The discussion was to be held at 10:45 a.m. on a Sunday in 1979. The subject: If George Bush ran for president, what were his chances?
In keeping with his father’s preparation mantra, Baker had a six-page paper drawn up by aides to guide the conversation, a brutally honest assessment of the prospective candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. His plan was to distribute it among the Bush advisers who would attend the meeting, then collect copies back after it was over to prevent leaks.
“Bush cannot look too hungry,” the memo argued, and he “should avoid being labeled as ‘moderate’ or ‘Northeastern’ or ‘Ford’ candidate.” Reading it over in advance of the meeting, Baker pulled out his black pen and began scrawling his thoughts next to key lines. In the margins, he ticked off his friend’s weaknesses with bracing candor:
No “base”
“Loser” image
Substantive lightweight
Harsh, to be sure, but a fair reckoning of how Bush was seen in the months before the next presidential contest, if not the reality of who he was. Baker knew that there was no point in believing your own spin. Better to tell the truth, at least to yourself, and he was right about Bush’s challenges. At age fifty-four as 1979 opened, Bush was an unlikely presidential contender—a former congressman who had served just four years in the House and lost two campaigns for the Senate before taking on a series of high-profile but short-lived political appointments. Bush earned respect, not raves. He was everyone’s second choice, a résumé candidate, an insider and a moderate at a moment when his party cared nothing about credentials and everything about finding a crusading conservative to turn Jimmy Carter out of the White House.
But Baker still thought there was a path for Bush, or at least little to lose, and as he read through the memo, he wrote out “one strength,” which was that Bush was “a national candidate w/a natl. view of problems & solutions.” Bush’s experience as Gerald Ford’s CIA director, on the other hand, presented a more mixed political dilemma for an aspiring president, Baker thought: “Good w/far right wing. Bad—spy as Pres!” And then toward the end, he wrote out his own formula, the one that would set a plodding candidate on the path to national office and remain Baker’s strategy for decades of campaigns to come: “Key to winning is: Start early & develop an organization better than any of the opponents. McGovern did it. Nixon did it. Carter did it. Primary elections are won by organization!—almost regardless of candidate.” He underlined “organization.”
Baker was nothing if not organized. Tapped by his friend to put together a national campaign, he set about the task with typically painstaking preparation—assembling a staff, drafting a budget, developing a fundraising plan, crafting a message. This was a new challenge for Baker. For all the star power he earned in Ford’s campaign, he had arrived late, only taking over after the nomination was won. Now it was up to him to build a campaign from scratch.
AS GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH started out the race for the 1980 Republican nomination, he was nobody’s front-runner. That title belonged to Ronald Reagan, who had emerged from his near-upset of Ford with increased stature and the power of a growing conservative movement behind him. Early polls found so little support for Bush that he had an asterisk next to his name. His grim-humored campaign staff declared themselves members of the Asterisk Club.
Baker and Bush had begun discussing a possible campaign as early as December 1976, just weeks after Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter. Then the CIA director, Bush had offered to stay on as a nod to the apolitical nature of the job, but Carter rejected the idea. That left Bush more than a little bitter, but it freed him up to pursue his real ambition. Together, Bush and Baker paid visits to Reagan and Ford to disclose their intentions. Ford indicated that he did not expect to run again and gave Baker his blessing to work for Bush. Reagan was noncommittal about his own plans but expressed appreciation to Bush for the gesture of checking in first. Even as Baker was mounting his ill-fated campaign for office in Texas in 1978, he was advising Bush on what would come next. Now that Baker’s bid was over, he became chief executive officer of the Asterisk Club.
The strategy Baker developed was to emulate what another asterisk had recently done to capture the presidency. Carter had been the first candidate to really make the Iowa caucuses an important benchmark of presidential politics, devoting enormous time and shoe leather to working the farm state in advance of the 1976 race. The payoff was huge. Baker calculated that Bush could do the same thing. “I had read Hamilton Jordan’s book,” Baker said, referring to Carter’s political guru, “and I had seen what Iowa did for Jimmy Carter.” While Reagan enjoyed the star power, Bush would undercut him by virtually moving to Iowa and building an insurgent campaign. Baker’s plan may have lacked in originality, but it had the virtue of capitalizing on Bush’s natural friend-making skills. Still, Bush was no peanut farmer; the Ivy League–educated, tennis-playing Connecticut preppy turned oilman from Texas could hardly relate as easily as Carter could to Iowa voters. And in Reagan, Bush faced a competitor with deep Midwestern roots. Reagan had even lived and worked in Iowa early in his career, becoming a popular radio broadcaster known as Dutch.
A host of other prominent Republicans were angling for the nomination as well, including Bob Dole; Senator Howard Baker, who had made a name for himself challenging Richard Nixon during Watergate; and two congressmen from Illinois, Philip Crane, a conservative who had led the charge against Carter’s plans to relinquish the Panama Canal and sign an arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, and John Anderson, a moderate who had been a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and advocated raising gasoline taxes to pay for new highways. But the candidate who most worried Baker was John Connally, the former Democratic governor of Texas who had been in the car with John Kennedy when he was shot in Dallas and later joined Nixon’s cabinet as treasury secretary. Now a Republican, Connally not only drew from the same Texas base as Bush, but with his tall frame, shock of silver hair, and deep gravelly voice, he looked like “central casting’s idea of president of the United States,” as Baker put it.
Undeterred, Bush formally announced his candidacy on May 1, 1979, taking care to boast that he was a “lifelong Republican,” an unmistakable jab at Reagan and Connally, who were not. His speech was not exactly a rousing call to arms. He promised “principled, stable leadership.” But he also promised energy as he took on the sixty-eight-year-old front-runner. He made a point of showcasing himself jogging, a not-too-subtle jab at his opponent’s age, which burned Reagan to no end. While Reagan stayed above the fray, Bush made himself omnipresent in Iowa, attending all the cattle calls and coffee fundraisers that he could. In the end, he would spend twenty-seven days campaigning in Iowa before the caucuses, compared with just forty-five hours by Reagan.
The political landscape seemed to tilt in Bush’s direction. In November 1979, just two months before Iowa Republicans would caucus, Iranian militants stormed the United States embassy in Tehran and seized more than fifty American diplomats, the start of a long, grinding hostage crisis that would badly damage Carter’s credibility even as it played to Bush’s foreign policy credentials in his battle with Reagan and Connally. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the next month further reinforced the likelihood that the Republican contest would play out against the backdrop of national security challenges.
Still, as he hosted “Ask George Bush” forums, he was neither a polished nor an exciting candidate. He would show up for an event and draw only a single radio reporter. He would sit for an interview with socks that no longer had any elastic, exposing his bare legs to questioners who struggled to avert their eyes. He told audiences that his father “inculcated in me a sense of public service,” a line that struck Baker as so awkward that he finally intervened. Inculcated! “George, you’ve got to stop saying that,” Baker told him. “It sounds like a venereal disease.”
Baker set about building a team of relatively younger aides; many like him had served in Ford’s short-lived administration. His meteoric rise in post-Watergate Washington had left Baker with what would become a lifelong network of Republicans. One of the first in the door was Margaret Tutwiler, an Alabama debutante whose family owned much of Birmingham and who had worked under Baker in the 1976 campaign. Another early enlistee was Karl Rove, a young veteran of George W. Bush’s failed congressional campaign in 1978. Both of them remained in the Bush family orbit for many years to come.
Robert Mosbacher, a gregarious Texas oil mogul who handled fundraising for Bush’s 1970 Senate campaign and served as finance chairman for Ford’s 1976 race, was the obvious choice to run the money operation. Baker had become friends with Mosbacher in 1970, when both of them lost their wives to cancer. Baker also brought on two other Ford veterans: Robert Teeter, the pollster, and David Gergen, who had served as White House communications director. From his Texas campaign, Baker recruited Pete Teeley, but he could not convince Frank Donatelli, a diehard Reaganite, to join the Bush team. When he heard that David Keene, a conservative operative working for Reagan, had run afoul of the campaign manager, John Sears, Baker happily summoned him to Texas and convinced him to jump to Bush’s team as national political director. Keene then recruited a couple more rising operatives: Rich Bond and Vic Gold. “We didn’t have a big gang of people,” Teeley said.
Baker did not bring a strong political imagination to the campaign. His asset beyond his close friendship with the candidate was a ruthless pragmatism that allowed him to pick talented staff members and give them the room to perform. “He doesn’t pretend to be the great creative genius or anything like that,” Keene observed. “That’s rare in politics. He knows who he is. He knows what he can do and he does it as well or better than anybody. But he also knows what he doesn’t do.”
While most top strategists sought to stay close to the candidate, Baker had no need to establish his relationship with Bush and no interest in packing his bags to spend the next few months on the road. “He didn’t want to be the candidate’s buddy,” Keene said. Instead, Baker tried to get Keene to travel with Bush. Keene also said no, and suggested Gold, a former Spiro Agnew aide and one of the party’s best speechwriters. “George Bush is a wonderful guy and has no political instincts at all and his reaction time is weeks,” Keene said. “So we figured it would be a good mix because Vic’s reaction time is nanoseconds.” Then again, Gold, once described as the “Mount Vesuvius of press secretaries,” also had a habit of getting so worked up that he would quit in a huff before coming back to a campaign. He was known for shouting at press van drivers who fell behind a motorcade and pounding an assistant over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. “Vic was a sideshow in himself,” Teeley said.
A BIGGER CHALLENGE for Baker was managing the sprawling and sometimes unruly Bush clan. He would need this skill more than once in the coming years.
Jonathan Bush was a successful investment executive in New Haven, now assigned to his brother’s fundraising team, an effective backwater for keeping troublesome relatives out of strategy or messaging. But Jonathan’s constant efforts to assert more control over the operation drove Robert Mosbacher to distraction and conflicted with Fred Bush, the finance director (and no relation to the family). Baker was regularly brought in to mediate.
The tension finally blew up into what Baker later characterized as a “shouting match” on the evening of February 12, 1980, when Jonathan laid out a series of grievances over an upcoming Los Angeles fundraiser, complaining that he should “honcho” the dinner instead of Jerry Weintraub, the Hollywood producer and friend of the candidate, who was being named to chair it simply because he was a “big deal late-comer.” Baker snapped and told Jonathan to stop being petty.
The next day, Baker put it in writing. “I am sick and tired of getting caught in the middle of your pissing match with Mosbacher and Fred B.,” Baker wrote to the candidate’s brother. “I am not doing my job for GB when I spend time arguing with you.”
Baker even raised the matter with George Bush. But after a night’s sleep, he thought better of it. “Forget about my comment about Johnny,” Baker wrote to Bush the next day. “You don’t need to worry about those things. I am tired of getting caught in the middle of disputes between people in finance, but the situation can be handled without your involvement.”
Then he fired off another memo to Jonathan, Mosbacher, and Fred Bush. “I have refereed my last argument over the timing and announcement of fund raising events,” he wrote. Unfortunately for Baker, he was wrong.
Finally, in April, Jonathan tried to smooth over the latest dispute. “Let’s put our differences aside and bury the hatchet,” he wrote Baker.
“The hatchet is buried,” Baker wrote back. “But I simply do not have time to argue with you about scheduling decisions.”
Jonathan was not the only Bush who got on Baker’s nerves. Prescott Bush Jr., another brother of the candidate, called at one point to ask for money because he was convinced George could win a lot of African American votes in the New York contest. Exasperated, Baker replied, “Pres, that’s not what we’re concentrating on. We’re focused on Iowa and New Hampshire.” Baker stood his ground, assuming that George would back him up. (“There are no amateurs in politics,” Baker sighed years later when asked about this. “Everybody is an expert.”)
If handling the family were not awkward enough, there was also the matter of the candidate’s longtime personal assistant, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who was quickly making enemies on the campaign staff. Fitzgerald, an attractive young divorcée, first met Bush while working at the Republican National Committee a few years earlier. Neither spoke of it publicly but it was clear a personal relationship of some closeness developed. Bush even called Fitzgerald regularly one summer at the beach house in North Carolina she was sharing, according to a housemate later contacted by the reporter Susan Page. He brought her to China as his personal secretary and then to the CIA. Many who worked for him over the years wondered about their relationship. Bush, a flirt with a habit of bottom-squeezing attractive women he encountered, repeatedly sought out Fitzgerald despite the questions it raised and any pain it caused Barbara. Colleagues often interpreted Fitzgerald’s airs as a sign that she was the boss’s secret girlfriend. Whether they actually had an affair was never clear; one person in Bush’s inner circle told Page that they had a romantic relationship for a dozen years. Both denied it to Bush’s biographer, Jon Meacham. Baker always professed not to know—but did not rule it out.
Either way, Fitzgerald caused great consternation for Baker. After Baker arrived to run the campaign, she trashed him during after-hours drinks with other members of the staff. “He’s a loser, two-time loser, lost for Ford and then lost for attorney general,” she said. Karl Rove reported the comment to Baker, who told Bush about it. But Bush continued to empower Fitzgerald and she was able to get away with behavior that no one else could. She blocked access to the candidate and disregarded instructions. Indeed, she had laid out the campaign headquarters in such a way that Baker had to go through her office to reach Bush. Baker ordered Rove to have a door cut in the wall between his office and Bush’s so he could speak with the candidate without having to go through her. “She thought she was in charge of things,” said David Keene. “She was a pain in the ass.”
Baker thought so too. He considered her rude, presumptuous, and impossible to deal with. She added events to Bush’s schedule without consulting Baker, she was slow going through files, she could not delegate efficiently, and she often did not answer the phones. The breaking point came when she told David Gergen to send a speech for the candidate to her rather than to Baker. After he found out, Baker angrily told her to fax him the speech in Washington, but the night passed and it never came. She later claimed that Bush had told her not to send it but when Baker asked the candidate, he denied it.
In frustration, Baker grabbed an envelope and scrawled out a list of complaints about Fitzgerald. “Have worst of all worlds because she didn’t do as I asked & she said she would,” he wrote. “Responsibility vs. Auth. My pol judg. may not be best but it’s better than hers.” He was so aggravated that after filling one side, he turned the envelope over to keep going. “If I ask janitor to tell her to do something—she has to do it. Otherwise org. will never function smoothly. To even have to go thru this is stupid. Conspiratorial. Play games.”
On another occasion, he wrote more about her in an angry note to himself that he kept for years. “She wants to run the campaign,” he complained. Another time, he scratched out a list of people Fitzgerald had offended, including “Barbara Bush!” he added with an exclamation point. “Now—‘me’ & I get along w/everybody.”
One night, Baker groused about the situation with his wife. He did not know what to do, he said. Fitzgerald was only hurting Bush by disrupting the operation.
“Honey, you have to talk to him,” Susan told him.
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
Baker could not bring himself to confront his friend about Fitzgerald. It was too sensitive. Finally, he had an idea. He asked Susan to talk with Bush and tell him that her husband would quit if the situation did not change. It was an extraordinary act of deflection—threatening to resign through his wife.
Nonetheless, Susan could see how upset her husband was and agreed to do it. She dialed Bush from the phone in the kitchen of their Houston house while, unknown to the candidate, Baker stood next to her listening to the conversation. After she explained the problem, she outlined the stakes.
“George,” Susan said in her honeyed Texas accent, “you’re going to lose Jimmy because he can’t operate this way.”
Bush seemed surprised. “Oh, really?”
Bush agreed to make a change. He would not fire Fitzgerald—he was too attached to her for that—but he sent her to New York to work on fundraising with Jonathan Bush. For Baker, it lumped two of his problems together. He considered it the perfect solution.
The episode said much about Baker’s relationship with Bush. He cherished their friendship and was determined to do everything he could to put him in the White House. But he was no longer the rookie he was when Bush assigned him to run Harris County during his Senate race a decade earlier. Baker was now a seasoned political hand, managing his second presidential campaign, and he was not going to stand for the likes of Jennifer Fitzgerald or Jonathan Bush getting in the way. Some of his aides thought Baker lost a little respect for Bush in the process. Yet for the first time, he was acutely conscious of the fact that he was no longer Bush’s peer but his subordinate. And he found direct conflict with his friend and boss intolerable.
BAKER’S BET ON Iowa, meanwhile, seemed as though it might actually pay off. Sticking to the plan Baker had formulated in 1979, Bush attended every fair and every forum in Iowa he could, even as Reagan stayed away. In Iowa, showing up mattered. And Bush had showed up, again and again. When Bush, who had trailed Reagan by 36 percentage points in Iowa seven weeks before the caucuses, suddenly won a straw poll of Republicans in Ames, the victory, although technically meaningless, generated favorable attention and a whole new set of expectations. By the time the frigid day of the caucuses arrived on January 21, 1980, with the temperature dipping to 24 degrees, Bush was surprisingly hot. He now felt he at least had to come in second to Reagan. When reporters asked him the morning of the caucus how he would react to a third-place showing, he said, “I’ll make it sound like a victory, but you won’t let me get away with it.”
As the early results began trickling in that evening, Bush found himself actually leading. The margin held up. Somehow, against all odds, he had pulled off the upset of the year, toppling Reagan, the conservative darling and prohibitive front-runner, with 31.6 percent to 29.5 percent. Bush exulted. “The impossible dream, the asterisk on all these polls just four months ago!” he exclaimed at his victory party.
Bush and Baker had accomplished what they were looking for—they had set themselves up as the clear alternative to Reagan heading into the primaries. None of the other candidates had come close. “I suppose I am out of the pack,” Bush said on television after his win, “but they will be after me, howling and yowling at my heels. What we will have is momentum. We will look forward to ‘Big Mo’ being on our side, as they say in athletics.”
Baker grimaced at the “Big Mo” phrase. It sounded too cocky, too premature. It raised expectations too high. And it went against the strategy he had developed. Baker, backed by David Keene and Robert Teeter, urged Bush to talk about the issues that animated his campaign, not his political prospects. They had gotten the attention of voters, but now the candidate needed to tell them what he stood for. Republicans in New Hampshire needed a reason to vote for him other than the fact that he had won in Iowa. “In Iowa, we defined the George Who,” Baker said, “but we never had figured out the George Why.”
Flush with victory, Bush brushed off Baker and the others. No longer the asterisk, Bush got carried away by success and figured that what worked in Iowa would work again in New Hampshire, where he had also erased a huge deficit in the polls. “You’re not out there,” he told his team back at headquarters. “You haven’t seen what it’s like.”
Now the trick was to draw out Reagan, who was scrambling after the surprising Iowa debacle. Invariably the contest would boil down to Reagan, still the favorite of conservative insurgents, and a single establishment rival. Bush was determined to be that lone alternative. “The clean fingernail Republican,” as William Loeb, the publisher of the conservative Manchester Union Leader and a Reagan supporter, described Bush.
On February 11, Baker and the Bush campaign team received a letter from Jon Breen, executive editor of the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire, offering to host a “public meeting” between Reagan and Bush on February 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the gymnasium of Nashua High School, just three days before the all-important primary. “We propose this one-on-one encounter,” Breen wrote, “given the prevalent wisdom that Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush are the front-runners in the campaign for the Republican nomination.”
Baker and Bush were ecstatic. One on one! They had what they wanted—a two-man race.
DESPITE THE THRILL of the Iowa win, the campaign was a grueling slog for Baker. When the campaign started, “Jim soon became an asterisk at home,” Susan recalled. “As punishment for his long and frequent absences, our baby would refuse to hug him for hours after he returned.” She added, “He was not in my good graces either.” She was left to deal with the troublesome older children as they struggled with drugs and alcohol, all with Dad out of town much of the time.
Baker had rented a house at 718 S. Royal Street in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington and a little over a mile from the campaign headquarters, living there by himself for months until Susan and Mary-Bonner moved up from Houston. A creature of habit, Baker ate dinner nearly every night at the same restaurant in Alexandria, ordering the same kidney pie before smoking a cheap cigar. “I complained to him once—a guy with your money ought to buy a good one,” David Keene said.
Alone in his rental, Baker’s thoughts turned toward the strange twist in his life that had brought him into politics—and left him with a rebellious, unhappy brood of kids back in Texas. He sent a note to all four of his sons, enclosing a pamphlet on the health dangers of smoking too much pot. “I hope you each know that I do this only because I deeply love each and every one of you,” he wrote. “I haven’t lectured any of you for a number of years about this, so I hope you will forgive me this one time.”
He added a line designed to weigh on the boys. “It was ten years ago yesterday that Mom left us,” he wrote. “I know she’s been up there keeping track of us and is proud that each and every one of you are making it in spite of losing her. I know I’m proud, and I’m sending you this material also because I know she would want you to read it.”
For Baker, the reference to Mary Stuart was a painful one. She was the one who had been a Republican. She had been the one who had volunteered on campaigns. Imagine what she would have thought had she seen her Democratic husband at the head of a surging Republican campaign for president.
ON THE NIGHT of February 23, Baker and Bush arrived at Nashua High School in New Hampshire only to find a surprise waiting. John Sears, the Reagan campaign manager, sent word to David Keene that he wanted to see Bush. Keene was offended at the presumption. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. Campaign managers don’t summon candidates. If Sears wanted to see someone, it would be his counterpart. So Baker met with Sears, who told him that Reagan wanted to open up the debate to all the candidates, not just the two of them.
“It’s important that we have everybody included,” Sears said.
“Well, the ambassador is pretty dead set against it,” Baker replied, referring to Bush, “but I’ll take the message back.”
As he turned to go, Baker noticed the door to an adjacent room was ajar. Inside were Reagan and four other candidates who had not been invited—Bob Dole, Howard Baker, Philip Crane, and John Anderson. At that point, Baker realized it was an ambush.
Baker told Bush what was happening but the candidate, as predicted, remained adamant that they had agreed to a two-man debate. “None of us tried to talk him out of it,” Baker said. Only two chairs had been set up onstage, but Reagan marched on with the four excluded candidates. The Reagan campaign had agreed to foot the bill for the debate to get around a complaint that the newspaper was violating federal election law by making what amounted to an illegal campaign contribution to the two candidates it had invited, but now Reagan was pushing to include the entire slate. Jon Breen, the Telegraph editor who was serving as moderator, tried to cut him off.
“Turn Mr. Reagan’s microphone off,” Breen directed the technical staff.
“I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” Reagan replied sharply, mangling the editor’s name but drawing a burst of applause from the audience.
It was a moment of drama that would resonate long after the evening had ended. Reagan appeared confident and decisive, while Bush seemed peevish and unwilling to confront his fellow candidates.
Dole, for one, was livid. As the barred candidates filed off the stage, he whispered to Bush, “I’ll get you someday, you fucking Nazi.” Descending from the platform, Dole encountered Baker and poked him in the chest. The two had worked together in 1976 when Dole was the vice presidential nominee and Baker the campaign chairman. Now Dole hissed at him. “You’re never going to forget this,” he snarled.
Bush’s handling of the flap did not impress many others either, least of all Reagan. “After the debate in New Hampshire, he thought Bush was a wimp,” said Lyn Nofziger, a longtime Reagan aide. With the surprise ambush, Reagan had effectively thwarted the one-on-one moment Bush had sought—while the debate proceeded with just the two candidates, it was thoroughly overshadowed by the confrontation over the other four. Later that night, Baker ran into David Broder, the venerable political reporter from The Washington Post, who told him that they had screwed up big-time. “I don’t think any of us appreciated the downside that was going to take place as a result of our saying no,” Baker said.
Three days later, Reagan roared to a convincing victory in New Hampshire, taking 50 percent of the vote to 23 percent for Bush. It was a devastating defeat for Bush and Baker. The Big Mo was gone. A week later, Bush bounced back with a much narrower win in Massachusetts, but Reagan was still far and away the leader in national polling. The best news for Bush was that at least he had consolidated for himself the role of the main challenger to Reagan. By April, Dole, Baker, Crane, Anderson, and John Connally had all dropped out.
Bush was the last man standing, the last one who had the chance to stop the insurgent conservative movement from capturing the party. But he was fighting the tides. Reagan had harnessed the strength of the newly emerging religious right and vowed to ban abortion, while taking on the Soviet Union and taming a federal government that had grown out of control. Bush offered no particular ideology beyond a conventional country-club Republicanism. While he too talked tough about the Russians and said he personally opposed abortion, he was not as much of a saber-rattler and he did not support a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. Rather than attack government, his argument, essentially, was that he would run it better than the other guy.
The establishment rallied behind Bush, even if the political class was never convinced of his capacity for pulling off an upset, and the two candidates raced around the country seeking advantage. Reagan swept most of the succeeding primaries, although Bush squeaked by in Connecticut, where he was born.
Bush made a stand in Pennsylvania, where he thought he had a good chance to pick up a major state with many delegates, and he continued to pound Reagan. In a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on April 10, he ridiculed Reagan’s supply-side economic theory, the notion that if he cut taxes deeply, it would set off an explosion of growth so powerful that it would produce enough new tax revenue to keep the deficit from ballooning. Reagan had been promising not just to cut taxes but also to dramatically increase defense spending while still reducing budgetary red ink.
“What I’m saying is that it just isn’t going to work,” Bush said at Carnegie Mellon. Reagan’s plan was “what I call a voodoo economic policy.”
The phrase was catchy and it stuck. Pete Teeley had come up with it after reading an editorial that criticized Jimmy Carter by calling his policy the product of “witch doctors.” Teeley kept the metaphor but switched the target, adapting it to fit the emerging critique of Reagan.
But Baker was not amused. By this point, he had concluded that Bush was not going to win the nomination and he was already thinking ahead. His goal now was to do well enough that Bush would earn his way onto the ticket as the vice presidential running mate. The way to do that was to demonstrate strength but not to alienate Reagan. To that end, Baker had already come up with a list of banned words that Bush’s team was never to use about Reagan, including “jingoistic,” “extremist,” and “irresponsible.” Baker even rejected a commercial that the media team had developed showing a picture of Carter with a voice talking about the danger of a former governor with no national experience who could not get the job done. As the announcer warned against making “the same mistake again,” Reagan’s picture came onto the screen. “It was a very good negative ad,” Baker said later. “But if we’d run it, I can promise you, George Bush would never have been put on the ticket.”
Now there was Teeley and his “voodoo economics.” Baker got on the phone. “Pete, you’ve got to be goddamn careful in terms of what he’s saying out there, because if it goes too far, there will be no way that he’s going to get on the ticket,” Baker scolded.
Then he called Bush and said much the same thing. “Make sure Teeley doesn’t push you too far,” Baker said.
But as Bush saw it, he was still running for president not vice president, and he defended Teeley. “Jim, he’s the only one here who wants to win other than me,” Bush said.
Bush was right about that. A memo sent to Baker from Rich Bond a few days later outlined the prospects in the remaining states, declaring five of them “hopeless” and the rest difficult. “Even with a Pennsylvania win, there will be no significant change in GB’s fortunes in the above mentioned states,” the memo said.
Bush did go on to beat Reagan in Pennsylvania on April 22 and came close in Texas, but as predicted, Reagan then racked up a string of victories. Baker commissioned a twenty-page memo dated May 1 and titled “Assessing the Value of Campaign Survival Until the Republican Convention,” which listed the advantages and disadvantages of staying in. “Bush’s major objectives are best met by remaining an active candidate until the convention” as long as he focused on Carter and didn’t tear down Reagan, the memo concluded. “One Bush objective perhaps threatened by his campaign’s longevity is the Vice Presidential nomination, but there is also no good evidence that his chances are actually improved by his campaign’s demise.” Staying in, the memo argued, would preserve Bush’s visibility and allow him to “lay claim to future leadership” in the party.
Even so, Baker was coming under pressure from Bush allies to press the candidate to call it quits. “I have never wanted to discourage him, so I have not raised the question of withdrawing to George,” Representative Bill Frenzel of Minnesota wrote Baker on May 14. “However, it’s time for you, or somebody, to do so. In my judgement [sic], we are well past the time when we are able to do him any good.” It was hard to argue with the math. By the campaign’s count, Reagan had secured 870 delegates to 272 for Bush. A memo sent to Baker predicted Reagan would have enough to clinch the nomination before the big June 3 primaries in California, Ohio, and New Jersey.
It turned out not to take even that long. On May 20, the day after the memo, Bush prevailed in Michigan, a big state and a big win. But even as he and his team celebrated, ABC News and CBS News focused on Reagan’s victory that same night in Oregon, reporting that it would put him over the top for the nomination. That may have been premature. There were a dozen contests left and different counts had Reagan still a bit short, but Baker could read a map and an accounting ledger. They were running out of money—if they kept up the same burn rate, they would reach the federal spending cap by May 31.
Bush’s allies in Congress headed to the Alexandria campaign headquarters to meet with Baker and urge the candidate to withdraw. The time had come, they argued. There was no realistic chance of winning the nomination, so staying in served only to damage Reagan, the inevitable nominee. Baker was increasingly coming to the same conclusion and struggling to find a way to convince Bush. “Jim turned off the phones in California and closed the headquarters without telling him,” David Keene said. That “was like a two-by-four and it got his attention.”
When the Post’s David Broder called, Baker admitted that the campaign did not have enough money to compete in California, Reagan’s home state. “If you can’t do California,” Baker told Broder, “then you can’t argue to people that you still have a shot in terms of the numbers. And once you concede that, why do you stay in?”
It was the question of the hour, but not one that Bush had expected to read in the newspaper. Even though Baker’s quote was in the eleventh paragraph of a story on page A3, it exploded with the force of a bomb. Broder interpreted it to mean that Bush would not contest the biggest prize of June 3. “Bush All But Abandons California Race, Plans Think Session,” the headline read.
Reporters following Bush in New Jersey peppered him with questions about Baker’s comment. “Baker says you don’t have anything going in California. Does this mean you’re dropping out?”
Bush was furious. From a Holiday Inn in New Jersey, he phoned Baker back at campaign headquarters.
“What in the hell are you doing?” Bush demanded.
“All I did was be truthful,” Baker replied. “We don’t have the money.”
Baker had violated his own cardinal rule about not saying anything publicly that would cause problems for his candidate and he admitted to Bush that he should not have. He would always insist that he had not intended to send a message to the candidate through the media. But the point was still valid.
“George, I think it’s time to get out of the race,” he said.
Bush was flatly against it. “No, Jimmy,” he said. “If we can only get to California, we’ll be able to turn this thing around.”
“We just don’t have the money,” Baker said. “I wish to hell we did, but we don’t and I don’t see how we can get it.”
Bush was in denial, but he planned to meet with Baker and other advisers back at his home in Houston over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. On the plane heading south, Bush remained defiant. “I WILL NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER. NEVER,” he wrote out on a notepad. Bush felt that pulling out would be a betrayal of the people working for his campaign in the upcoming states. And he could not stomach the idea of surrendering. Bush was the only person Baker knew who was as preternaturally driven as he was. “He is the most competitive guy you ever met,” Baker said. Now Bush was pretty incensed at Baker, thinking of him sitting comfortably back in campaign headquarters. “Jimmy wasn’t on the road with us all the time,” said Susan Morrison, a press aide, reflecting the way Bush viewed it. “His lack of passion we didn’t want to hear. We wanted him to bleed a little.”
In the sunroom of his house in Houston, Bush sat down with Baker as well as David Keene and Vic Gold. Barbara Bush and other family members were reinforcing the candidate’s instinct to stay in, making Baker’s job that much tougher. Some advisers, such as Nick Brady, an investment banker who was close to Bush and running the New Jersey campaign, insisted he could rack up delegates there and elsewhere on June 3. But Baker, Keene, and Teeter agreed that they were done. There was no point to staying in the race. Baker argued that there was still a chance of becoming vice president but not if Bush aggravated Reagan.
“We still have a shot at it,” Bush responded.
“George, you’ve got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em,” Baker replied. “Take a look at these numbers.”
Baker took a sheaf of papers and spread them out on the coffee table.
“Jim, I’ve never quit anything until it was finished,” Bush said. “This is no time to start.”
“But the campaign is finished, George,” Baker insisted. “You’re the only one who doesn’t seem to know it.”
Baker made the case for Bush’s vice presidential prospects but the candidate was skeptical that Reagan would want him. Baker argued that Reagan would come around. Bush would be the only one at the convention other than Reagan with delegates. “That gives you one hell of a leg up because to solidify the party, he really ought to pick you,” Baker said. “You’re seen to be a moderate. He’s seen to be a conservative. You’re the last man standing.”
The debate continued over the course of the holiday weekend. It was a brutal task for Baker, pushing his best friend to acknowledge that he had lost. “He had a hell of a tough job convincing the candidate that now was the time to fold,” Nick Brady said.
Finally, Bush gave in, telling Baker and the staff to draft a statement for him to look at. “The fat lady may not have sung yet,” Bush sighed, “but she’s warming up in the back room.”
Baker and his team headed back to the local Marriott where they were staying to script Bush’s exit. They ended up with a realist’s lament that very much sounded like the pragmatic lawyer who had run the campaign with an unsparing eye for his candidate’s weaknesses from the start. “My instinct was to keep fighting,” Baker had Bush say in his withdrawal statement, adding, “I see the world not as I wish it were, but as it is.”
The episode left some raw feelings. Barbara Bush was furious with Baker and would remain upset about it for decades. “I may have been mad at Jimmy Baker at the time for saying that he wanted to get out,” she told her biographer, Susan Page.
“I think Baker’s point was, if you want to be considered for vice president—” Page began.
Barbara interrupted. “Baker wanted to be considered as chief of staff,” she said sharply. “He ran for that.”
At that point, of course, Baker had no clue that he might end up running a future Reagan White House, but the comment indicated just how deeply Barbara felt that her husband’s best friend had been out for himself first. Yet even if that were true, Baker saw clearly what the family could not. In the end, Bush could not overtake Reagan at a moment when the party was turning sharply to the right.
Still, with Baker’s guidance, Bush the asterisk had done better than anyone had a right to expect. He won seven contests and piled up 3 million votes to Reagan’s forty-four wins and 7.7 million votes. In the process of pulling the plug on Bush’s ambitions, Baker very well may have saved them—and his own.
BAKER RETURNED HOME to find that at least one voter was perfectly happy that the campaign was over. For Susan, it was not just the eighteen months since Bush’s phone call interrupted their Florida vacation. It was the Texas attorney general’s race. It was the Gerald Ford campaign. It was the Commerce Department and the move to Washington and the merger of two unhappy families.
By the time Bush dropped out in May 1980, Susan was exhausted and ready for her husband to spend time with her and their young bonus baby. “I was so relieved. I was so tired I was cross-eyed,” Susan said. “We had been married seven years and I want to tell you it felt like seventy because he was gone all the time.”
But Baker was not done. While one campaign was now shutting down, a different one, more subtle, more complicated, was just getting under way, and this one had an electorate of just one. Baker was determined to get Bush onto the 1980 ticket, if not in the number one slot then in the number two position. And he had less than two months to do it.
Bush was right that Reagan was not at all inclined to pick him. Reagan was still raw over Bush the jogger’s unspoken but obvious emphasis on the age difference, not to mention the “voodoo economics” comment. The former governor made clear to his own advisers that he wanted someone other than Bush. The search for a running mate soon had an acronym—ABB, for Anybody But Bush.
Baker’s argument was a simple one—putting Bush onto the ticket would bring the party together, uniting moderates and conservatives. He began talking up the possibility in interviews and he sent signals in private to the Reagan camp about Bush’s willingness.
But Baker found an obstacle he had not anticipated—his old boss, Gerald Ford. In the days leading up to the opening of the Republican National Convention in Detroit on July 14, Reagan contemplated asking his onetime rival to join his ticket. The idea was almost unthinkable, even absurd—a former president serving as vice president? How would that work? What would Ford be called, “Mr. President” in deference to his old position or “Mr. Vice President” in keeping with his new one? Yet as implausible as it seemed, Baker discovered that onetime colleagues like Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, a former Ford economic adviser, were lobbying the former president to do it.
As the convention opened at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena, the delegates were abuzz with the possibility. Intermediaries shuttled between Reagan and Ford to see whether it might work. Ford had conditions—he wanted to chair National Security Council meetings, exercise veto power over certain appointments, and bring Kissinger along with him as secretary of state and Greenspan as secretary of the treasury. Then Ford made a fateful and curious decision to visit the CBS News anchor booth overlooking the convention floor to give an interview to Walter Cronkite. As the delegates stared up at the booth, the Reagan team watched on television with astonishment.
What Ford described was more than the typical vice president’s role. Cronkite noted that it sounded like more of a “co-presidency.” Ford did not disavow the term. Back in his suite listening, Reagan looked appalled. “No, that’s not right,” he said.
With that, the Ford boomlet was over. Reagan could not accept an arrangement that diminished his authority as president.
“Who else is there?” he asked.
“There’s Bush,” said Richard Allen, an adviser to Reagan, circling back to the most obvious alternative.
“I can’t take him,” Reagan said. “That voodoo economic policy charge and his stand on abortion are wrong.”
Allen did not consider that an absolute rejection. He handed the candidate a copy of the Republican platform, which included a strong anti-abortion plank. “If you could be assured that George Bush would support this platform in every detail, would you reconsider Bush?” he asked.
Reagan thought for a moment. “Well, if you put it that way, I would agree to reconsider.”
At the Hotel Pontchartrain, Baker and the rest of the Bush team, not knowing any of this, had all but given up on his chances. Baker told Pete Teeley to give a “lid” to the reporters waiting for Bush in the lobby, meaning that there would be no more news for the day. But while Teeley was in the elevator heading down, Baker got a call from someone in the Reagan camp.
“Hold everything,” Baker told Bush. “This thing’s about to come apart. Somebody’s having second thoughts.”
Baker ordered another aide to intercept Teeley in the lobby to stop him from dismissing the reporters. “It’s not over yet,” he said.
Even so, no one in the Bush suite thought he was about to be selected. The candidate, dressed in a red sports shirt, drank a Stroh’s beer with his advisers and watched television as the hours drifted by without any further news. Finally, at 11:37 p.m., the phone in Room 1912 rang. Baker picked it up.
“Is Ambassador Bush there?” he heard.
“Who’s calling?” Baker asked.
“Governor Reagan.”
Baker handed the phone to Bush. Nick Brady went to fetch Barbara Bush, who had gone to rest. Despite the tip to Baker, everyone figured this was the end of the line for George Bush and Reagan was calling to let him down easy. As Bush pressed the receiver against his ear, Baker could only hear his side of the conversation.
“Hello. Yes sir, how are you? Yes sir.”
After a pause, Bush suddenly turned, grinned and flashed a thumbs-up signal.
“Why, yes sir,” Bush said into the phone. “I think you can say I support the platform wholeheartedly.”
With that, George Bush found himself on the Republican ticket as the vice presidential candidate, voodoo economics and his position on abortion readily cast aside in the name of ambition and party unity. Baker’s conviction had been right—after proving himself in the primaries, Bush got out just in time to keep from alienating Reagan.
“George’s exodus was timely,” Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, one of Reagan’s best friends, said later. “Had he held out much longer, George might well have been vetoed as vice president.”
BAKER HAD SUCCEEDED in getting his friend onto the ticket, but now the question was what to do himself. Reagan’s advisers asked him to manage the Bush vice presidential campaign, but having already run the general election race for an incumbent president, it did not appeal to him. He dismissed a suggestion to be political director for the same reason. William Casey, who had taken over for John Sears as Reagan’s campaign chairman, wanted Baker to come on board as his deputy chairman, but Ed Meese, a longtime Reagan hand from California, already had that title and objected.
Baker had breakfast with David Keene near the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, to talk over the options.
“What should I ask for?” Baker wondered.
Keene had an idea. “You should volunteer to be the guy that takes care of the debates,” he said.
Baker seemed intrigued. Keene noted that the Reagan camp was reluctant to debate, worried that he might not match up to Jimmy Carter. Keene harbored no such doubts.
“If there is a debate, Jim, have you seen Reagan lose one?” he said. “So it’s a win-win deal and you’re not getting yourself into the day-to-day business and so you don’t get into a fight.”
Baker took the amorphous title of “senior adviser” and agreed to be in charge of debate negotiations for a campaign that wanted no debates. He moved into an office on the third floor of the Reagan headquarters and brought with him a core team from the Bush campaign, including Margaret Tutwiler and David Gergen. Soon enough, he was asked to attend strategy meetings that went beyond debates. Still, “the Reagan team was in charge,” Tutwiler remembered. Baker and his entourage were the outsiders.
Not everyone in the Reagan camp was happy about Baker’s arrival, foreshadowing years of internal wars to come. Baker was either a Bush loyalist, or out for himself, not for the cause. In meetings, the self-appointed Reagan loyalists would take on the newcomer. “Jim Baker is the biggest phony who ever lived,” said Max Hugel, a Reagan campaign aide who would go on to serve as a deputy CIA director under Bill Casey. “One day we were in a budget meeting and I said, ‘I need $3 million for my voters groups.’ Baker turned to me and asked, ‘Why do you need all that money?’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you why. I studied the campaign you ran for Ford in 1976 and if you had used the three million you had left wisely, you would have won.’ ”
The 1980 general election battle took place in a country in crisis. With Iran still holding fifty-two American hostages and the Soviets rampaging through Afghanistan, the United States appeared to be in retreat. At home, the country was bogged down in a debilitating recession exacerbated by fuel shortages and high interest rates. Reagan deployed Carter’s own “misery index” formulation from 1976 against him—adding unemployment and inflation figures that fall produced a combined rate reaching about 20 percent. Americans were having trouble finding jobs, buying homes, and even filling their cars with gasoline. For Baker, the idea of turning the misery index around on Carter seemed like sweet revenge.
More broadly, the nation was still struggling to find its footing after the twin nightmares of Vietnam and Watergate. Ford and Carter had not restored America’s faith in itself—the pardon of Nixon, the energy crisis, a shrinking manufacturing sector, decaying inner cities, waves of crime, a meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and culture clashes over race, sex, and drugs had all taken their toll. National will had been so sapped that Carter ultimately gave a lecturing speech bemoaning what came to be called “malaise,” even though he never actually used that word.
Reagan was the anti-malaise candidate, unabashedly patriotic and optimistic, celebrating the United States as a “shining city on the hill,” a vision that had been missing in American politics for years. His great appeal came not in his sometimes fuzzy, even muddled, policy prescriptions or his chest-beating anti-Soviet rhetoric, but in his own indomitable belief in American exceptionalism. Contrasted with Carter’s Sunday-school-teacher approach to politics, Reagan seemed even to many Democrats to be a breath of fresh air. But his history of unconventional ideas and divisive statements caused trepidation. He had called unemployment insurance “a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders” and asserted that trees were responsible for 80 percent of air pollution. His strident Cold War rhetoric raised fears of nuclear confrontation. Carter’s strategy was to paint him as a dangerous lightweight and warmonger.
When it came to debates, Keene turned out to be right. Managing a candidate with a shaky command of facts and a disconcerting penchant for confusing movie tales with real life, Reagan’s team feared putting him onstage without a script for an hour or more, unsure if he would be nimble enough to parry a sitting president far better schooled in the nuances of policy. Nancy Reagan, among others, totally opposed debates. But as the fall wore on, Baker pressed Reagan to take on the president and the California advisers increasingly came to the conclusion that they had to accept at least one or two forums, if only because polls suggested that Reagan still needed to close the deal with the public. “We can’t run out the clock when we don’t have the football,” said Drew Lewis, who ran Reagan’s campaign in Pennsylvania.
As Reagan moved toward agreeing to a debate, he was confronted with the question of what to do about John Anderson. The Republican congressman, “a stubborn man who does not suffer fools lightly,” as The Washington Post described him, had lost the party nomination fight, but filed as an independent in the general election. Running as an earnest if pedantic truth teller, Anderson was polling a distant third, but Reagan took the position that it would not be fair to debate without him also onstage—a way of pumping up the independent’s candidacy on the theory that he would draw more voters from Carter. The president, understandably, refused. Ultimately, Baker negotiated two debates, one featuring just Reagan and Anderson and another between the two major party candidates.
Michael Deaver later credited Baker with convincing Reagan to debate Anderson. Either way, Baker thought the visual would work to Reagan’s benefit—Carter would look afraid by not showing up. And he counted on Reagan’s winning personality to shine against Anderson’s dour persona. On the night of the debate in Baltimore on September 21, Baker gave Reagan a card just before he went onstage with one word of advice: “Chuckle.” As it turned out, Anderson proved a good sparring partner for Reagan to warm up against. “It sort of wiped Anderson out,” Baker said. “He was, after all, a Republican, and he was a terrible debater and he was a colorless guy.”
To negotiate the showdown with Carter, the two campaigns met at the office of the sponsoring organization, the League of Women Voters. But the talks bogged down. Baker excused himself to go to the men’s room and a minute later so did his Democratic counterpart, Robert Strauss, who happened to be a friend and fellow Texan. Within fifteen minutes, the two lawyers returned with a deal, a dozen details spelled out on the back of a Reagan-Bush campaign envelope that Baker happened to have in his pocket.
The last unsettled issues were time and place. Reagan’s team wanted a date as late as possible, figuring that the closer to the election, the better. Baker went so far as to propose that the debate be held on the night before the election. Carter rejected that, assuming that Reagan would make a blunder and wanting more time for any gaffe to sink in with the public. They settled on October 28 at the Cleveland Convention Center—still late enough in the campaign that it played in Reagan’s favor. “We were outfoxed by Jim Baker in agreeing to it so close to the election,” Stuart Eizenstat, a top Carter adviser, later concluded. More importantly, in Eizenstat’s view, Baker’s ability to convince Reagan to debate in the first place proved decisive. “His confidence in his candidate may have assured his election,” he said. Carter also came to believe that Baker had gotten the better of him. “He out-traded the people who were representing me at the time,” he said years later.
Baker would have more than just confidence. Just a few days before the debate, he found himself with a black loose-leaf binder that turned out to be Carter’s debate briefing book. Baker remembered receiving it from Bill Casey, the campaign chairman, although Casey would later deny it. Either way, Baker did not ask where it originally came from. He did not want to know. A lawyer who prided himself on his rectitude chose to turn a blind eye to whatever nefariousness had delivered the briefing book into his hands, a rare lapse in judgment for someone who would become famous for seeing potential trouble around corners. But at this point, early in his political career, he suddenly found himself with the road map that Carter’s campaign had prepared for the president’s showdown with Reagan.
Baker thumbed through it for an hour or two before passing it along to the aides helping to prepare Reagan for the debate. The book outlined Carter’s strategy for presenting himself as a seasoned, tested, and mainstream president challenged by an unproven and radical opponent: “You are moderate, he’s extreme; you are cautious, he’s a hip-shooter; you are trained for the job, he’s inexperienced; you understand complexities; he’s simplistic.” It outlined some snappy lines for Carter to use, such as denouncing Reagan’s economic plan as a “rich man’s tax cut which would flood the country with dollars as fast as the printing presses could print them.” And it repeatedly urged Carter to paint Reagan as a risky choice for America, someone who could only “offer uncertainty for the future.”
Baker would later say that the briefing book was not all that helpful, given that many of the themes and arguments contained in it had been used publicly during the campaign already. But at the very least, it provided a certain comfort for Reagan’s team that it could anticipate what was to come. What Baker did not anticipate is what the clandestinely obtained briefing book would come to mean for his own life when it was later revealed that he had it.
As for Reagan’s own briefing book, David Gergen was in charge of preparing it. The first version was “quite thick” and when he presented it, he noticed “Nancy looking daggers,” Gergen said. “I made sure the next book was drastically shorter.” The actor in Reagan could always master his lines and articulate his larger themes, but he was hardly a wizard of policy details and Nancy did not want him lost in the weeds.
Either way, Reagan brought his top game to the stage in Cleveland, outflanking the incumbent with a genial performance that defused fears that he was a reckless, trigger-happy cowboy. As Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s longtime right-hand man, described it, “Reagan looked relaxed, smiling, robust; the president, erect, lips tight, looking like a coiled spring, ready to pounce, an overtrained boxer, too ready for the bout.” Carter pressed his case, portraying himself as a careful student of government while depicting Reagan as a radical right-winger who would gut Medicare and Social Security. “There you go again,” Reagan chided Carter for supposedly misrepresenting the Republican’s positions, a line that Baker later said was not pre-scripted. Carter was mocked for saying that he had asked his twelve-year-old daughter, Amy, what the most important issue in the campaign was and she answered nuclear nonproliferation. Reagan avoided the gaffes Carter’s team had counted on and closed his case with the simple, devastating question that would become a staple for future campaigns: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Stuart Spencer, who had returned to the Reagan fold after his work for Ford in 1976, conceded that Carter may have won on substance, but not on overall presentation. “Carter on the issues did a pretty good job,” he said, “but he had a totally different style than Reagan.” For Reagan, the debate was a chance to show the public that he was not the scary extremist or bumbling actor that Carter had portrayed, in effect reassuring voters who might have been nervous about turning over the presidency to him. Some of the skeptics were on his own team.
After the debate, Baker called Margaret Tutwiler and asked what she had thought of the showdown. Although she had already voted for Reagan by absentee ballot in her home state, she had been among the strongest loyalists for Bush and had remained dubious of the Republican nominee. But she told Baker she no longer questioned her vote.
“Are you serious?” Baker asked.
Dead serious, she answered.
Baker had already grown to trust Tutwiler’s political instincts. If she was now fully on board, he concluded, then they had accomplished what they needed.
“We have won this election,” Baker told her.