They shared a tent in the wilds near Cody, Wyoming, the vice president and the secretary of the treasury, far away from the noise and the polls and the naysayers. For four days, they rode horses and fished for trout as if they were still just a couple of old friends from Texas, never mind the Secret Service agents who formed a perimeter around their encampment.
A backcountry camping trip in the Shoshone National Forest seemed like the right way for Baker and Bush to get away during the Democratic National Convention that nominated Michael Dukakis in July 1988. Tradition stipulated that a candidate stay out of public view during the other party’s quadrennial conclave. Baker was in his last days before resigning from the cabinet to take over the campaign for the fall election. Wyoming had always been his place to escape, the place where he felt most himself, ever since that long-ago adventure with his father. This time, Baker had planned to go fly-fishing there with Dick Cheney, but the Wyoming congressman was sidelined with a quadruple bypass heart operation. Baker decided to take the trip anyway, inviting Bush instead. It was, he thought, the perfect way for them to reconnect.
In the tent, they did not hear Bush mocked at the convention in Atlanta as a child of privilege, “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” as Ann Richards, the tart-tongued, silver-haired state treasurer of Texas put it. They did not hear Jim Hightower, the caustic Texas agriculture commissioner, call Bush “a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” They did not hear Tony Coelho, the House majority whip, joke that Bush took Baker along on his fishing trip “in case George is too squeamish to bait his own hook.” They did not hear Ted Kennedy skewer the vice president for failing to stop major mistakes made by the Reagan administration like Iran-contra, leading the assembled Democrats in a chant, “Where was George?” After emerging from the forest, Bush told reporters, “The good thing about the absolute wilderness is you don’t have to listen to Ted Kennedy.”
Bush and Baker may have tuned out, but the Democratic convention was a success and Baker knew that he was about to take over a dysfunctional campaign in deep trouble. Bush had dispatched his Republican rivals and was heading toward his own convention. He had yet to persuade the American public, however, that he was the right man for the job. In anointing Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants and the third-term governor of Massachusetts, the Democrats had selected a standard-bearer with an inspiring story rooted in the American Dream. While he was a cool, even stoic character, not burdened with an excess of either emotion or charisma, Dukakis boasted a record of economic revival in his state that had been dubbed the “Massachusetts Miracle.” He projected steady assurance, a mows-his-own-lawn integrity. “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence,” he declared at the convention.
In the months leading up to Atlanta, Dukakis had emerged from a pack of well-credentialed but little-known Democrats to win the nomination after more celebrated figures flamed out, like Gary Hart once his overnight rendezvous with a model named Donna Rice was exposed, or chose not to run, like the liberal icon, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York. Although he was a stolid technocrat, Dukakis had no trouble outpacing Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona and Senators Joseph Biden of Delaware and Paul Simon of Illinois. It was an uninspired race despite the party’s frustrations after eight years of Reagan. For a while, Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado considered a campaign, leading pundits to describe the field as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dukakis relied on superior organization and finances as he piled up enough delegates to claim the nomination. To pull the party together, Dukakis selected as his running mate Lloyd Bentsen, Bush’s old Texas adversary, a choice hailed as a canny reprise of the Boston-Austin axis that propelled John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to the White House in 1960. Dukakis emerged from the convention with a commanding 17-point lead over the incumbent vice president.
Not only was Bush trailing badly in the polls, he had an organization that was riven by infighting, turf wars, and competing theories of the case for Bush. It was the early Reagan White House all over again. The G-6 led by Lee Atwater that was supposed to seamlessly lead a transition from one Republican presidency to the next had degenerated into a politburo of rivals. As Baker began focusing on his new mission, he received a memo from Gary MacDougal, an assistant campaign manager who came to Bush from a successful career in the business world, laying out in the stark terms of the Harvard MBA and McKinsey consultant he had once been just how messed up the campaign really was. The link between Lee Atwater, Bob Teeter, and Craig Fuller, the top strategists, and the actual campaign staff was “weak and intermittent,” the MacDougal memo said, resulting in Bush “largely getting the short-term thinking of three people, and not enough product of the campaign organization.”
“There is tremendous confusion and considerable animosity” between the two sides, MacDougal told Baker, “with key members of each referring to the other as a ‘black hole.’ ” There was more: Speeches were not creative. There was no agreement on policies. Coordination between the Republican National Committee and the White House was poor. Leaks were endemic. There was too much last-minute event planning and not enough preparation for important meetings. “This all adds up to the fact that the Vice President is not being served with the best possible product in a timely fashion—in speeches, events, or policy,” MacDougal concluded.
Baker’s arrival temporarily made it even worse, stirring up the team’s barely suppressed stew of resentments and insecurities. When he resigned as treasury secretary to take over as campaign chairman, the only person as unhappy as Baker was Atwater, who feared the arrival of the vice president’s close friend. “Lee was running on paranoia all the time,” Fuller recalled, and thought he was being supplanted by someone with far greater influence over the candidate. He was “nervous about getting layered,” said Ed Rogers, his deputy. “There was a time when it was, ‘Are we out of here? Is there going to be a new team? Are we getting flushed?’ ”
Baker had no interest in flushing Atwater. After seeing Atwater in action during the 1980 and 1984 campaigns, he had a healthy respect for the operative’s talents. More importantly, he did not want to be Lee Atwater. He wanted to be the treasury secretary—or the secretary of state in waiting. If he was going to pilot the campaign, he planned to fly at a far higher altitude than Atwater did. “He was very upset,” Baker remembered. “I said, ‘Look, Lee, this isn’t going to diminish you. It’s going to enhance your role and you don’t need to worry about it.’…What he didn’t understand was I didn’t want to be the chief political operator.” Like the candidate himself, Baker still saw politics as a dirty business. The campaign was a necessary if unseemly way station in between jobs that were important.
In many ways, Baker and Atwater were as opposite as could be. “They were very different personalities,” said Frank Donatelli, who was White House political director for Reagan at the time and coordinating with the Bush campaign. Baker “was a buttoned-down lawyer and Lee was a wild man.” At thirty-seven years old, Atwater was full of twitchy, manic energy, “an insecure kid who got to play in the big leagues,” as his onetime boss, Ed Rollins, put it. The son of an insurance adjuster and a high school Spanish teacher, Atwater led his own rock band in school called the Upsetters Revue and cut his teeth on Republican campaigns in the New South immediately after college. Working on one race after another before joining Reagan’s White House, he had a reputation for no-holds-barred politics, a dirty trickster who, according to legend that he denied, encouraged an anti-Semitic fringe candidate to go after a mutual opponent and arranged for an operative of a competing campaign selling a fundraising ticket to be arrested for scalping. Atwater reread Machiavelli every year, or at least wanted people to think he did, and kept a likeness of Stonewall Jackson on his wall next to a photograph of Reagan. When it came time for a biography to be written about Atwater, it was, naturally, titled Bad Boy.
To assuage Atwater’s concerns, Baker let him keep his prime corner office at campaign headquarters and took another one across the hall instead. Baker heaped praise on him at an early staff meeting, boasting that Atwater was the first person he hired when he became Reagan’s chief of staff. That, Rogers said, was the “Southern pol” in Baker, telling a “preacher’s story” that might not hew exactly to the facts but was intended to stroke its subject. “Baker didn’t know for some weeks after I was hired that I was working there,” Atwater told colleagues.
Baker also enlisted the candidate’s son George W. to reassure the jumpy campaign manager. The younger Bush had been suspicious of Atwater at first, challenging him during an early campaign strategy session with the family at Camp David in 1985. “How do we know we can trust you?” George W. asked then. If he had doubts, Atwater replied, then he should move to Washington and work in the campaign to keep an eye on him, a dare that the brash son accepted. When David Remnick profiled Atwater in Esquire magazine as a ruthless, conscience-free operator—“all blood on the floor and don’t look back”—who was so crude that he pulled down his pants and urinated in front of the writer, it fell to the younger George to reprimand him. “You need to earn your spurs through performance, not interviews,” he told Atwater.
Atwater got the message and, by the time Baker arrived, he and George W. had come to trust each other, making the candidate’s son the right emissary. “He was nervous about Baker, which meant that his priorities might not have been 100 percent correct,” George W. recalled later. “He knew Baker, how close he was to Dad, and he didn’t want to get cut out of the mix.”
Atwater was not the only one wary of Baker’s arrival. When he convened an introductory meeting, Baker told the staff that he was not planning to make major changes, that he was just a superstructure coming in on top. But he noticed a young woman in the corner staring at him with a look of resentment. “We’d just come through this campaign,” the woman, Janet Mullins, recalled later, referring to the primaries. “We’d won. What do we need this guy for?” Several people had to move offices in order to accommodate Baker and his portable team, she remembered, “so that had everybody—at least it had me—in a snit.”
Baker had his assistant Caron Jackson summon Mullins to his new office to meet one-on-one. Mullins, who had come from the informal culture on Capitol Hill, where she had been an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was in the habit of walking around the campaign headquarters without shoes. Now, she felt defiant as she headed down the corridor. “I had my jacket off, my suit jacket off, and I’m barefoot, and I walk down to the other end of the hall barefoot and walk in and stick out my hand and say, ‘Hey, Jim, nice to meet you,’ ” she said. “Nobody calls him Jim, nobody. I thought Caron was going to faint on the spot.” Baker, though, laughed. “It was kind of an instant bonding moment,” Mullins said.
In the end, Atwater, Mullins, and the others came to appreciate that Baker was not mounting a hostile takeover. If anything, Baker’s arrival meant the end of the campaign by committee that had been paralyzing Bush’s effort. Finally, there was a boss. “It was chaos,” said Robert Zoellick, who accompanied Baker from the Treasury Department. “Baker brought order.” He had unquestioned authority. No one would dare go around Baker to appeal one of his rulings, because he spoke with Bush’s proxy in a way that Atwater simply could not. A decision was now a decision. Atwater had been running “a pretty loose ship,” as Donatelli put it, and the ship was all but lost in the fog. Not only was Michael Dukakis far ahead on the eve of the Republican National Convention, he was leading in twenty-four states with a total of 353 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed to win the presidency.
BAKER’S PROBLEMS WERE NOT just with his staff. Bush himself turned out to have an end run in mind and it was about as big a maneuver as a candidate could make without consulting his own campaign chief. On their fishing trip in Wyoming, the two men had talked about the looming choice of a vice presidential running mate and Bush had offered a quick handicapping of some of the possibilities. But the only actual decision he told Baker about in the tent that night was that he had reluctantly ruled out his good friend Alan Simpson, the state’s abortion-rights-supporting Republican senator. Now that it came time to actually pick a candidate to join the Republican ticket, Baker was entirely in the dark. Bush had made the selection without telling anyone. Baker had arranged for vetting to be handled by one of his own advisers, Robert Kimmitt, his general counsel at the Treasury Department. But while Bush had Kimmitt vet a variety of possible choices, the vice president did not share his thoughts on what Kimmitt turned up. “I wanted it totally kept to myself,” Bush said years later.
In a way, it seemed like an act of rebellion against Baker. Like many politicians, Bush had never liked the idea of being handled and resented the portrayal of Baker as the wise man behind the bumbling leader. Reporters were already writing that Baker would be a sort of “deputy president” in a putative Bush White House. “If you’re Bush, you don’t like this perception that somehow Baker’s the puppet master,” said Janet Mullins. “You can certainly draw a conclusion that that was Bush asserting his independence and authority. He was going to make that decision on his own.” Bush may also have reckoned that Baker would not like his choice. “There’s a side of me that also thought Bush didn’t consult with Baker because he knew Baker wasn’t going to agree with him,” Mullins said.
With Simpson ruled out, the finalists included both Bob and Elizabeth Dole; Jack Kemp; Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico; and a little-known junior senator from Indiana named Dan Quayle, talked up by conservatives as a fresh face at age forty-one. Quayle would be a reassuringly hard-line presence on a ticket with Bush, who had never really overcome their doubts despite eight years as Reagan’s loyal sidekick. (Donald Trump, the media-hungry developer who had groused about Baker’s economic policies, sent word through Lee Atwater that he would be willing to serve as vice president, an offer that Bush dismissed as “strange and unbelievable.”)
At a meeting the Friday before the convention, Baker and other Bush advisers met to discuss the list of finalists. Bob Teeter asked everyone for their first, second, and third choices. Only Roger Ailes and Craig Fuller named Quayle as their first choice (Fuller also made Quayle his second and third choice). If Baker gave his preference, it has never been reported. He was widely believed to favor Bob Dole, a safe, conventional choice. Years later, Baker denied having a favorite, Dole or anyone else.
Shortly after the meeting, Bush advisers leaked the finalists to The New York Times and suggested that while Dole was the front-runner, Quayle had “surprisingly strong support.” It was an old Washington trick to leak the prospect of a decision you disagreed with in hopes that public disclosure would generate enough vocal opposition to kill it. At least some savvy readers of the Times assumed the leak was Baker’s way of trying to sink Quayle. But if so, it did not work, perhaps because few in Washington took the idea of a Quayle selection all that seriously.
Quayle himself was bewildered by the story, unsure what to make of it, so he called Baker on Sunday night to find out what was going on.
“I don’t know who leaked that,” Baker told Quayle.
Quayle said fine, but if it was true, preparations needed to be made.
“Don’t worry,” he remembered Baker answering. “I’ve got a great team if you’re the nominee.”
But that was a big if. Baker did not think Quayle’s selection was likely and despite his mantra about the Five Ps did nothing more to prepare for it.
ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, the second day of the Republican National Convention, Bush was in the White House. He held his regular intelligence briefing, then prepared to leave for the gathering in New Orleans that would officially designate him as Reagan’s successor. To Baker, the focus should be establishing Bush as his own man finally, not Reagan’s shadow. But there was another disaster brewing. After the briefer left, Craig Fuller asked Bush if he had made his decision about his vice presidential choice; it was supposed to be announced Thursday, the final day of the convention, with much fanfare, and advisers were still in the dark. Instead of answering, Bush shrugged and headed to Marine Two to fly to Andrews Air Force Base, where he would board Air Force Two for the flight to New Orleans. Alarmed, Fuller grabbed Baker at the first moment he could pull him aside.
“There may be a problem,” Fuller said.
Fuller explained his conversation with Bush. “There was only one answer to the question that’s acceptable—have you made your decision?—but I didn’t get it,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” Baker said.
“No, I’m not.”
“I’ll deal with it.”
After Air Force Two took off, Baker met privately in the plane’s cabin with the vice president. Bush had grown agitated the night before watching television images of reporters stalking some of his prospective running mates and he listened to Dole grouse publicly about the indignity of the process. Baker and Bush talked about moving up his plan and announcing his choice once he landed in New Orleans. Why wait? Bush agreed. “He thought it was unfair to them so he decided to accelerate the pick,” George W. Bush said of his father. Some Bush advisers suspected that Dole’s televised complaining may have killed any remaining chance that he would be picked for the ticket. Either way, just like that, the whole rollout plan was upended.
Everyone was hanging on Bush’s decision. During the flight, aides wrote out their guesses on scraps of paper. “None of us were right,” Fuller said. As Air Force Two began its descent for landing, Bush finally confided in Baker. Dan Quayle was his choice. Any doubts Baker harbored were put aside. “By the time Bush said, ‘I’m going with Quayle,’ Jim wasn’t going to argue with him,” said Charlie Black, the political strategist.
Even George W. Bush was out of the loop, waiting for his father in New Orleans with a puckish sign that said, “Dad you can tell me!” Also eager to find out was Reagan, who had addressed the convention the night before. Baker had arranged with Kenneth Duberstein, the chief of staff, for Reagan to meet Bush on the tarmac at Belle Chasse Naval Air Station outside New Orleans when Air Force Two landed. They shook hands and then Reagan boarded Air Force One to leave, a symbolic passing of the torch. During their brief encounter, Bush leaned over and whispered his decision in Reagan’s ear. Once airborne, curious aides asked Reagan: Who had Bush selected? But the hard-of-hearing president had gotten only that it was the senator from Indiana, so some of his staff assumed that meant Richard Lugar, the state’s senior lawmaker. Even at this late hour, the idea of Quayle still seemed implausible.
After Reagan’s departure, Bush and his entourage were taken to the house of the naval station’s commandant, where sandwiches were waiting for them. Bush and Baker huddled again in another room, then Baker came out to break the news to the rest of the team that Quayle would be the running mate. Aides raced to notify the losing candidates and track down the winner in a hotel room in New Orleans.
Baker got Quayle on the phone. “I thought, ‘Oh crap, I lost,’ ” Quayle recalled, since he assumed that Bush would call the winner himself and leave the runners-up to Baker.
But Baker surprised him. “Hang on for the veep,” he said.
Bush picked up. Would you join me on the ticket? he asked Quayle.
Excited, Quayle instantly said yes.
Bush was pleased. Quayle had been his choice and he had made it, unswayed by Baker or anyone else. In his mind, it was bold, it was confident. He was picking the next generation of political leadership. He was not being handled. To Bush, the blond-haired, blue-eyed senator came straight out of central casting as the embodiment of the future, a youthful rebuttal to all those stories dinging Bush as the exemplar of the status quo. He was putting next in line to the presidency someone he really did not know, with a scant record and a thin reputation, but that did not seem to bother Bush.
The vice president told Quayle they would announce the decision shortly at the Spanish Plaza boat pier. Baker then came back on the line to manage the logistics and the Bush team’s slapdash, even reckless, approach to one of the campaign’s key decisions quickly became apparent. When Quayle expressed concern about navigating his way to the announcement given the thousands of people who had gathered, Baker told Quayle that was his first assignment—to figure out how to get there.
Don’t blow it, Baker said. “Remember,” he added in an edgy joke, “this decision is revocable.”
They both laughed, but as Quayle later put it, “it was the last laugh I would have for a long, long time.”
QUAYLE WAS an unlikely choice for a conventional thinker like Bush. The scion of a newspaper empire, Quayle was born in Indiana, lived most of his childhood in Arizona, and then returned to Indiana for high school, college, and law school. His mother’s father, Eugene Pulliam, owned more than a dozen medium-sized newspapers, including The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star. Quayle joined the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam, a decision that spared him combat overseas but would soon prove problematic back home. He worked in the family business and in state government before winning a seat in Congress in 1976. Four years later, at the age of thirty-three, he defeated Senator Birch Bayh to become the youngest person ever elected to the Senate from Indiana.
Conservative and friendly, with movie-star looks and a boyish grin, Quayle impressed some of the older Republicans in the Senate but hardly cut a wide swath on Capitol Hill. His one claim to major legislation was a bipartisan worker training bill co-sponsored with Ted Kennedy. Baker knew Quayle but not well. He had little regard for him. A son of privilege himself, Baker could hardly be offended by Quayle’s family background. But for a lawyer with an exacting eye and a serious sensibility, Baker clearly found something about Quayle off-putting, the sense perhaps of a callow youth without the heft to justify the exalted position he was being given.
His first teasing line to Quayle—this decision is revocable—would set the terms for the relationship. Bush might have offered the job, but now Baker would tell him how to handle it. This was direction, not deference, as if Baker wanted Quayle to understand who would be calling the shots from the very start. What other staff member—and despite his time in the cabinet, that was what Baker was now again—would feel so uninhibited in joking about punishing a prospective vice president?
What came next would be the antithesis of Baker’s famous Five Ps. As Bush rode the Natchez, a paddleboat on the Mississippi, up to New Orleans, Quayle was left to find his way to the Spanish Plaza without help. “Nothing!” he remembered with undiminished exasperation twenty-five years later. “I have to get there on my own!” When he did get there, he was winded and frazzled, unprepared for his worldwide television debut.
The scene was chaotic. Two Secret Service agents making their way through the crowd called out, “Where’s Quayle? Where’s Quayle?”
Finally, the senator got to the stage and Bush happily introduced him as “a young man born in the middle of this century and from the middle of this country.”
Quayle had trouble containing his enthusiasm. “Hot” and “pumped up,” as Craig Fuller remembered him, Quayle came across like a cheerleader at a high school football game, grabbing Bush’s arm and shoulders again and again, telling the crowd, “Let’s go get ’em! All right? You got it?”
The awkward scene only presaged the pandemonium that would follow. Unfamiliar to many in the national media, Quayle suddenly confronted questions about his background: Did his family use its money or influence to buy his way into the National Guard to avoid military service in Vietnam? What did he do during a Florida golfing weekend with two other members of Congress and a lobbyist named Paula Parkinson, who later posed for Playboy after an investigation into whether sex was traded for votes? Was he a lightweight not up to the job? Robert Kimmitt had vetted Quayle, but at Bush’s instruction had shared his research with no one other than the candidate.
Now Baker, uncharacteristically unprepared for the media storm over Quayle, jotted down notes on his yellow legal paper to try to get hold of the story. He came up with phrases to describe Quayle: “A Leader for the Future!” and “Bold Reach Across Generations.” Quayle was indeed young, Baker thought, but that should be turned into an advantage. “JFK Pres at 42,” he wrote, a comparison that Quayle would later pick up on to his eternal regret. Next to the initials “P.P.,” for Paula Parkinson, Baker wrote, “Absolutely nothing to it, checked out.”
As day turned to night, Baker huddled in Room 3820 of the Marriott with his close aides trying to figure out damage control. “It was not a happy group,” Dick Darman remembered. They were trying to squelch any talk of dumping Quayle, but several top campaign officials understood that was the unspoken option on the table. “It seemed obvious that if—if—there were to be any change of candidate, it would have to be done by Thursday, before the acceptance speeches,” Darman said.
Baker called Quayle. “Look,” he said, “there’s a total meltdown on this National Guard thing. It’s absolutely coming unglued. We’ve got to talk to you. I’m sending over Kimmitt and Darman.”
Quayle objected. It was already midnight. “This is totally ridiculous,” he said. He would just go out in the morning and answer questions.
“How are you going to answer the questions when you don’t know what happened twenty years ago?” Baker asked sharply.
“I’ll give my version of it.”
“What if your version is different from somebody else’s version?”
“Well, that’s life, isn’t it?”
No, that was not how it would be done, not in a Baker operation. Darman and Kimmitt slipped over to Quayle’s hotel room and found the senator in his underwear and his wife, Marilyn, in bed. For the next two hours, until 2 a.m., they went over the questions with Quayle in detail.
Returning to Baker’s suite, Kimmitt and Darman reported that while Quayle could not remember everything, he was probably being honest in his denials of wrongdoing. The mad scramble continued throughout the night, with Baker’s team even calling and waking up Quayle’s father to ask what he remembered.
The staff typed up two pages of questions that Quayle might face and some suggested answers. Baker reviewed it and circled three about the National Guard that he thought were most troublesome:
Do you think you got preferential treatment?
Do you think it proper to move some people ahead of others?
Do you think it was fair for you to get in when others didn’t?
Predictably, those were some of the many questions Quayle was pummeled with by reporters the next day and the senator, alone and hardly prepared, quickly grew resentful at Baker’s efforts to take control. Amid the press frenzy, Baker went to the ABC News booth at the convention to offer public support for Quayle. But when Quayle came into the hall for the news conference at which he intended to clear the air, he noticed Baker pulling out a piece of paper and previewing for gathered reporters “almost verbatim” what Quayle was about to tell them. “The intended effect,” Quayle said later, “was to show them that he was in charge of me. Baker wanted to signal to the media that I was not really his choice, and that he was making the best of a bad situation. He was putting himself in a win-win position. If I sank the ticket, it was somebody else’s fault, not Baker’s. If I didn’t, it was because Baker had taken charge of me.”
In the heat of the moment, Baker was not sure about the path forward. Talking points delivered to him for the last day of the convention included this line, to be used only if asked: “There has been no serious discussion or consideration of replacing Dan Quayle on the ticket.” Baker hedged his bets. “Did he lie?” he wrote next to the typed talking points. “To the best of my knowledge—No.” And then he added in parentheses: “Based on everything I know now—No!”
There was plenty of finger-pointing afterward. Still furious after New Orleans, Baker asked Kimmitt to explain why he had not done more to vet Quayle. Why, for instance, had he not interviewed Paula Parkinson? Kimmitt explained that Bush had asked him not to contact outsiders to preserve the secrecy of the process. And in any case, Kimmitt said, he would not have approached Parkinson. “Through conversations with those who know her,” he told Baker in a memo the next week recounting what had happened, “we believe her to be deceitful, opportunistic and unbalanced, and the mere fact of interviewing her would have given her more standing and credibility than she deserves.” Kimmitt also rejected assertions that he had not examined Quayle’s military service. “I did discuss the Guard issue, both in my first interview of Quayle and in my report to the Vice President,” he wrote to Baker. “It would therefore be inaccurate for either of them to indicate the matter was not discussed before the selection or that the issue of favoritism (my term, as opposed to ‘preferential treatment’) was not raised in those discussions.”
But no one on the campaign was mollified. They knew that the introduction of Quayle was a model of how not to announce a running mate. They could have used careful leaks over a couple weeks to prepare the ground for a Quayle nomination and draw out vulnerabilities well beforehand. They could have known their candidate better and been ready to address the criticism. But Bush had not trusted his own team, or even his own best friend, enough to make that happen. “It was Dad who changed the timing, not Baker,” George W. Bush said later. “The problem was you either make the decision to announce the guy a week ahead of time or you wait for the last minute so that there’s not time for the shark tank to start feeding on the blood.” Somehow, his father let himself get caught in the middle, with terrible results. “It was my decision, and I blew it,” the elder Bush dictated to his diary after the convention, “but I’m not about to say that I blew it.” He seemed to be referring to the way the choice was announced, not the choice itself, but Baker thought both were true. “How dumb,” Baker said later. “We spent the first week of the campaign answering questions about Quayle’s background.” Baker was mad—at both Bush and himself.
WHILE BAKER STRUGGLED with the Quayle contretemps, he hardly even touched another internal battle within the Bush campaign that would arguably have greater consequences. Peggy Noonan, the speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, already famous for her soaring words, had been assigned to draft Bush’s convention speech accepting the nomination, probably the single best chance for the vice president to step out of Reagan’s shadow and frame his message for the fall.
It had been, up until now, an empty campaign. Bush’s argument for the presidency had essentially amounted to a recitation of all the impressive jobs he had held. The ultimate résumé candidate, Bush had never touched a chord with the public the way Reagan had nor articulated a larger idea that animated his drive for public office beyond the sense of noblesse oblige he inherited from his father. Indeed, he dismissed all the talk about “the vision thing,” as he put it derisively.
And so it fell to Noonan to make the case for a candidate who had not done so himself. The unofficial lyricist of the Reagan Revolution, she crafted an address that would give voice to what she saw as Bush’s best qualities, while making sure he embraced Reagan’s conservative causes. It was a tricky balance. The speech was meant to be Bush’s declaration of independence after nearly eight years at Reagan’s side. With Noonan as his muse, Bush would define his mission as more inclusive than that of the outgoing president, who was often criticized for indifference to the plight of disadvantaged Americans. “I want a kinder and gentler nation,” Bush would say. The speech would have him call for a nation where private groups and citizens, not government, stepped up to address society’s issues, “like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”
As Noonan drafted the speech, though, the other important goal was to dispel the wimp charge once and for all. The best place to do that was the section where Bush would pledge opposition to tax hikes, a surefire applause line. Noonan was aiming for something maximally memorable. Channeling the tough-guy movie hero Dirty Harry played by Clint Eastwood, she wrote in the line: “My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes, but I will, and the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I’ll say no, and they’ll push and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: No new taxes.’ ”
Dick Darman and Craig Fuller were aghast when they saw her draft. The policy advisers, more moderate than Noonan, fretted that it was unrealistic for Bush to tie his own hands so tightly. Darman deleted the line. When the draft speech was returned to Noonan, she noticed it was missing and put it back in. The next time it came back to her with more edits, the line was gone again. “We all knew it was a good line,” Fuller said. “We just didn’t know in governing you could stick with it.”
In her memoir, Noonan said she thought Bush’s aides did not like the personal imagery because “lips are organs” and “there is no history of presidential candidates making personal-organ references in acceptance speeches.” But, she said, “I kept putting it back in. Why? Because it’s definite. It’s not subject to misinterpretation. It means, I mean this.”
Noonan showed the speech to Baker, who offered no objection to the line. His only instructions were to put in more good economic news. Baker, just arriving on the campaign, had given Darman his proxy to review and scrub the convention speech. If Baker had intervened and backed up Darman and Fuller, he presumably would have succeeded in excising the flamboyant language. But he did not get involved in the debate and without him, Darman and Fuller failed to persuade Roger Ailes, who thought it would work. “We got overruled,” Fuller said.
A WEEK AFTER the convention, Baker convened an all-day meeting of the campaign team to evaluate just how bad things were for Bush’s candidacy. The first of four planned sessions was, according to the agenda, supposed to address “the nature of the problem.” Baker’s diagnosis was as crisp as it was cutting. “Seen as weak,” he scribbled on the written schedule for the day.
At least Bush had emerged from the convention finally on a positive trajectory. He had picked up support from Catholics, ticket splitters, and independents. But he still faced a 12-point gender gap among women. He was ahead in the South, behind in the Mid-Atlantic and California, and roughly tied in the Midwest battleground states such as Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. An analysis prepared for the meeting concluded that Bush had 126 electoral votes in his base plus marginal leads in states with another 168 electoral votes. He had to win nearly all of them to cobble together a 270-vote majority in the Electoral College. Bush was in trouble and Baker harbored few illusions about what it would take to get him elected.
“Our biggest prob.—need to have Bush seen as a strong leader,” Baker wrote. “Bush’s negatives due to perception of him as weak.” He listed four main objectives: establishing Bush as his own man, controlling the agenda, staying on offense, and, perhaps most significant for the final campaign sprint to come, tearing down Dukakis. “He’s out of mainstream of trad. Am. Values,” Baker wrote. Next to that, he scribbled, “Prison Furlough, Pledge. Veto of mandatory sen. for drug dealers. Death penalty for drug kingpins.”
In the end, Baker concluded that Bush was better on offense than defense. “Anytime GB has been on attack he has gained in polls,” Baker wrote. “Whenever he gets ahead and stops attacking—his standing declines.”
So the answer was clear: Keep attacking. The kinder and gentler Bush would have to wait.
When Baker first arrived on the campaign, Atwater had feared that “Baker would oversee a very punctual, orderly, on- or under-budget state funeral.” He need not have worried. Just because Baker carried himself in a more formal, cabinet secretary kind of way did not mean he eschewed Atwater’s scorched-earth campaign tactics. Baker was more than willing to give him latitude to run the campaign largely as he saw fit. Bush and Baker knew exactly what they were getting in their aggressive campaign manager. Atwater was the high priest of the negative campaign and this was the era when attack ads created by poll-driven campaign consultants like the relentless young South Carolinian ruled American politics more than ever before. With Americans glued to their television sets watching a proliferating array of cable television channels, they were a captive audience to be bombarded with marketing messages. Atwater had figured out early in his career that sometimes it was harder to sell your candidate than to attack the other guy (he called it “driving up the opposition’s negatives”), and Bush was proving to be a hard sell.
Still, Atwater now had to convince Baker to go along with a slash-and-burn fall campaign tougher than any in recent memory. “Lee, who was plenty happy to do negative campaigning, was shaking his head and saying, ‘How in the hell are we going to get Baker and Bush to go along with this?’ ” recalled Charlie Black. “Jim was always looking at everything to make sure we weren’t crossing the line on things,” Black remembered, but it soon turned out that Baker rarely vetoed tough attacks. “Sometimes we might want to hit a little harder on something and Baker said, ‘No, you’ve got to put that in Bush’s words,’ or something like that,” Black said. “But when you had to go strong on the offense there, Baker was better able to get Bush to do it.”
Although Baker would long cultivate a reputation for civility in an uncivil era, the post-convention strategy sessions convinced him that there was no other way to win but attacking and he signed off on an unrelenting, flag-waving campaign to paint Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, as an unpatriotic leftist out of touch with old-fashioned American values. While he may not have conceived the attacks, Baker did not object to hitting Dukakis on the full array of opposition-research-driven, culture-war “wedge” issues that Atwater and Roger Ailes proposed to use, such as harping on Dukakis’s decision, back in 1977, to veto a Massachusetts bill to require teachers to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance. “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” the mild-mannered Bush was soon shouting at campaign rallies. Nor did Baker complain about Atwater and Ailes going after Dukakis on a prison furlough program in Massachusetts that released a black convict named Willie Horton who then raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend. The program was part of an effort to help ease convicts’ eventual reintegration back into society and most states had similar programs at that point before the tough-on-crime wave of legislation of the 1990s. But Massachusetts was the only one that included first-degree murderers serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. The program had been started by a Republican governor, but Dukakis defended it and refused to sign legislation exempting first-degree murderers serving life sentences and imposing other restrictions.
Al Gore was the first to weaponize the Willie Horton case against Dukakis, during the Democratic primaries. James Pinkerton, a Bush campaign researcher, noticed and included it among seven possible attacks on Dukakis that he gave Atwater. Bush began citing the case during speeches through the summer. How much had changed for Baker over the last ten years—the same candidate for Texas attorney general who had refused to go after an opponent in 1978 for not extraditing a suspect who then later went on to kill two people was now leading a national campaign eagerly exploiting an eerily similar case. Baker had lost that campaign; he did not plan to lose this one.
By fall, the Baker-run operation began airing a television ad attacking the Massachusetts furlough program, showing a series of inmates walking through the revolving door of a prison. Nearly all of the prisoners in the video were white; just one was black, although he was the only one who glanced up at the camera with a sinister look. This was a long way from the sunny campaign optimism of Reagan’s “Morning in America.”
The Willie Horton commercial that would go down in history, however, was a different ad produced by an operative named Larry McCarthy, working for an ostensibly independent group called the National Security Political Action Committee. In that ad, called “Weekend Passes,” Horton was singled out, a picture of his scowling killer’s face shown as the narrator described his torture and rape of the Maryland couple. In the end, the ad was only shown sporadically on cable television, but its impact was magnified by repeated coverage on newscasts, giving it far more distribution than it otherwise would have had.
Baker had no quarrel with the ad at first, but when Democrats and media commentators criticized it for brazenly appealing to racial fears, he tried to distance the campaign by writing the committee that aired it and asking that it be withdrawn. The letter, however, hardly seemed the act of someone genuinely disturbed by the ad. The day it first aired for the start of a planned twenty-eight-day run, McCarthy’s committee had hand-delivered an offer to Baker to take it down if he objected. Baker did not write his letter in response until twenty-five days later, when the commercial was just about finished with its programmed schedule. And while Baker did not control the committee that made the ad, many found that implausible. “Anybody who believes that believes in the tooth fairy,” Dukakis said later.
In any case, the record was clear that the Bush campaign had long focused on Horton as a major vulnerability for Dukakis. “If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we’ll win the election,” Atwater had told a breakfast of Republican activists back in June. A month later, in a speech, Atwater referred to Horton, “who for all I know may end up being Dukakis’s running mate.” Roger Ailes told Time magazine in August that “the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
Dukakis later called his failure to respond more effectively to the Willie Horton attack “the biggest mistake of my political career.” By the time it aired, Bush had already pulled ahead of Dukakis and polls suggested that his widening lead coincided as much with the fall debates as the controversy over the ad. Still, Willie Horton would be associated with Bush—and Baker—for years to come, a metaphor for racially coded campaign tactics aimed at dividing Americans for political benefit.
When it was all over, Dukakis the bland technocrat had been remade into a dangerous and practically un-American figure, a foolish liberal who favored criminals over their victims, who would watch you get mugged in a dark alley and do nothing. Baker, who prided himself on working across the aisle to get things done, had no hesitation about employing bare-knuckled tactics to win office. The campaign he walked into was losing and he wanted to win. This, he thought then and still thought years later, was what it took.
BAKER USED his reputation for rectitude as a negotiating tool. As he haggled with the Dukakis camp over debates, he brought along a useful foil in Roger Ailes, who was so well known for his hardball politics that Time magazine later that year called him “the dark prince of political advertising.” As Ailes put it, “Baker and I would do good cop, bad cop. They thought I was crazy and Baker was sane.” Both men played their roles with gusto. “Every once in a while I’d go crazy and say something half-obscene and Baker would calm me down,” Ailes said. “Then he’d say, ‘I’ve got to leave, got to get back to the White House. I’ll leave you with Ailes.’ And, of course, they’d immediately say, ‘No, no, no. That’s okay. Don’t leave us with Ailes.’ ”
Baker, as usual, got what he wanted out of the negotiations—in this case, two presidential debates instead of the four Dukakis demanded and the last one more than three weeks before the election, so there would be time to recover from any stumbles. Even the little things mattered. Ailes kept pushing for a taller podium that would emphasize Dukakis’s short stature; the Democrat was just five-foot-eight to Bush’s six-foot-two and Americans had an almost unbroken record in the television era of electing the taller presidential candidate. But Bush was still nervous headed into the debates. He was far more schooled in the details of policy than Reagan had been, but he had none of the president’s deft touch when it came to translating his views for a mass audience. And then there was Bush’s “transcendent dorkiness,” as Newsweek called it—his fractured syntax, refusal to use the first person, and propensity for odd locutions and verbal stumbles, such as when he declared September 7 to be Pearl Harbor Day or referred to the “successful Reagan White House” as the “sexy Reagan White House.”
Baker scheduled three mock debates to prepare. Dick Darman played Dukakis. Advisers gave Bush a seven-page strategy memo urging him to be aggressive. “You cannot afford to lie back or be defensive,” it said. He should focus on “furloughs and pardons, tax increases, spending” and bad judgment by Dukakis. By hand, Baker added his suggestion that Bush emphasize Dukakis’s membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, outlining for Bush arguments he could use to claim the group should be considered radical: “Prohibit nativity scenes and menoras. Elim. movie ratings. Take In God We Trust off money. Opposed to death penalty. De-crim. some drugs. And on and on!”
Baker tried setting public expectations low for Bush by emphasizing to reporters that Dukakis was a master debater. But he did not set the bar low enough. When Bush first met Dukakis onstage at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on September 25, the vice president trotted out his anticipated attack lines to little effect. Instead, Dukakis put him on the defensive about abortion, asserting that Bush’s position in favor of outlawing the procedure would “brand a woman a criminal” and threaten her with prison.
Bush came offstage feeling down. He had dutifully mocked Dukakis for calling himself a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” as Baker suggested, and run down the list of the group’s controversial legal positions in one of the night’s more memorable attacks, but he did not think he had done well and neither did the media. “I’m going to do a heck of a lot better the next time,” he promised Baker.
Baker thought part of the problem was poor management of the candidate. Bush had become too anxious about the debate and his team was not giving him enough time to rest. His speeches for the next day were coming in too late each night and Bush had trouble sleeping if he did not get them before going to bed. “Energy Level: Slower to recover from fatigue than 1 month ago,” Baker wrote by hand. “He’s tired. (Loosen up on schedule).”
Bush’s wobbly first debate performance was quickly followed by another headache for Baker. At the vice presidential debate with Lloyd Bentsen at the Omaha Civic Auditorium on October 5, Quayle could hardly compete with the white-haired Texan with the rich accent and the wise-man gravitas. The debate produced perhaps the most devastating line in modern American politics. Under fire for his youth, Quayle noted that he had as much experience as John Kennedy had when he ran for president, a comparison Baker had made. Bentsen looked like a coyote ready to pounce.
“Senator,” he drawled, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.” Then, with a practiced pause, he added, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Quayle refused even to look at Bentsen during the exchange. “That was really uncalled for, senator,” he responded, tight-lipped and fuming.
Bentsen, with a sly smile, seemed to enjoy the moment. “You’re the one that was making the comparison, senator,” he said, nearly snorting the word senator, “and I’m one who knew him well.”
Bush stood by his running mate, dutifully claiming that Quayle had “knocked it right out of the park.” Reagan weighed in to brand Bentsen’s Kennedy line a “cheap shot.” But if it was cheap, it was certainly effective. Baker understood that Bentsen had turned Quayle into a punch line and made little effort to pretend otherwise. “When you think about what might have happened, we have to be pretty happy,” Baker told CNN, damning Quayle with faint praise. Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, who had come to especially dislike Baker, fumed as they saw the campaign chairman tell reporters that both candidates did well during the debate.
After stewing for a couple days, Quayle finally erupted, telling reporters that he had reached a “snapping point” with the campaign trying to control him—and no one doubted that he meant Baker. Given the code name “Supervisor” by the Secret Service, Quayle declared that he would no longer be supervised. He had had it with the campaign trying to script his every word and every move, right down to when he should wave at crowds. He had not been getting along with Stuart Spencer, whom Baker had placed on the running mate’s plane to watch over him.
“I am my own handler,” Quayle declared. “I’ve done it their way this far and now it’s my turn.”
After hearing about the candidate’s outburst, Baker tracked him down on the road. In no uncertain terms, Baker warned him against rejecting the campaign’s advice. It was the only time since Bush and Baker together had called to offer him the vice presidential nomination that Quayle remembered hearing directly from Baker, but the running mate was in no mood to back down.
“I’ve had all the advice I can take,” Quayle complained, “and none of it has been any good.”
Baker, trying to contain the damage, put out word that he understood Quayle’s frustration, saying the candidate was “justified at being steamed” over anonymous sniping by Bush aides and adding that “if I could find out who it was who criticized him, they would be fired.” But few took that seriously. Newsweek noted that Baker “threatens to dismiss any Bush aide who trashes Quayle.” Then the magazine asked, cheekily, “Will he fire himself?”
THE FINAL DEBATE between Bush and Dukakis on October 13 proved a turning point—and Bush never even had to say anything. In a crowded auditorium at the University of California at Los Angeles, Bernard Shaw, the CNN anchor and lead moderator of the debate, opened right from the start with a question stemming from Bush’s attacks on Dukakis for being soft on crime.
“Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Shaw asked.
It was a shocking question, envisioning the brutal killing of a candidate’s wife. Murmurs of disbelief rippled through the press room, where reporters were watching. But Dukakis, who in the days leading up to the debate had been feverish as he battled a virus, gave an answer that conveyed no sense of outrage.
“No, I don’t, Bernard,” he said. “And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” In his typically cool, bloodless manner, Dukakis then went on to give an exposition on the best way to approach drugs and crime.
It was, arguably, a principled response sticking closely to a position Dukakis had long taken, one he was unwilling to modify even if his own family was theoretically involved. But his lifeless rendition made him seem hardly human. This was his wife, after all, that Shaw was talking about. No one needed to tell Baker that Bush had come out the winner of that encounter. The rest of the ninety-minute debate might as well have been called off. By the next day, Dukakis’s support in the polls had fallen from 49 percent to 42 percent. The 17-point lead of late summer had turned into a decided Bush advantage.
“Well, this debate’s gone so good, I guess we can pull all the negatives,” Baker said with a wink as the team celebrated in a nearby hotel afterward. Lee Atwater missed the wink and immediately panicked. Baker calmed him down. “Don’t be shakin’ your knee,” he teased.
Baker had no intention of letting up. The attack ads would continue. After Dukakis made the mistake of riding in a sixty-eight-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank wearing an ill-fitting helmet in the vain hope of reinforcing his national security credibility, the Bush operation pounced. Sig Rogich, a media consultant who had been part of the Tuesday Team that made Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial in 1984, saw news coverage of the event and wrote a script at his home the same night. In short order, he put together an ad using the images to ridicule the diminutive Democrat and portray him as weak on defense.
But Rogich had second thoughts. He began to worry that it might be too cruel, overkill for a campaign that was already well ahead. He called Baker at campaign headquarters to suggest running a more positive ad instead. Baker was having none of it.
“We’re all sitting around the table and we’re taking a vote,” Baker told him, “and you lost.”
Rogich should not have been surprised. To Baker, campaigns were not about charity. As he often told Rogich, “Let’s not forget, it’s about winning.”
The ad debuted on October 18 during Game 3 of the World Series and the impact was devastating. Dukakis looked ludicrous, grinning in the tank as if he were a kid on a ride at Disney World, his head all but swallowed by the wide helmet. Dukakis filmed a response, lambasting Bush for his negative barrage. “I’m fed up with it,” the governor said. But it was too late. The indelible image of Dukakis in the tank not only stuck with the public, it would become a metaphor for years to come, a cautionary lesson for generations of new candidates about the photo op that backfired. Never would future candidates in either party let themselves pose with something silly on their head. Dukakis in a tank would become a byword for failure, the worst presidential public relations stunt since Calvin Coolidge cavorted in a Native American headdress back in 1927.
The Bush attack ads were so successful that coverage of his campaign’s relentless negativity became the primary topic of the race’s final days, and Baker took a drubbing for it during an appearance on Face the Nation on CBS.
“How much lower will this campaign sink?” Lesley Stahl asked in her introduction to the program. “We’ll ask the Bush-Quayle campaign chairman Jim Baker. Is this the meanest, dirtiest campaign ever?”
Stahl had known Baker for years and been one of his regular contacts in the media, not to mention his conspirator in practical jokes on each other. But as soon as the camera turned to Baker, she went right after him. “I want to show you something,” she said, holding up a flyer distributed by the Maryland Republican Party highlighting what it called the “Dukakis-Willie Horton team.”
“They suggest that if you vote for Michael Dukakis, Willie Horton is going to come pay you a visit,” Stahl said. “Now, come on.”
“That is totally out of bounds, totally unauthorized,” Baker agreed. “It was not authorized by our campaign.”
Baker came prepared to turn the tables. He pulled out another set of flyers, including one with a squirrel portraying Bush as nuts. He quoted Dick Gephardt as saying that “Adolf Hitler would love these people,” adding, “Now, that’s an outrageous statement.” The real negativity, he added, began with “the absolute savaging” of Bush at the Democratic convention.
But Stahl did not back off. She cited a furlough ad run by the Bush campaign that featured an announcer saying that Dukakis had let out first-degree murderers even as the words “268 escaped” flashed on the screen. “Now, the words and the sign are very misleading,” she said, “because 268 murderers did not escape.”
“I don’t admit that it’s misleading and I don’t admit that it’s incorrect,” Baker replied.
“I’ll tell you something,” Stahl chided, “it’s my business and in my business as a television reporter, if I say something and put some words up on the screen that conflict, that’s inaccurate.”
BAKER MAY HAVE BEEN defensive, but with a comfortable lead, the Bush team’s main fear in the final days of the campaign was appearing to look overconfident. A few weeks out, Bush held a news conference at which he was peppered with questions about what his presidency would look like and whom he would appoint to key positions. “I just cannot let myself get distracted into thinking about that,” he insisted. “Nobody in this room believes me. But I am telling you the truth—the whole truth….There are no names or lists.”
By Saturday morning, October 22, more than two weeks before Election Day, that was no longer the case and Bush interrupted the last-minute campaign prep to talk to Baker about becoming his secretary of state. Baker had already had some of Washington’s most powerful jobs, but this was the one he had long coveted. “I am assuming that Jim said yes,” Barbara Bush recorded in her diary. “Ridiculous to talk about jobs when you haven’t won, but very necessary.”
On the same day he talked with Baker about taking over the State Department, Bush asked John Sununu to be his White House chief of staff if he won. Sununu, the bulldozer governor of New Hampshire, had arguably saved Bush’s candidacy during his state’s primary. But he was an acquired taste, an imperial force with none of Baker’s finesse or appreciation for the subtleties of the corner West Wing office. “Baker doesn’t like it at all,” Craig Fuller recalled. As with the Quayle nomination, though, Bush pointedly did not ask Baker’s opinion, another act of rebellion against the man he had brought in to save his campaign. Bush’s resentment of Baker’s reputation was only enhanced by a Time magazine cover story in the final weeks of the race featuring Baker and John Sasso, Dukakis’s adviser, with the headline, “Battle of the Handlers.” Baker hated it too, but for a different reason: it was a reminder that he was not secretary of state yet, that for all his glorified status and glowing reviews, he was still just a staffer, down in the muck with Lee Atwater, slinging negative ads. Years later, he would remember the Time cover and wince. “That just cut me to the quick,” he said.
Baker made a halting attempt to counter Bush’s decision on Sununu, quietly tasking an emissary to reach out to Fuller to implore him to stay in the White House as deputy chief of staff. Fuller rebuffed the suggestion; he had already decided to leave government and, besides, it would do no good for Sununu to have a staff that was not his own, nor would it work if Bush did not want it. Baker later raised the matter with Fuller directly.
“You need to think about this,” he said.
“I have,” Fuller said. “Jim, it’s not what he wants.”
Resigned to a decision that he considered a mistake, the Handler from Houston flew home the day before Election Day. On the morning of the vote on November 8, he and Susan went to cast their ballots, then went out for some Mexican food. Baker was too nervous to talk much about the State Department. Instead, he and Susan talked about escaping to the new ranch in Wyoming that they had just managed to buy after years of on-again, off-again looking. Wyoming was where he had gone with Bush at the start of the long, stressful campaign summer and it had been on his mind at the New Orleans convention a few weeks later when he had run into Donald Kendall, the chief executive officer of PepsiCo. Kendall told Baker he was just back from his own ranch in Wyoming. “I’m a jealous wreck,” Baker had responded, mentioning how much he wished that he too could find a place there. A couple weeks later, Kendall unexpectedly called back with news of a ranch that had just become available. Baker, mid-campaign, could not go see it, but Susan flew out and fell in love with the remote old homestead called the Silver Creek Ranch. It covered 1,555 acres in the Wind River range of the Rocky Mountains on the other side of Yellowstone from Baker’s first Wyoming elk hunt with his father more than four decades earlier. He and Susan would buy it for $625,000 as soon as the campaign was over.
But first they had an election night to get through and, later that evening, as returns began to come in, they joined the Bushes at the home of Charles and Sally Neblett, two longtime friends of both families. The early results were surprisingly worrisome. “We walked into the Nebletts’ feeling pretty shaky,” Barbara Bush recalled. “All our friends thought we had it in the bag.”
Baker, feeling cautious, bet Lee Atwater that Bush would get under 53 percent of the popular vote. Atwater would later pay him off halfway through the evening. Even as the numbers improved later that night, Baker resisted accepting victory. “We need to wait on Michigan,” he said at one point. At another, someone ribbed him that he was the last holdout: “NBC, ABC and CBS have called it but Baker’s still out.”
By the time the evening was over, Bush had won. He would be the nation’s forty-first president. In the end, he swept forty states to take 426 electoral votes and mustered 53 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first sitting vice president since Martin Van Buren in 1836 to earn a promotion. Bush’s win did not match Reagan’s landslide of four years earlier, but it was a smashing comeback for a candidate who had appeared a sure loser as recently as Labor Day.
The next day, Bush announced his first appointment as president-elect, surprising exactly no one by choosing as his secretary of state James Addison Baker III.