Baker’s career as an international diplomat began, as many things in Washington do, at a dinner party. He had never loved the compulsive schmoozing that was so much a part of the capital’s life, although he had always seen the utility of it in a city that drew little distinction between working and socializing. In the early 1980s, when he ran Ronald Reagan’s White House, he was invited to everything but dreaded the red-carpet glitz that Nancy brought to entertaining, seeing it as an interruption to his endless piles of work. He would sneak out of even the most dazzling State Dinner after the food was served to go back to his office, while the other A-listers were still watching the entertainment.
Still, he made sure to show up when it counted and he and Susan had become regulars at the famous Sunday-night suppers of the hawkish old columnist Joseph Alsop in Georgetown, a bipartisan tradition of the city’s ruling class going back decades. When Katharine Graham, the Washington Post Company chairwoman and the city’s ruling social power, celebrated her seventieth birthday in 1987 with a black-tie soiree for six hundred, the Bakers were there and he grew friendly enough with Graham to play mixed doubles tennis against her and George Shultz, another of her favorites.
Robert Strauss was one of those whose invitations Baker would accept. Fellow Texans, the two had been friends since their days facing off during the 1976 presidential election, when one was the Republican campaign chief and the other the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Both subscribed to the school of thinking in Washington that did not let differences in political parties get in the way of either dinner parties or problem solving. Although Strauss held no official title beyond law firm partner at that point, The New York Times had dubbed him “the capital’s leading wise man” and he was so well connected on both sides of the aisle that Jim Wright, the Democratic House speaker and another Texan, once offered a toast, calling him “a close friend of the next president of the United States—whoever the hell he may be.” In fact, just a year earlier, Strauss had tried to bring Wright together with Shultz to settle the great foreign policy feud of 1980s Washington, the years-long debate over Nicaragua and the contras. “I’m terribly partisan,” Strauss told The Times, “but I think people trust me.”
The effort fizzled, but Baker’s ascension to Foggy Bottom offered another chance. “I want to get you and Jim Wright together,” Strauss told the incoming secretary of state. “I think Wright would like to work with you, he thinks he can work with you, and maybe the two of you can find a way to take Central American policy off the domestic political agenda.” Wright had become one of the most vocal opponents of Reagan’s contra war, going much further than past speakers by intervening directly in foreign policy. Baker, for his part, had watched as the Reagan administration’s fixation on Nicaragua led to a debilitating misjudgment that nearly wrecked an otherwise successful presidency.
On the evening of December 8, 1988, Jim and Susan Baker arrived at Strauss’s top-floor Watergate apartment, where they joined Wright and his wife, Betty, as well as Nick Brady and his wife, Kitty. After the main course, with chairs pushed back to savor the expansive view over the Potomac River, the dinner table talk turned to Central America, as it had for years in Washington.
Baker told Wright that the new president was ready to talk. He wanted to take Nicaragua off the table, Baker said, and would not ask Congress for any more military aid for the contras.
Wright brightened up. If so, he replied, then there was a real chance for a bipartisan ending to a dispute that had divided the capital for a decade.
That was just what Baker wanted to hear and he resolved that his first big negotiation as secretary of state would be not with a foreign power but with the Congress of the United States.
The goal was both audacious and unlikely, in that it would require Democrats still furious with Baker for running what they considered the nastiest, most superficial presidential campaign to date to make a deal that would extricate America (and Bush) from a guerrilla war that had caused Republicans nothing but political problems. The conservatives who had long questioned Baker’s fidelity to their cause would howl, but he believed that if he did not find a way to end the war in America’s backyard, he would never have a chance to achieve bigger things elsewhere. “That was the holy grail of the political left in this country and the political right,” Baker said. He would be the statesman who would finally settle it—and allow the country to move on.
ON JANUARY 25, 1989, late in the afternoon on the third full workday of the Bush presidency, the Senate unanimously confirmed Baker as the nation’s sixty-first secretary of state. Shortly thereafter, Baker raised his right hand and was sworn in by a White House clerk, with no fanfare or guests. He had a pile of urgent work and big plans, as his opening to Wright signaled. The new president might still call him Jimmy in private moments, but Baker believed that he had finally shed the burden of being merely his best friend’s aide. The State Department would give him the platform and the stature. Eight years at the upper levels of the Washington power structure had taught him how to use it.
A natural deal-maker, he had already negotiated tax reform with Democrats on Capitol Hill and currency policy with other world powers. In Baker’s Washington, bipartisanship was not a synonym for selling out, it was the way to get things done now that the election was over. He had little in the way of direct foreign policy experience, but he had observed Reagan wage the closing battles of the Cold War. The press, usually favorable, would now be even more explicitly Baker’s instrument. So would that forever friendship with Bush, although he would have to carefully tend it. As the bruising campaign they had just been through together showed Baker, Bush could be insecure too. Foreign policy was his first interest and now it would be Baker’s turf. Conflict was almost inevitable. The sharp-edged Washington player that Baker had become was nothing if not zealous about guarding his territory. Baker was, as Bush confided to his diary early in the new administration, “very, very sensitive about his prerogatives.” Even before either of them was sworn in, coverage of his secretary of state rankled the incoming president. One narrative in the press predicted that Baker would be so powerful in the new administration that he would essentially act as “the alternate president.” Bush knew he should ignore it, but he just could not. “Nonsense,” he grumbled in his diary even as he made a point of mentioning it.
None of this, of course, stopped Bush from throwing a grand party in the White House for the ceremonial swearing-in of his secretary of state (new Secret Service code name: “Foxtail”), two days after his confirmation. The doubles team from the Houston Country Club had made it big and both Bush and Baker shed their usual preppy reserve for the East Room celebration, an invitation-only affair presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Baker’s large blended family was present, including all eight children, everyone except his mother, who, unable to travel at age ninety-four, had received a congratulatory phone call from Bush earlier in the day. Baker’s youngest daughter, their bonus baby Mary-Bonner, was not yet twelve years old; her godfather was now president. Standing in the back were Baker’s loyal aides Dick Darman, now about to become Bush’s budget director, Margaret Tutwiler, and Robert Kimmitt. Brent Scowcroft, the elfin former national security adviser to Ford who was returning to the same post for Bush, almost did not get a seat when a guard said he was not on the guest list.
“This is a very special occasion for me,” Bush told the audience, “because as you all know, Jim and I have been friends for a long time, going back perhaps more years than either of us would care to admit—long, really, before our public lives began.” Baker was savvy, sensitive, and tough, Bush said, and he “will be my principal foreign policy adviser” dealing with “a world that demands new strategies and new solutions.” Seeming to forget about the harsh campaign that had just gotten them into the White House, Bush also vowed that he and Baker would “restore bipartisanship to foreign policy,” bringing back something that had been lost in the epic battles of the Reagan era. Baker, he concluded, “will be a great secretary of state.”
Baker took the microphone next. “As you mentioned, Mr. President, you and I have come a long distance together,” he said in his Texas twang. “I hope to continue to merit your confidence. I know I will continue to enjoy our friendship. One other thing—I hope that in foreign policy, we’re going to make a better team than we oftentimes did on the tennis courts in Texas.” He smiled. It was the sort of teasing comment only a friend could make—and one that for the room and the larger international audience reinforced a message Baker wanted to send, that the two of them were more than just commander in chief and secretary of state, that when he spoke he was speaking for them both. Baker finished with a nod to the hard days that might lie ahead. “It’s been my experience for eight years here now in Washington,” he said, “that after the swearing in, sooner or later, comes the swearing at.”
Baker had long aspired to the State Department, an ambition born of a success so rapid that it was easy to forget how quickly it had all happened. He was fifty-eight years old and only ten years earlier he had been a between-jobs Houston lawyer who had just lost a campaign for the only political office he ever tried to win. It was a mark of his convincing rise that Baker’s appointment now was not the least bit controversial. No one mentioned it, but the new secretary of state had never been to Moscow. He did not speak any foreign languages. He had no international relations philosophy. Washington simply expected him to succeed in this, as he had succeeded at every challenge the city had thrown at him. Baker, relentlessly competitive and, by this point, more than a little bit cocky, would surely find a way to win at this too.
It was one of those accidents of history that Bush and Baker would get their chance to lead America on the world stage at such a moment. Both were profoundly cautious men, believers in words like “prudence” and “restraint” at a time when a revolution was actually happening. “The totalitarian era is passing,” Bush had said in his inaugural address a few days earlier as he was sworn in as the nation’s forty-first president. “A new breeze is blowing.” Usually such rhetoric from presidents is overblown. But not this time. The rapprochement with the Soviet Union, unthinkable just a few years earlier, was for real, and old Cold War certainties were unraveling along with it. In nearly four years in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev had steered America’s greatest enemy in a new direction, introducing market reforms, opening up democratic discourse, and making arms control breakthroughs with Reagan. Now, unrest in the outer reaches of Moscow’s empire hinted at the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the European order, while the proxy wars of the superpower confrontation in places such as Afghanistan and Angola as well as Nicaragua and El Salvador might also finally be coming to an end.
This was the main event and Baker knew it. Baker had learned at the White House and Treasury Department how to be strategic and disciplined about picking priorities, leaving other matters, even very pressing ones, to the people who worked for him. As he surveyed this “moment rich with promise,” in Peggy Noonan’s grand phrasing for the Bush inaugural address, Baker had no intention of letting himself get bogged down by the daily crises that could easily consume a secretary of state’s time. Baker had little interest in Asia, Africa, or South America, nor did he want to become embroiled in the turmoil in South Africa as its system of racial apartheid unraveled in the face of international protests and sanctions. He especially wanted to stay away from the Middle East and the endless failed quest for peace between Israel and the Arabs. Baker was determined not to get sidetracked on a fool’s errand. “Now is not the time to come up with a high visibility initiative,” a memo prepared for Baker stated about the Middle East. Baker picked up a pen and underlined the phrase “not the time.” The end of the Cold War was too big, too all-consuming. He and Bush did not exactly know yet what they would do about it, but of its overriding importance they were sure.
WHEN HE SHOWED up on the seventh floor of the State Department’s blocky headquarters in Foggy Bottom, he was determined to clean house. Those who had worked for the Reagan administration would not automatically be staying. “This is not a friendly takeover,” Baker told associates. Other secretaries had become captive to the building, he felt, and therefore worked at cross-purposes to the presidents they were supposed to serve. Although he did not say so explicitly, this was at least partially what Baker thought about his immediate predecessor and friend from the Reagan administration, George Shultz, who was beloved by the career diplomats even as many of them took issue with Reagan’s foreign policy. “I’m going to be the White House’s man at the State Department,” Baker said again and again, “not the State Department’s man at the White House.”
Scarred by the turf wars between Shultz at the State Department and Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon, well aware of how Shultz had often lost out, not only to Weinberger but also to the brash, ideological White House staffers who had gravitated to Reagan’s National Security Council, Baker had resolved to stay tight with Bush and his other top advisers, no matter what. “Nothing comes between me and my president” became his mantra and if it was sometimes honored in the breach, it was, at least, a constant reminder to Baker of where his true power derived. Baker well remembered the troubles that had plagued the Reagan national security team. One way to avoid that was to work closely with Brent Scowcroft. Baker had known him since the Ford administration and while their relationship to that point had been “mostly a bantering one,” as Scowcroft put it, they shared a certain pragmatic sensibility about international affairs. Baker appointed one of Scowcroft’s closest friends, Lawrence Eagleburger, a career diplomat, as deputy secretary of state, giving himself a sounding board about how the national security adviser might view certain issues and effectively ensuring that there would be no secrets between the State Department and the White House. It was a relief to Scowcroft too, who saw Eagleburger “like an arm right into the Baker camp.” The two had worked together on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff and were “soul mates,” as Scowcroft put it.
For his own deputy, Scowcroft picked Robert Gates, a career CIA officer who had risen to deputy director of the agency and was known as a hard-liner on the Soviet Union. But in a nod to Baker, Scowcroft promised that the secretary of state would be the primary foreign policy voice for the administration. Scowcroft said he would do no television interviews and give no public speeches without clearing them first with Baker, a deference that few if any of his predecessors had shown and one that soon became unnecessary because Baker trusted Scowcroft implicitly. Needless to say, that was not the case with all of Bush’s men. Baker remained especially suspicious of Dan Quayle. When Bush told Baker right before the inauguration that he was thinking of sending Quayle on an early European visit to meet with foreign leaders, Baker intervened. How about sending Quayle on a tour of South America instead? Bush readily agreed.
On key appointments, especially those that concerned foreign policy, Baker did not hesitate to make his views heard. When John Tower, the former Texas senator who was Bush’s initial choice for defense secretary, was rejected by the Senate amid allegations of drinking and groping women, Bush was bombarded with names of possible replacements. He toyed with moving Scowcroft over to the Pentagon, but could not bear to part with his national security adviser. So Baker got behind Scowcroft’s idea of turning to their mutual friend, Dick Cheney, who had been rising in the ranks of the House Republican leadership. Now Republican whip, Cheney was poised to become the House minority leader when Representative Robert Michel, a genial moderate from Illinois who had led the caucus for eight years, retired. On a Friday afternoon in March, however, Bush upended those plans. Baker sat with Bush in the residential part of the White House when the new president called to offer Cheney the defense appointment. That night, Baker called Cheney’s house in Virginia to make sure he was in. “Dick, damn it, I hope you’ll take this job,” he said. Cheney was more of a hard-liner than Baker was, especially when it came to the Soviet Union and the contras, but Baker, who had established a tradition of fly-fishing trips with Cheney in the Wyoming backcountry, also considered him a reasonable voice who would be a team player.
The tandem of Baker, Cheney, and Scowcroft in the three most important national security positions would over the next four years guarantee a close collaboration unheard of in modern administrations. From the start, the three decided to have breakfast once a week without staff in Scowcroft’s West Wing office, where they could hash over the big issues without becoming ensnared in the politics of their separate institutions. It was a striking change from the Reaganite past when the top national security officials were barely on speaking terms. “We all knew each other,” Cheney said. “We all trusted each other.”
For the career diplomats at the State Department, however, Baker was already proving an intimidating figure. Staffers were told that he had exacting preferences for the way memos should be formatted, down to the font size and margins. Rumors even ran around the building that he had fired not one but two assistants in prior stops in government because of typos, the sort of mythology that cements a reputation, whether it was true or not. “He was so tightly wound and focused,” said Lorne Craner, a legislative aide to the new secretary. No matter how distinguished their careers or urgent their problems, the permanent foreign service staff learned quickly that Baker would rely heavily—at times, almost exclusively—on the small coterie of advisers he brought with him.
Unlike George Shultz, who famously showed up in Foggy Bottom without a single aide of his own, Baker brought his “plug-in unit” with him to the State Department, “Baker’s dozen,” as some career officials took to calling them, although the real inner circle was not even that big. Robert Kimmitt came as undersecretary of state and Robert Zoellick as Baker’s counselor. Janet Mullins moved over from the campaign to serve as legislative liaison. Margaret Tutwiler would come too, of course, although she had to be convinced to take on the very visible role of assistant secretary for public affairs because she was nervous about briefing reporters every day when she was not yet a master of the details and jargon of foreign affairs. She turned down the job four times before giving in. Karen Groomes and Caron Jackson would also make the move with Baker.
Baker and his team “came to the State Department with a certain animus against the career Foreign Service,” said David Mack, a Middle East specialist in the department. That was not entirely true; there were some assistant secretaries who would penetrate the circle. But by and large, Baker brought with him the approach that had worked for him at the White House, Treasury Department, and several presidential campaigns. “Jim Baker ran policy cabalistically, with a small group of insiders who were not well connected to the building and who, in fact, attempted to discourage the bubbling up of ideas from the building and who really had no guiding overall strategic sense,” said Chas Freeman Jr., who was soon tapped by Bush to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Among the few newcomers to the tight Baker circle was a smart young Soviet specialist named Dennis Ross, who had served on the National Security Council staff under Reagan and then joined the Bush campaign even though he was a Democrat who had once worked on the campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern. After the election, Scowcroft asked Ross to be his deputy national security adviser, but Ross took an offer from Baker instead to be the State Department director of policy planning, the job that the storied Sovietologist George Kennan, architect of containment, had invented for himself in the momentous years when the Cold War was just beginning. In theory, it was a less powerful position than the White House job Ross turned down, but given the new secretary’s forceful persona and unique relationship with the incoming president, Ross “felt the action would be with Baker.”
THE ACTION WOULD indeed be with Baker, but not right away. Bush came out of the box intent on slowing down and rethinking the nation’s foreign policy, especially when it came to the Soviet Union.
Bush first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 at the funeral of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko and thought the new Soviet leader, up until then a relatively unknown former party boss from Stavropol in southern Russia, was just a slicker sort of apparatchik with “a disarming smile, warm eyes and an engaging way of making an unpleasant point,” as he put it in a cable to Reagan. But Bush wanted to maintain good relations. In December 1987, as he was gearing up to run for president, Bush told Gorbachev during a Washington visit not to pay attention to the “empty cannons of rhetoric” he would hear in the upcoming campaign. After the election, in December 1988, Bush joined Reagan for another meeting with Gorbachev on Governors Island in New York.
But while publicly supportive of Reagan, Bush had no plans to simply pick up where the outgoing president left off. He privately believed Reagan had become too accommodating to Gorbachev, as did many Republican hard-liners throughout Reagan’s administration. Baker shared Bush’s assessment. While he had a lot of respect for Shultz, privately he thought his predecessor had not been a tough enough negotiator and gave up too much to the Soviets. “Don’t you think you all went too far?” Baker asked Rozanne Ridgway, an assistant secretary under Shultz and top negotiator for Reagan’s summits with Gorbachev. Ridgway would be eased out within a year.
Bush wanted to recalibrate. So instead of action, his first move toward the Soviet Union was to order a strategic policy review that would come to be known as The Pause. It took months, maddening allies and adversaries alike, and ultimately resolving little at all. But Gorbachev was not planning to wait. He used that December 1988 visit to New York to deliver a speech at the United Nations announcing that he would withdraw 500,000 troops from Eastern Europe, a splashy move that caught Reagan and Bush off guard and established once again that the Soviet leader was the driving force in a changing world.
When Bush and Baker met during the transition with Henry Kissinger to talk about the Soviets, the old intriguer first insulted them by implying that they did not have an overarching strategy, then suggested one of his own design: a secret understanding with the Kremlin in which the Soviets would agree not to use force to stop reform movements in Eastern Europe while the West would promise not to take advantage of the situation at the expense of Moscow’s security interests. Kissinger called it the “Finlandization” of Eastern Europe, suggesting that the region would be nominally independent but dominated by the Soviets—a concession that, had it gotten out, would have caused the new administration no end of trouble with conservatives who would consider it a sellout. To convey the idea, Kissinger proposed that a back channel be established with the Soviets, clearly seeing himself as the go-between and eager for one more chance to get in on the action. Bush and Baker had little time for that.
But the incoming president did use Kissinger to take a letter to Gorbachev on a forthcoming trip to Moscow, repeating his assurances of goodwill and urging him not to see anything nefarious in The Pause. “Our purpose is to assure a sound and coherent American approach,” Bush wrote. “It is in no way an attempt to delay or reverse the positive progress that has marked the past year or two.”
Kissinger met with Gorbachev in Moscow on January 17, 1989, three days before Bush’s inauguration, and faxed a memo back to Scowcroft summing up the encounter. Gorbachev told Kissinger that changes were afoot in Eastern Europe that no one could stop, but warned that both sides should be careful not to threaten each other’s security. When Kissinger was getting up to leave, Gorbachev grew pensive. “I lead a strange country,” he told Kissinger. “I am trying to take my people in a direction they do not understand and many do not want to go.” His economic reforms had taken longer than he thought. What he needed, he said, was “a long period of peace.” That gave Bush room to maneuver, Kissinger thought. “In my view Gorbachev is treading water with perestroika,” he wrote in his memo to Scowcroft. “He is looking to foreign policy as a way out. He will pay a reasonable price to that end.”
Kissinger again offered himself as a secret conduit when he showed up later that month to personally brief Bush and Baker on his meetings in Moscow. Baker and Kissinger had a complicated relationship, not just because of the tense way they first encountered each other in the 1976 campaign, when Baker, an obscure Ford political appointee, assured Republicans that the controversial secretary of state would not be retained in a new term. Beyond the personal friction, there was a genuine gulf in the experience and self-conception of these two secretaries of state. Kissinger saw himself as a geopolitical strategist and a grand architect of history, a latter-day Metternich shaping the forces that guided the world. Baker, by contrast, gave little thought to the Treaty of Westphalia or the historical context of great-power competition. He was no professor. He would seek to cut diplomatic deals as a corporate lawyer would. He was a problem solver, animated by the challenge of finding ways to get things done. “For Baker, the world was like a giant jigsaw puzzle, unassembled on the living room floor,” said Aaron David Miller, who worked on Middle East issues for the new secretary.
Baker and Kissinger might both be considered realists and both were perfectly comfortable negotiating with the nation’s enemies and making concessions to get a better deal. But Kissinger had a hard time seeing Baker as a worthy successor. To him, Baker was still a fixer, not a statesman. “He has a less complicated approach to international order,” Kissinger would say archly of Baker in years to come. The sense of competition was palpable between the two men, who would end up as the two most important secretaries of state of the last half century.
IF HE WAS GOING to fix something, Baker had determined that it would be the futile war in Nicaragua. The conflict had ground on for years without a clear victory. A preliminary peace accord had halted much of the fighting but failed to advance a permanent resolution. Baker’s dinner conversation with Jim Wright that night at Robert Strauss’s apartment had convinced him that he could make the issue finally go away once and for all with the right kind of bipartisan deal. “He knew the time was right to come in and do this in the afterglow of having won the election,” said Janet Mullins.
To help make it happen, Baker decided to hire a point person from outside of his party altogether, asking Bernard Aronson to become his assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Aronson was a little stunned. A proud Democrat who had served as policy director for the Democratic National Committee, he hailed from a family with roots in the civil rights movement and he got into politics himself through trade unions. But Aronson also supported the contras and thought theirs was a worthy cause. He was friendly with congressional Republicans such as John McCain and Henry Hyde and, at one point, even wrote a speech on the subject for Reagan.
For Baker, hiring a Democrat, albeit one philosophically in tune with himself, was a clever gambit. Dan Quayle was not too pleased and neither was Senator Jesse Helms, the crotchety conservative Republican from North Carolina who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but Baker got Aronson confirmed nonetheless. The only way to accomplish what he wanted, Baker calculated, was to forge a consensus with lawmakers, and that meant Democrats. “Work w/Congress,” he wrote on notes for the administration’s first cabinet meeting. He underlined it, twice.
Baker knew he would never get Democrats to agree to any more military aid but he and Bush could not let the contras languish in the field either and humanitarian aid was due to expire on March 31. “They couldn’t just walk away because of the politics and the geopolitics,” said Aronson. “And yet they didn’t want to refight the Central American wars starting out their presidency.” If Baker could get lawmakers to approve funds for food, clothing, and shelter just for a year, that would tide over the fighters until elections scheduled for February 1990. The administration would commit to respecting the results of the vote as long as it was deemed free and fair. Baker knew that might mean accepting the Moscow-backed Sandinistas in power since they were likely to win, but he reckoned that was better than keeping up a flailing war.
He met with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to sell the idea. To make it work, though, Baker focused most of his energy on Democrats whose buy-in was crucial. Part of the strategy was setting himself up as a reasonable interlocutor, holding off the conservative flank of his own party. “It has now turned into a negotiation between me and the Democrats in the House and Senate,” he wrote in talking points in preparation for a call with Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic majority leader. “My own party is excluded from that process and I am beginning to catch hell for that. Jesse Helms wants to introduce a military aid package right now and I am trying to hold them off.”
No Democrat in Congress had been more outspoken in opposition to the contras—and more of a thorn in the side of the Reagan administration—than Jim Wright. For years, the speaker had inveighed against the American-sponsored war and inserted himself into negotiations in the region, much to the consternation of the Reagan White House. But he too seemed ready to move on. Wright told that to Bush himself as well as to Baker; over steak and salad at an early lunch in his congressional office with the incoming president, Bush had asked him to work with Baker on a deal and Wright agreed. In early March, Baker went to see Wright on Capitol Hill.
“We want to wind this thing down,” Baker told him. “We’re willing to substitute negotiations for military action. But the president is getting some flak from the right wing. They’re already accusing him of abandoning the contras. That’s the one thing he promised in the campaign never to do.”
Wright was struck that Baker did not use the favored Reagan-era term “freedom fighters” to describe the contras. For Baker, the contra cause was not some article of religious faith. He was willing to cut deals.
For eleven days in a row, Baker and Aronson shuttled back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. “This was to be the pattern of his diplomacy during the next few weeks,” Wright later wrote. “He would meet with each faction privately, hear its complaints, weigh its demands. Then he would go to the other side and present the opposition’s wish as its ‘bottom line.’ Baker would tell Democrats how intractable Republicans were being. I had no doubt he was telling them how unreasonably we were behaving.” With so much at stake, Baker sweated the details. He personally called the president of Honduras to pin down an extension on the amount of time exiled contra fighters could remain in camps in his country, then haggled with Wright over which Democrats to invite to a meeting. When he brought a detailed, two-page single-spaced proposal stamped “SECRET” across the top to a session with Democratic leaders, Baker personally collected every copy except the one he left with Wright.
All the talking, all the horse-trading came down to sniffing out what the many players needed to come to terms, a process that was Baker at his strongest. He was at heart a canny pol who knew Congress well, knew who could deliver, knew how to play them off each other just enough to get them to give a little, knew he needed to give enough himself so that everyone could come out of the negotiation feeling they had won. Baker had a talent for connection. He could be whatever he needed to be at the moment it was necessary. The young man who slid back and forth from Texas to Princeton, from the Ivy Club in the spring to the wildcatter’s rig in the summer, now applied the same skills on Capitol Hill.
Lorne Craner, the legislative aide, recalled Baker during the contra talks moving from office to office, conservative to liberal and back again. For Craner, it was a master class in deal-making. One day, he accompanied Baker to meet with Jesse Helms and other hard-line Republicans, watching the secretary of state softening up the North Carolina senator by talking about duck hunting. When that ended, Baker went next door to meet with Senator Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who was outspoken on Central America, and the two bonded over opera. It worked in part because it was genuine. “Baker would tell a dirty joke or talk about hunting or ask John Dingell if he’d been out shooting birds. That was how he related to these guys,” Janet Mullins remembered, referring to an old bull Democratic congressman. “When he wanted something and was up against somebody who didn’t want to give him what he wanted, he’d bring ’em in and give them that squinty-eyed look and talk pretty straight with people. And he was always more briefed than anybody else, so you weren’t going to outwit him.”
Baker’s smooth charm masked his driving ambition. There was always an agenda, sometimes hidden. “He has a compelling presence,” Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “but he is such a fox that you feel the impulse to check your wallet when you leave his office.” Yet Baker believed there were rarely permanent enemies. There was nowhere he would not go if he thought he could make progress. As he sought bipartisan support for a resolution of the Nicaragua war, another Democrat he wanted to enlist was Jimmy Carter. Never mind that Baker had worked on two campaigns against Carter—Ford’s in 1976 and Reagan’s in 1980—he knew that Carter had taken a strong interest in Central America and had a lot of friends there on the other side of the ideological divide. If he could collaborate with Carter, it would defuse a lot of the potential opposition, both in Washington and in the region.
Baker made a point of flying to Atlanta shortly after Bush’s election for a public appearance at the Carter Center and sat down privately with the former president. Ostracized over the eight years of Reagan’s tenure, Carter was happy to finally be consulted again, given the due he felt a former president deserved. “I’m one of the few Republicans who has a high regard for Carter,” Baker would say later. It helped that, like Wright, they shared a friendship with Robert Strauss. And Carter knew that Baker carried weight that his predecessors did not, thanks to his friendship with Bush. “They were probably as close together as any president and secretary of state that I remember with the possible exception of Nixon and Kissinger,” Carter said. “I knew he spoke for President Bush when he came down to Georgia.”
On Capitol Hill, the Democrats eventually agreed to go along with Baker’s plan, authorizing $4.5 million a month in humanitarian aid to the contras until the following February. But Representative Dave Obey of Wisconsin, who chaired a key appropriations subcommittee, insisted that the humanitarian aid be authorized for only part of the year, so that Congress could review what was happening on the ground. Baker agreed to stop aid at the end of November if the top four congressional leaders did not send letters approving its continuation, in effect handing lawmakers a veto if they chose to use it. “Baker knew we had a losing hand and he was very open to reshuffling the cards and trying to both defuse the bitterness so that he could start his tenure, and the president’s tenure, with a good relationship with the Democratic Congress,” Aronson said. “It was a chance to live to fight another day, but on very different terms.”
Bush signed the agreement on March 24 in the Cabinet Room of the White House with Baker and legislative leaders from both parties by his side, a far cry from the Reagan days when Democrats wanted nothing to do with his Central American adventures. “Today, for the first time in many years, the president and Congress, the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House and Senate, are speaking with one voice about Central America,” Bush said.
Baker later went to the White House briefing room, where he acknowledged that he was cleaning up the mess left by his former administration. “We all have to admit that the policy basically failed to some extent because we were not united,” he told reporters. “We had an executive branch going in one direction and a legislative branch going in another.”
“Does it mean an end to the war?” he added. “Let’s hope so.”
Not everyone in the administration was happy with Baker. Although he had purged many of the Reagan true believers at the State Department, Dan Quayle and other conservatives thought the secretary of state was selling out the contras. Acutely aware of the pockets of opposition, Baker had negotiated the deal himself and while keeping in touch with Bush and Scowcroft, he did not feel the need to shop it around to other players.
As a result, C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel, was miffed not to have a chance to review the agreement, as he normally would with nearly any other deal. He spoke out when he received a call while on vacation in Florida from Robert Pear, a New York Times reporter. The agreement, he told Pear, could have constitutional issues if it effectively gave a single house of Congress veto power over actions of the executive branch. Baker’s position was that it presented no such problems because it was a political “gentleman’s agreement,” not binding legislation.
Caught off guard by the reporter’s call, Gray did not think through how his comments would be received. By the time the next day’s Times arrived with the front-page headline “Unease Is Voiced on Contra Accord,” Gray knew he was in trouble. “Within minutes,” Gray remembered, “Bush called me and said we have a very unhappy secretary of state who’s about to go on Meet the Press and this is going to mess up what he was trying to say or what he wanted to say. It’s just awful. He said come in and talk, we’ve got to figure out what happened.”
Baker was indeed a very unhappy secretary of state. Robert Zoellick called Margaret Tutwiler to let her know about the story and she reached Baker in Houston. “Baker was absolutely livid,” Bernard Aronson remembered. Baker was already upset at Gray over the White House counsel’s insistence a few weeks earlier that the secretary sell some bank stock that could pose ethical questions. In fact, he had been so mad about it he had actually gone to the Oval Office to tell Bush to his face that he did not think the new president’s chief lawyer was “up to the job.” Now Gray was inserting himself into Baker’s policy lane too. “This was the first foreign policy achievement of our administration and the White House counsel is saying it might not be,” Baker said. “That was because we didn’t bring him into the loop—and had we brought him into the loop, we may never have gotten the deal.”
Gray called Baker to apologize and got an earful. “He was mad,” Gray said. “He was very mad. He has this Southern graciousness so he did accept my apology, but you could tell it was not a happy acceptance.”
In public, Baker tried to restrain his pique, but he held firm on the larger point, going on television that Sunday as planned to reinforce it. “Basically, it’s a restoration of presidential power and not any diminution of it,” he said on ABC’s This Week. In private, the feud went on for days. By Tuesday, Bush himself had to intervene, calling first Gray and then Baker to urge them to settle their differences.
Baker’s deal, meanwhile, stuck. The wars in Central America, which had so dominated Reagan’s foreign policy, disappeared from the front pages.