Baker got to know Ronald Reagan long before the myth of Ronald Reagan was created. In fact, he helped create the myth. But he never fooled himself into believing it. In the years and decades that followed Reagan’s time in office, his admirers would transform him from a successful president to a political saint, reimagining him as an ideal leader, the Republican answer to Reagan’s childhood idol Franklin Roosevelt. His promoters spent years waging a campaign to attach his name to all sorts of public institutions, from Washington’s National Airport to a large new federal office building to schools and roads across the country. It was not enough that he be an admirable president; he had to be a venerated one.
In reality, of course, Reagan was no saint. He was a politician with extraordinary talents and clear weaknesses. He sometimes dozed off in meetings. He confused scenes from movies with real-life events and once mistook his own housing secretary for a visiting mayor. He stoked racial division with his talk of “welfare queens” and widened America’s income gap. He told the same stories again and again as metaphors for his beliefs, no matter how sketchy the facts. His mastery of policy was hazy at best. David Stockman tore his hair out trying to get Reagan to understand the consequences of his own financial policies, to no avail. Clark Clifford, the Democratic elder statesman who had seen presidents up close since Harry Truman, privately referred to Reagan as an “amiable dunce.”
Reagan was at the very least a diligent student of his lines, carrying around four-by-six cards in his breast pocket to refresh his memory, but he put in light hours at the office and favored afternoon naps. “It’s true that hard work never killed anybody,” he liked to joke, “but I figure why take the chance?” As congenial as he was, he charmed people rather than connected with them, rarely letting others in. Not particularly social beyond a tight circle of friends, he preferred retiring to the White House residence after a day at the office, changing into his pajamas, and eating dinner with Nancy on trays in front of the television set. He hated personal conflict and let disputes within his team fester, to the detriment of his own agenda. He was personally generous when he came across a hard-luck case, secretly sending checks to help individuals whose stories of trouble he learned from a letter or on the news, but he expressed little empathy for the needy in the aggregate as he urged cuts to social programs. An indifferent manager, he tolerated a degree of scandal within his administration that a more assertive president would have shut down.
What made Reagan special was his boundless sense of optimism at a time when America desperately needed it. Despite the economic hardship he inherited and the “crisis of confidence” that his predecessor had identified, Reagan managed through sheer force of personality to infuse the nation with his belief in a better tomorrow. One of his favorite anecdotes was the story of two children at Christmas; the pessimist was given a roomful of toys and suspected that there had to be a catch while the optimist got a roomful of manure and giddily plunged his hands into the pile, reasoning that if there was this much dung, there must be a pony in there somewhere. After years of unrest through Vietnam, Watergate, recession, and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan reversed a sense of national decline and replaced it with a renewed confidence. He was devoted to the new conservative catechism of lower taxes, a strong military, and anti-Communism, but not so wedded to the details that it stopped him from reaching across the aisle to achieve many of his priorities with bipartisan support. To Reagan, compromise was acceptable and course corrections necessary at times. He did not practice the politics of personal destruction; he fought hard but treated his opponents with dignity and respect.
Working at his side every day, Baker had come to understand Reagan in a way that few others did. Reagan’s most fervent supporters had a vision of what they thought he was—or what they thought he ought to be—but it often did not comport with what his chief of staff saw day in and day out in the Oval Office. Baker did not delude himself into thinking that Reagan was smarter than he was. He knew the president was neither oracle nor sage. Yet he had come to respect Reagan’s horse sense and political instincts. He had learned how to manage Reagan the way any good chief of staff must manage a president—by listening to what really mattered to him and what did not.
Baker also recognized that while Reagan talked in black and white, he governed in gray. For all of the conservative chanting about “let Reagan be Reagan,” Baker saw time and again a president who was more pragmatic than some of his supporters assumed. “I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flag flying,” Reagan told Baker repeatedly. Holding out for some pure version of policy or principle was not Reagan’s way. He was willing to take what he could get, then come back and get more the next time. Sometimes he even took a few steps backward in the interest of moving ahead another day. “That was Ronald Reagan,” said Jim Cicconi, a White House aide to Baker. “He was the labor negotiator and he was a very principled conservative but he believed in getting things done and he recognized that in a democracy you can’t have your way 100 percent all the time.”
While widely hailed as the man who made Reagan’s presidency effective, Baker had a remarkable talent for distancing himself from its failings. In that, he was like his boss, who was dubbed the “Teflon president” by Representative Patricia Schroeder, a Democrat from Colorado, because nothing stuck to him. There were plenty of ethical lapses that might have tarnished a different president or chief of staff. By the spring of 1984, the press and opposition Democrats had already coined the phrase “sleaze factor” to cover the administration’s growing roster of scandals. In addition to Richard Allen and the Japanese money in the safe, other senior officials found themselves in trouble, including Bill Casey, whose stock dealings were called into question; William French Smith, who was forced to give back a $50,000 severance payment from his old company; and Anne Gorsuch Burford, who resigned as head of the Environmental Protection Agency after being cited for contempt by Congress for refusing to turn over papers related to suspected favoritism to industry. On top of that, the head of the Small Business Administration resigned after investigations into grants, a deputy CIA director resigned amid allegations of irregular stock transactions, the deputy defense secretary resigned after being accused of insider trading, and an assistant EPA administrator was convicted of perjury.
The latest questions involved Baker’s rival, Ed Meese. After Reagan selected Meese for attorney general, allegations surfaced about his dealings with a San Diego savings and loan and subsequent federal jobs for some of those who helped him with financial matters. In April, a special prosecutor was appointed to look into the situation, holding up his confirmation. By one count, six high-ranking administration officials had been indicted on criminal charges and twenty-five had resigned, been fired, or had their nominations withdrawn under fire. Baker, as alert as he was to his own reputation and rigorous about avoiding any issues that could impugn his own integrity, had clearly not been able to impose comparable discipline on the government that he effectively ran from that corner office in the West Wing. Yet, as smelly as the administration got at times, Baker was able to keep away from the stench.
Likewise, he was rarely cited when critics assailed some of the more controversial aspects of Reagan’s first-term record, from the accumulating deficits and the budget cuts affecting the most vulnerable to the ideological warfare that seemed to leave the United States on the same side as death squads in Central America and a brutally racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Ever close to the press, Baker was always associated with the victories and rarely if ever the defeats.
AS THE 1984 ELECTION year opened, the United States was a different place than it had been the last time voters were asked to pick a president. Reagan’s America had moved beyond the 1960s and 1970s, and it was beginning to recover its strength economically and reassert itself on the world stage. The social movements of the previous decade pushing for expanded rights for women, minorities, and gay Americans had ebbed; the deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment expired during Reagan’s first term, falling three states short of the thirty-eight it needed for ratification. Instead, Christian conservatives had gained momentum, preaching against the feminism, casual premarital sex, open homosexuality, widespread drug use, and other cultural changes that had alienated many traditionalists. The culture war was on, especially in the South and West.
American lifestyles were changing dramatically as technological innovation disrupted workplaces and homes. The spread of cable television transformed the entertainment landscape and the emergence of Cable News Network, or CNN, brought a new twenty-four-hour-a-day urgency to the latest developments in Washington, around the country, and overseas. The first Apple Macintosh personal computer went on sale in January 1984. Hewlett-Packard followed later in the year with the first home ink jet printer. Motorola had just released a massive brick of a mobile phone.
Under Reagan, not only innovation but capitalism itself seemed back—and so, many argued, was greed, which became a running theme of the decade’s cultural and political debates. “Once more acquisition of wealth had been given a moral rationale,” Haynes Johnson wrote in his account of those years, Sleepwalking Through History. A new show debuted in early 1984 called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous celebrating Reagan-era extravagance. It would be a few more years before Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street would popularize the phrase “greed is good,” but the conversation had already turned.
Overall, the economy was indeed booming, expanding by 7.2 percent in 1984, the highest growth rate in three decades and higher than any year in the three decades that would follow. No one was talking about the “misery index” anymore. Although the federal deficit had doubled on Reagan’s watch, inflation and gas prices had fallen dramatically since he took office, which had more direct impact on many Americans’ daily lives. Unemployment stood at 8 percent as the election year opened, higher than it had been at any point during Jimmy Carter’s presidency but it was falling, down from 10.8 percent at the end of 1982 and heading toward 7.2 percent by Election Day. If the country was still struggling, the trend lines at least seemed to be pointing in the right direction.
The benefits of Reaganomics, however, skewed to the rich. Average annual income rose by 3.5 percent in Reagan’s first term, according to a study by the Urban Institute released in 1984, but by just one percent for typical middle-class families compared with 9 percent for the top one fifth of earners. The poor, those in the lowest one fifth economically, actually saw their income fall by 8 percent, according to the study. For black families of all economic strata, income fell by 3.7 percent.
Many parts of the country did not feel the boom. Steel mills and factories in places such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit were trimming workforces or closing altogether. The term Rust Belt describing the sinking industrial Midwest was popularized. In Los Angeles, crack cocaine was introduced to the streets and with it came a spasm of violence that signaled a deadly new phase of the illegal drug crisis. Across the country, homelessness was on the rise. And scientists were grappling with an emerging virus called acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, that was devastating the gay community, an epidemic that Reagan was slow to recognize or confront.
But Reagan had changed public expectations for what government would or could do about the ills of society. The idea that the state would help the disadvantaged and aggressively move to end discrimination had given way to the belief that government had gone too far. “The debate in the last four years has been over which federal aid programs to cut rather than which to expand, over which civil rights rules to limit rather than which to enlarge, and over which natural resources to develop rather than which to protect,” noted David Rosenbaum of The New York Times.
For all of that, the public perceived the country to be heading toward a better future in a way that it had not for many years. Fifty percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going in the United States, twice as many as felt that way before the 1982 midterm elections and up from just 12 percent during the worst moment of the Carter presidency in 1979. Reagan may have advanced a divisive ideology, but he wrapped it in a warm and grandfatherly package that resonated. “President Reagan has made a mockery of the conventional wisdom that the country was ungovernable,” the author and historian Richard Reeves wrote as the election year began.
THAT OWED TO BAKER as much as anyone. It was his job to translate Reagan’s vision into concrete action. He was the negotiator, the implementer, the enforcer. It fell to him to deal with the problems, and the problem people, that Reagan preferred to avoid.
When David Stockman made another run at raising taxes to bring down the deficit, Reagan slammed the door hard, insisting that the problem was spending not taxes. The next day, Stockman told Baker that he was going to resign. He would have nothing more to do with what he considered fiscal know-nothingism and he did not want to be associated with deficits that over the course of five years would top $1 trillion.
“I can’t make a fool of myself any longer, Jim,” he said. “This budget is so bad, it’s beyond the pale.”
Baker responded with icy coldness. “You do that and you’ll stab the president right in the back,” he said. “The Democrats will have a field day in the 1984 campaign. Let me remind you of something, my friend. He stuck by you. Now you stick by him. You’ve made as many mistakes as the rest of us around here. So stick that unwarranted pride of yours right up your ass and get back in the trenches with the rest of us.” Stockman stayed.
Central to Baker’s mission, as he saw it, was helping Reagan avoid mistakes, particularly the kind that could cripple his presidency. At the top of his list was the proxy battle with the Soviets that kept escalating in Nicaragua. Reagan was in a constant struggle with Congress for enough money to keep the ragtag contras fighting, and Democratic lawmakers were increasingly restless. Sensing the danger to Reagan, Baker “was like a dog with a bone” about Central America, Michael Deaver said, convinced that “the crazies want to get us into war.”
If Baker needed any further proof, he got it with the revelation early in 1984 that the CIA had placed magnetic mines in three of Nicaragua’s harbors in hopes of sinking a transport ship carrying weapons, an operation that was clearly an act of war. Disclosure of the mining alienated one of the president’s chief allies on Capitol Hill, Senator Barry Goldwater, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the conservative icon who had given Reagan his start in national politics back in 1964. Goldwater had just assured another member of his committee that the administration was not mining the harbors. Now he felt betrayed. “Dear Bill,” Goldwater wrote in a letter to Bill Casey. “All this past weekend, I’ve been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the president having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America. It gets down to one, little, simple phrase: I am pissed off!”
Equally upset was the top Democrat on the committee, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who resigned from the panel in protest. Only after Casey apologized and promised to do a better job of keeping the lawmakers informed did Goldwater cool down and Moynihan rescind his resignation. But in hindsight, Moynihan would see this as a pivotal moment for Reagan’s administration and for the country, the “first acts of deception that gradually mutated into a policy of deceit.”
Congress had been seeking to limit American involvement in the region for two years and the Reagan team had been laboring just as hard to figure ways around the restrictions to get more money for the contras. Lawmakers passed the first Boland Amendment, named after its Democratic sponsor, Representative Edward Boland of Massachusetts, in late 1982, barring the CIA from financing any group in Nicaragua with the goal of toppling the government. The CIA bypassed that by claiming its support for the contras was not for regime change but to stop Nicaragua’s efforts to destabilize El Salvador. Congress, however, limited the funds available even for that purpose and finally the money ran out in May.
Among the ideas to circumvent the limits was soliciting third countries to contribute, a suggestion that Baker quickly rejected. In June, Robert McFarlane called a meeting of the National Security Planning Group to discuss the options. Baker was not there, but he was much invoked as Reagan’s most senior officials tried to figure out how they could get the money without illegally defying Congress.
“I would like to get money for the contras also, but another lawyer, Jim Baker, said that if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense,” George Shultz said in a discussion that would be transcribed and later studied by investigators.
Casey pushed back. “Jim Baker said that if we tried to get money from third countries without notifying the oversight committees, it could be a problem and he was informed that the finding does provide for the participation and cooperation of third countries. Once he learned that the finding does encourage cooperation from third countries, Jim Baker immediately dropped his view that this could be an impeachable offense, and you heard him say that, George.”
Shultz refused to back off. “Jim Baker’s argument is that the U.S. government may raise and spend funds only through an appropriation of the Congress,” he said.
“I am another lawyer who isn’t practicing law,” Caspar Weinberger chimed in, “but Jim Baker should realize that the United States would not be spending the money for the anti-Sandinista program; it is merely helping the anti-Sandinistas obtain the money from other sources.”
Even Baker’s close friend George Bush seemed open to the idea of soliciting foreign countries for money for the contras. “How can anyone object to the U.S. encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas under the finding?” the vice president asked. “The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people could interpret this as some kind of an exchange.”
The discussion ended inconclusively. McFarlane said that no one should be authorized to seek financial help for the contras until they had more information. “And I certainly hope none of this discussion will be made public in any way,” he warned.
Reagan agreed. “If such a story gets out,” he said, “we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did it.”
In years to come, investigators would look back at this meeting as a key milestone on a path that would deeply damage Reagan’s administration. That Baker was not present is telling, as he had wanted to keep clear of any shenanigans that the “crazies” were up to. But not only was he aware of the debate then raging over how far the White House could push traditional boundaries, he had weighed in on it. Baker later told investigators that he did not remember using the phrase “impeachable offense” but did advise that “we should take a very close look at the question of legality” of such solicitations and argued that “we could not do indirectly what we couldn’t do directly.”
WITH THE COLD WAR still raging and the Sandinistas still in power and the economy still fragile, Reagan had to decide whether to seek a second term. At seventy-three, he was already the oldest man to serve in the presidency. Was he really up for another four years? Did he have the vigor for the ordeals of the world’s most pressure-filled job?
One person who never seemed to doubt that Reagan would run for a second term was Baker. When a colleague wrote out a series of notes on a legal pad seeking Baker’s guidance, number thirteen on the list was “If Reagan not run, what.” Baker dismissed the question out of hand. “Going to run!” he wrote next to it on the legal pad. “I’m certain.” In speaking with reporters on background, without allowing his name to be used, he assured them that he was “99 percent” confident that Reagan would run. He bet so many of them that Reagan would run, he eventually had $225 on the line.
Whether Reagan could win was another matter. In the aftermath of the midterm defeat, he was at the nadir of his presidency, his approval rating sliding to a dismal 35 percent. Hypothetical matchups against leading Democrats showed him losing. The outsider in 1980 was now the incumbent, an insurgent no more, and if he could not turn things around, someone could do to him what he had done to Jimmy Carter.
Baker’s political team looked for ways to rehabilitate Reagan’s image, especially among his own base. One of the most important keys to success for a president seeking a second term is first knitting up his own party; three of Reagan’s four most recent predecessors faced primary challenges that cost them. Baker and the other strategists were determined to avoid that. A few months after the midterm elections, aides drafted a proposal for “concrete steps we can take to improve our standing with the populists.” Among the suggestions: Have Reagan do play-by-play for a baseball or football game, reprising his days as a sportscaster; invite retired athletes or rodeo champions to the White House; visit a national park; and give a speech to the National Rifle Association. In his own memo, Ed Rollins argued that Reagan needed to reconnect with the nation. “Ronald Reagan has always expressed the best aspect of populism, which is optimism about people,” he wrote. “He has always scorned the elitist view of mankind, which is pessimism about people.”
Baker made sure that the planning for the reelection campaign began long before Reagan decided whether he would run again. Lee Atwater, the young political operative, drafted a sixty-three-page memo for Baker and the rest of the team analyzing the nation’s shifting politics. The balance of power for Republicans, he noted, had been moving to the Sun Belt, a band of states stretching from the Old South to the Pacific coast that now controlled 266 electoral votes, just four shy of the majority necessary to secure the presidency. That worked to the advantage of Reagan, a character straight out of the American West who was most popular in that part of the country.
But Baker had multiple contests to run and win in 1984, and not all of them were with the voters. With Reagan stalwarts like Ed Rollins and Lyn Nofziger making noise about Baker’s leadership and plotting against him, the challenge was to stay on top of what would become a massive campaign apparatus from his West Wing office. History showed that incumbent presidents had no choice but to run their reelection campaigns from the White House, which meant that Baker would be in charge. He held a meeting at 7 a.m. each day with Michael Deaver, Stuart Spencer, and Bob Teeter. They studied the latest data from the president’s pollster Richard Wirthlin—or “Numbers,” as Baker called him—and made the strategic decisions that were passed along to Rollins at campaign headquarters, located near Capitol Hill in offices with all the charm of an insurance company.
To keep tabs on Rollins, Baker assigned Margaret Tutwiler to serve as his liaison to the campaign, playing bad cop when necessary. After years of working for Baker, she had long since expanded her role beyond her early years as a glorified personal assistant. Increasingly, she was known as Baker’s right hand and alter ego, the person who most understood his mind-set at any given moment and who could speak for him authoritatively without even checking first. Lee Atwater came to see her as a power player. Once when Rollins failed to come through on a routine request, she laid down the law with Atwater. “Let me give you a bit of advice,” she said. “If Baker asks you what’s the weather like today, you’d better send over a weather map.”
Like Baker, Tutwiler hailed from Southern aristocracy, in her case two of Birmingham’s oldest and most prominent families, the Tutwilers and the DeBardelebens. An early Tutwiler helped bring the first railroad to the state and the family made its fortune in minerals and real estate. Her father jumped with the Eighty-second Airborne Division on D-Day and was shot, but survived to become an investment banker. “When her parents married it was not so much a wedding as the merging of two coal and iron fortunes,” Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in The Washington Post. Tutwiler was educated her first few years in a one-room schoolhouse where she and a friend made up the entire fourth grade, but hers was also a childhood of country clubs and coming-out balls. She went to Finch College, the same New York finishing school that Mary Stuart Baker had attended, before returning home to study at the University of Alabama.
In the Reagan White House, Tutwiler was often the only woman in the room and the only supporter of abortion rights. She was known to deeply admire and even worship her boss, always referring to him deferentially, even in private, as “Mr. Baker.” But she had a deliciously sharp tongue and, at age thirty-three, could talk back to him like no one else could. When he would ask her to do something he found too unpleasant to do himself, like discipline a wayward aide, she would say, “You’re fifty-four years old. Why can’t you?” She often chided “Mr. Caution” for his restraint. For his birthday that election year, she gave him a book titled The Wimp. In an era and a profession where women were not major players, Tutwiler proved herself to be indispensable to Baker—“tough and smarter than a shithouse rat,” as Richard Nixon once described her.
Rollins, the campaign manager, however, resisted the Baker-Tutwiler leash. At one point, Rollins complained to Paul Laxalt, who had been given the title of campaign chairman, that he had been told to report to Baker at the White House. Laxalt called up Baker to demand to see Reagan. Baker asked what he wanted to talk about.
“I’ve known Ronald Reagan a lot longer than you,” Laxalt snapped, according to an account he later gave Rollins. “I don’t have to tell you what I want to see him about.”
When Laxalt arrived in the Oval Office, Baker was there waiting. “Mr. President,” the senator said, “I just want to know who’s running your campaign, me or Jim.”
“You are,” Baker interjected.
“I didn’t ask you, Jim,” Laxalt said.
Reagan told Laxalt he was in charge of the campaign.
Laxalt then turned to Baker. “Jim, leave Rollins alone,” he said. “He reports to me. I’ll report to the president and keep you informed.”
Baker was livid and called Rollins afterward. “Why the hell are you sandbagging me?” he demanded.
“I’m not sandbagging you,” Rollins said with faux innocence. “I’m just trying to get the pecking order straight.”
IF IT WERE NOT clear already, the pecking order ended at Baker’s desk. “Baker might have been in the White House but we were all working for him,” said Charlie Black, the political strategist. Even as Baker managed the tribal conflicts inside his party, he kept a close eye on the other side of the aisle to anticipate Reagan’s fall opponent. After the poor GOP showing in the 1982 midterm elections, a strong field of Democrats had been drawn into the race, sensing an opportunity to take down a weakened Republican incumbent.
Walter Mondale, the former vice president, started as the favorite of most of the party’s institutional elite. A classic, old-school liberal from Minnesota, Mondale, however, was confronted by a variety of challengers, including Senators John Glenn of Ohio, Alan Cranston of California, Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, and Gary Hart of Colorado; former senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the party’s 1972 nominee; former governor Reubin Askew of Florida; and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the fiery civil rights leader.
Like everyone else, Baker assumed that Mondale was likely to win the nomination once Senator Ted Kennedy decided not to join the race and figured they could simply rerun Reagan’s 1980 playbook. Baker joked with colleagues that they could print up bumper stickers that said, “Mondale—What If He’s Worse Than Carter?” Glenn was the Democrat Baker worried most about. The first American astronaut to orbit the earth, Glenn could match Reagan on patriotism and family values. Adding to Glenn’s heroic sheen was the conveniently timed release of the big-screen movie The Right Stuff in the fall of 1983 in which the lookalike actor Ed Harris portrayed Glenn as a young Boy Scout–like astronaut during his heady Mercury Seven days. But as Glenn positioned himself in the political center, he struggled to build an effective organization and never caught fire with liberal primary voters. Most of the other candidates did not even get that far. Cranston marginalized himself as a one-note nuclear-freeze candidate, Askew excited exactly no one outside Florida, and McGovern was quickly relegated to the also-ran category, a ghost from a failed past.
Instead, Mondale found himself pressed on two sides by Hart, a wavy-haired Westerner with Kennedy-esque good looks presenting himself as a new-generation Democrat, and Jackson, a charismatic, media-savvy preacher rallying the party’s all-important African American constituency and its most fervent liberal activists. With his traditional organization, Mondale easily won the Iowa caucuses but lost in a stunning upset to Hart in the New Hampshire primary. Suddenly, Hart was the fresh face, the candidate with “splash, dash and glitter,” as he wryly put it.
Mondale slugged it out with Hart over the next several months trading primary wins. Hart, who ran McGovern’s 1972 campaign, hammered away at the former vice president as a creature of special interests and a Great Society throwback. Mondale finally confronted Hart during a Democratic debate when he mocked the young senator’s so-called “new ideas” by borrowing a line from a Wendy’s fast food hamburger chain advertisement then playing on television. “Where’s the beef?” Mondale demanded. While Hart had arguably put out more substantive policy ideas than Mondale, he struggled to respond. He was not helped by subsequent news reports that as a young man he had changed his name, his signature, and even his date of birth.
Jackson was never a threat to take the nomination away from Mondale but as he mounted the most serious presidential campaign ever waged by an African American candidate, he drained the front-runner of left-leaning voters who otherwise might have sided with him against Hart. Jackson had a talent for grabbing the limelight with his catchy campaign rhetoric—“hands that once picked cotton can now pick presidents,” he declared—and he was determined to make the Democratic Party take both him and his African American base seriously. “We are going from the guttermost to the uppermost,” he vowed. Jackson even upstaged Reagan with a freelance diplomatic mission to Syria where he secured the release of an American Navy navigator who had been shot down over Lebanon.
Still, Mondale had all the institutional advantages of a former vice president—the finances, the organization, the endorsements, everything except the energy. Bereft of passion as it was, Mondale Inc., as his campaign came to be called, finally outpaced Hart to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in July. Hoping to energize his campaign and bring his party together after the fractious battle, Mondale looked past Hart and Jackson to pick a running mate, selecting instead Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first woman ever to have a place on a major party’s national ticket.
PIVOTING TO THE GENERAL ELECTION, Mondale now faced the daunting task of taking on an incumbent who was now recovering much of his strength. As the economy rebounded in 1983 and 1984, so did Reagan’s standing with the public. The president’s approval rating, mired in the mid-30s a year earlier, shot up to 55 percent by the beginning of the election year and he looked like a far more formidable opponent than when Mondale first decided to run.
Mondale chose to hit the president on the high deficits Reagan had racked up, perhaps his starkest failure. Rather than balance the budget by 1984, as he had promised, Reagan had widened the gap between revenues and expenses exponentially, from $74 billion in Jimmy Carter’s last full year in office to $208 billion at the end of 1983, the largest deficit since World War II, both in raw dollars and as a share of the economy. Promising to cut the deficit by two thirds in four years, Mondale made the case that spending cuts alone would not solve the problem—and that Reagan knew it. “Let’s tell the truth,” Mondale said in his nationally televised acceptance speech at the convention. “It must be done. It must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
The idea was to position himself as the candidate of candor, but Mondale also opened himself up to the predictable attacks from Republicans. Never mind that just the day before Mondale’s speech, Reagan had signed a budget bill into law raising taxes by $50 billion over four years while cutting spending by $11 billion. Reagan was seen as the tax cutter and he would run on that for the rest of the campaign. Moreover, Mondale’s choice of Ferraro, another Northern liberal, for his running mate seemed to play right into Lee Atwater’s Sun Belt electoral strategy. “In a very real sense, the election is over,” Atwater wrote in a memo four days after the Democratic convention. “What we do now will determine the shape and size of our victory—but barring a major catastrophe, President Reagan is assured of reelection.”
Still, Baker’s responsibility gene meant that he understood that Mondale might be right and he argued that Reagan could not—or at least should not—categorically rule out raising taxes in his next term. He also suspected that the Democrats were trying to trap Reagan into making a definitive vow ruling out new taxes so that they could then accuse him of preparing to cut Social Security and Medicare to balance the books. So Baker and others on the pragmatist side of the Reagan camp argued for what they called “wiggle room.” On a sheet of talking points, Baker scratched out his recommendation for how the president should approach the issue: “(a.) Don’t say will balance budget—Want to, but need tools—line item veto, Balanced Budget Amendment. (b.) Don’t say NEVER on tax ques—Say: I want to cut, not raise.”
Baker took a jaundiced view of the difference between campaigning and governing. A memo prepared for him anticipated the possibility of a flip-flop on taxes, noting that three other presidents in the last century had made major promises during the campaign that they would not keep after taking office—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. The memo singled out in particular Wilson, who campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the slogan of “he kept us out of war,” then just weeks after being inaugurated took the United States into World War I. “The exigencies of the election force us to solemnly swear that Walter Mondale is the tax-increase candidate and Ronald Reagan is the no-tax-increase candidate,” the memo said. “We need to hold that posture through November 6. After that we can always do as Wilson, Roosevelt and Johnson did.”
Reagan accepted Baker’s advice. In his initial response to Mondale, the president insisted that he had “no plans” to raise taxes—Washington code for keeping his options open—and said he would do so only if the government, after cutting everything possible, was still spending more than it was taking in. A few days later, he hit on the phrasing that would preserve his flexibility while drawing the distinction with Mondale. “My opponent has spent his political life supporting more taxes and more spending,” he said. “For him, raising taxes is a first resort. For me, it is a last resort.”
That effectively settled the matter and underscored another rule of politics. Candidates or elected officials are given the benefit of the doubt on issues where they are associated with taking a strong ideological stance. Because Reagan was seen as a tax cutter, voters forgave him when he raised taxes, as he did in 1982 and again right before the Democratic convention, assuming he must have had no choice.
None of that would matter if the economy took a downward turn again. As chief of staff running a reelection campaign for an incumbent president, Baker had one top priority: keeping the good times rolling at any cost. And so one day that summer, he summoned Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, to the White House to meet with the president.
The Fed controls the money supply and interest rates, giving it the power to stimulate growth or strangle it. For the entirety of Reagan’s presidency to this point, the bank had been led by Volcker, a six-foot-seven giant of a man, who dominated intellectually as well as physically. Originally appointed by Jimmy Carter, Volcker had been given a second term by Reagan out of a desire to maintain continuity and he had largely conquered the extreme inflation that had afflicted the country in the 1970s. But the Fed was supposed to be an independent entity, isolated from political machinations.
When Volcker arrived at the White House, he was taken not to the Oval Office but the more informal library. Reagan was there but seemed uncomfortable to Volcker and uttered not a word. Instead, he left the business to Baker, who delivered his message to the central banker with characteristic Texan bluntness.
“The president is ordering you not to raise interest rates before the election,” Baker declared.
Volcker was stunned; it was clearly overstepping a president’s authority to try to order a Fed chairman what to do.
Unsure how to respond to such an egregious violation of norms, Volcker said nothing and just walked out. As it happened, he had not been planning an interest rate increase anyway and so the matter never came to a head. But it showed how far Baker was willing to go to preserve power.
With the economy in good shape, Baker envisioned a stay-the-course, feel-good campaign with little in the way of new policy pronouncements or specific campaign promises. Instead, Reagan capitalized on a summer of patriotism, fusing himself with the national identity. He traveled to Normandy to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, delivering a stirring speech from Pointe du Hoc. The next month Reagan flew to Los Angeles to attend the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games, the first American president to do so. With the Soviet Union and the rest of the eastern bloc boycotting in retaliation for the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the United States won eighty-three gold medals, the most ever by any country in any Summer Games. Two weeks of crowds chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A!” on national television reinforced Reagan’s election-year message that “America is back.” When the Republican National Convention opened in Dallas barely a week after the closing ceremony, the delegates who gathered to renominate Reagan were chanting, “U-S-A, U-S-A!” too. At a rally in Orange County, California, that followed the convention, one woman in the audience told a reporter, “First, the Olympics, now this. I’m just OD-ing on pride in America.”
That was the goal for Baker and the Tuesday Team, as the campaign’s media squad was called. In what would become the most iconic advertisement of the year, the team produced a sixty-second spot that radiated sentimentality. “It’s morning again in America,” the fatherly narrator said. “Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history.” Featuring images of a paperboy and a farm tractor and a church wedding, the ad evoked a nostalgic return to the seeming simplicity of the 1950s after decades of social upheaval, economic dislocation, political crises, and overseas conflicts. “Under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder, and stronger, and better,” it concluded. “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
The campaign was selling a narrative of rebirth and renewal, even if it was selective. Mondale complained about the sugary theme of the Reagan campaign. “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs,” he said on the campaign trail. “No one’s hurting. No one’s alone. No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But if Reagan’s version of reality was a little rosy, it was a version that many Americans were ready to embrace. Time magazine ran a cover that fall with the headline “I ♥ U.S.” and the overline “America’s Upbeat Mood.”
INDEED, REAGAN APPEARED to be cruising to an easy victory when he showed up for the first debate with Mondale in Louisville on October 7. Richard Wirthlin’s polls had him up by 55 percent to 37 percent on the morning of the encounter, a whopping 18-point lead that would be hard for the Democrat to erase in just four weeks. All Reagan had to do was not make any big mistakes in either of the two face-offs that had been scheduled.
But there were warning signs during the rehearsals leading up to the debate. Baker told David Stockman, who was playing Reagan’s Democratic opponent, to push hard in hopes of shaking the president out of what seemed to be an incumbent’s complacency. While Reagan was better versed on policy details now that he had been in office dealing with them every day, it had been four years since he had debated anyone. He was not used to being challenged frontally.
Stockman took up his assignment with relish, pressing Reagan relentlessly to the point that the president finally blew up at him. “Shut up!” Reagan yelled during a discussion of Social Security.
Afterward, an unsettled Reagan shook Stockman’s hand. “You better send me some flowers because you’ve been nasty to me,” Reagan said.
Stockman blanched. “Baker made me do it,” he said.
Even from afar, Mondale’s team sensed an opening. Patrick Caddell, a strategist for the candidate, sent him a memo before the debate urging him to be aggressive yet gracious with the president. “Reagan has been so cocooned that the public may not realize that Reagan is having more difficulty hearing, following arguments, etc., than he did several years ago,” Caddell wrote.
Caddell had a point. Reagan was clearly not as sharp as he was four years earlier and while he probably had not yet developed the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually take his life after leaving office, he had moments when he seemed out of it. When a reporter asked him during his summer retreat to his California ranch what the United States could do to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table, Reagan stared blankly for a few moments without answering. Nancy whispered to him, “Doing everything we can.” He then faithfully repeated that out loud: “Doing everything we can.”
As the president and his challenger greeted each other onstage at Louisville’s Center for the Performing Arts on that evening in October, Mondale sensed that something was wrong with Reagan. “He didn’t seem alert—not tired exactly, but not all there,” Mondale wrote later. Mondale followed Caddell’s advice and Reagan quickly fell on the defensive. He stumbled over words, mangled his own familiar stories, repeated mind-numbing statistics, rambled through his closing statement, and seemed to lose track of the rules at one point. “I’m all confused now,” he admitted.
When Mondale pushed him on taxes, the president retreated to an old favorite. “There you go again,” Reagan said.
This time, though, Mondale was ready. He noted that when Reagan used that line against Jimmy Carter in 1980, he was denying that he would cut Medicare. But in fact, Mondale said, Reagan then proceeded to do just that as president.
“And so when you say, ‘there you go again,’ people remember this, you know,” Mondale said.
That was something of an exaggeration; Reagan really had not made much of a push to scale back Medicare, unlike other programs. But the rejoinder worked for Mondale. Suddenly, Reagan appeared old, a befuddled septuagenarian well past his prime. A race that was supposed to be a runaway now looked competitive. While Reagan still had a sizable lead after the debate, Mondale was declared the winner of the debate by 66 percent to 17 percent. If Reagan could not dispense with the age question, it seemed conceivable that Mondale could overtake him. Reagan knew he did badly. “I stunk,” he told Stuart Spencer afterward.
Baker was on edge in the aftermath. Nancy Reagan was furious. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded of Michael Deaver. She was looking for someone to blame and her candidates were Baker and Dick Darman, who was in charge of debate preparations. It had not escaped her attention that Baker seemed to take credit for her husband’s achievements, so he should take blame for his setbacks.
Baker knew that Reagan’s poor performance was not Darman’s fault and did not think it was his own either. Reagan simply had not put in the work needed. Spencer had gone to Camp David with the Reagans the weekend before. “I had the briefing books with me,” Spencer said. “Put them on that table and he and I watched movies for two days. Every morning when I’d come over, I’d look at the books and they hadn’t moved.”
But Nancy and Paul Laxalt decided that the problem was that Reagan had been over-prepared, his head stuffed with too many facts and figures. “He was brutalized by a briefing process that didn’t make any sense,” Laxalt told reporters, a public repudiation of Baker and Darman. Baker was too important to the White House to toss overboard, but Darman was seen as arrogant and neither Nancy nor Laxalt would miss him terribly if he were gone. Baker and Darman felt aggrieved; they both knew that the reason October 7 had been picked as the date for the debate was because Nancy had insisted on it after consulting with her astrologer.
Baker wanted to keep Darman if at all possible. While Baker knew how much his aide could grate on colleagues, he had come to depend on Darman. But Baker could not—or would not—stop Nancy from sending Spencer to tell Darman to resign.
At 5 p.m. one day after the debate, Darman dropped by Baker’s office. Instead of his usual welcome, Baker turned away from Darman, staring out the window onto the patio outside the West Wing.
“What’s up?” Darman asked.
“What’s your reaction?”
“My reaction to what?”
“Didn’t Stu talk to you?”
“No,” Darman said. “He stopped by my office. But I wasn’t there. And when I came back, I couldn’t find him.”
Baker said nothing, seemingly uncomfortable.
“What did Spencer want?” Darman asked.
Baker stared at him grimly. “He was going to tell you that you had to resign.”
Darman felt he had been hit in the stomach. As he put it in his memoir, “When Spencer was commissioned as the angel of death, there weren’t many victims who survived.”
Reeling, Darman ventured with a lightness he did not feel that he was glad he had not been there when Spencer stopped by. “What is the supposed reason I’m to resign?”
“The first lady wants you out.”
“Have you talked with her?”
“No. But a job’s been done on you. Spencer says she’s dead serious. I argued with him. And I want you to know I told Spencer that I would have to get the message from the president.”
“You mean you didn’t say, ‘If he goes, I go’?”
Darman meant it half jokingly, but Baker did not take it that way. Instead, Baker pointed out that Darman had always said that if he ever became a liability he would go. Darman knew that Baker, while a friend, was habitually careful about putting himself in danger. The two discussed the matter further and agreed that Darman should go see the president himself.
In the end, Darman appealed to Deaver, who agreed to fix the matter with Nancy. Darman was spared, but it was a close call. It was also a revealing moment about Baker. No matter how much he relied on an adviser, even one as close as Darman, Baker would only go so far for someone else. By insisting that any order to dismiss Darman had to come from the president, Baker did protect Darman, because he knew that Reagan would never fire a member of his staff in such a circumstance. But Baker was not willing to take on Nancy directly. He did not stop Spencer from trying to convey Nancy’s edict nor did he even warn Darman that it was coming. Indeed, Spencer later denied that he told Baker that Darman had to go, saying that he had only “cautioned him about Darman.” So when Darman showed up at his office unawares, Baker’s first question was to ask his reaction to a resignation demand that may never have been made—in other words, testing to see if Darman might voluntarily fall on his sword, thus relieving Baker of the pressure. Ultimately, it was Deaver, not Baker, who saved Darman.
Darman emerged from the episode scarred. He told one friend that Nancy was “insane.” More important, it soured Darman on his mentor Baker. As one person close to Darman said, he “took that very personally when he got blamed for that and he was upset that Baker didn’t stick up for him.”
ON THE DEFENSIVE, Baker and the campaign team decided to shift the advertising to something a little closer to a policy argument—although not much closer. A new ad produced by the Tuesday Team began airing after the debate that returned to the Cold War, invoking Reagan’s peace-through-strength approach to national security, albeit without any specifics of any kind. “There’s a bear in the woods,” the narrator said as the screen showed a lumbering beast with a hunter standing watch nearby. “Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?” It was the scary metaphorical counterpoint to “Morning in America.”
If Baker was hoping that his friend George Bush would right the ship during his own vice presidential debate just four days after Reagan’s, he was destined to be disappointed. Bush was wary of facing off against Geraldine Ferraro. Never before had male and female candidates gone head to head on a national stage like this and Bush was uncertain how to strike the right balance—he needed to attack the other ticket to stanch its momentum following the Louisville debate, but he did not want to look like he was beating up a woman. Ferraro had been on the defensive in recent weeks because of financial questions about her husband, John Zaccaro, who ran a real estate holding company and initially refused to release his tax returns. But Bush knew if he pounded too hard, it might generate sympathy for her.
The balance he sought eluded him as they met for their debate in Philadelphia on October 11. When he pushed back against Ferraro’s comparison of Reagan’s policy in Lebanon with Jimmy Carter’s record in Iran, Bush came across as condescending.
“Let me help you with the difference, Mrs. Ferraro, between Iran and the embassy in Lebanon,” he said.
“Let me just say, first of all,” Ferraro replied, “that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy.”
Bush did not dig out of that hole when he was caught on a live microphone the day after the debate awkwardly boasting about his performance to a group of longshoremen. “We tried to kick a little ass last night,” he was overheard saying.
Not so much. It would fall to Reagan, who had one last chance in Kansas City on October 21. Rather than worry as much about briefing books or critiquing his last debate, Baker and the campaign team focused on building up the president’s confidence for the next one. They brought in Roger Ailes, a longtime Republican strategist whose habit of pumping up Reagan earned him the nickname “Dr. Feelgood.”
The writer Garry Wills compared Reagan’s performance in the first debate to the legendary actor Laurence Olivier experiencing stage fright late in his career. Olivier overcame that by having a fellow actor always in sight; Reagan’s team adopted the technique by making sure that Nancy would always be in the president’s view when he took on Mondale. They wanted him loose, not worried. Just before Reagan went onstage at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium, Baker handed him a note alluding to the one he had given him back in 1980. “Chuckle again,” it said, “and have fun out there.”
He did. The debate was in theory about foreign policy, but about a third of the way through, the inevitable age question came up. Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun couched the question in polite terms, recalling that during the Cuban Missile Crisis John Kennedy had to go with little sleep for days.
“Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?” he asked Reagan.
“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” Reagan answered. “And I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he went on, adding with mock seriousness, “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
Even Mondale burst out laughing. And the reporter acknowledged that Reagan had hit a home run.
“Mr. President, I’d like to head for the fence and try to catch that one before it goes over, but I’ll go on to another question,” Trewhitt said.
Indeed, from that moment on, the age question was essentially settled. Baker later insisted that the line had not been scripted ahead of time. Reagan did not use the response that his advisers had actually prepared for him: “Yes, age is an issue in this campaign—my opponent’s ideas are too old.” But at some point before the first debate, Baker recalled, Reagan had tried out something similar during a ride in a White House limousine. “Well, I might just say, if I’m asked, ‘If he doesn’t question my age, I won’t raise questions about his youth and inexperience,’ ” Reagan had told him. The next time Baker heard Reagan use it was on the debate stage.
Mondale never had a real chance after that. Reagan probably would have won no matter what, but with the second debate he had quelled the most serious concern the public had about keeping him in office. He had an 11-point lead in Wirthlin’s poll on the morning of the debate, which ballooned to 17 points by the following day. “You’ll see that I was smiling,” Mondale said, remembering the moment years later. “But I think if you come in close, you’ll see some tears coming down because I knew he had gotten me there. That was really the end of my campaign that night, I think.” Afterward, he said, “I walked off and I was almost certain the campaign was over, and it was.”
Two weeks later, on November 6, Reagan won in a landslide, capturing forty-nine states, losing only Mondale’s home of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. He took a resounding 59 percent of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes, the most ever in American history. He prevailed in nearly every income group and drew especially strong support among younger voters who had been skeptical of him four years earlier. He cemented the South as the party’s new base and held on to the Reagan Democrats who crossed lines during his first election.
His coattails, however, were not particularly long. While Republicans picked up fifteen seats in the House, Democrats retained a strong majority, and in the Senate, Reagan’s party actually lost two seats. The victory was more about Reagan than Republicans.
Either way, the president and Baker’s team savored the success at an election night party at the Century Plaza hotel where Susan had first learned of Reagan’s plans to conscript her husband four years earlier.
“Four more years!” the crowd chanted. “Four more years!”
“I think,” Reagan said, “that’s just been arranged.”
AFTER THE VOTE, Baker met with reporters for breakfast. The election was a great victory, he said, but he acknowledged that it did not add up to much of a mandate. They had run on a gauzy cloud of patriotism but did little to define an agenda for a second term beyond not raising taxes and limiting the scope of government. They would not be able to point back to any particular policy that was effectively ratified by voters. And because they did not carry Congress with them, there would be limits on how much they could muscle through anyway.
One of the reporters later mentioned the conversation to Ed Rollins, who interpreted it in the most objectionable way and confronted Baker about it.
“We have to play down the mandate talk,” Baker said, according to Rollins. “We didn’t get the congressional seats we needed. Tip is still in charge and we don’t want to antagonize him.”
“Jim, that’s bullshit,” Rollins remembered replying. “The president just won forty-nine states and 59 percent of the vote and that’s a mandate in anybody’s book.”
“The campaign is over,” Baker said. “Now we’ve got to govern.”
For Baker, campaigning was what you did to get the chance to govern. You said what you had to say but the true test was what came afterward. To some critics, the Reagan campaign of 1984 signaled the triumph of image over reality, of “large lies told through the calculated repetition of soothing imagery and potent symbolism,” as William Greider, the same journalist who had played confessor to David Stockman, wrote in Rolling Stone. “If the politics of 1984 describes the future,” he added, “then Americans are being reduced to a nation of befogged sheep, beguiled by false images and manipulated ruthlessly.”
Baker did not see it that way, or at least he did not admit to seeing it that way. The reelection represented a validation—of Reagan, yes, but of Baker too. And it had turned out better than even he had hoped it might. A month after the vote, Baker sent $250 to the columnist Joseph Alsop to pay off a bet made before the election over a dinner of stone crabs at a party with a bunch of journalists at the home of Meg Greenfield, the editorial page editor at The Washington Post. “As I remember it,” Baker wrote to Alsop, “you felt that we would win in excess of 58% of the popular vote in the Presidential election, and I expected it to be something less than that.” He also sent a copy to Greenfield. “Meg,” he wrote, “I bet you didn’t know your guests were running a bookie operation at your dinner parties. JAB III.”
After four years in the White House, Baker was a full-fledged member of the club. It did not matter that Reagan was a conservative and the Post’s editorial page editor was a liberal. They were part of the same ruling establishment. The Reagans loved Greenfield’s boss, Katharine Graham, and went to her Georgetown home for dinner from time to time. Baker did too. This was when Washingtonians from opposing parties could share a meal without being accused of selling out their principles.
Baker had steered Reagan through the worst moments of the first term and helped transform him from a muddled, gaffe-prone former actor struggling with a miserable economy to the most successful president of a generation. Baker had lashed Reagan’s story to the country’s, making him the essential leader of his time. The seeds of the myth that would later develop had been planted.
Now, Baker hoped, he might finally be liberated himself.