Baker was in an official car one day in the fall of 1983 on the way to lunch at the Madison Hotel, a favorite venue just a few blocks from the White House and across the street from The Washington Post, when Michael Deaver mentioned almost offhandedly that the president had ordered a leak investigation. With lie detector tests for everyone. Including Baker.
“I’ll be goddamned!” Baker erupted. Lie detectors? Again? How had that happened without him knowing about it? Baker realized that Reagan had been upset about stories in the Post and other outlets reporting about a secret order he had just given to American forces in Lebanon, but no one had mentioned lie detector tests. Baker was the chief of staff but someone had clearly pulled an end run around him and gotten to the old man.
Deeply agitated both at being circumvented and at the prospect of strapping members of the White House staff to polygraph machines, Baker ordered the driver to turn the car around and rush back to the White House. When they arrived just a few minutes later, Baker raced through the corridors of the West Wing with Deaver hot on his heels and burst into the Oval Office, where he found Reagan in the small adjacent dining room having lunch with George Bush and George Shultz, who had succeeded Al Haig as secretary of state. The usually deferential Baker confronted Reagan.
“Mr. President, Mike tells me you just signed an order for a leaks investigation,” Baker said.
“Yeah,” Reagan confirmed. “That was a terrible leak.”
“But he also said you’ve ordered polygraphs on everybody at the NSC meeting,” Baker said.
“That’s right.”
“With all due respect, sir, I’m not sure you can polygraph a constitutional officer,” Baker said, referring to the vice president, who was sitting at the table, taking this all in.
At that point, Shultz, who was hearing about the leak probe for the first time, spoke up in full umbrage. His honor was being besmirched. “Mr. President, you’ll only polygraph me one time,” he said, “and then you’ll get yourself another secretary of state.”
Baker’s objections were both principled and practical, recognizing that even if he was not guilty of this leak, a lie detector test could open the door to all sorts of questions he would just as soon not answer. Eventually, Reagan backed down on the polygraphs rather than face the scandal of his secretary of state resigning in protest, but the leak investigation would proceed through other means. Despite his tactical victory, Baker still felt in danger. He was well known as a leaker and understood that suspicions would fall on him despite his denials. Once again, the tribal rivalries of Reagan’s White House were consuming Baker and placing him at grave risk.
The rupture inside the West Wing came as the president struggled to deal with the ongoing civil war in Lebanon, a benighted corner of the Middle East ripped apart by competing factions and trammeled by unforgiving neighbors. After Israel invaded in the summer of 1982, Reagan had sent eight hundred Marines to Beirut to serve as peacekeepers and oversee the departure of Palestinian forces, in what was the first significant overseas military deployment of his presidency. The Marines soon left, but after Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated and attacks by pro-Gemayel forces resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of civilians in Palestinian refugee camps, Reagan sent them back to stop the country from spiraling out of control. It was never clear, however, how much he or his team were really committed to the mission. Baker looked at it more from a political standpoint than a geopolitical one. “It’s easy to start a war,” he said years later. “It’s hard to end it. And a lot of presidents get in trouble with foreign adventures, wars of choice particularly.”
Sure enough, a car bomb in April 1983 devastated the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. By that fall, the situation had deteriorated even further. Dispatched to Lebanon to scope out the situation, Robert McFarlane, the deputy national security adviser, sent back a grim report. In a memo marked “SECRET” and “NODIS” (for No Distribution), he warned the White House on September 10 that events on the ground raised the concern that Lebanese armed forces could be defeated and the government could topple. “In short,” he wrote, “tonight we could be behind enemy lines.” In another cable, McFarlane recommended that United States forces use tactical air strikes to support the Lebanese or risk a partial “Syrian takeover of this country.”
Reagan discussed the matter in the Situation Room for much of Sunday, September 11, with his top advisers, including Baker; Bill Casey; William Clark, the national security adviser; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the United Nations ambassador; Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary; and others. Baker and most of the other aides argued against an escalation of force or took no position, but Reagan agreed to authorize air power, justifying it as backing up the Marines on the ground even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the civil war. He signed a secret order giving the Marine commander permission to call in naval gunfire from the USS New Jersey offshore in the Mediterranean as well as tactical air strikes by American warplanes. By the next day, however, the secret was blown. No fewer than eight news organizations, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, reported the decision. In Lebanon, McFarlane was furious and threatened to resign, complaining that his diplomacy and even his safety had been jeopardized. The leak roiled the administration and, at the behest of Clark and Ed Meese, Reagan ordered Attorney General William French Smith to investigate. “I ask you to use all legitimate means in your interviews including use of the polygraph,” Reagan told Smith. If anyone failed to cooperate or was discovered to have leaked, he added, “I will expect that person to resign.”
Baker’s lunchtime intervention had stopped the polygraphing before it started, but he felt exposed nonetheless. After all, he had actually talked with Lou Cannon, one of the reporters who wrote the Post story. Baker maintained that he and Cannon had only discussed a nonsecret element of the story, the White House strategy to get congressional backing for its troop presence in Lebanon. “We’re seeking bipartisan support, not a Tonkin Gulf resolution,” an unnamed White House official had told Cannon. On a copy of the article, Baker scratched next to that quote, “Me.” But he insisted he had not been the one to divulge the order to fire.
Anxious, Baker called Cannon. According to notes Baker took of the call, he did not tell the reporter that an investigation had been launched but he did say that questions had been raised about whether he had been a source on the air strike part of the story. Cannon agreed to provide Baker a letter affirming that the chief of staff had not told him about the president’s order. Baker then met with FBI agents and denied being the source. But he was still worked up about the possibility of lie detector tests. On the back of a piece of White House stationery, he summed up his concerns: “(1) only if all are; and (2) only if BC will take re: the articles in my file.” By that, he meant William Clark, whom he blamed for hostile leaks in other news stories. “Bad idea tho’—distrust, etc.”
Journalists rarely agree to discuss their sources for a story, even to rule any out, since doing so could point leak hunters to the right target, but Cannon gave Baker the letter exonerating him anyway, underscoring the chief of staff’s close relationship with reporters. “We did not talk about matters relating to Lebanon except War Powers,” Cannon wrote in the letter. “My recollection on this is clear.” No one was ever held responsible for the Lebanon leak. David Gergen, who wrote a seven-page memo analyzing the news stories for clues, noted that military affairs reporters had bylines on several of the articles and pointed out that after the decision was made, Pentagon officials began giving instructions, which widened the circle of people who knew about it. “There was no leak but a gush,” Gergen wrote.
Baker had escaped blame, but the tension within the national security team would only grow.
BAKER HAD initially favored William Clark’s appointment as national security adviser. Judge Clark, as he was called because of his previous service as a Reagan appointee on the California Supreme Court, had seemed far preferable to the ineffective Richard Allen. A fellow rancher as close to Reagan as a “brother,” as the United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick once put it, Clark went all the way back to the beginning with the president, to his first campaign for governor in 1966. He had been Reagan’s chief of staff, executive secretary, and cabinet secretary in Sacramento. He had personally recruited both Ed Meese and Michael Deaver. He would not be pushed around by them or anyone else. But that clout carried a price for Baker. The first sign of trouble came when Clark had insisted on reporting directly to the president, not through Baker or Meese. “That’s how we’re going to get into a war,” Baker complained to Deaver. But Clark’s long relationship with Reagan had made it impossible for Baker to block the arrangement.
Soon enough, Baker and Clark found themselves at odds, the embodiment of the ratfuck that had so worn down the chief of staff. He seethed when he found out that Clark had secretly tried to open a back channel to the Soviet Union. And he swung into action after learning that Clark had brought Kirkpatrick to the Oval Office to convince the president to send her to Central America without telling George Shultz. “Mr. President, don’t you think that your secretary of state should be made aware?” Baker asked, effectively killing that end run.
For his part, Clark objected to what he considered a campaign of leaks by Baker’s team to undercut him. Clark was convinced that Baker’s staff began its morning meetings asking, “How do we roll Clark today?” He saw Dick Darman as the prime culprit and eventually had the code changed on the electronic lock to the national security suite to keep him out. Darman retaliated by having a coded entry installed on his own office door. At one point, angry at negative media references to Faith Whittlesey, one of the conservatives on his staff, Clark brought his complaint directly to Reagan in the Oval Office. While a stunned Baker looked on, Clark accused the chief of staff’s team of “brutalizing” Whittlesey. Livid at the ambush, Baker later called Clark and lit into him. “It was the only time Baker lost his temper with me,” Clark said.
This was about more than turf and ego. The struggle had its roots in a broader philosophical divide within the Reagan administration. Clark, a staunch Cold Warrior, thought Baker was too soft on the Soviet Union and had poisoned Nancy Reagan against him and the equally hawkish Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon. “Baker tried to convince her that Cap and I were too aggressive with the Soviets, that we were too hard-line, that our conservative postures could start World War III, that we were irresponsible for convincing the president to double the defense budget,” Clark said. He was more than a little right. Whether due to Baker or not, Nancy saw Clark as “a user” who claimed to represent Reagan even when he did not. As for Baker, he considered Clark “not the brightest bulb in the chandelier,” a “rogue NSC adviser” who despite a lack of command of foreign policy was playing to Reagan’s ideological convictions in order to push for dangerously confrontational policies. “We never knew where Clark was going and he always appealed to the dark side of the old man,” Baker said years later.
The fall of 1983 was a grim time in the Cold War. On September 1, a Soviet warplane shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian passenger jet that had wandered into Russian airspace, killing all 269 people on board—including an American congressman, Larry McDonald, a Democrat from Georgia. The Soviets initially denied involvement and only later admitted destroying KAL Flight 007, while asserting that it had actually been an American spy plane. Reagan was furious and publicly denounced the incident as a “crime against humanity,” an “act of barbarism,” and “inhuman brutality,” but he did not retaliate in a meaningful way.
Reagan’s restraint earned him praise from his usual critics and much of the mainstream media, but engendered frustration among his conservative allies. “If the best this president can do is shout ‘barbarism’ and order a few mild sanctions in the wake of Moscow’s murderous attack on the South Korean airliner, there should be dancing tonight in the Kremlin,” The Detroit News said in an editorial that David Gergen highlighted in yellow and sent to Baker. “Even Jimmy Carter did better than that.”
The Cold War had reached one of its lowest moments. Reagan had written a personal letter to the longtime Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev after the assassination attempt two years earlier, but that had not yielded any change in the relationship and then Brezhnev died, handing power to Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief, who soon fell ill too. By then, the war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was raging and the Reagan administration was looking for better ways to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan. Reagan’s defense buildup was changing the balance of power, but his insistence on deploying Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe had provoked mass protests in the streets of Western capitals and driven a wedge among the allies. Popular support for a nuclear freeze was fueled in the United States with the airing that fall of an ABC television movie called The Day After, depicting an apocalyptic America reeling from the devastation of a nuclear war. Reaction to the movie was so powerful that a nervous White House dispatched officials and surrogates to make dozens of public and media appearances to calm nerves and explain administration policy.
Amid all the geopolitical tension, the atmosphere inside the West Wing among Reagan’s feuding advisers grew so toxic that Deaver tried to get Reagan to intervene. “It just became almost intolerable,” Deaver said. After discussing the matter with Reagan, Deaver brought Baker, Meese, and Clark to the Oval Office, but the president, ever conflict averse, meandered around without bringing up the purpose of the meeting. “Everybody sat there and nobody would say anything,” Deaver recalled. Finally, Deaver raised the elephant in the room. “We can’t operate this way anymore,” he told Reagan, asking him to direct the combatants to craft a compromise that would restore order. Reagan agreed, but no one ever followed up. So Deaver tried again by inviting Baker and the two others to Blair House for drinks one night, hoping they might lubricate their way to a peace accord. It was not to be. At the end of the night, Baker and Meese agreed to shake hands but Clark refused even that, leading to more recriminations.
By October, Clark, who found himself suffering painful headaches at night, finally gave in. Recognizing the forces stacked against him, he decided to call it quits. By happenstance, James Watt, the controversial interior secretary whose tenure had generated fierce criticism from environmentalists, had just imploded with an ill-considered crack about the diversity of a coal advisory commission. “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple,” he told a breakfast of lobbyists. Under pressure from Baker, Watt resigned, which solved two problems for the chief of staff by creating an opening that Baker could slide Clark into.
With Clark’s nomination as interior secretary, Baker saw a way out of his own crushing workload. Hoping to finally move beyond the role of fixer, he came up with the perfect replacement for Clark as national security adviser—himself. He would gain experience at foreign policy and would be dealing with issues of great import rather than trying to keep the bumper cars of the West Wing from crashing into each other every day. Dick Darman would come along as his deputy.
To make the switch, Baker knew that he would have to find a new chief of staff who would be acceptable to Reagan, as well as to Nancy, so he set his sights on Deaver. Never mind that Deaver was actually thinking about leaving the White House. Baker convinced him that he had to take over the big corner office. “Baker knew just how much arm to twist—‘I’ll be right downstairs, we’ll have the same team and it will be good for the president,’ ” Deaver remembered him saying. Deaver agreed and the two presented the idea to Reagan, who signed off on it without seeming to give much thought to such a momentous personnel shift.
The plan had the support of George Shultz, who thought Baker had run the White House “with brilliance” and a “deft touch.” “Baker was by miles the most competent person over there and would be good to work with,” Shultz later wrote in his memoir. But Baker knew his appointment would run into opposition among the conservatives, so he conspired to keep them in the dark. Clark’s departure for Interior was announced on October 13. Baker planned to have his own new assignment announced the next day and Reagan agreed. Baker had a news release drafted and ready to go. When Baker went to the Oval Office to go over the final details, he and Reagan discussed whether the president should go immediately to the press briefing room to make the announcement or first tell the rest of the national security team at a meeting that was about to start down in the Situation Room. Baker said Reagan should tell the national security team first and, in a rare miscalculation, decided not to attend the meeting himself for fear of tipping off his rivals, who would wonder why he was there.
But the debate about how to announce the decision had made the president late for the meeting and William Clark came up to the Oval Office to find him and bring him down to the Situation Room. In the hallway heading down to the meeting, Reagan showed Clark the news release announcing Baker as his successor.
Clark was flabbergasted. Baker as national security adviser? He appealed to the president to first “roundtable” the decision, using a favorite Reagan term for consulting his team, and so, reluctantly, the president did not announce the move when he joined his advisers in the Situation Room, giving Clark a chance to rally opposition. As the group discussed Lebanon, Clark passed a note around the table tipping off his allies, Meese, Weinberger, and Casey, who were equally outraged at the prospect of Baker running national security.
After the meeting, the four conservatives huddled and agreed to throw themselves at the president as a unifed front. They pulled Reagan into Clark’s basement office and told him that they could not accept Baker in that job. He had no foreign policy experience. He would not be able to serve as an honest broker since he was already seen as aligned with Shultz. And he could not keep a secret. “Mr. President,” said Casey, still burning from his scrap with Baker over Debategate, “you can’t have the biggest leaker in Washington as your national security adviser.”
Meese also objected to Deaver as chief of staff, bitter that his old colleague from California had effectively betrayed him to tip the balance of the Troika to Baker. He had come to see Deaver as power crazy and now took the opportunity to exact retribution by torpedoing his promotion.
Reagan was shocked at the virulence of the objections to both men and agreed not to move forward with the appointments. Reversing the decision would be a painful exercise. He knew he would be upsetting two close advisers who had been loyal to him. “I’m not sure that Mike Deaver will speak to me after this,” the president said as he left the room. Once he was gone, Clark found Robert McFarlane and filled him in. “That was a close call,” Clark told him.
Upstairs, Reagan summoned Baker and Deaver to the Oval Office. “Fellas, I got a revolt on my hands,” he explained. He was right about Deaver’s reaction. Deaver had not really wanted to be chief of staff in the first place and had to be talked into it by Baker, but now hearing that Reagan was abandoning him, he erupted. “How could you do this?” he demanded. One report even had him cursing the president and saying, “This is the second time you’ve done this to me,” referring to a split the two had back in their campaign days, although he later denied it. “I would never say that,” Deaver insisted. “I may have been thinking it, but I wouldn’t have said it.” Either way, there were angry words from someone who had been close to an adopted son to Reagan. “I was getting mad,” he conceded later. “I was thinking, you know, Come on, I’ve been around here for 20 years.”
Baker, by contrast, accepted defeat graciously. “Mr. President, when I came here, I said I’d do whatever you wanted me to do,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it. I don’t have to do this. I’ll be whatever you want me to be for as long as you want me to be.”
Deaver felt chagrined. “God, what kind of jerk am I?” he remembered thinking. “Here’s Baker, he’s only been here three years, and he’s being what an American is supposed to be. He’s loyal. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Reagan noticed too. He hated personal conflict and Deaver’s hurt feelings were painful to confront. He was grateful to Baker for not making it worse. “Jim took it well but Mike was pretty upset,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “It was an unhappy day all around.”
That did not mean Baker was not devastated. He was just better at hiding his feelings. He had thought that he would serve as chief of staff for two years—that was about the typical run and for good reason. It was such a burnout job. Baker felt the weight of the presidency on his shoulders. The best days of Reagan’s tenure might be behind him; with the economy on tenterhooks and an election coming the following year, Baker was ready for a new challenge. And he had literally come within five minutes of getting it. As Robert Kimmitt, who was then the executive secretary of the National Security Council, observed, had Baker and the others not lingered in the Oval Office to discuss how to make the announcement and Reagan just showed up in the Situation Room without encountering Clark first, the president would have disclosed his decision to the assembled team. It would have been done, and the dissenters would have had to accept it. “If they hadn’t had that debate and he had just come down on time,” Kimmitt said, “history would have been very different.”
Baker might have been thwarted in his personal ambition. But he had not been routed entirely and he set about making sure that Meese, Casey, and their camp would not be able to install one of their own at the NSC. As Reagan retreated to Camp David for the weekend to consider other choices for national security adviser, the conservatives lobbied for Jeane Kirkpatrick. Baker, along with Shultz and Deaver, considered her too hard-line and managed to block that idea—to Baker’s own detriment, in a way, since Reagan was thinking about sending him to the United Nations to replace Kirkpatrick if she did get the job. Kirkpatrick never forgave Baker. She saw him and Deaver as sexist, devious manipulators of a good-hearted president. “One thing I didn’t understand was why Reagan didn’t see how objectionable Baker and Deaver were,” she wrote in an unpublished autobiography. “Like Iago. Why didn’t Othello see who he really was?”
Instead of Kirkpatrick, Reagan settled on Clark’s low-key, self-effacing deputy, Robert McFarlane, a Marine veteran who had served in Vietnam and worked on Henry Kissinger’s staff. Casey was not happy with the selection, fearing that it would still give Baker too much sway, but overall McFarlane was seen as a safe choice, unobjectionable to most camps, probably because each side thought it could manage him. But it was a fateful decision. McFarlane’s ambition to help free American hostages held in Lebanon by dealing with Iran and to keep money flowing to the contras in Nicaragua despite congressional restrictions would have profound consequences in Reagan’s second term. Had Baker been national security adviser instead, Deaver concluded, “Iran-contra wouldn’t have happened, that’s for sure.”
Reagan too came to regret the outcome. “My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as national security adviser, I suppose, was a turning point for my administration,” he wrote in his memoir, “although I had no idea at the time how significant it would prove to be.”
AS BAKER HAD FEARED, the Lebanon mission took a deadly turn just six days after McFarlane’s appointment was announced. The escalation of force had indeed drawn the United States deeper into the country’s bloody war and made the American peacekeepers even more important targets.
On October 23, Hezbollah terrorists slammed a truck filled with explosives into the Marine barracks in Beirut, collapsing the four-story concrete building in a cloud of dust and debris and killing 241 American military personnel, mainly Marines. It was the largest single-day loss of life for the Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
Reagan, who was staying at the Augusta National Golf Club at the time, was shaken when McFarlane woke him up and told him the news. “How could this happen?” the president asked, looking as if all the air had been sucked out of him. Many Americans were distraught as well, wondering why their troops were there in the first place. Among those who shared that view was Baker. While he had failed to become national security adviser, he began weighing in on the Lebanon venture.
“Bud, what is the light at the end of the tunnel here?” he began asking McFarlane at regular intervals.
“There really isn’t any,” McFarlane acknowledged.
In the immediate aftermath, Reagan vowed firmness and scorned Democrats who called for him to pull the Marines out, saying that would amount to “surrender.” But in fact, he took little action in response, much like the aftermath of the Korean airliner shoot-down. Influenced by Baker and others, he quietly ordered the withdrawal of the Marines several months later. To Baker, it was a wise pivot to avoid another Vietnam; if Lyndon Johnson had resisted the instinct to keep doubling down, America would never have been caught in the devastating spiral of escalation in Southeast Asia. But the decision would nonetheless have its own consequences. In years to come, other Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, including a radical named Osama bin Laden, would point to the episode as evidence that Americans were paper tigers who could be bloodied and forced to retreat for just the cost of a truck, a few tons of explosives, and a single suicide bomber.
As the country was reeling from the Beirut bombing, Reagan and his team were headed to military action in a more unlikely place far closer to home. In mid-October, a military junta had seized control of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. Within six days, Reagan decided to send in American troops. He was ostensibly responding to a request for intervention by several other Caribbean islands and acting to protect and evacuate 1,100 Americans studying at a medical school in St. George’s, the capital. But in reality, Grenada had become an unlikely Cold War battleground and Reagan determined to make a show of force close to home, a warning to the Soviets and anyone else who might be testing Reagan’s resolve. As tests go, it was a pretty minor one. There was little risk of major resistance. But as Baker helped manage the preparations, he was acutely aware that, while the goal in Lebanon was to maintain peace, this would be the first time the United States was sending its forces into actual combat since Vietnam.
Baker knew it would be important to get Congress on Reagan’s side for the operation, or at least mute any opposition. Shortly before the troops were to land, he snuck over to the Capitol using back staircases and little-known doors to slip into Tip O’Neill’s office. He asked the House Speaker to come to the White House that night for a secret meeting with Reagan. When O’Neill and other congressional leaders arrived a few hours later, they were shepherded into the mansion through a roundabout way to avoid reporters and taken upstairs to the residence. Reagan disclosed his intention to invade Grenada and then had Caspar Weinberger and General John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, present detailed maps. O’Neill was miffed at being presented with a fait accompli. “This is not a consultation,” he complained. “This is a notification.” Getting up to walk out, O’Neill told Reagan, “Good luck.” Baker interpreted that to mean, You’re on your own.
The other challenge for Baker was figuring out how to keep the operation secret from the White House press corps. No one had told Larry Speakes what was going on, so when Bill Plante of CBS News heard rumors of American forces assembling for an invasion, the spokesman checked with Rear Admiral John Poindexter, who had just taken McFarlane’s job as deputy national security adviser. “Preposterous, knock it down hard,” Poindexter responded through a staff aide. Speakes used the same word with Plante. But later that night, after Plante called again with more information, Speakes feared that he had been misled and called Baker, who was at a dinner party.
Baker judged that he could not disclose the operation to Speakes, but unlike Poindexter was careful enough not to get trapped in a lie or to let the White House spokesman get caught in one either. On the phone from the dinner, Baker simply cautioned Speakes not to make definitive statements.
“Larry,” he said, “be careful what you say. There is something going on.”
He instructed Speakes to show up early the next morning and meet him at the White House mess at 5:45. When Speakes arrived at the appointed hour, Baker handed him an inch-thick packet of documents on Grenada and told him to announce the invasion at 7 a.m.
Furious at Poindexter for lying to him, Speakes was not much happier with Baker for leaving him in the dark until hours after troops had actually gone ashore. He had been given just an hour to get up to speed before briefing the press corps. “That was treatment about as unfair as I had ever received,” Speakes said later. “I had never been so mad in my life, but I knew there was nothing I could do except to choke it down and head out there in front of the press and try to do my job.” The episode badly damaged his credibility with the reporters he had to face every day. Baker regretted that. “I may have made a mistake,” he said later, “but we were so afraid that there might be a leak that would cost lives and in the back of our minds, that Vietnam syndrome was very, very big.”
In the end, United States forces had no trouble seizing Grenada, installing a friendlier government, and routing a unit of Cuban troops, with eighteen American troops killed in the fighting. The medical students had never been in as much danger nor the Cubans as involved in the island as the Reagan White House had claimed, but it was a relatively quick and efficient operation, especially compared to the mess in Lebanon. Some suspected that was the point—to flex muscles in the Caribbean to distract from the failure in the Middle East. Baker insisted the students really were a concern, albeit an exaggerated one. “It wasn’t just manufactured,” he said. “But it was important to knock down this little tyrant who had appeared there; it was of the same ilk as the Sandinistas and the Cubans. We made it clear that this was not something we were going to permit.”
AFTER NEARLY THREE YEARS in what he considered the worst job in Washington other than his friend George’s role as vice president, Baker was still eager to find a way out. With the national security adviser post now unavailable, he was intrigued when he was approached about becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball. Baker was eventually one of two finalists along with Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, to replace Bowie Kuhn, who had failed to muster enough votes for a third term. George Will, the Washington Post columnist who had a passion for baseball, wrote that if Baker wanted to run for president someday, he should take the job because it would give him far higher name recognition.
Baker was not exactly a big baseball fan and had no particular history with the sport, but he took the prospect seriously enough that he had the league headquarters send over documents about how the organization worked and he wrote out questions, including everything from the size of the staff to the powers of the office to the state of the collective bargaining agreement. His kids loved the idea. “When I found out, I was ecstatic,” said Doug Baker. “Commissioner of baseball over chief of staff any day.”
Exhausted and stressed out, Baker claimed to be seriously considering the job. But of course he could not just step away from running the country. “Baseball commissioner?” Margaret Tutwiler yelled at him. “What kind of a nothing job is that? You don’t even know anything about baseball.” Finally, the reality came home when Baker spoke with Edward Bennett Williams, the legendary Washington lawyer and owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Williams was the original man to see in Washington, a counselor to presidents and the first person to call when someone powerful got in trouble. He told Baker that the baseball owners would love to have him as commissioner, but there was no way he could leave the government because Reagan was eventually going to put him in the cabinet. That was not so clear to Baker, but he bowed to the inevitability that Williams had sensed and, once again, deferred to Reagan.
Looking for the cabinet position that Williams had foreseen, Baker set his sights on the Justice Department. But when William French Smith prepared to step down, Baker once again found himself at odds with Ed Meese, who also had his hopes set on becoming attorney general. Meese had been fascinated with law enforcement for years and Reagan accommodated him by nominating him in January 1984. “This is his life long dream,” Reagan wrote in his diary.
Frustrated, Baker made clear publicly that he would not stay in his corner office beyond the 1984 election. “I think the president would be better served by someone else in this job in a second term,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
But the music was coming to a stop and there were no empty chairs for Baker. When Bill Casey told the White House that he did not want to run the CIA in a second term, Baker once again topped the list of possible replacements. An ally broached the topic with Casey one evening as they enjoyed an after-hours drink.
“So Jim Baker’s going to get your job,” the ally ventured.
“He’s the last fucker that will get that job,” Casey growled.
Casey ended up remaining at Langley deep into the second term. No way would he hand over his job to Baker.
Through all of the ordeals, the family crises and the conflicts in the White House, through all of the ratfuck, Baker turned to his faith. Unlike so many religious conservatives who loudly supported Reagan, Baker kept his devotion private, but thanks to Susan he had become a more committed believer. Few around him realized just how religious he really was, but it was a regular part of his day. While chief of staff, he increasingly found himself reading a well-thumbed edition of The Runner’s Bible, a collection of more than one thousand Bible passages and commentaries first assembled by Nora Holm in 1910 for a busy seventeen-year-old daughter. Meant as “spiritual guidance for people on the run,” it would become a standard resource for many Christians.
One day in the summer of 1984, with the election looming and his future on the line, Baker recommended the book in a letter to a woman who had been ill. “I want to call your attention to The Runners Bible, which has been a source of great comfort to me through trials and tribulations, both in this office and elsewhere,” he wrote her. “My mother gave me one when I was much younger, and every day I try to read the chapters entitled ‘Fear Not Only Believe’ and ‘I Will Help Thee.’ It is small, easily read and I carry it with me. Perhaps you will find it as comforting as I do.”