“I guess we bombed out there today, didn’t we?”
It was early March 1989 and the new secretary of state had just finished his debut speech in Vienna at the opening session of a key round of negotiations over how many conventional military forces the Cold War rivals would keep in Europe now that the conflict was winding down.
Counterparts from dozens of countries around Europe were present, but with the administration’s foreign policy toward the Soviet Union still under review, Baker did not really have much new to offer. He felt the room go flat. The Pause was not playing well. Once again, the Soviets were seen as driving the discussion.
Dennis Ross tried to reassure the secretary that he had not bombed. “Not really,” he said. “If you look at the substance of what’s happening, the Soviets are accepting our position.”
“I’m talking about the politics of it all,” Baker replied. He had just come off the campaign trail. He knew when he had lost a crowd. “Look who’s getting the big cheers. Then look at who’s getting the big yawns.”
An accord with Congress was one thing—Baker was a seasoned master at that—but now he was playing on a much bigger stage as the chief diplomat of the United States at a time when the Soviet Union was roiling with change. Baker had come to Vienna less because of the conventional forces talks than for a first chance to sit down for an extended meeting with his counterpart from Moscow, the man who would be his partner in ending the Cold War.
Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, was hardly the archetypal Moscow diplomat. Shorter, stockier, and two years older than Baker, with a winning smile and a head of flowing white hair, Shevardnadze cut a far different figure than his longtime predecessor, the dour and imposing Andrei Gromyko, nicknamed “Mr. Nyet” for his gruff approach to the West. Shevardnadze’s real distinction was that he was a provincial upstart with no prior international experience when Gorbachev installed him at the Foreign Ministry. The son of a teacher, Shevardnadze grew up in Soviet Georgia, working his way up the Communist apparatus, becoming head of the region’s interior ministry and then the local party’s first secretary before being plucked to join the Central Committee in Moscow and later the Politburo. He and Gorbachev had been friends since the 1950s, secretly bonding over their disdain for the creaking Soviet system. “Everything is rotten,” Shevardnadze had once confided to the future general secretary during a walk at a Black Sea resort.
If anything, it would soon turn out that Shevardnadze was even more committed to breaking up the old system than Gorbachev, sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations of his fellow Georgians and scarred by the Stalinist repressions that had claimed his wife’s father, executed as an “enemy of the people,” and also swept up his cousin, a famous artist. At the time, Shevardnadze’s true leanings were not yet entirely clear to the Americans, although intelligence analysts had correctly pegged him as a key Gorbachev ally on the Politburo and a fellow believer in what Russians called the “new thinking.” Just as importantly, in his first few years at the Foreign Ministry, Shevardnadze had impressed his Reagan counterparts as serious and reliable; George Shultz assured Baker that he could do business with Shevardnadze. Bush called in from Camp David before the meeting in Vienna too, “giving Jimmy a few suggestions based on my own personal contacts with Gorbachev that will show Shevardnadze how close Jim and I are,” he told his diary. This might be a new team, Bush wanted Baker to tell the Soviets, but it is “a team that knows what it’s doing.”
It did not necessarily seem that way. In Vienna, Shevardnadze proposed dramatic reductions in conventional troops in Europe by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, leaving Baker, held hostage to The Pause, with nothing concrete to counter. The absence of a proposal left the Soviets worried and Shevardnadze feared that Baker was taking a harder line than Shultz had. The Soviet translator, Pavel Palazchenko, thought Baker’s speech was laying out what “sounds like an imperious demand” on the Soviets for further concessions.
Baker and Shevardnadze met the next day in the same American ambassador’s residence where John Kennedy was by his own reckoning “savaged” by Nikita Khrushchev during their first encounter in 1961. The Baker-Shevardnadze meeting was far more cordial, with the one-on-one part of the session in the ambassador’s study lasting an hour and seven minutes rather than the twenty minutes allotted. The Soviets were struck that the new secretary of state was willing to get more into the details of arms control than Shultz had been, but also noticed that he needed to rely on his briefing book and aides more than his predecessor. Either way, they were frustrated by Baker’s larger message that Bush was not yet ready to engage. “What were they waiting for?” Gorbachev asked later. “Some of the signals we were receiving were quite alarming.” Hard-liners in Moscow thought The Pause was “evidence that Washington was plotting against the Soviet Union, or at least had no intention of improving relations.”
To prepare for his first session with Baker, Shevardnadze had his government produce a dossier on the new secretary of state. It concluded that Baker was a “pragmatist,” not a “zoological anti-Communist,” a deal-maker with whom the Soviets could work. But when they met, Shevardnadze came away with a mixed impression of Baker. He seemed like a “cold fellow,” he told Gorbachev, with none of the humanity that he had found in Shultz. For his part, Baker had immediately liked Shevardnadze but was struck by the stress that Soviet reformers were under to deliver. “Can’t help but get impression of the pressure Shevardnadze and Gorbachev feel to make perestroika succeed quickly,” Baker wrote in six pages of typed notes from the trip. “They’re leaders in a great hurry, possessing a sense of urgency, but lacking a plan.”
Baker returned to Washington looking for a plan too. The Pause was not wearing well at home, and Baker hated being assailed for what the conservative National Review magazine called his “decidedly listless debut” on the international stage. The strategic reviews that the new president had ordered were disappointing, just “mush,” as Baker put it, with the bureaucracy sending up warmed-over versions of past ideas. Aides came to call the proposals they were getting the “status quo plus” option and thought there was little plus about it. But the career diplomats were growing as impatient as the Soviets. Jack Matlock, the ambassador to Moscow, bitterly told colleagues that the marching orders from Washington amounted to: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”
Bush was increasingly ready to pick a course, but there was still no consensus within his inner circle about Gorbachev and what he was really up to. Baker was the most optimistic that the Soviet reform effort was real. Dick Cheney, Robert Gates, Dan Quayle, and Brent Scowcroft remained skeptical. At a meeting on March 30, Bush told his team that Gorbachev had eroded American leadership in Europe and that it was time to seize the initiative again. With the president’s prearranged approval, Scowcroft then proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union set a goal of withdrawing all of their ground troops from Europe by the turn of the century. “Cheney looked at Scowcroft as if he’d lost his mind,” Gates remembered. Cheney countered by suggesting that they push Gorbachev to release more information about the Soviet military, an idea that hardly satisfied Bush’s grand ambition. Baker, always looking for a deal, tried coming in somewhere in the middle, proposing that both sides get rid of all of their tanks in Europe. But Scowcroft thought that missed the point—he wanted to get rid of troops because that would take the Soviet boot off Eastern Europe. Bush ended the meeting dissatisfied. “If we don’t regain leadership, things are going to fall apart,” he warned.
As the Bush team dithered, events were barreling ahead. In April, Poland legalized the Solidarity labor movement that had challenged the Soviet-backed regime and set elections in which the opposition could compete, ending the Communist Party’s forty-five-year monopoly on power. Eastern Europe was not waiting for The Pause. Bush decided to deliver a speech in Hamtramck, Michigan, home to many Polish Americans, promising his support. But the tangible offerings were meager and unimpressive—tariff relief, possible debt rescheduling, modest new loans. Even these ideas provoked a debate. Nick Brady, the onetime Bush campaign lieutenant who had succeeded Baker as treasury secretary, resisted financial aid, arguing that it should be given only for economic reform, not political changes. Baker disagreed.
The Bush team was an unusually collaborative group, especially compared with its predecessors. But that did not stop Baker from pushing back when he thought other cabinet officials wandered too far into his diplomatic lane. In late April, Cheney went on CNN and expressed doubts about Gorbachev’s capacity. “If I had to guess today, I would guess that he would ultimately fail,” Cheney told Robert Novak and Rowland Evans on their talk show. “That is to say that he will not be able to reform the Soviet economy to turn it into an efficient, modern society. And when that happens, he’s likely to be replaced by somebody who will be far more hostile than he’s been in terms of his attitude towards the West.”
When Baker heard about the interview, he erupted. That was not the message he wanted to send—Cheney made it sound as if Bush had no faith in Gorbachev’s staying power. Aggravated, Baker called Cheney.
“Cheney, you’re off the reservation,” the defense secretary remembered Baker telling him.
Cheney offered a mea culpa. “I got it,” he said. “Won’t happen again.”
But Baker was not done. He wanted to make sure Cheney’s view would not represent the administration’s position. He called Bush as well as Scowcroft and told them that the White House should distance itself from Cheney’s remarks.
“Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity,” Baker told Scowcroft.
The White House did just that. At his daily briefing, Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, dismissed Cheney’s comments as merely “his personal observations.” In a speech later the same day, Bush, without mentioning Cheney by name, noted that he had told Gorbachev that “we wanted to see perestroika succeed in the Soviet Union.”
In case anyone missed the point, Baker piled on a few days later in a speech of his own. “The president has said and I have said that we have absolutely no wish to see perestroika fail,” he said. “To the contrary, we would very much like it to succeed.” He added that they had been “so encouraged by the words and the concepts of what General Secretary Gorbachev refers to as the ‘new thinking.’ And in a number of places, I think it’s fair to say that words have turned into realities.”
ON MAY 10, 1989, Baker’s government Boeing 707 touched down outside Moscow in the clearing of a birch forest just outside the capital at Vnukovo-2, the strictly off-limits airport reserved for Communist Party leaders and visiting foreign dignitaries. It was Baker’s first big trip as secretary of state and his first time in the Soviet Union. The plane had been on historic missions before, even if Baker had not—the legendary Air Force jetliner with the blue-and-white United States of America paint job had ferried Henry Kissinger to Paris for secret talks with the North Vietnamese and taken three former American presidents to the 1981 funeral of Egypt’s assassinated leader Anwar Sadat.
Its first assignment, when it rolled off the line back in 1962, was to serve as Air Force One for John Kennedy. It took the young president to Berlin in 1963 and, later that year, to Dallas. His body was brought back to Washington on board that terrible November day and it was on the plane that Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office. The plane was handed over to secretaries of state in the 1970s and Baker would make constant use of it over the next few years, treating the small stateroom up front as an airborne office when it was not a bedroom, with faxes flying back and forth to Washington and secure voice communications that usually worked. The plane was ancient by then, rattling and shaking every time it took off. Once, over Guam, the stabilizer went out, and “we damn near tanked,” Baker remembered, plunging to just a few hundred feet over the water before the Air Force pilots got the plane under control again.
While Baker had written his junior thesis on Russia at Princeton, he had never before visited Moscow and the Russian capital he landed in that spring day was a city unlike anything the secretary of state had encountered before. May was just about the best time to visit Moscow, when temperatures were moderate and the sun got up early and stayed up late. Yet Baker was stunned to see how drab and shabby the capital of the world’s other nuclear superpower really was. A country with enough military power to wipe out half the planet looked like a run-down vestige of a nineteenth-century power, with peeling paint and empty roads. He was struck that at night the few drivers on the streets only flipped on their headlights at busy intersections and, when it rained, pulled over to reattach windshield wipers that were otherwise kept hidden away lest they be stolen. It reminded Baker of a trip to Mexico City when he was a child. As treasury secretary, he had dealt with a number of developing countries, but when a reporter asked him if Moscow resembled those, Baker said no—this was worse.
Baker had come to test Gorbachev to see if he was for real. Just a few days before Baker’s departure from Washington, the Soviet leader had sent a secret letter that, among other things, mentioned almost offhandedly that Moscow had cut off arms shipments to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and in fact had not delivered any weapons to them since 1988. None of America’s intelligence agencies had detected an arms cutoff, but if it were true, it would represent an important step as Baker sought to defuse the regional conflict.
Baker arrived at the Kremlin the day after landing in Moscow and was ushered through a series of reception rooms to St. Catherine Hall. In contrast to the grimy streets, he and his entourage noticed the massive, gold-leafed doors and tsarist splendor left intact by the Communist bosses. The two delegations sat at a long blond-wood table. In addition to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the Soviet side included Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the General Staff, in full-dress uniform. (Baker aides counted twelve rows of ribbons on his chest.)
Gorbachev opened with a forty-five-minute disquisition on perestroika. Baker’s visit had come right in the middle of an extraordinary experiment in democracy unleashed by Gorbachev’s reforms. A new party congress had just been chosen in a partially competitive election across the Soviet Union, a landmark first, and later that month the new legislature, including Gorbachev rivals such as Boris Yeltsin, the renegade Moscow party boss, and Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned dissident, would convene in Moscow. The Communist Party, much to the dismay of some of the hard-liners sitting around the table with Gorbachev and Baker that day, was starting to surrender its monopoly on power. “You have to stay the course,” Baker told Gorbachev, pointing out that that was Reagan’s campaign slogan in 1984. They took a lot of criticism for it, he noted, but they won.
Still, Gorbachev was on edge. At such a delicate political moment inside the Soviet Union, he needed to prove that his opening to the West was yielding results, results that Bush had not yet delivered. Gorbachev was well briefed on what was happening in Washington. He made a point of mentioning Cheney’s televised comments and took note of the fact that Baker had brought with him Robert Gates, suggesting that the deputy national security adviser was the head of a secret cell within the American government intent on discrediting perestroika. Baker assured Gorbachev that Cheney’s remarks did not reflect American policy and defended Gates by saying that everyone in the American government wanted perestroika to succeed. It was not entirely true, as Baker well knew—in fact, Gates was both influential and deeply skeptical of Gorbachev, “the Eeyore of Sovietology,” as David Ignatius wrote that month in The Washington Post, “someone capable of finding a dark lining in even the brightest cloud.” For years, Gates and his colleagues at the CIA had taken the position that Gorbachev’s reforms would fail and that the United States should remain extremely cautious in dealing with him. Gates saw no reason to change his mind now. Those views were well known and many believed that Gates was, as Ignatius put it, the “main architect of the Bush administration’s cautious, sensible and utterly uninspiring response to Gorbachev.”
Gorbachev could not afford to wait for Baker and sprung a surprise on him during the Moscow visit, publicly announcing that he would unilaterally withdraw five hundred short-range nuclear weapons from Europe. The Americans were not impressed on the merits—their intelligence said that would still leave the Soviets with ten times as many as the United States. What they did not realize was that the Soviets actually had far fewer such weapons than American intelligence agencies believed, making the cut a much greater share than it seemed at the time. Even more important than the numbers, as a matter of political symbolism, Gorbachev had once again gotten the jump on them.
The reviews of Baker’s visit were not glowing. “Baker is one of the foxiest of inside operators dealing with Congress and in American politics,” wrote Robert Novak, who accompanied the secretary on the trip. “But he is the new boy in the global high-stakes game, and Gorbachev left him sprawled in the dust.” Baker understood that he had been embarrassed. On the flight home, he “invented reasons to come back to the press area of his plane three times,” according to Don Oberdorfer of The Washington Post, talking off the record in hopes at least of swaying his own department’s press corps. He left a clear impression that he did not intend to let Gorbachev upstage him again.
Instead, it was Cheney who almost did so. As Baker made his way back to Washington, Bush was scheduled to give three commencement addresses over the course of two weeks to discuss his emerging approach to the Soviet Union, at Texas A&M University, Boston University, and the Coast Guard Academy. The day before Bush was to deliver the first of them, however, Cheney was planning to give his own speech, reflecting his distinctly darker view, right after Baker had insisted to Gorbachev that Cheney did not speak for the administration. “We hope the Soviet changes are sincere and permanent,” the draft of Cheney’s speech read. But “it would be dangerous—extremely dangerous—to believe we should abandon a policy that works, just because we have some reason to hope.” In fact, that was just what Bush was about to do—favor hope over long-standing policy. Getting word of the speech, the White House ordered Cheney not to give it, the second time in a month he had to be reined in.
Bush proceeded with his own addresses, which attracted only modest attention given the paucity of concrete initiatives in them. During one of the speeches, he resurrected Dwight Eisenhower’s never-approved idea of an “open skies” agreement allowing the superpowers to fly reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory to reduce suspicion of arms buildups, but while that may have been momentous in the 1950s, it was less meaningful in the age of spy satellites. Still, Bush offered a telling phrase coined by his Soviet adviser, a young Ph.D. named Condoleezza Rice, to describe where he was headed—“beyond containment,” meaning the United States was finished with George Kennan’s signature approach to the Cold War and now intended to engage the Soviet Union on another level. “Containment worked,” Bush said at College Station, Texas. But it was time to move on. “We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations,” he said, adding: “Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order.”
Yet his administration kept speaking with multiple voices. While Cheney had been shut down, just four days after Bush’s “beyond containment” speech Marlin Fitzwater referred to Gorbachev from the White House briefing room podium as a “drugstore cowboy,” selling arms control proposals that did not actually add up to that much. A few days after that, Dan Quayle defended Fitzwater and echoed the assessment, calling Gorbachev “a bit of a phony.” Baker stewed over the disconnect.
Bush was tired of being outplayed by Gorbachev and sidelined by the bureaucratic infighters of his own team. He summoned advisers to his family’s oceanfront estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, on May 19 to explore options for getting out in front of the Soviet leader. Adopting an idea from Baker, Bush advanced a proposal to slash American forces in Europe by 25 percent, which would involve withdrawing 75,000 of the more than 300,000 troops stationed on the continent. Under his plan, the Soviets would pull down to the same bottom-line number, which would be a more radical reduction for them because they far outnumbered the Americans in the theater. Still, Cheney and Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reacted with alarm, arguing that that was drawing down too much. Crowe “fought virtually every proposal tooth and nail,” Baker recalled. Cheney’s point was that Gorbachev was moving in their direction already, so they should not make concessions to get what he would probably give them anyway.
Frustrated, Bush snapped that he wanted to be bold. History was watching and he did not want to be on the wrong side. “Don’t keep telling me why it can’t be done,” he demanded. “Tell me how it can be done.”
Eventually, the plan was cut by more than half, to a proposed 10 percent reduction in United States forces in Europe, or 30,000 troops. If the Soviets were to come down to the same level, by contrast, they would have to pull out 325,000. Bush’s proposal also called for moving up the deadline for withdrawal by five years to 1992.
That was intended to help make it easier for Baker to smooth over a rift that had developed within NATO over short-range nuclear weapons. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987, had eliminated a whole class of weapons, but small, tactical nuclear bombs that could be delivered at a range of hundreds of miles and wipe out tens of thousands of people were not covered. The United States and Britain had been advocating the modernization of these weapons, while German leaders were opposed, recognizing that if any of them were ever used, it would be on their territory. “The shorter the missile, the deader the Germans,” became their mantra. But if conventional forces were cut dramatically, it would reduce the need for such weapons, which were intended mainly to counter the overwhelming Soviet advantage in ground troops in Europe.
Baker flew to Brussels in advance of the NATO summit to sell the wary allies on the initiative. Baker sat down with the other foreign ministers at 5 p.m. on May 28 for what would prove to be a marathon negotiation. The British, acting on the views of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were still pressing for modernization of the tactical nuclear weapons, while the Germans were resisting. The group canceled a dinner planned at a nearby castle and instead brought in sandwiches and cookies while they kept haggling.
At some point, Robert Zoellick wearied of the British intransigence and told Baker they did not have to put up with it. But Baker said the time was not yet right. “Sometime very late tonight or tomorrow morning, my friend George Bush is going to have to make a decision—who is running this alliance, him or Margaret Thatcher?” Baker told him. “I watched Margaret Thatcher wrap Ronald Reagan around her little finger. And when the moment comes, I want to make it as easy as possible for my friend to do the right thing.”
Baker had no intention of caving to the British demands; his patience was aimed at making sure that Bush could tell Thatcher that his secretary of state had stuck by the British every step of the way and they had gotten what they could so it was time to move on. Zoellick was struck by Baker’s three-dimensional chess. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, I’m working at this level; he’s playing about six steps ahead.’ ”
In the end, Bush never had to make the alpha move with Thatcher because Baker, consulting with him by telephone throughout the long night, got the British to cave first. They settled for a face-saving announcement about the troop cuts, and by 12:50 a.m. Baker signed off on the final language as long as the word “partial” was used before “reductions”—and that “partial” be underlined. That shattered the deadlock and the meeting finally broke up at 1:04 a.m. Baker, feeling pumped up at what amounted to his first overseas deal as secretary of state, returned to his hotel to drink a celebratory beer with his team.
That set the stage for Bush’s arrival in Brussels for the meeting with other NATO leaders. His announcement of the proposed troop cuts drew rave reviews and finally put the Americans back into a leadership role. In a speech after the summit in the medieval West German city of Mainz on the Rhine River, Bush articulated a vision of a new order without an Iron Curtain, of a Soviet sphere integrated into the rest of the world and not isolated from it. “Let Europe be whole and free,” he declared, a phrase that would come to define success for American policy for more than a quarter century to come. The Pause was finally over.
ON THE FIRST WEEKEND of June, Baker looked forward to a rare opportunity to relax after the trips to Moscow and Brussels. With the president at Kennebunkport, Baker figured he could escape for a few hours, so he called his son Jamie to propose a round of golf.
“Grab your sticks and come over right now,” Baker said.
For a moment, Jamie did not reply. “I don’t think you are going to be playing any golf today,” he said finally. “I’m sitting here watching tanks roll through Tiananmen Square on CNN.”
“You’re kidding me,” Baker said.
At that moment, the other phone in the house rang, the secure line connected to the State Department’s operations center. When Baker picked up, he was told that protests in Beijing had turned violent and the Chinese military was firing into the crowds. There were heavy casualties and great uncertainty.
Golf was definitely out. And so was the equilibrium that Baker and the rest of the Bush administration had sought in the relationship with China since taking office barely four months earlier. The bloody crackdown on June 4 in Beijing’s monumental Tiananmen Square would present Baker and Bush with their first real foreign policy crisis, one that would test the lines between moral values and the national interest.
Pressure had been building for weeks as nearly a million Chinese flooded into the center of Beijing demanding change. With the movement for democracy sweeping Communist-dominated Eastern Europe, younger Chinese responded by challenging their own repressive government, pushing for the resignation of Communist Party officials and embracing Western values. Occupying Tiananmen Square, they erected a thirty-three-foot-tall statue made of foam, papier-mâché, plaster, and metal framing that they called the Goddess of Democracy. That it bore a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty hardly went unnoticed in Washington.
Viewing the protesters as an existential threat to their grip on power, China’s Communist Party leaders chose a different course than Gorbachev in Moscow. Rather than reforms, they opted for a brutal crackdown. When the troops were mobilized that June weekend, they opened fire indiscriminately, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of protesters. Pictures of the slaughter were beamed around the world, including the unforgettable image of a lone protester standing in front of a tank and refusing to move out of the way.
The massacre put Bush in an awkward position. As a former envoy to China, he had a long-standing predilection for building and maintaining strong relations. China was one area of the world where Baker would play only a supporting role. “President Bush was the desk officer on China,” Baker liked to say. The last thing the president wanted was a rupture. But he could hardly fail to object to the butchery in Tiananmen. Complicating matters even further, Fang Lizhi, a noted astrophysicist and China’s best-known dissident, showed up at the American embassy in Beijing asking for refuge amid the crackdown; he was taken in, unavoidably inserting the United States into the middle of the already volatile situation.
Bush flew back from Maine the next day and consulted with Baker and Brent Scowcroft. “We deplore the decision to use force,” the president told reporters. He suspended arms sales and military contacts while promising a sympathetic review of requests by Chinese students in the United States to extend their stays. But he imposed no sanctions nor did he recall his ambassador or take stronger measures. He immediately came under fire from both liberals and conservatives. “While angry rhetoric might be temporarily satisfying to some, I believed it would deeply hurt our efforts in the long term,” Bush wrote in his foreign policy memoir.
Baker concurred with Bush’s instincts. As shocked as anyone by the violence, he nonetheless worried that an excessive reaction would unravel all of the progress made since Richard Nixon’s diplomatic opening. So did Nixon, who called Bush to urge restraint. When it came to balancing human rights concerns against what he perceived to be the national interest, Baker could be unsentimental. China was not the only such case confronting him in that first spring at Foggy Bottom. The white-minority regime in South Africa, whose system of apartheid had drawn worldwide condemnation, appeared on the edge of collapse. Just a week before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Baker had met with South Africa’s foreign minister and pressed him to end apartheid and release the country’s most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela. At the same time, he made clear that there were limits to how far the administration would go. Baker told the visiting minister that he “would like to not increase economic sanctions because we think they are counterproductive,” but he had “to work with Congress,” and South Africa should understand “how strongly Congress views their practice of apartheid.”
The reaction in Congress also loomed large for Baker in handling this crisis with China. Although Bush had served in the House for four years, Baker was actually more attuned to the politics of Capitol Hill from his Reagan-era tax reform and other deal-making and he urged the president to issue tougher statements to head off any measures that would go further than Bush wanted. This realpolitik response to Tiananmen Square did not go over well with everyone on Baker’s team. He was coming under considerable pressure from Margaret Tutwiler, who was devastated by the pictures of innocents trammeled by tanks and gunned down in the street. She had a friend in China she was not able to reach and she was taking the situation personally. She kept pressing Baker to speak out more strongly, to take more action. And for the first time, she refused to go out to the State Department podium and publicly deliver the company line.
“I’m not briefing,” she told Baker. “I can’t do this.”
He looked at her with an even stare. “Well, you are,” he said.
“No, no, no, I’m sending Richard,” she replied, referring to her deputy, Richard Boucher. “I can’t do this.”
Baker would not budge. “Well, you are.”
She did, unhappily, but did not let up her private importuning of Baker as the crackdown continued. Dozens of Chinese students were peremptorily executed and when Baker met with the Chinese ambassador to Washington to lodge protests, he was told in no uncertain terms that this was an internal matter and the United States should keep out of it. Baker then gave voice to the administration’s criticism in an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “They may be able to clear the square,” he said. “They won’t be able to clear their conscience.”
Still, Bush refused to take harsher actions urged by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The president tried to personally call Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and, when he could not get through, wrote a letter emphasizing that he did not want a break in relations and offering to secretly send a personal envoy. Deng sent word back that he would receive an emissary from Bush.
The president called Baker and told him it should not be the secretary of state because the trip had to be under the radar. “Jim Baker does not want to be undermined, so I thought of a lot of alternatives,” Bush later recorded in his diary. “Kissinger and Nixon—too high profile, and too much propensity for leakage, though both would be very good,” he added. He considered several ambassadors or diplomats, “but I don’t want to undermine Baker’s running foreign policy.” So he settled on Scowcroft, who would be close enough to the president to be taken seriously but low-profile enough to slip in and out without notice. Baker agreed but suggested that his own deputy, Larry Eagleburger, go along too. In fact, Baker did not seem all that unhappy about being supplanted. His keen instinct for self-preservation kicked in. “Baker dropped China like a hot potato right after Tiananmen,” observed Richard Solomon, the assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific. “Baker didn’t want to get sullied by this nasty issue.”
Scowcroft and Eagleburger flew to Beijing in July and returned to Washington without anyone noticing. They delivered Bush’s message, that China had to find a way to come to terms with the dissenters without further violence, only to be rebuffed by party leaders who told them that it was none of America’s business. The situation remained stalemated for months as Congress agitated for more sanctions while Bush and Baker resisted in the name of preserving relations.
When Baker sat down with China’s foreign minister, Qian Qichen, in September, he made clear that the administration’s approach was driven more by political pressure than moral outrage. “I believe that the domestic situation in the United States may now be a little bit better with regard to the U.S.-China relationship,” he told Qian at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York during a break from the United Nations General Assembly. “I hope we can continue our dialogue so as to find a way to put the relationship back on track.”
Qian suggested one way to do that would be to proceed with a previous agreement to have Chinese rockets put American satellites into orbit. Baker concurred, but again stressed the political pressures on him. “This is a very sensitive issue in the U.S. and if it became publicized, I fear Congress would require us to prohibit it or refuse to go ahead,” he said. “Therefore, we need to be very careful about timing, when to move forward.”
This was classic Baker—more focused on how to keep the relationship stable than expressing indignation over China’s actions, while using Congress as a prod to induce better behavior by Beijing. Scowcroft made a return visit to China that winter, this time publicly, and there was much outrage back in Washington when the national security adviser was shown toasting Chinese leaders by candlelight, “as friends, to resume our important dialogue,” a mere six months after the massacre. But the administration’s political calculation was correct. The heat over Tiananmen faded with time. A year after the slaughter, the Chinese finally allowed Fang Lizhi to leave the country for exile in the United States while Bush moved the relationship back onto a more normal track. The Chinese had not only succeeded in their crackdown, they had made a definitive choice that would redound in the international system for decades to come, opting for economic liberalization without easing up politically. There would be no glasnost in Beijing.
IN EARLY JULY, Baker and Bush turned their attention back to Europe and the Soviet Union. The president traveled to Poland and Hungary to see for himself the rapid changes in Eastern Europe. As with China, their mutual instinct skewed toward stability. While Solidarity led by Lech Wałęsa had just swept parliamentary elections in Poland in a stunning victory over the old regime, Bush nonetheless urged General Wojciech Jaruzelski to run for president to manage the transition to a more democratic system in a steady fashion. Jaruzelski, the dour Communist leader who ordered tanks to crush Solidarity in 1981, had in recent months opened the door to a new, freer society and allowed his onetime opponents to move into power. Bush sought to show support for change with a package of economic assistance for Poland, but it was so small that Scowcroft privately considered it “embarrassingly meager.” The package Bush offered in Hungary was even less significant.
From there, Bush headed to Paris for the annual Group of 7 meeting. At one point, he sat on the steps of the terrace at the American embassy with Baker and Scowcroft, brooding over how to move forward with the Soviets. Both Bush and Baker prodded Scowcroft into conceding that it was finally time for a meeting with Gorbachev. Still wary of the Soviet leader, Scowcroft had resisted getting together until they knew what could come of it, but Bush had grown impatient. It did not have to be a full summit, he said, just an informal get-to-know-you session. Scowcroft gave in. On Air Force One leaving Paris, Bush wrote Gorbachev a letter proposing the meeting, an invitation the Soviet leader would quickly accept.
Baker found himself back in Paris just ten days later after receiving a surprising inquiry from Eduard Shevardnadze asking if he had planned to attend an international conference on Cambodia in the French capital. Baker had not yet decided to go, but he took the question as a summons. Shevardnadze would not have asked if he was not eager to meet. And so once more Baker boarded his plane and jetted across the ocean. During a break in the Cambodia conference, the two met for three hours and Shevardnadze unloaded about the troubles at home—worker strikes, regional restlessness, economic stagnation. It was a remarkably frank and disquieting performance. No other Soviet official, Baker thought, would have opened up like this. The foreign minister was unburdening himself in a way that made it even clearer that if Baker and Bush were going to invest in Gorbachev, they had to figure out how to deliver for him. The public platitudes would not suffice, a reality that was even more urgent after Tiananmen, which had stiffened the resolve of Soviet hard-liners who were eager to send their tanks into the streets too.
Once again, Baker came away from meeting with Shevardnadze with a sense of him as a heroic figure racing against time. At Margaret Tutwiler’s suggestion, Baker invited Shevardnadze to travel with him in the fall to Wyoming, where he had recently bought his new ranch, pitching it as a chance for them to further build their relationship. Staring at panoramic photographs that Baker had brought with him of the mountain homestead, Shevardnadze accepted right away. Baker sent a long account back to Bush for his private reading. “My day in Paris,” he called it.
Baker and Shevardnadze would have to figure out how to get Bush and Gorbachev together—and how to give them each something to show for the encounter. Even just making it happen was proving to be both a political and logistical headache. Finding a venue and date was not easy. Finally, after Bush learned that Gorbachev would be traveling in December to Italy, someone proposed Malta. Bush’s younger brother, William, who went by Bucky, had just been to the Mediterranean island and raved about how lovely it was. Scowcroft, meanwhile, had mentioned that Franklin Roosevelt had met during World War II with Winston Churchill aboard a Navy ship off Newfoundland, an idea that appealed to Bush’s desire to downplay the meeting and have an excuse to keep the media at arm’s length. They set the dates for December 2 and 3. Bush told everyone: Do not call it a summit.
While the Malta non-summit was being arranged in secret, the administration came under fire back home for not taking a more energetic approach to the Soviets. Senator George Mitchell, the Democratic majority leader, assailed the Bush team’s “timidity” and “almost passive stance,” suggesting that it seemed practically “nostalgic about the Cold War.” Irritated, Baker fired back the next day at a news conference, his first since becoming secretary. “When the president of the United States is rocking along with a 70 percent approval rating on his handling of foreign policy, and I were the leader of the opposition party, I might have something similar to say,” Baker said.
It was a blatantly partisan comment for a secretary of state, underscoring how much Baker still saw statecraft through the lens of domestic politics. Some of his administration colleagues were privately uncomfortable not only about the tenor of Baker’s response but the validity of Mitchell’s criticism. Even Scowcroft, who had resisted a presidential meeting and recognized that Mitchell was motivated by partisanship, would later say, “I also believed we should be doing more.” But could the two foreign ministers deliver it?
Shevardnadze arrived in Washington in September for the trip to Wyoming. Baker invited the Soviet minister to join him on an Air Force DC-9 for the flight west. Shevardnadze usually traveled on his own plane, but when Baker aides said the secretary wanted to use the four-and-a-half-hour trip for an unstructured discussion, he agreed to fly on the American aircraft. Baker, his coat and tie off, sat with Shevardnadze, wearing a white shirt and black vest, across a table in the front of the plane. They tucked into a dinner of chicken parmesan and a Robert Mondavi 1987 sauvignon blanc served by Air Force stewards, then settled in for a long conversation. In addition to the interpreters, Dennis Ross sat uncomfortably on a State Department attaché case next to Baker taking notes, while a Soviet aide did the same for Shevardnadze. Jack Matlock, the American ambassador to Moscow, and his Soviet counterpart listened intently.
Baker and Shevardnadze talked for nearly two hours, with the Soviet minister going even further than he had in Paris describing the dysfunction back home. The republics were increasingly pulling away from Moscow, he said, and he personally favored “total autonomy” for them even while hoping to maintain some semblance of a union. He described a deteriorating economy and public discontent. For Baker, it was an eye-opening conversation. Ross thought the secretary and foreign minister had “crossed a threshold” during the flight, forging a personal connection that went beyond typical diplomatic cordiality.
Once on the ground in Wyoming, the two stayed at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Jackson Hole—Baker’s new ranch was far too rustic and off the grid—and continued their talks in a log cabin built in the 1930s with a breathtaking view of Jackson Lake in the Grand Teton National Park. At one point when the two ministers were having their picture taken, a pair of moose appeared behind them. At night they could hear coyotes howl.
Shevardnadze came bearing two major concessions. In an effort to break the deadlock over nuclear arms control, he said the Soviets would no longer link a new treaty to their concerns over the Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense program that had so divided Reagan and Gorbachev. And he announced that Moscow would dismantle its phased array radar facility in Krasnoyarsk that the United States had long considered a violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or ABM. Those policy shifts cleared the way for Baker and Shevardnadze to sign seven bilateral accords and announce progress on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START.
Before leaving, Baker wanted to show Shevardnadze one of the things he loved about Wyoming by taking him fishing. That proved a bit of a nightmare for his staff. (“Can I tell you how difficult it is to translate ‘waders’ into Russian?” said Karen Groomes, the aide who handled the logistics. “They were like, ‘What do you mean?’ ”) When the two eventually went angling for trout on the Snake River, Shevardnadze, a novice, unsurprisingly failed to catch anything. “We almost had major crisis in US-USSR relations—he’d never fished before—at all!” Baker wrote afterward in a note to Tom Brokaw of NBC News, a fellow outdoorsman. As a parting gift, Baker presented Shevardnadze with black cowboy boots with his initials on them, made specially in Houston.
Baker and his team saw the visit as a turning point; he and “Shevy,” as he now called the foreign minister, were to be partners going forward as much as interlocutors. “That was a real bonding experience with Shevardnadze and Baker,” Robert Gates, who was on the trip, remembered years later. “That relationship in some ways may have been more important than the president’s relationship with Gorbachev.”
Yet at the time, Gates was not sure where it would lead. In the weeks after Wyoming, the deputy national security adviser wrote out a speech giving voice to his doubts. The twenty-nine-page text he drafted for a security conference at Georgetown University concluded that Gorbachev’s economic program “is likely to fall far short” and he forecast the reassertion of “Stalinist controls over the economy.” Gorbachev’s policies, he wrote, “are likely to lead in the foreseeable future to major instability” and, perhaps thinking of the recent events in Tiananmen, Gates predicted “a growing likelihood of the broad use of force at home.” When it came to ongoing Soviet support for regimes in North Korea, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Gates added, Gorbachev’s “new thinking” actually “seems to well serve old goals.”
When Baker saw the draft, he grew incensed. It was Cheney all over again. Scowcroft tried to mollify Baker by having Gates rewrite the speech. But Gates kept the thrust of his remarks, choosing instead to add about a half dozen references to Baker’s past speeches in an effort to make it seem as if the two were on the same page. “I believe his text as revised basically is a complement to your speeches, and provides a useful perspective in the current environment in a way that is helpful to the President,” Scowcroft wrote Baker as he sent the amended text to the State Department. Baker was not assuaged. He certainly was not going to fall for such a transparent Washington ploy. He underlined the phrase “complement to your speeches” in Scowcroft’s cover memo. “No way,” he scribbled next to it. Then he marked up the latest Gates draft with acerbic comments.
The next day, Baker handed Bush a one-page memo outlining his grievances about the speech in eight bullet points. His pique radiated off the page. Gates’s speech “in some places directly contradicts the policy I announced” and “would be a major mistake and create the view that there are two schools of thought in the Administration.” Few had dared publicly to challenge Baker’s lack of foreign policy gravitas or academic experience. But he knew the critique existed anyway. “I don’t understand why the Deputy Director of the NSC—a staff position—feels the need to be visibly on the record in articulating US-Soviet policy,” he wrote, asserting his foreign policy primacy as secretary of state.
Baker succeeded in killing the speech but not without leaving some scars. “You’re breaking a lot of china over here,” Bush told him. Invariably, the conflict found its way into The New York Times when its well-sourced diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman heard about it. With the flap now exposed, Gates sent an apologetic note to the secretary. “It is most unfortunate that our private exchanges on this became public,” he wrote to Baker. “As I think you know, Friedman did not get the story from here—nor will any other journalist.” He tried to repair the damage with flattery. “For what it’s worth, I am a big admirer and booster of yours and would not want to do anything to cause you (or the President, about whom I care very deeply) a problem.”
In reality, Gates was less remorseful than angry at being steamrollered. He had sent the original draft of the speech to the State Department and it had been signed off on by Robert Kimmitt. “I felt I’d played by the rules in getting it cleared and everything and then all of a sudden, I’m told to stuff it,” Gates recalled years later. Still, with the passage of time, Gates was ready to concede that Baker had read the changes in the Soviet Union better than he had. “At the end of the day, Jim was right and I was wrong. But I was very pouty for a day or two.”
The episode was not just a process foul or a doctrinal difference about Soviet policy. It was also, significantly, a marker of Baker’s sensitivity about his relationship with Bush. The Gates speech, he worried, would encourage some to question whether he and the president were on the same page; even asking the question, Baker believed, would be a direct threat to his power. When Baker spoke, senators and foreign leaders had to assume that it was the same thing as Bush speaking. His clout in Washington and around the world stemmed not just from his friendship with Bush, but from the perception of it.
A master leaker himself, Baker hated when others leaked about him. Just days after the Gates flap, the columnist Morton Kondracke wrote in The Washington Times about Baker’s periodic feuding with Dan Quayle, quoting unnamed advisers to the vice president who had called the secretary’s support for Gorbachev’s reform efforts “appeasement.” They had also speculated that the secretary of state was positioning himself to run for president in 1996 after a second Bush term instead of Quayle. Kondracke cited Margaret Tutwiler who quoted Baker saying, “No, I don’t want to be president.” But Baker again chafed at being publicly undercut. Pulling out his black felt pen, he scribbled in the margin of the column: “Mr. P—We have successfully avoided this kind of crap for 9 months! We won’t be able to continue if these people keep it up. Please have it knocked off.” He then sent it to the Oval Office.
Bush understood Baker’s sensitivity as well as anyone. He too bristled under the barrage of criticism of their shared approach. While Quayle and Gates worried about going soft on Gorbachev, Bush was just as peeved by the outsiders who thought he was letting an opportunity slip away.
“I keep hearing the critics saying we’re not doing enough on Eastern Europe,” Bush recorded in his diary. But, he added, “if we mishandle it, get way out looking like an American project, you would invite crackdown.” And that, he said, “could result in bloodshed.”
The date was November 8, 1989.