One day just a few weeks after the disastrous 1982 midterm elections, Baker got a call. His son John had been arrested on drug charges back in Texas. The private troubles that had been afflicting Baker’s family for the past decade were about to spill over into public view.
Baker had made a name for himself at this point as the buttoned-down lawyer who ran the White House efficiently and effectively. What few around him knew was that he struggled to run his own home efficiently and effectively. With the children mostly grown or away in school, the tensions had subsided, but each day brought the risk of another meltdown.
In John’s case, it came in the form of a sting operation by the sheriff’s department in Pearsall, where he had recently moved. Now twenty-two years old, the only one of the Baker children not to go to college, John had been bouncing around without much purpose, officially managing the family’s Rockpile Ranch but more interested in smoking another joint than finding a real job. Baker understood what his son was up to. When John moved to Pearsall, his father had warned him that Frio County was a Democratic jurisdiction with a Democratic sheriff. “Without saying it, he knew I was doing drugs and he was trying to tell me, without telling me, ‘Don’t do that, you need to be careful who you’re with,’ ” John said years later. “And I was like, ‘I know what the hell I’m doing.’ ”
Except, of course, he did not. Undercover agents came to him asking to buy some pot and he sold it to them. They later arrested him on a felony charge of delivering less than an ounce of marijuana. John was positive it was a political attack on his father. “They clearly knew who I was,” he said. “It was a raw deal.” Not that he denied the crime. Later in life, after years of rehabilitation, he would admit the fault was his. But he also knew he had put his father in a terrible position, and that added to the emotional turmoil. After spending just thirty minutes in jail on that day in December 1982, John was released on a $10,000 bond, but faced a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Baker reached his son by telephone and tried to console him. Baker then put Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, on the line to advise him how to handle any reporter inquiries. Baker felt miserable. “It was a BS thing,” he concluded. “If he hadn’t been my son, he would never have had” all the attention. “Poor kid. I felt really sorry for him.”
The episode with John came as Baker was working for a president who had made “the war on drugs” a centerpiece of his domestic agenda. Just two months before the arrest, Reagan had declared in a speech at the Justice Department that illegal drugs now constituted a threat to the national security of the United States. Nancy Reagan picked up on the issue too. During a stop at Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, California, she urged youngsters to stay away from drugs. When a fourth-grade girl asked what they should do if someone offered them drugs, the first lady replied, “Just say no.” With that, a slogan was born, one that she would transform into the signature of her time in the White House. Eventually, Just Say No clubs would form and Nancy Reagan would record public service announcements, write guest articles, and appear on popular television shows like Diff’rent Strokes and Dynasty to promote an antidrug message.
Little did she realize that her husband’s top aide was struggling with the issue in his own family. Baker later recalled no conversations with the first lady about it, an indication of just how much he kept his private life private. The Reagans were surely aware of what had happened—John’s arrest had been reported in the media and other staff members knew about it—but they were no likelier to inquire than Baker was to volunteer. If it was awkward for Baker to be running the just-say-no White House while his children were just saying yes, he did not let on. And it was a sign of the times that reporters, while publishing short notices about John’s arrest, did not make a big story of it. Baker’s friends in the mainstream press were sympathetic and, in that era at least, largely stayed away from reporting on the families of the people they covered.
But the Baker family’s ordeal was one that defined the era. Thirty-four percent of high school students in the United States reported using illicit drugs in 1982, a huge proportion of the nation’s emerging adults and only slightly off its peak in 1979. Eleven percent reported using cocaine, double the proportion in the middle of the previous decade. In Mexico and Colombia, a whole deadly new industry had arisen around cocaine as drug cartels led by shadowy figures like the soon-to-be notorious Pablo Escobar made millions catering to the tastes of wealthy North Americans. The explosion of the derivative crack cocaine later in the 1980s would wreak havoc on inner cities and fuel a surge of violence.
Baker sat in policy meetings discussing what to do about the drug crisis during the day and then confronted it at home at night. “He had to balance his professional career at the White House with his personal life,” said Doug Baker. “Susan could handle most of it but he needed to get involved in the real diplomacy, father-son moments, to sort of say, ‘Look, I get where you’re coming from, but this is unacceptable and you’ve got to get a handle on it and if that means going somewhere and family being involved in these sessions, I’m willing to do it.’ ”
John ultimately reached a plea bargain, admitting guilt on a misdemeanor charge and paying a $2,000 fine. After his arrest, he flew to New York to check in to a drug rehabilitation clinic. At the airport, he found his father, trailed by Secret Service agents, waiting to take him. “When I saw my dad and I saw the look on his face, I burst into tears,” John said. “He just put his arms around me and told me, you know, ‘You’re going to get through this. I’m very proud of you. We’ve got a hiccup. We’ve just got to get through this.’ ”
Eventually, they would, but not without more pain and heartache. For Baker, it was a defining challenge of his personal life. “I think every one of our kids, with the possible exception of Bo and Mary-Bonner, tried drugs at one time,” he said years later. “Maybe not Doug.”
Susan, sitting next to him, shook her head at her husband’s naïveté. “Honey,” she said indulgently, “Bo was the ringleader.”
“But MB never did, right?” Baker asked almost plaintively, referring to Mary-Bonner. “She did?”
Susan smiled. “Shall I burst the bubble?”
AFTER TWO YEARS, Baker had built a relationship with Reagan and come to dominate the White House, but his growing influence had made him even more of a target. The brawling at this point was endemic. Baker came to call it the ratfuck, an old Texas term for “people stabbing you in the back, always fighting.” He saw secret trapdoors everywhere and he knew his rivals were eagerly playing the president in hopes of securing advantage. After the midterm election, for instance, Reagan offered Baker the job of secretary of transportation—an idea that other White House aides believed was planted by Ed Meese to get rid of his foe. Baker turned it down.
With the election behind them, Baker took on the third rail that had singed him back in the early months of the administration: Social Security. Following the debacle of David Stockman’s original proposal to stabilize the retirement program’s finances, Reagan and congressional leaders had appointed a fifteen-member bipartisan commission to study the issue, headed by Alan Greenspan, the widely respected former economic adviser to Gerald Ford, and including prominent appointees from both parties. Baker was “the conduit, it was his commission,” Greenspan recalled. “He set it up so that both Tip O’Neill and Reagan were brought along from the very early stages.” The commission was due to report back after the 1982 election but stalled amid disagreement over how to spread the pain. The issue was urgent—the Social Security trust fund was projected to run out by the middle of 1983, meaning that 36 million recipients were at risk of having their checks held up. So finally, a handful of commission members formed what was called a “sub-group” to work out a plan with Baker.
On January 5, 1983, the chief of staff invited the negotiators to his house on Foxhall Road, where no one would know they were meeting. They proceeded downstairs to the basement with its large picture window facing out on the woods, big-game trophy heads mounted on the wall, and a zebra skin covering the floor. While the group included senators, congressmen, and other White House aides, it ultimately fell to Baker and Robert Ball, a former Social Security commissioner who was O’Neill’s appointee, to hammer out an agreement. For Baker, it was a characteristically pragmatic negotiation, just hardheaded bargaining over what was doable and what was not. Baker came in proposing a three-year delay in cost-of-living increases. Ball resisted and eventually they compromised on a six-month postponement that would permanently change the date that future increases took effect each year. When Ball pushed for more revenues, Baker ultimately agreed to move up already scheduled tax increases so they would take effect sooner.
The talks continued largely in secret over the next ten days, with little more than a break to watch the Washington Redskins beat the Detroit Lions to advance in the playoffs. When the press caught on to what was happening, they staked out Ball’s house in hopes of following him to wherever the clandestine talks were taking place. Ball had to call Baker for help and then slip out the back and down a hill to a White House car that the chief of staff sent for him. By the end of the negotiations, they moved the group to Blair House across the street from the White House, so that Baker could easily shuttle back and forth while consulting with Reagan.
Ultimately, Baker and Ball came up with a formula that both their bosses could live with, a mix of measures that would spread the pain. In addition to the cost-of-living and tax schedule changes, their plan would tax the benefits of higher-income recipients, expand the pool of contributors by bringing in all new federal employees, require the self-employed to pay the employer share of payroll taxes in addition to the employee share, and transfer money from the general government fund to cover the cost of benefits for military veterans. Altogether, it would raise $168 billion to get the fund through the 1980s and into the 1990s, when for a time the program would be in better health because of the increased contributions of the maturing baby boomers. The commission adopted the plan with twelve Republicans and Democrats voting yes and three conservatives voting no. But it came close to falling apart when Baker insisted that Reagan and O’Neill issue a joint statement endorsing the plan, evidently afraid that the president could be left holding the bag if the speaker sounded any less supportive than Reagan did. O’Neill refused but he sent over a copy of the statement he would make, which allowed Baker to calibrate Reagan’s so they were roughly parallel. The two leaders worked together to fend off attacks in Congress, although lawmakers did change it in one major respect by adding another provision gradually increasing the full retirement age to sixty-seven by the year 2027.
The joint commitment by Reagan and O’Neill was key to success. They each had to swallow provisions they disdained, but they agreed that compromise was better than conflict. Reagan and O’Neill were neither buddies nor soul mates yet they shared a love for a funny anecdote and an incentive to make deals with the opposition. The two showed on Social Security that they were willing to do just that, even as they bashed each other freely about other issues. The legislation that Reagan signed in April 1983 became known as a model for bipartisan cooperation to solve a critical national problem, one that when it came to Social Security at least would not be repeated again for decades. “This bill demonstrates for all time our nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security,” Reagan, whose own commitment to the program until then had been something less than ironclad, said as he put his signature on the bill with O’Neill at his side.
It also was a model for how Baker approached issues. Rather than unilaterally propose unpopular plans that had no chance of success, the way David Stockman had done in 1981, the lesson of Social Security reform in 1983 was to bring all the parties together, keep the principals such as Reagan and O’Neill informed and committed to the process, define the problem as precisely as possible, and agree to stand behind the final product even against members of one’s own party. This was all vintage Baker. “The commission he built was a virtuoso demonstration of how to get things done in Washington,” Greenspan reflected. Ball pointed out that the commission itself was a bust but agreed that Baker’s intervention showed that bipartisan progress was possible. “In our negotiations he was able to put ideology aside and focus on the substance of what had to be done to get an agreement that would meet the needs of both sides,” Ball said. “He was also very clearly in charge on his side of the table.” As a result, Baker took the issue out of the next election.
Reagan was happy to leave the details to Baker. Strong on his core principles, Reagan was not one for the intricacies of the policies he was ostensibly pursuing. At the Group of 7, or G7, meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, in spring 1983, Baker gave Reagan a briefing book. The next morning, Reagan arrived late for a meeting with his staff, his eyes puffy and gait slow, looking “as if he had been run over by a Mack truck,” as David Gergen recalled. After about twenty minutes, Reagan finally pleaded guilty. “Fellas, I’ve got a confession to make,” he said. Rather than go through the briefing book, he had flipped on the television and found The Sound of Music, one of his favorite movies, so he stayed up late watching that instead.
“Reagan really needed a chief of staff,” observed Brent Scowcroft. “He wasn’t interested in much of the work of the president. So Baker really was co-president in a way.” That did not go over well with everyone. Some Reagan stalwarts thought Baker presumed too much. Baker and Deaver treated the president “rather like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take very seriously,” observed Richard Pipes, a hawkish historian from Harvard who served on the National Security Council staff.
Baker had more than one Reagan to manage, of course. Nancy was always looming in the background, a force to be reckoned with. She routinely passed judgment on the people who worked for her husband and she was regularly consulted on his schedule. If there was a news conference or a trip or speech, Baker would pass along the proposed date to Deaver, who would check it with the first lady and come back to say whether it looked okay or not.
At some point in his third year as chief of staff, Baker finally learned the secret: Nancy was consulting with an astrologer to determine the best timing for her husband’s major events. After the assassination attempt, she got back in touch with Joan Quigley, who read horoscopes in California, and explained that she was scared every time Reagan left the White House. From that point onward, she would check with Quigley about dates and times for everything from the State of the Union address to foreign visits to medical procedures. “Nancy felt terribly guilty that she hadn’t been with Dad when the assassination attempt happened,” said Michael Reagan. “She thought somehow that if she had been there, it never would have happened. So she reached out to try to find any way that she could stop this from happening again.”
Baker was flabbergasted, but he never objected. If that was what the first lady wanted, then so be it. She did not weigh in on policy or political decisions, just scheduling. Baker never did know whether the president realized what his wife was up to and he was not going to ask. “I was just trying to keep the trains running on time,” he said later. “I had a massive workload and I didn’t sit there and think, ‘Well, wait a minute now, you ought not to schedule a presidential speech on the basis of a horoscope.’ I didn’t worry about that. My job was to get things done.”
Baker kept the secret close and did not even share it with his closest aides. When the traveling press complained at one point about a predawn departure from Andrews Air Force Base that had been necessitated by one of the astrological signs, Margaret Tutwiler confronted Baker and asked why they had to leave that early.
“Why don’t you go talk to Mike about this,” he suggested.
So she did. And she was stunned when Deaver explained. “It was insane,” she recalled. She went back to Baker’s office. He turned around to face her.
“Do you understand now?” he asked.
Baker recognized that part of his job was keeping the first lady happy, which he did with Deaver’s help. Nancy respected Baker’s skill in running the White House and came to value his counsel. She thought he was more willing than Reagan to compromise, but unlike Baker’s conservative critics she considered him loyal to the president. Still, she recognized that he was a Washington operator. “He also cultivated the press assiduously—perhaps too much, because he leaked constantly,” she wrote in her memoir. “Although Jim did a lot for Ronnie, I always felt that his main interest was Jim Baker.”
BAKER FOUND HIMSELF increasingly under fire from the right. In December 1982, someone slipped him a copy of a letter that Lyn Nofziger had written to several veterans of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, summoning them to a breakfast meeting the following morning to discuss the prospective reelection bid in 1984. “I think it is important that the next presidential election be a Reagan-Bush campaign, not a Bush-Reagan campaign,” Nofziger wrote in the letter, a clear jab at Baker. Nofziger went on to say that the true conservatives had to win control of the campaign apparatus from the start. “Frankly, while I’m confident that the President is going to run,” he wrote, “I’m not confident that the campaign will be run by Reaganites.”
Fuming, Baker showed the letter to Reagan. “How long do I have to work for you before I’m a Reaganite?” he asked, according to an account he later gave a colleague.
Reagan assured him that he was one.
Baker called Nofziger from Air Force One as he and the president returned from South America. Nofziger later described Baker as “out of control, screaming and shouting about my letter and threatening dire circumstances.” Nofziger interrupted and said they were not on a secure line and told him to call back when the plane landed. He then hung up.
The phone rang again three minutes later. This time it was Reagan. “Lynwood,” he started, referring to Nofziger’s full first name like the parent of a teenager who had gone astray. “What are we going to do about this?” he asked, more calmly than Baker, but clearly responding to his angry chief of staff’s entreaty to intervene.
Nofziger, unwilling to challenge Reagan, said he would never deliberately embarrass the president and backed off. He promised to tell any reporters who called that he had misspoken. He later sent a letter of apology to Bush. But Baker was not mollified. Still livid, he sent a message to all of Nofziger’s invitees who worked in the administration ordering them not to attend the breakfast.
A few weeks later, Baker boasted that he had put Nofziger in his place. “I think we did what we should have done,” he told a reporter for The Dallas Morning News while hunting wild turkey back in Texas during the holiday break. “We cut him off at the knees.” Baker, dressed in military fatigues, went on to complain that Nofziger had stepped out of bounds. “How in the world, if you’re in charge of politics at the White House, can you let some damn guy announce he’s having a meeting planning the ’84 campaign and he hasn’t even told you about it?” he fumed. He acknowledged, however, that Nofziger reflected a wider disgruntlement on the right. “Are there a bunch of them out there who’d love to have my scalp? Yeah,” he said. “But they know they’re not going to get it.”
The outburst was a rare instance of Baker being quoted on the record discussing his internal feuds, probably a result of assuming the old rules of speaking on background applied with a reporter who was not one of his usual Washington contacts, and he caught flak for it once it was published. The Nofziger put-down, though, was overshadowed by another comment Baker made during the turkey hunt when he said that Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan should step down. Donovan had been investigated for reputed mafia ties while in business before joining the cabinet, but the special prosecutor determined there was not enough evidence to bring charges. “Ray Donovan shouldn’t be in here,” Baker told the Dallas reporter. The labor secretary was vindicated, he noted. However, he added, “Now he ought to do what’s right for the president.” After the story appeared, Reagan was forced to issue a statement expressing full confidence in Donovan and calling Baker’s comment “inadvertent and regrettable.”
All of this took a toll on Baker, who was finishing his second year running the White House with an eye on the exit. He and Bush remained close and he confided some of his troubles to the friend who had gotten him into politics in the first place. The vice president was not always a day-to-day player in Baker’s hectic new life, but he remained a confidant, an ally and a counselor. “Jimmy Baker at year end is tired and would like to transfer,” Bush dictated to his taped diary on New Year’s Day as 1983 opened. “He would love to be CIA or Defense or certainly Attorney General; but there is no indication that the president is going to make any changes of this nature.” Bush doubted that Reagan would let Baker go. A few weeks later, Baker stopped by to see the vice president at his office and asked what his friend thought about the United Nations post. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the UN, evidently was interested in moving on and Baker wondered whether he should consider replacing her. Bush, who had held the job himself during the Nixon administration, encouraged him to consider it.
“I think he should get out,” Bush later recorded in his diary. “He’s my friend and a loyal friend, but I think it would be good for him to be on about his business and doing something else. You get destroyed in there.” Bush suggested that maybe Bill Casey should go to the United Nations and Baker could take over the CIA, another of the vice president’s former stomping grounds. “He was thrilled and went charging out of the office,” Bush told his diary, “but what he did with that brilliant idea of mine, I don’t know.”
Reagan was not eager for a change, though, and so Baker remained in the corner office, the crosshairs tattooed on his forehead. On January 20, 1983, at a reunion of administration officials at the DAR Constitution Hall celebrating the second anniversary of Reagan’s inauguration, James Watt, a conservative firebrand serving as interior secretary, drew roaring approval with a chant aimed squarely at Baker, who was sitting in the hall. “Let Reagan be Reagan!” Watt shouted as the room erupted in cheers. “Let Reagan be Reagan!”
Allies of Bush and Baker in the room chafed, correctly interpreting it as a dig at them. The refrain, in fact, was such a hit that it became an instant favorite slogan on the right, often repeated at rallies. “This always struck me as odd, for these supposed Reagan devotees were in effect saying the same thing as his most vicious foes, namely that Reagan was a witless actor who merely recited lines others had written for him,” reflected Chase Untermeyer, a fellow Houston Republican serving as Bush’s executive assistant.
But it was enough to keep Baker and Bush on edge. Human Events, the conservative journal that Baker hid from Reagan, blamed the chief of staff for the defeat of a new defense spending increase. Mocking his supposed “legislative wizardry,” the journal said that “Mickey Mouse could probably do as well as Baker.” As for Bush, he worried about his own place on the coming reelection ticket. When Conservative Digest surveyed leaders on the right and found that 64 percent wanted Bush replaced as Reagan’s running mate, Bush sent a copy to Baker. “Light reading,” he scribbled on a cover sheet along with a frowning face.
Baker’s troubles stemmed not just from ideological differences with the ascendant right but from a conviction that he was too smooth for his own good and, as Nancy Reagan said, always out for Jim Baker. Even his friends and admirers acknowledged that he could be cynical and manipulative.
One day in April 1983, Baker summoned Ed Rollins, the White House political director, to his corner office. Burly, balding, and bearded, Rollins was a contrarian figure in the White House, a onetime teenage boxer who grew up in California as a self-described “blue-collar Democrat” before converting for Reagan. Along with Lyn Nofziger, he considered himself one of the keepers of the Reagan flame against the likes of Baker.
“Rollins,” Baker told him, “I want you to know that I’m going to give you a place in history and you damn well better remember who did it for you. I’ve been in there fighting for the last two hours to make you Reagan’s campaign manager. It’s not a done deal, but if you get it, it’s because of me.”
Rollins was surprised but pleased and when Baker called again later in the day to tell him the decision was final, he figured the chief of staff must really have gone to bat for him. Paul Laxalt, the senator who was close to Reagan and would serve as chairman of the campaign, called Rollins to congratulate him.
Rollins said he figured he must owe thanks to Baker. Laxalt asked where he got that idea and Rollins told him about his conversation with Baker.
“So that’s where he went when he snuck out of the meeting,” Laxalt said, in Rollins’s account. “Ed, you need to know Jim was fighting against you all the way.” Baker, in fact, had floated two other candidates for the job: Drew Lewis or Paul Manafort, two operatives he knew from the 1976 Ford campaign. But no one viewed as close to Baker was going to be acceptable to the Reaganites. Rollins became the fallback. Indeed, Laxalt added, Baker assumed that Rollins would not last in the job. His last words to Laxalt were supposedly: “He’ll never survive and then I get my pick.” That was Rollins’s version anyway.
Stuart Spencer remembered the episode differently. In his version, Baker did favor Rollins becoming campaign manager, over Spencer’s objection. “I got in this big argument with Baker and Deaver,” Spencer said years later. “So finally, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take Rollins, but he’s got to take Atwater with him.’ That’s exactly what happened at that meeting.” Lee Atwater, a talented young operative in the White House political affairs office, did in fact end up going with Rollins to the campaign. Spencer was clear about the reason too—by tapping him to run the campaign, Baker and Deaver were pushing Rollins out of the White House. “He was dumping on them, he was leaking crap on them, he was saying negative things on Baker,” Spencer explained. “They were trying to get rid of him.”
Baker in later years made no effort to hide the motivation. “We wanted to get Rollins offline and the way to do that was to make him the campaign manager, where he could go out and be a face card and do some interviews for the campaign, but not have any real serious input,” Baker said. “The ’84 reelect was run out of my office and Rollins, we gave him the title campaign manager, moved him out of the political job at the White House over to the campaign.”
One way or the other, the episode spoke volumes about how Baker operated. Either he cunningly took credit for something he actually opposed in order to pocket a chit or he contemptuously arranged for a fake promotion to rid himself of a troublesome aide who was never to be genuinely allowed to perform the duties assigned.
ON THE MORNING of June 9, Baker woke to find his worst nightmare in The Washington Post. It was just a 246-word item buried on page fifteen, hardly a banner story, but the newspaper’s White House correspondent, David Hoffman, reported that during the 1980 campaign, the Reagan team had secretly obtained a copy of Jimmy Carter’s briefing book before the candidates’ only debate. The article also pointed out that Baker had been in charge of debate preparations.
The story was based on Gambling with History, a new book by Laurence I. Barrett, a Time magazine correspondent, and while the briefing book episode occupied no more space in the text than Hoffman’s article, it would quickly transform into perhaps the most threatening and stressful time of Baker’s life in politics. The book said that “a Reagan mole in the Carter camp” had stolen the briefing material and that while Baker did not personally know how the Reagan team happened to obtain it, “he looked the other way when a dirty trick was perpetrated on Carter.”
For Baker, who cherished his reputation for scruples more than almost anything else, those few words were a body blow. “Baker was really torn apart by that,” recalled David Keene. “It’s like they’re ripping off his merit badge.” Having entered politics in the unsettling aftermath of the scandal that forced out a Republican president, Baker had been a stickler for the rules in every campaign and government job he had had, sometimes to a fault. “I came up through Watergate,” he said later. “I’m a lawyer and I’m cautious by nature. I’m a cross-the-Ts and dot-the-Is person.” It mattered to him that he be seen as a straight arrow. The son of the Warden, the grandson of the Captain, and the great-grandson of the Judge had no intention of being viewed as just another slippery pol. “You build a reputation in the private sector, spend a whole lifetime doing it, go to Washington and one little thing like that could kill you,” he said.
Worse, what quickly became dubbed Debategate opened yet another rift within the Reagan team, one that would pit Baker against one of the senior members of the president’s circle. Soon after the book’s publication, Representative Donald Albosta of Michigan, a little-known Democratic chairman of a minor subcommittee, decided to investigate, prompting a series of conflicting statements from Reagan’s administration. Baker dictated a letter to Albosta, but left out the critical information at first. “It is my recollection that I was given the book by”—and here the secretary left a blank space with “(don’t know)” in parentheses before continuing—“with the suggestion that it might be of use to the debate briefing team.” He left out the name at first to avoid it leaking, but filled it in for the final draft sent to the committee—Bill Casey, the campaign chairman who had become CIA director.
“I did not know then, nor do I know now, how that book was obtained by the Reagan campaign,” Baker wrote in the letter. “I never, directly or indirectly, asked anyone in or out of our campaign, or in the Carter campaign or White House, to provide or acquire that book from the Carter campaign or White House.” He added: “It is correct that, after seeing the book, I did not undertake to find out how our campaign had obtained it. There was nothing on its face that suggested it may have been an official document or a document sufficiently sensitive to have been controlled or closely held.” He said he “had no reason to believe that the book was illegally acquired.”
But Casey denied giving Baker the briefing book or ever having seen it himself. Baker was beside himself. How could Casey deny it? They met on a Sunday to try to reconcile their memories. “Say you saw it,” Baker pleaded, assuring Casey that it would not get him into trouble. Casey refused. He insisted he had not seen it.
Soon the Post broached the idea of lie detector tests to see who was telling the truth. “It put the fear of God in me because Casey was CIA director and I figured he’ll game it and I’m telling the truth and I’ll get screwed,” Baker said later.
Casey was a formidable adversary. Hunched over with disheveled clothes, thick glasses, a barely decipherable mumble, and a penchant for secrecy, Casey seemed at times like not just America’s spy chief but a character out of an espionage novel. A Queens-born lawyer, Casey served during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the CIA, becoming head of secret intelligence in Europe. He returned to the private sector after the war, making millions as a venture capitalist, then bounced around Republican politics for years before Richard Nixon named him chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He later served as an undersecretary of state, chairman of the Export-Import Bank, and a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board before leading Reagan’s campaign in 1980.
For his reward, Casey wanted to be secretary of state. But instead he was sent to Langley to head the CIA. “He wasn’t quite suave enough” for the world of diplomacy, Nofziger said. “When he talked, he chewed on the end of his tie; food would get caught in his teeth and in the middle of the meal he’d reach around and get it out.” Some Reagan confidants thought it was not a good idea to pick Casey for the CIA either. “It was a double mistake, because he put an embittered, brilliant Casey in charge of the CIA, and that led to problems,” said Martin Anderson. By the end of his first year in office, Casey was running a secret war in Nicaragua to counter what he viewed as a Communist beachhead in North America.
Since the beginning, when he warned Michael Deaver that Central America could be dangerous to Reagan’s presidency, Baker had sensed that Casey was one of those figures whose adventurism could mean trouble. He instructed Dick Darman to set up a system to ensure that Casey would never see Reagan without the chief of staff knowing about it. Anytime Casey did get in to see the president, Baker urged Michael Deaver to casually “drop by” or, at the least, he would personally head over to the Oval Office afterward to debrief Reagan. “Baker was convinced from day one that the hard-right people—Casey, Clark and Haig—would try to move the president into some kind of military action in Central America and would destroy his presidency,” Deaver said. “So he would use me, because I could go into a meeting since I wasn’t thought of as a player, as far as policy was concerned.”
Even when Baker was in the room, it was never totally clear what Casey was up to. The CIA chief would sit next to Reagan and mutter at length until finally the president would nod as if he were following, even though everyone else in the room was convinced that Reagan did not understand what Casey was saying any better than they did. “God knows what he just approved,” Baker would lean over and whisper to other advisers afterward.
Casey pushed back against Baker, regularly sending what became known as “zingers” to the chief of staff, usually news stories with notes attached like, “Stop these leaks” or “They are coming from the White House.” Baker would show the notes to Larry Speakes, who took offense. “We should turn this right back around and send it back to CIA,” Speakes would say. “This is where the leaks are coming from.”
After the revelations about the briefing book, months of investigation ensued. Baker’s carefully constructed reputation and his cultivation of Democrats and the media paid off. Robert Strauss, the former Democratic National Committee chairman from Texas who guided Carter’s campaign in 1976 while Baker ran Gerald Ford’s, attested to his former adversary’s integrity. “Anything Jim Baker says, I would judge to be true,” Strauss said publicly. “There isn’t anyone in American politics whose ethics I place higher than Jim Baker’s.”
Even Donald Albosta, the Democrat running the congressional probe, did not wait for the investigation to be over to indicate that he was inclined to believe Baker over Casey, and the chief of staff never did have to take a polygraph. “I term Jim Baker an honest person,” Albosta told the media. “I term him a friend. I’d feel very badly if anything came up that reflected badly on Jim Baker. If it does, it’s a loss to the country.” He added, “As for the others, I don’t take any position.”
Just how helpful the purloined briefing book was for the Reagan camp was never clear. Although Reagan said he had never seen it himself, David Stockman, who played Carter in the debate rehearsals, had a copy. “It wasn’t worth a damn,” Baker insisted. But the Post examined it against the transcript of the 1980 debate and found that at various points, Reagan seemed to anticipate Carter attacks that had been outlined in the briefing book with ready responses. At one point, the paper noted, Reagan even rebutted Carter’s statistical attacks before Carter used them. For years to come, Carter was convinced that the briefing book made a difference. “Reagan was quite well briefed before I got there,” he said. But Carter accepted Baker’s account. “If Baker said he didn’t know it, I believe that would be the truth.”
Baker was so intensely focused on the matter that when Margaret Tutwiler mentioned almost in passing one day in the West Wing that she recalled him telling her in 1980 that he had received Carter campaign material from Casey, he instantly picked up a telephone and barked at an aide to summon Fred Fielding, the White House counsel. When Fielding arrived, Baker ordered Tutwiler to repeat what she had told him, then told her to instantly write a memo recording her recollection. Her memory corroborated him in his fight with Casey. Baker privately told an associate that Casey would “rue the day” if their conflicting accounts were ever tested in a legal setting.
The months of inquiry weighed on Baker. “It ate away at him,” said Jim Cicconi, his aide. A poll showed that 70 percent of Americans believed that the president should fire Baker, Casey, and Stockman if they were shown to have committed improper acts. “It ain’t fun to see your name dragged through the crud every day,” Baker confided privately to a reporter. One night, Baker took Tutwiler and Darman across the street from the White House to Maison Blanche, a favored Reagan administration hangout where reporters liked to meet presidential aides for expense-account dinners (“the hot shots’ hot spot,” owner Tony Greco boasted to People magazine). Baker told his aides over the meal that he was thinking about resigning. But when Baker went to Reagan and offered to step down, the only time he would do so during eight years in the administration, the president refused to accept. “He had months of hell over this,” said Susan Baker. Even in his rare moments at home, he was obsessing over it. “Dick Darman had to come over and hold his hand any number of times.”
Eventually, the Justice Department determined that there was no criminal wrongdoing to investigate and the 2,400-page report produced by Albosta’s subcommittee concluded in 1984 that Baker’s account was more believable than Casey’s. The subcommittee was told that Casey had received the briefing book from Paul Corbin, a longtime Kennedy family retainer who was paid $1,500 by Casey three days before the debate and another $1,360 a week later for “professional services.” Corbin denied it to the subcommittee in a sworn statement, but he had privately told a Republican friend, Timothy Wyngaard, that he delivered the briefing book to Casey, and Wyngaard told his boss, Dick Cheney, Baker’s old Ford colleague. “I was able to call Jim and say, ‘Jim, here’s what happened,’ ” Cheney said later. Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant who went on to become a prominent Reagan biographer, later investigated and concluded that there was “little doubt” of Corbin’s involvement.
Casey never did let go of the dispute. Nearly a year after the Albosta subcommittee’s report, Baker made light of the controversy at the Gridiron Dinner, the annual white-tie gala that brought together the president and top Washington figures with journalists for a night of awkward skits. When his turn came to speak, Baker joked about the briefing papers episode, saying he would challenge Casey to a duel—lie detectors at ten paces. Casey was livid and scratched out an angry six-page typed letter to Baker. He rewrote it over and over again, making it a virtual indictment of Baker. “Jim, you succeeded in reviving my interest in finding some way to get to the bottom of this matter,” Casey wrote. “Your credibility was put at stake again when you raised this matter again last Saturday night.”
But Casey equivocated over sending the letter. On a separate piece of paper, he wrote out four pros and seven cons. On the plus side, it “gets record straight” and “lets individual and others know depth of feelings,” he wrote. But on the negative side, it would “cause a public dispute within the Administration family” and might provoke Baker to call for a special prosecutor and “reopen case with possibility of a criminal investigation or at least lead to the calling for polygraph examinations.” In the end, the cons outweighed the pros in Casey’s mind. On a draft in his files was written, “No version apparently sent.”
Just as Casey never let go, neither did Baker. Even decades later, he mustered deep outrage over what had happened. Susan Baker equated the trauma of the briefing book flap to the death of a granddaughter as “the two most awful things” her husband had endured during the time they had been married. The Warden’s son did not like attacks on his integrity. He did not like questions about his credibility. And he was not about to sully the Baker name. “Baker cared a great deal about doing no harm to his family’s heritage,” Tutwiler observed. “That’s very important to him.”