On the afternoon of March 30, the seventieth day of the new administration, Baker was in his corner office in the West Wing with no idea that there might not be a seventy-first. Then he looked up to find a rattled David Gergen bursting in.
“Do you know what’s happened?” he asked. “Somebody’s tried to shoot the president—and Brady’s been hit.”
Reagan had been at the Washington Hilton Hotel just two miles up Connecticut Avenue from the White House addressing a national conference of the AFL-CIO’s Building Construction Trades Department, accompanied by his press secretary, Jim Brady. Baker had been supposed to go too but had begged off, sending Michael Deaver in his place. Reagan was leaving the Hilton on a dreary, drizzly afternoon when a disturbed young man trying to impress a Hollywood actress opened fire.
As Baker tried to absorb Gergen’s news, the telephone rang. Margaret Tutwiler picked it up. It was 2:38 p.m., eleven minutes after the shooting, and Deaver was on the line from George Washington University Hospital, where Reagan had been rushed. Deaver told her to keep the line open and put Baker on. Deaver told Baker what had happened—how a bullet had whizzed right past him, how Brady and at least one Secret Service agent had been hit, how the president had been thrown roughly into a limousine by another agent and seemed to have been hurt, perhaps with a bruised or broken rib.
“We don’t know what the problem is,” Deaver said. “It may be a heart attack.”
Ed Meese rushed into Baker’s office. He had just seen on the electronic board that displayed the president’s location that he was en route to the hospital.
Tutwiler announced that Deaver had come back on the open line. Meese picked up another extension to listen.
“He’s taken a shot in the back,” Deaver reported.
“Shit,” exclaimed Baker.
“Jesus,” said Meese.
Just then, Jim Brady, his skull pierced by a bullet, was wheeled past a horrified Deaver. “It doesn’t look good for Jim,” he reported back to Baker and Meese.
Deaver passed the telephone to Daniel Ruge, the White House physician, who was with him at the hospital. The president was losing blood, the doctor explained. He was in serious danger. Baker pulled out his black felt pen and took notes as he listened. “P hit/fighting,” he scrawled as other aides looked over his shoulder in shock.
Just like that, Baker’s world seemed to have stopped. Not quite eighteen years after the murder of John Kennedy, another president had been hit by a would-be assassin’s bullet. Once again, the country was thrown into turmoil. Who was behind it? Was it the work of America’s enemies? Did the threat extend beyond this shooting? Most important, would the president make it?
For Baker, this would be the true opening test of his time in the White House. He had quarreled with Al Haig about crisis management, but no one had really considered a scenario like this and no one had had a serious conversation about presidential succession despite Reagan’s advanced age. While Baker had prevailed over Haig in making sure that George Bush would be in charge in a crisis, the vice president at the moment was in Texas, where he had just given a speech to a cattlemen’s convention. It was up to Baker to decide what to do. For all of his fixation with the Five Ps, nothing in his experience practicing law in Texas or running political campaigns had prepared him for such a moment. All he could do was keep calm and, just as crucially, appear calm. He knew that everyone would be looking to him.
Meese announced that he would go to the hospital and Baker decided to go too, but before they left, the phone rang again. Haig was on the line and had heard the news but was still under the impression that Reagan had not been hit. Baker filled him in.
“It looks quite serious,” Baker said. “I’m going right to the hospital.”
Haig, the general, kicked into command mode. “I will move immediately to the White House,” he said. He would gather cabinet secretaries and call Bush.
Lacking a better option, Baker concurred. “You will be my point of contact,” he said.
Moments later, Baker, Meese, Lyn Nofziger, the political director, and Larry Speakes, the deputy press secretary, piled into a White House car and raced the few blocks to the hospital with sirens blaring and lights flashing. As they hurried into the emergency room, they found Reagan on a gurney, his shirt off, an oxygen mask on his face. Baker was shocked by his appearance. Normally, Reagan had a ruddy color. “Now, he was ghostly pale,” Baker recalled.
He had not lost his sense of humor. Reagan had already joked with Nancy that he “forgot to duck” and asked his doctors if they were Republicans. Now seeing his top aides, the president winked at Baker and, spotting Meese too, asked, “Who’s minding the store?”
But the situation was serious. Speakes took notes as the doctors briefed Baker and the others. “Doctors believe bleeding to death,” he wrote. “Can’t find a wound. Think we’re going to lose him. Touch and go.”
Eventually the doctors found an entry wound under Reagan’s left arm and concluded that the .22 caliber bullet had lodged in his lung. They whisked him off to surgery. Baker and the others headed to a small hospital chapel, where they were joined by Nancy. Baker dropped to his knees to pray.
At this point, Baker was presented with the most important decision of the crisis. The president had been shot and was undergoing surgery. Should Reagan’s powers be transferred temporarily to the vice president? Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified three years after Kennedy’s assassination, if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet judged “that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” The provision had never been invoked before. Reagan was clearly not able to discharge his duties.
But Baker was reluctant to take action that would put his best friend in the Oval Office, even temporarily. He knew that Reagan’s conservative coterie remained suspicious of his loyalties. “I didn’t want people thinking—and I knew George Bush didn’t want people thinking—that there would be a power play by the vice president’s office,” Baker said later. Baker, Meese, and Nofziger ducked into a broom closet at the hospital to discuss the matter. They decided by themselves that they would not declare Bush the acting president, justifying it because the doctors told them Reagan would not be unconscious for long. Bush himself was not part of the discussion. Pete Teeley, by then the vice president’s press secretary, had called him in Texas to inform him about the shooting and Haig later reached Bush on Air Force Two to tell him to come home. But Baker did not ask his friend about the pressing question; there had not been time. “I never talked to him about that,” Baker said later. “We made that decision at the hospital.”
On the open line back to the White House, though, Baker was told that Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, had gone ahead and drafted letters to Congress that would trigger the temporary transfer of power to Bush just in case. Dick Darman, Baker’s right-hand man, had found Haig, Fielding, and others going over the papers and grew alarmed. Never shy, Darman broke into their conversation and said it was premature. He snatched the documents and took them to his office, where he hid them in a safe. On the phone with Baker, he asked for permission to do what he had already done. Baker, miffed that Fielding had presumed to draft such critical documents without consulting him first, authorized Darman’s actions after the fact.
The afternoon was a blur of misinformation and miscalculation. At one point, television networks reported that Brady had died, when in fact he was still alive. “This thing is out of control,” Deaver told Baker. Baker had Nofziger brief reporters at the hospital and sent Speakes back to the White House to deal with the media there. But watching on television from the White House basement, Haig grew agitated by Speakes’s uncertain performance at the podium and before anyone knew what was happening, the headstrong secretary of state was marching upstairs to set the record straight.
Just a year removed from triple bypass surgery, Haig was in such a hurry racing up the stairs that he overexerted himself. He burst into the briefing room, sweaty and out of breath, his voice quavering. As cameras transmitted the scene to a jittery nation, Haig came across as the opposite of calm. Asked by reporters who was in charge, Haig said he was.
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so,” Haig declared. “As of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending return of the vice president and am in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”
In fairness, Haig was trying to be reassuring, but he was wrong on more than one point. The order of presidential succession beyond the vice president was determined by statute, not the Constitution, and according to the statute, the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate came after the vice president and before the secretary of state. Moreover, absent the president and vice president, the law put the secretary of defense in charge of emergency military commands. More troubling than his legal misinformation, Haig gave the impression of someone eager to seize power, provoking derision and mockery, including within the White House.
Baker returned to the White House at 6:15 p.m. and briefed everyone in the Situation Room on the latest from the hospital. He was exhausted but, unlike Haig, unflappable and in command. Others noticed that his suit remained creased and his tie firmly in place.
“The president is in good shape,” he reported. During two hours of surgery, the doctors had opened Reagan’s chest and stopped the bleeding. The doctors’ prognosis, Baker added, was “better than good, but they wouldn’t say very good.” Jim Brady, however, had been shot in the head and would survive only with brain damage. Two others were hit, but would live—Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service agent who turned into the line of fire to shield the president, and Thomas Delahanty, a Washington police officer who was struck in the neck and suffered nerve damage.
Richard Allen, the national security adviser, recommended that Bush take over some of Reagan’s tasks the next day, including leading a cabinet meeting.
“I think that’s fine,” Baker said. But they should not get “involved in questions of succession and incapacity and that sort of thing.”
Air Force Two landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at 6:30 p.m. but instead of having his helicopter take him directly to the White House, Bush ordered it to fly to the vice president’s mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, where he would board a motorcade and ride to the White House. Sensitive to creating the wrong impression, Bush reasoned that only the president landed on the South Lawn. He arrived in the Situation Room at 7 p.m. Neither Baker nor Bush would do anything to give their conservative critics any ammunition, even at the risk of making the wrong decision on transferring power. “I got criticized roundly” for not invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment, Baker said years later, “maybe justifiably.” But the Washington logic of the situation dictated exactly the course that Baker had taken. He and Bush were untarnished. Reagan’s hold on his office was unquestioned. His bureaucratic rival Haig looked like an unstable and power-hungry fool. No wonder Baker maintained that “it turned out to be absolutely the right decision.”
What’s more, Baker had firmly established himself as a steady leader in a crisis, cementing his place in charge of the White House without ever needing to actually declare it. Even Ed Meese was impressed.
“I want to tell you, it’s a pleasure doing business with you,” Meese told him as the terrifying day came to an end.
“Same here, Ed,” Baker replied.
ACCOMPANIED BY MEESE and Michael Deaver, Baker arrived at Reagan’s hospital room the next morning at 7:15 a.m. The president had had a breathing tube in his throat over the previous night, making it difficult to talk, and had been peppering the nurses with notes scribbled out on pink and white hospital forms. “I am aren’t alive aren’t I?” he wrote, woozily mixing up the words. He later said he had woken up in a white room with a white ceiling and a pretty nurse staring down at him so he thought he might be in heaven. Over the course of the next few hours, he dashed off a flurry of other notes, some in black felt pen, others in pencil.
“Could we rewrite this scene beginning about the time I left the hotel?”
“What happened to the guy with the gun?”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“All in all I’d rather be in Phil,” meaning Philadelphia, reprising the famous W. C. Fields line.
The notes were reassuring. His sense of humor intact, Reagan seemed aware of what had happened to him and was asking the right questions. Now with the tube removed, he was able to make wan jokes out loud.
“I should have known I wasn’t going to avoid a staff meeting,” he said as he noticed Baker and the rest of the Troika entering the room.
When the aides told him not to worry, that the government was still functioning, Reagan quipped, “What makes you think I’d be happy about that?”
Baker had brought with him a bill to be signed, a measure on milk price supports whose importance at this point was mainly to show that the president was still in charge. Reagan borrowed Baker’s pen and summoned enough strength to scratch his signature across the bottom, making it law. They told him a little about his assailant, John W. Hinckley Jr., a twenty-five-year-old drifter who grew up in Texas and became obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, resolving to win her favor by killing the president. Reagan feigned disappointment. “I had hoped it was a KGB agent. On second thought, he wouldn’t have missed then.”
Baker was happy to see the president in relatively good humor, but it was clear he was still in rough shape. Reagan was a seventy-year-old man who had been shot in the chest. The episode was generating enormous national sympathy for the president, but Baker worried that a long recovery and any demonstrable weakness could revive questions about his age. Baker and the others explicitly resolved to convince the country that Reagan was better off than he really was. Aides throughout American history have labored to hide presidential maladies, from Woodrow Wilson’s virtual incapacitation late in his tenure to John Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, and while this did not compare to those cover-ups, the Baker team would not be fully forthcoming with the public either.
Signing the dairy legislation was a first step in projecting the image of a president still capable of carrying out his duties. But Reagan was in no shape to make decisions and it was Baker who was really in charge. The aftermath of the assassination attempt reinforced a truth that was counterintuitive—even with Bush holding the number two constitutional position, his friend was the one actually running the White House in Reagan’s name, even when the president was well. “The vice president is not a powerful position and the chief of staff is an extraordinarily powerful position,” Baker reflected later. Baker made a point of stopping by Bush’s office next door to keep him updated on events, but he was not taking direction from Bush anymore.
In the days after the shooting, Baker labored to shield Reagan from scrutiny, fearing visitors would surely notice his diminished capacity. After Senator Strom Thurmond, the Republican from South Carolina, somehow made it past the Secret Service and talked his way into Reagan’s hospital room, Nancy Reagan was livid. Baker summoned Max Friedersdorf, the president’s legislative director. “Max,” Baker told him when he arrived at the hospital, “I want you to stay here until I tell you to leave.” He was to let in no member of Congress. An exception was made for Tip O’Neill, the Democratic House speaker from Massachusetts, who would be critical to Reagan’s legislative agenda. Bringing a book of Irish humor as a gift, O’Neill arrived in the hospital room, grabbed Reagan’s hands, and kissed his head. “God bless you, Mr. President,” a teary O’Neill said, and then got on his knees to pray for Reagan, choosing the Twenty-third Psalm. He left shocked at the president’s condition, concluding that he had come “closer to death than most of us realized.”
O’Neill’s visit helped cement the beginning of an unlikely friendship between the two men. From the start, Baker had recognized that it would be in Reagan’s interest to reach out to O’Neill. The president faced a House dominated by Democrats and the only way he would get his agenda through would be to forge a coalition that included at least some in the opposition party. A bulky old-school pol with a bulbous nose, a thick mass of white hair, and a jovial style that belied his legislative savvy, O’Neill was a backscratching ward heeler who operated on the theory that all politics was local. He was as liberal as Reagan was conservative, a creature of Cambridge and Washington who was skeptical of the outsider from California. But they were both Irish storytellers of roughly the same age who enjoyed a good joke and a hearty laugh. Richard Williamson, a White House aide, had prepared a memo during the transition identifying O’Neill as an important target for Reagan’s charm offensive.
“Speaker O’Neill will never be an enthusiastic supporter of Ronald Reagan’s programs,” the memo said. “However, he could become a valuable ally, just as Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was often a valuable ally to President Eisenhower in the 50’s and Republican Senate Minority Leader Ev Dirksen was often a valuable help to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 60’s.” The memo urged Reagan to invite O’Neill to the White House regularly. “As they get to know one another, they will like each other. Speaker O’Neill sincerely wants what is best for America. And while he will often disagree with Reagan’s substantive proposals, he sincerely will want President Reagan to succeed.” The same memo recommended that Reagan make a gesture to Jimmy Carter in his early months in office, such as inviting him to a White House dinner. “Ultimately, while the American people overwhelmingly rejected President Carter, they continue to like Jimmy Carter personally,” it said.
In a later generation, the idea of reaching out to leaders of the other party would be anathema, but to Baker it was only common sense. It suited Reagan too. He never did have Carter for dinner and essentially stiffed his predecessor for eight years, but he made a point of reaching out to O’Neill. During the transition, the incoming president had visited the speaker on Capitol Hill. At their meeting, Reagan predicted he would get along well with the Democrats in Congress since he had had good relations with the California legislature. O’Neill could not help thinking that a little naive. “That was the minor leagues,” he told Reagan. “You’re in the big leagues now.” Still, soon after the inauguration, the Reagans invited O’Neill and his wife, Millie, to the White House residence for a private dinner along with Baker and Susan, Baker’s staff making sure to obtain the speaker’s favorite cigar for the occasion. Reagan and O’Neill talked movies and swapped Irish tales. O’Neill was struck by how little Reagan seemed conversant with or even interested in the details of policy. But like so many others, O’Neill found it hard not to like the new president, deeming him “an exceptionally congenial and charming man.”
After a week with the president in the hospital, Baker resolved to return the White House to action. “We need to get back on substance this week; news play on President’s health largely over,” said an agenda written for Baker for the staff meeting on April 6. Reagan, wearing a red cardigan and a wide grin, returned to the White House five days later and appeared in a series of carefully staged photographs. The country rallied behind him; his approval rating in the Gallup poll rose from 55 percent to 66 percent and pundits praised his unflappable response to the near-death experience. “The honeymoon has ended and a new legend has been born,” David Broder wrote in The Washington Post. On April 28, just under a month after the shooting, a vigorous-looking Reagan rode up to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress, which gave him a hero’s welcome.
With Reagan now out of danger, Baker resolved to capitalize on it. He knew that poll numbers drove legislation and that any Congress, even one controlled by the opposition, could not resist a president with so much support.
BY NOW, Baker was picking up on the ways of Washington. Through a combination of instinct and intense experience, he had learned a lot about how the capital worked and how he could make it work for him. Some of his methods were simple common sense. He had assembled an inner circle deeply loyal to him and highly competent. Baker turned their efficiency into a political calling card. It was then that he adopted his habit of returning any call from a member of Congress by the end of the day—to be sure, he might not return the call until the evening when he could be reasonably sure the lawmaker had gone home, but it generally still earned him credit with the members. “Nobody was ever better at dealing with Congress,” said Larry Speakes.
Baker was careful, too, to make sure that rivals within the White House, such as Ed Meese, felt included and informed as much as possible. He had Michael Deaver tend to Nancy Reagan, who had clearly emerged as the critical unseen player in the White House. But the surface comity masked deeper fault lines. “It didn’t matter how much Meese and Baker and Deaver would all hug,” said Ed Rogers, a White House aide at the time. “At the staff level, there was always tension and banana peels being thrown in front of each other.” The Meese faction, dominated by the California conservatives who had been with Reagan for years, resented Baker, the Washington usurper. “Deaver and Baker had the attitude that they had to protect the president from himself,” observed William Clark, the longtime California adviser who came to Washington first as deputy secretary of state. “Meese had the attitude: Let’s let Reagan be Reagan, number one, and secondly, let’s advance what we know to be his vision and his innermost philosophy and thoughts.”
For his part, Baker could be scornful of Meese, whom he privately called “Poppin’ Fresh, the doughboy,” after the famous Pillsbury commercial of the time. Meese’s ideological purity was never going to get anything done, Baker believed, nor did he understand how actions would play with the public. When two Navy F-14s shot down a pair of Libyan jets that opened fire on them in the Gulf of Sidra in August, Meese was in charge while Baker was off in Texas and Deaver was away on vacation. Meese chose not to wake Reagan until hours later. Baker and Deaver “were furious,” Bob Schieffer of CBS News recalled. “They feared that once the story was discovered by the press, Reagan would be portrayed as a president who was not in command of a tense situation that easily could have escalated into a crisis.” Baker and Deaver resolved afterward that they had to take foreign policy out of Meese’s portfolio; one way to do that was to push out Richard Allen and replace him as national security adviser, which would take time but reflected the emerging power dynamics in the administration. Meese had no idea what was coming and did not recognize the danger he faced as Baker gradually surpassed him as the most important force in Reagan’s White House. “It isn’t really undercutting Meese,” said Hedrick Smith, the New York Times White House correspondent. “It’s just outdistancing Meese.”
Baker exuded competence, which drew people toward him and enhanced his position within the West Wing. “Jim Baker looked like the efficient production foreman, with a pencil behind his ear,” recalled David Stockman, the budget director. “He cussed a blue streak and told off-color jokes. He was tall, trim and self-confident. He had a way of moving things along, of pointing to the ceiling and spinning his arm around in a 360-degree circle, saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s move it.’ He struck me as the one who really knew what he was doing.”
As important as any factor in Baker’s rise was his assiduous courtship of journalists. Baker recognized, as Meese and others did not, that power in Washington was driven in part by the perception of power and that no one did more to create or preserve that perception than the media—especially the national television broadcasters, who still dominated an era when millions of Americans stopped everything to watch one of the three nightly newscasts. Like other Republicans, Baker assumed most reporters skewed liberal, but unlike many of the Reaganites, he did not view them as the enemy. He understood that what they really wanted more than anything was a good story. If he kept them supplied, they would be happy—and less likely to come after him. If he got his version of events out, the stories were more likely to reflect his point of view. And he used journalists as an early warning system. “You’d walk into his office and he’d greet you with, ‘Smith, what are you up to today?’ ” Hedrick Smith said. “He’s so canny about sensing where trouble is coming from.”
Baker started each day trying to shape the coverage that would come. “Okay, what’s our story today?” he asked in the morning staff meeting. As with senators and representatives, Baker tried to return any call from a reporter by the end of the same day and, if he could not, made sure that Margaret Tutwiler did on his behalf. Larry Speakes estimated that Baker spent as much as 50 percent of his time with reporters and editors, probably an exaggeration but a revealing one. The media, at least the part of it that really mattered, was still small enough that it could be managed; aside from ABC, CBS, and NBC, there were the wire services, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the weekly newsmagazines Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Baker, as chief of staff, became an expert in their care and feeding.
Baker was acutely aware of reporters’ deadlines and knew that if he called a broadcast journalist shortly before the evening news went on the air, he could shape the resulting report. If Tutwiler popped her head into his office in the late afternoon to say that ABC’s Sam Donaldson was on the phone and wanted something fresh for the broadcast, Baker would come up with a new tidbit and have her pass it along to him. He would then stop whatever meeting he was in at 6:30 p.m. to turn on the television and watch the top of the network shows. Each Friday, he invited reporters from the newsmagazines to his office before their issues were put to bed so that he could dole out the insider nuggets that they craved to distinguish their stories from those in the daily newspapers. He fed the egos of reporters who loved nothing more than boasting of their inside sources at the White House. Reporters knew that his version of events could be self-serving or incomplete, but they also knew that Baker was always accurate with whatever he chose to share. “You could pretty well take it to the bank; he was a straight shooter,” said the Post’s Lou Cannon, the premier chronicler of the Reagan era. “I think the press corps was willing to be spun by Baker because he was so accessible and because he was basically honest.”
Baker was the master of the strategic leak. If he wanted to bury a bad story that was bound to come out anyway, he might give it to the wire services late on a Friday afternoon so it would get less notice as the town emptied out for the weekend. If he wanted to highlight a positive story or float a new initiative, he arranged for it to land in the Monday morning newspapers, when it could set the agenda for the week. He routinely used such trial balloons to test a policy proposal or a personnel appointment before actually approving it; if the leak generated fierce opposition, he could drop the idea without ever assuming authorship. He often used cutouts. “Darman and I were sometimes the designated leakers and Baker would expect us to put certain things out,” said David Gergen.
When Baker personally ventured out on the Sunday television talk shows, he invited a large coterie of advisers to go over every possible question he might be asked and script out answers. He scribbled notes on his typical yellow legal pad. “He would say, ‘That’s a good answer on that, now let me get that down,’ ” Larry Speakes recalled. “And then someone, most likely Darman, would say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe you ought to couch that in a different way.’ And Baker would say, ‘Well, let’s see how this sounds now.’ ” The sessions dragged on so long that Speakes began making excuses to avoid attending, citing his son’s Little League games or other reasons. “It was a tortured process that took hours longer than it should have, tying up Baker, me and several other top-level White House staffers,” Speakes groused.
For the most part, though, Baker preferred speaking with journalists “on background,” meaning that he would be quoted only as an anonymous senior White House official. In doing so, he gave reporters the sense of being on the inside. “Candor and gentle persuasion are the fish Baker peddles,” Deaver said. By providing the narrative through his own eyes, of course, Baker ended up as the protagonist of many stories.
Baker always insisted that he did this in service of Reagan’s agenda and indeed his careful cultivation of the press did advance the president’s interests. “Almost all the other great leakers I’d known had this crying need for publicity for themselves or recognition or praise—the Kissinger approach, which whenever he leaked something, he really wanted everyone to know who put it out,” said Marlin Fitzwater, who served in the White House under both Reagan and George Bush. “Baker never did that. He was the honest broker in that sense. When he chose to deal with the press, it was for a reason and the reason was for the success of the presidency.”
Even so, Baker understood that his own interests were served if the presidency’s were. And he considered tending journalists necessary for survival in a cutthroat White House. “I got the reputation in the Reagan administration for being an extraordinarily prolific leaker,” he told a ghostwriter on one of his memoirs after leaving office in comments that were never published. “I was. In that milieu, it was rat fuck. If you didn’t leak, you didn’t live.” He had freedom others did not. “I had a license to operate; sometimes I went too far,” he admitted, without elaborating.
The drawback for Baker was that everyone in the White House knew he leaked. His fingerprints were seen on every story—even those in which he actually had no part. “Baker is one of the great leakers of our time,” complained Lyn Nofziger. “You could tell every time something came out that was needling Meese or me or one of us. You knew exactly where it came from.” Some even began to suspect Baker of leaking information masked in a way that was intended to be blamed on his rivals, a Washington skill that has had many White House practitioners over the years. “The Baker team were masters of the black art of using someone else’s phrases with reporters so somebody else got fingered for their leaks,” remembered Ed Rollins. Meese, by contrast, was not much of a leaker and his team was not particularly adept at it. All they could do was complain. “I would say that generally the leaking was to the disservice of the president, from whoever it might have come from,” Meese later said mildly. He was sharper in his memoir, complaining about “backstabbing by leak.”
The relationship between politicians and journalists was different in those days, adversarial during the day but clubby at night. They could socialize together or even play pranks on one another without it being publicized. Once, at Deaver’s request, Lesley Stahl, the CBS reporter, taped a fake broadcast reporting that Baker had fallen out of favor with Reagan, who was supposedly planning to ask for his resignation. Moreover, Stahl reported, Baker was secretly suffering from anorexia. Deaver edited the “report” into a tape of the evening news and showed it to Baker, who was flabbergasted until he got the joke.
Not one to take a prank like that lying down, Baker exacted his revenge by getting Tom Wyman, the CBS chairman, to call Stahl at her White House booth the next day and pretend to dress her down for unprofessional behavior.
“It’s inappropriate for you to be cavorting like that with the White House staff,” he lectured.
Then Wyman relented. “Baker’s put me up to this. Don’t tell him I told you.”
BAKER KEPT a ferocious schedule. He woke at 6:00 each morning in the house that he and Susan had bought at 2415 Foxhall Road in the woodsy Spring Valley area of Washington, just across the street from Nelson Rockefeller’s old estate, and arrived at his office about an hour later. At 7:30, he hosted the Troika for breakfast served in his office by Filipino stewards. Each of the three presidential advisers brought notes but Baker tended to dominate the discussion. “He always had the longer checklist,” Deaver said. They reviewed overnight developments overseas, went through the morning news, and plotted out the day’s agenda. At 8:00, Baker hosted the morning meeting of the senior staff, collecting more information and issuing instructions. It was a disciplined session but Baker was open to dissent. “His staff would tell him he was nuts or blow up at him in meetings and he would tolerate it,” Deaver said. “He had no problem with their form of communication.”
Around 9:00, Reagan arrived at the Oval Office and his secretary would then summon Baker, Deaver, and Meese. The rest of the day was filled with additional meetings, phone calls, and brushfires, with Baker sneaking a quick lunch of tunafish on toast and a glass of buttermilk or, on Thursdays, the Mexican special from the White House Mess. Baker was relentless about following through, constantly making notes on his yellow legal pads and ensuring that tasks had been completed. “He was absolutely tenacious, at times to the point of driving me nearly bonkers,” Deaver said. “Jim would call ten or twelve times in a morning, checking to be sure I had done something he had mentioned at breakfast.” Baker would return home around 8 or 9 p.m. Weekends were just two more workdays until Monday. “He doesn’t ask you to come in on Saturday,” remembered Margaret Tutwiler. “But he’s in, so you’re there.”
It would require a fanatical work ethic to push through Reagan’s proposed 30 percent tax cut as his first major initiative. To coordinate the effort, Baker relied on the Legislative Strategy Group that Dick Darman had set up inside the White House. Meeting several times a week, the group allowed Baker to control the most important elements of the Reagan presidency through a handful of aides put in charge of strategy and priorities. “It was the main policymaking and governing institution inside the White House, short of the Oval Office,” said Kenneth Duberstein, then a legislative aide. To keep Meese happy, Baker made him a regular member along with Max Friedersdorf, David Gergen, and Craig Fuller, the vice president’s chief of staff. Others would sometimes attend as well, including Donald Regan, the treasury secretary; David Stockman, the budget director; and Martin Anderson, the president’s domestic policy adviser. But Baker put Darman in charge and Darman reported to him.
Darman was a force unto himself in the White House. Born into a family of New England textile mill owners, he had a fierce intellect and knew it. He was still irritated that he got a 790 on one part of his SAT for college instead of a perfect 800. He earned undergraduate and business degrees from Harvard before going into government, where he worked in the Nixon administration for Elliot Richardson in three cabinet departments: Health, Education, and Welfare; Defense; and finally Justice. At the latter, he was involved in reaching the plea agreement that resulted in Spiro Agnew’s resignation, although the Watergate turmoil soon had him and Richardson quitting in the Saturday Night Massacre. Richardson was his first mentor; they lived near each other in the Virginia suburbs and Richardson was godfather to one of Darman’s sons.
For Darman, government was an instrument to be tamed and used to advance the country; he was “a creature of the center,” in his own words, not a revolutionary. He favored markets and pluralism, but he was fundamentally a technocrat who did not care much for ideology. By the time he arrived at Reagan’s White House, he had added a fourth cabinet department to his résumé. “That gives my dad something that was really pretty rare among Republicans, which was an understanding of how government works,” his son, Jonathan Darman, observed. Which is why when Baker allowed him to write his own job description, he crafted it in such a way that he would handle all the paper that went through the White House. Darman understood that paper was power and it was one of the things that Baker came to appreciate most about him. “Reagan’s in-box was my out-box and vice versa,” Darman once said. At the same time, it made him a control freak. “He screams and throws paper when he is not happy,” said Marlin Fitzwater. “And he’s not happy when he’s not in total control.”
Darman was a policy innovator who found ways of achieving the president’s goals that others had not imagined. He understood the numbers and pored through briefing books that often went ignored. “He was the only guy in the Reagan White House who knew where every piece of paper was and what was on it on policy,” said Stuart Spencer. “That’s the kind of animal he is.” But Darman’s willingness to cut ideological corners to make deals generated great animosity from conservatives like Ed Rollins, who described him as “a man whose talents were as prodigious as his ego.” Darman’s sharp elbows and derisive manner won him few friends even among those who might agree with him politically. “Dick was somewhat insecure so anybody who threatened his shadow, he would react very strongly,” said David Gergen. “He thought I did that. I thought he did that.” Martin Anderson called him “easily the most disliked man in the White House,” concluding that “even his boss, Baker, didn’t seem to care for him very much.” But Baker was no sentimentalist and he was in the White House to win, not to make friends. He understood that Darman’s bedside manner rubbed some colleagues the wrong way, but considered him too valuable for it to matter.
The task for Baker and Darman was translating Reagan’s grand design into reality. In his first few weeks in office, Reagan had outlined a program of tax cuts, spending reductions, and military expansion, but the package had stalled until the assassination attempt. Just days before John Hinckley opened fire, Newsweek published a story under the headline “Is the Big Tax Cut Dead?”
The president’s courageous recovery from the shooting changed the political dynamics and Baker intended to capitalize on it. He understood that Reagan’s economic plan would require bipartisan agreement. While the Senate was in Republican hands, Democrats still held a strong majority in the House, led by Tip O’Neill, the old-style liberal who, as David Stockman saw him, “was a fly in New Deal amber.” But Baker’s team gambled that there were enough conservative Southern Democrats, known as Boll Weevils, to build a coalition with the Republican minority. Darman identified sixty-seven “potentially gettable Democrats” as their targets.
Baker sought to pave the way for the tax drive through careful orchestration. Republicans started with a bipartisan budget-cutting plan known as Gramm-Latta, named for its sponsors, Representatives Phil Gramm, a conservative Democrat from Texas, and Delbert Latta, a Republican from Ohio. The budget was meant to bring the government under control and eliminate the federal deficit by 1984, when Reagan would presumably be running for reelection. But it proved harder than Reagan’s team had imagined—every program they wanted to cut had a constituency, it seemed, often including fellow Republicans. By the time they came up with their blueprint, the Reagan plan was $44 billion short of wiping out the deficit. In a bit of budgetary legerdemain, Stockman simply designated the shortfall as cuts that would be identified later. He came to call it the “magic asterisk.”
Despite this fundamental flaw, Baker and the White House peeled away enough of O’Neill’s caucus to pass it handily. On Reagan’s behalf, Baker had figured out how to wield power on Capitol Hill; as much as anyone at that point, he seemed to be clearly in command of the capital. Back in his district the next day, a dispirited O’Neill was asked by a constituent what was happening in Washington. “What’s happening to me in Washington?” O’Neill replied. “What’s happening to me is I’m getting the shit whaled out of me.”
Even before the budget vote, Baker’s team drafted a plan for the next stage, a plan that would surely have made headlines had it been revealed at the time. The memo outlining it showed how calculated Baker was with the media, gaming out leaks and story lines in advance to make it look as though Reagan was working with the opposition when, in fact, he was manipulating it. “Leak story that White House has been approached by several key members of Congress (including Democrats) about coming up with a tax accommodation,” read one memo from Baker’s team. “ ‘The White House’ would be said to be ‘intrigued’ by the possibility.” If not an outright lie, Baker was certainly willing to stretch the truth to shape the narrative in ways that were advantageous.
But then Baker was thrown off by an issue he did not expect. Franklin Roosevelt’s popular Social Security program, now more than four decades old and embedded in American society, turned out to be confronting both short-term financial instability and long-term demographic trends. The immediate crisis stemmed from lower-than-expected payroll tax revenues due to higher-than-expected unemployment in recent years and cost-of-living increases automatically tied to inflation. In the longer term, the program would be threatened when the first of the post–World War II baby boom generation began to retire at the end of the century. With recipients living longer and fewer new workers to pay into the system, Social Security would eventually face bankruptcy.
David Stockman developed a plan for about $100 billion in cuts to make the program solvent for decades, including postponing the next cost-of-living increase for current retirees and trimming benefits significantly for future retirees. Early retirees who began collecting checks at sixty-two would find their benefits slashed by about 30 percent. Stockman understood his proposed cutbacks would be controversial, so to outmaneuver potential opponents, he circulated the plan around the West Wing on a Saturday and then presented it to Reagan on the following Monday along with Martin Anderson, the domestic policy adviser, and Richard Schweiker, the former senator and onetime putative running mate for Reagan in 1976 who was now serving as health and human services secretary.
Reagan had a history as a critic of Social Security. In his breakthrough moment in politics, delivering his 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Reagan had declared that paying into and collecting Social Security should be “voluntary” for those who could provide for their own retirements, a position that opponents had hung around his neck ever since. In 1976, Gerald Ford hammered him on Social Security before the Florida primary, going on to win the delegate-rich state, a victory that arguably helped the incumbent secure the nomination. So raising the issue now risked reviving questions about Reagan’s commitment to the politically popular program. Darman warned Baker that it “could well ignite an inferno on the Hill,” as Stockman later put it. But the president surprised Baker and Darman by signing off on Stockman’s plan on the spot.
Baker was too late to stop the president from approving the proposal, but he could control how it would be presented and sold. Within hours, he convened the Legislative Strategy Group and outsourced the plan away from the White House. “They wanted the president to announce it and I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the third rail, we’re not going to do it,’ ” Baker recalled. “And it wasn’t easy to get Reagan to agree not to do it, to be very honest with you.” Instead, Baker insisted that it be announced by Schweiker; Darman even suggested that it be announced in Baltimore, the home of the Social Security Administration—and far from the capital. Schweiker objected. “If there’s any doubt as to where the president stands, this’ll be dead on arrival when it gets to the Hill,” he argued. “By damn, I’ve spent twenty years on the Hill and I know when something will fly. So let’s not start on the defensive.” Baker refused to give in; Schweiker would be the front man. “I was furious,” Stockman said later. “But there was nothing I could do. Baker was chief of staff.”
He was also right. Switchboards on Capitol Hill lit up with calls of protest and the plan quickly flopped. Handed a political weapon, Tip O’Neill and the Democrats bludgeoned Republicans for shafting older Americans. Republicans in Congress wanted nothing to do with the plan and within a week of Schweiker’s announcement, the Senate voted 96 to 0 to oppose its major elements. Baker had learned his lesson. Never again would he let Reagan walk into such a trap. “Jim Baker carried around a bazooka, firing first and asking questions later of anyone who mentioned the words ‘Social Security,’ ” Stockman said.
The damage done, Baker quickly pivoted back to the tax cuts. O’Neill and other Democratic leaders opposed them, arguing that they would balloon the deficit, benefit the rich, and be used to justify more cuts to programs for the poor. Like George Bush during the Republican primaries, they derided what would come to be known as Reaganomics, mocking the idea that Washington could cut taxes, increase defense spending, and still balance the budget. But O’Neill recognized there was no way to thwart a popular new president on such a voter-friendly initiative, especially amid the national outpouring of sympathy after the assassination attempt. So even as he publicly skewered the tax cuts as mean-spirited, he made no effort to keep the legislation from coming to the House floor.
Representative Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, suggested smaller rate cuts phased in over time. Baker was holding a strong hand, though, and unwilling to give in to Rostenkowski. Instead, he recruited other Democrats. For Baker, congressional maneuvering was like playing a game of pinball, as Darman put it, with the ball ricocheting from one bumper to another. The player had to make sure the flippers hit at just the right moment. This was Baker’s great skill. He recognized when the time had come to make a deal. “He knew you were never going to come to a table and get everything you wanted,” said Karen Morgan, his longtime aide. “That just wasn’t realistic. And so he would always look for the elements where you could give a little bit because he’s a realist and he’s a diplomat and he’s a negotiator.” He also understood how far he could go without pushing too hard. Reagan agreed to delay the first year of the tax cuts and reduce the total to 25 percent, but that was as low as he would go. “Jim Baker made a few private runs at the president,” Stockman said. “But Baker knew a Rock of Gibraltar when he saw one and nothing was to be gained by running his boat up against it.”
On June 4, Reagan appeared in the Rose Garden to announce a bipartisan tax-cutting program that included concessions intended to lure Democrats without acceding entirely to Rostenkowski’s demands. The plan would cut rates across the board by 5 percent in 1981, another 10 percent in 1982, and a final 10 percent in 1983, instead of 10 percent each year. The top rate would come down from 70 percent to 50 percent and tax breaks would be expanded for married couples, retirement accounts, capital gains, and estates, while some of the business breaks originally envisioned would be trimmed. Joining the president for the event were several Democrats, including Senators David Boren of Oklahoma and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, and the Democrat-turned-independent Harry Byrd of Virginia.
While O’Neill remained opposed, Baker set about wooing other Democrats. “We stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we traded, and the president was very good at that and willing to do it all day and all night,” Baker said. So was Baker. “Jim kept saying to me, ‘Give me more members to call,’ ” said Kenneth Duberstein, the White House lobbyist. Baker told Boll Weevil Democrats that Reagan would not campaign against them in 1982 if they supported the tax cuts, effectively trading away the party’s chances in the next election in order to secure a more immediate victory.
On July 29, both houses of Congress passed versions of the tax measure. Reagan won the key vote in the House 238 to 195, with forty-eight Democrats joining a nearly unanimous Republican caucus; even more jumped on the bandwagon for the final vote. After the two bills were reconciled into a final measure, Reagan, wearing faded jeans, a denim jacket, and cowboy boots, signed it into law on August 13 in front of his white-stucco ranch house in California.
O’Neill grudgingly appreciated Baker’s skill. “They put only one legislative ball in play at a time,” he said years later, “and they kept their eye on it all the way through.”