbers and did not say much. As the aides turned to leave, the president pulled out a cigar and gave it to Baker.
“I quit smoking,” Baker announced.
“Well, take it anyway,” Ford said.
As the night progressed, Ford looked strong in Michigan, his home state, as well as New Jersey and Connecticut, while Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois were too close to call. Texas and New York were on the edge as well. If Ford lost those two big states, aides asked themselves, was there still a path to victory? Deep into the night, Ford and his team waited. Finally, the president went to bed without knowing for sure whether he would wake up to a full term of his own. Around 3 a.m., it became clear to his advisers gathered at a Washington hotel for the election night party that he would fall achingly short. Baker, who had stopped smoking after Mary Stuart died, lit up the cigar.
By morning, it was over. Ford had staged a remarkable comeback. From 33 percentage points down, he had closed the gap to finish the election with 48 percent of the popular vote to 50 percent for Carter. In the Electoral College, it was even closer—if a little more than nine thousand voters in Ohio and Hawaii had gone the other way, it would have flipped those two states and kept the presidency in Ford’s hands.
There were enough irregularities that Ford briefly contemplated seeking recounts in close states. But since he had lost the popular vote nationally, “it would be very hard for me to govern if I won the presidency in the Electoral College through a recount,” Ford told his team.
Baker, for one, agreed. “He was right, of course,” Baker said. Ford conceded.
Ford’s chances of winning the election were probably doomed the day he pardoned Richard Nixon. “If he hadn’t pardoned Nixon, we would have won,” Baker said. “It was the right thing to do for the country, but we would have won. We saw it in our polling every day.”
Two days after the election, Baker wrote Ford a note. “The best man did not win this race, and the American people are the losers for it,” he said. Ford wrote a gracious letter back and then hand-scrawled a P.S. at the bottom: “You were superb. Thanks from all the Fords.”
At the time, however, some Republicans pointed a finger at Baker after they discovered that the campaign still had nearly $1 million in the bank after the election. Given how close the outcome had been, it seemed like political malpractice not to have spent every dollar. Baker later said the money had been allocated to liaison groups and could not be transferred to, say, television commercials. He attributed his caution on this front to the hangover from Watergate. “I was determined that the investigations that take place after you win or lose a presidential election were not going to find that we overspent the limits,” he said. “In those days, there were strict limits.”
Not everyone found Baker’s reasoning persuasive. “When I found out there was still a million left over, I crawled over his frame,” Spencer said. “He pointed out the penalty and I said, ‘You think they’re going to put the president in jail if he overspends his damn money? Hell no.’ I would have pushed the envelope. He wasn’t going to push the envelope.”
Even so, Baker came out of the campaign a winner. He had taken a candidate far behind in the polls and brought him within a hair of victory. He had assembled top-flight operatives and forged them into a team that would come to dominate Republican Party politics for years to come. And he had impressed many in the party as a steady, pragmatic hand. “He did one superb job,” Ford said afterward. “Jim Baker is a talented, able guy and I would trust him anywhere, under any circumstances.”
But Baker had no idea what he would do next. After the election, Ford tried to install him as chairman of the Republican National Committee, only to be blocked by Reagan. Baker had come to Washington, risen like a meteor, and now here he was, barely a year later, just forty-six years old with a desk waiting for him back at his Houston law firm and no desire to take it.