This time they went fishing for Siberian grayling. A freshwater cousin of the salmon, the grayling was bigger than Wyoming trout, so Eduard Shevardnadze figured he had a fighting chance. He held the rod with determination, his face marked by tension as he studied the water intently. “He did not want to fail again,” his translator remembered. Finally, the foreign minister got a bite and happily reeled in his catch as Baker and their aides expressed delight.
It was the summer of 1990, and Baker had accepted an invitation from Shevardnadze to reciprocate for their Wyoming frontier sojourn. Rather than meet in stolid, forbidding Moscow, Shevardnadze asked Baker to join him in Irkutsk, a Siberian outpost on the shores of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, filled in summertime with melted ice from the mountains.
Baker arrived at 2:20 a.m., recovering from a nasty case of intestinal flu from a prior stop in Singapore. He and Shevardnadze spent most of the next day in meetings and cruising on a hydrofoil around the lake and the Angara River, where they each caught a single fish. In the evening, they gathered in a VIP log cabin built to host Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, before his visit was canceled over the U-2 spy plane incident. In classic Russian fashion, an eight-course meal was then laid on, keeping them up until late at night.
The talks centered on the rapid unwinding of the geopolitical order in Europe, the same issues that had occupied Baker and Shevardnadze over the past year and a half. Only in passing did they even touch on the topic that would consume them for the next half year—the growing instability in the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein, the blustery, mustachioed Arab strongman who ruled Iraq with an iron fist, had been hounding his smaller neighbor in Kuwait for months, coveting its oil fields to add to his own.
Reassured by Middle East allies, including President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and King Hussein of Jordan, that Saddam Hussein would never actually invade Kuwait, Baker felt free to focus on other matters. But around midnight, after returning from his marathon day with Shevardnadze, the traveling secretary of state received a call from Robert Kimmitt back in Washington telling him that Iraq was massing troops on the Kuwait border. The CIA’s deputy director, Richard Kerr, now thought the chances of an invasion were growing. At 7:45 a.m. Siberian time on August 2, Kimmitt called back with grimmer news, speaking elliptically over the phone, given that the secretary was on Soviet territory on a line that was presumably being monitored.
“Do you recall the subject we talked about before?” Kimmitt asked.
“Yes,” Baker said.
“Well, Dick Kerr’s people now think it’s more likely than not the country we spoke about is going to move.”
Baker got the message. After hanging up, he headed to his first meeting of the day with Shevardnadze and repeated what he had just been told.
“It looks bad,” Baker told him. “We hope you can restrain them.”
Shevardnadze, deeply familiar with Iraq, a Soviet ally and arms customer for decades, expressed skepticism that Hussein would be so brazen. “I can’t believe that. What could he possibly gain?”
The minister instructed an aide to check with Soviet intelligence and then reported back to Baker. “Don’t worry,” Shevardnadze said. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
As the meeting progressed, Margaret Tutwiler suddenly appeared and slipped Baker a note. “Gentlemen,” Baker announced after reading it, “the State Department operations center has received information that Iraqi troops crossed the border of Kuwait.” Yet even with this news, neither the American secretary of state nor the Soviet foreign minister fully recognized the opening of a new crisis. Perhaps it was only a feint or a limited incursion that could be reversed. “The Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington does not believe that it is yet a full-scale invasion,” Baker reported.
Shevardnadze, too, remained dubious. Iraqi troops had crossed their neighbors’ borders before and stayed briefly before turning around. Baghdad could hardly want another fight after its disastrous eight-year war with neighboring Iran, which had practically bankrupted Iraq and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths before ending in an inconclusive stalemate barely two years earlier. “I could not imagine that Saddam Hussein would dare to invade Kuwait,” Shevardnadze said later. It seemed “completely irrational.” The two went back to their discussions about conventional forces in Europe.
As the official meetings wrapped up, Baker and Shevardnadze were hoping that Iraq might pull back. Still not entirely absorbing the import of the situation he now had to deal with, Baker went ahead to his next scheduled stop in Mongolia, where his real goal was two days of hunting ibex in the Gobi Desert. Rather than accompanying him, several of his aides, including Dennis Ross and Robert Zoellick, were already scheduled to hitch a ride on Shevardnadze’s plane back to Moscow, which they did, enjoying generous helpings of caviar during the flight while speculating with the Soviets about what Hussein was up to. Shevardnadze was in an expansive mood with his guests, but just as uninformed as the Americans.
Any hopes that Hussein was bluffing had evaporated by the time Baker landed in Mongolia, where he received word that Iraqi troops were heading to Kuwait City, the capital, and gobbling up the entire country. Seizing Kuwait would give Hussein control of 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves; if he continued on to Saudi Arabia, now within easy striking distance, he would become master of nearly half of the petroleum supplies on the planet.
In his hotel room in Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital, Baker was woken in the middle of the night by Tutwiler, who reported that his team in Moscow was suggesting a joint statement with the Soviets condemning the invasion and that Shevardnadze was willing. At 1:45 a.m., Baker called Bush, who was on Air Force One en route to Aspen, Colorado, for a speech and a meeting with Margaret Thatcher. Bush signed off on the idea.
Baker never got to the ibex hunt. Cutting short his Mongolian visit, he decided to fly to Moscow to stand with Shevardnadze for their joint statement, but while he was in the air, the Soviets kept pulling back from the tough language in the draft. Ross told his Soviet counterpart, Sergei Tarasenko, that the statement had to threaten an arms boycott to have any real bite, but Iraq had been a Soviet client state for years and Russian generals were pushing back. Shevardnadze worried about aggravating Hussein at a time when eight thousand Soviet citizens were still in Iraq and potentially at risk. Ross threatened to tell Baker to turn his plane around and not come to Moscow if the statement was toothless.
What Baker’s team guessed but did not fully know was that Shevardnadze was fighting a rearguard battle inside his own government. “For several hours, I had been trying to overcome strong resistance,” Shevardnadze acknowledged later. When Baker landed at Vnukovo-2, the VIP airport outside Moscow, Ross came on board his plane to explain the impasse. Shevardnadze then spirited Baker into an airport building and upstairs to a spartan second-floor conference room. Baker quickly detected that Shevardnadze needed to hear that the joint statement was not an automatic green light for an American war. “I gave him the assurance that it was not just an excuse to create a U.S. military presence,” Baker said.
After ninety minutes, Baker closed the deal and Shevardnadze agreed to the stronger language, including an arms embargo. “It was one of the most difficult decisions I had ever had to make,” Shevardnadze said. Baker learned afterward that the Soviet foreign minister acted without Gorbachev’s explicit permission.
Looking tired after a long flight across the Eurasian continent, Baker read the statement to reporters, denouncing the “brutal and illegal invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi military forces.” With Shevardnadze at his side, Baker said: “Today, we take the unusual step of jointly calling upon the rest of the international community to join with us in an international cutoff of all arms supplies to Iraq.”
The collaboration was a singular moment in Russian-American relations. After forty-five years of jockeying for control of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union were suddenly joining together to enforce common standards of international conduct. The message seemed clear: The days of tyrants like Hussein playing one superpower off the other were coming to an end. If the pending reunification of Germany were not enough indication that the world had changed, the scene of American and Soviet officials standing side by side surely was. As Baker wrote later, “The Cold War breathed its last at an airport terminal on the outskirts of Moscow.”
AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, Baker’s team was already calling it “the first post–Cold War crisis.” The confrontation in the Persian Gulf would determine the rules of the road for a new age. Bush would soon be speaking of a New World Order, but no one knew yet just what kind of order there would be. And could the United States successfully rally the world to enforce it?
There were plenty of reasons why the Iraqi invasion posed a threat beyond the immediate crisis. Here was a regional power exercising force to redraw national boundaries, oppress a weaker neighbor, violate the human rights of its people, seize control of oil resources, and threaten another even more critical neighbor. But beyond the national and international interests at stake, Bush was simply offended. If the United States was going to be the world’s policeman, then Hussein was one street thug who would have to be put in his place.
That Iraq would suddenly become the primary focus of the Bush presidency only underscored how much Baker and his team had missed the warning signs. “We didn’t pay any attention to Iraq,” Baker admitted later. Absorbed by the negotiations over Germany and managing the jaw-dropping developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, he had left the Middle East to others to monitor. The professionals at the State Department had done so, observing the run-up to the invasion, but uncertain what to make of it or how hard to push. In the prelude to war, Baker’s office had sent cables to the American embassy in Baghdad, and April Glaspie, the ambassador, had forwarded the messages to Hussein.
On July 24, a cable in Baker’s name outlined administration policy:
While we take no position on the border delineation issue raised by Iraq with respect to Kuwait, or on other bilateral disputes, Iraqi statements suggest an intention to resolve outstanding disagreements by the use of force, an approach which is contrary to U.N. charter principles. The implications of having oil production and pricing policy in the gulf determined and enforced by Iraqi guns are disturbing.
Without warning, Hussein summoned Glaspie the next day. Fluent in Arabic, she went to see Hussein alone without a translator or aide. In her rush, Glaspie had no time to seek additional guidance from Washington, so she stuck to the instructions she had already received. She told Hussein that any dispute should be settled by peaceful means, even as she noted that “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” She added: “James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” At one point, Hussein was interrupted and left to take a telephone call. When he returned, he told Glaspie that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had offered to broker talks with the Kuwaitis and he had agreed. “This is good news,” Glaspie said. “Congratulations.”
Glaspie’s message of neutrality in a border dispute was certainly not meant as an endorsement of Iraq’s claims against Kuwait, but simply a statement of long-standing American policy that Washington would not meddle in the specifics. Still, while Baker was focused elsewhere, some administration officials like Dennis Ross and Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, worried that Glaspie’s tone was not strong enough. They decided to send a letter in Bush’s name to Hussein repeating that “differences are best resolved by peaceful means and not by threats.”
After the invasion, critics complained that the administration had not done more to stop it from happening, pointing to Glaspie’s meeting with Hussein as Exhibit A. Bush, for one, defended Glaspie. “She was lied to by him,” he wrote after leaving office, “and she clearly spelled out that we could not condone settlement of disputes by other than peaceful means. It is a total misreading of this conversation to conclude that we were giving Saddam a green light to seize his neighbor.”
But Baker seemed more interested in distancing himself. Asked about the episode on NBC’s Meet the Press a few weeks after the invasion, he all but disavowed any knowledge of the instructions to Glaspie. “What you want me to do is say that those instructions were sent specifically by me on my specific orders,” he said. “I’m not going to deny what the policy was, but I’m going to say to you that there are probably 312,000 or so cables that go out under my name as secretary of state.” His defense did not impress. In a harsh column headlined “James A. Baker, Please Resign,” Michael Kinsley wrote in The Washington Post that “Washington’s greatest self-positioner” should step down as an act of accountability. “But taking responsibility isn’t Jim Baker’s style,” Kinsley wrote. “He has distanced himself from Glaspie. He also has mounted a damage-control campaign, both contemptible and hilarious, through his favorite medium of self-aggrandizing leaks to the press.”
Years after leaving office, Baker chose to deflect blame for deflecting blame. “We were being accused of hanging April Glaspie out to dry and we probably should have,” he told his ghostwriter one day while working on his memoir. “What I was really doing there, for which I got a lot of grief, was trying to protect her, because she didn’t receive any instructions.” He added that he did not want to say that on Meet the Press “and put another nail into her coffin, if you will. So I just kissed it away by saying, ‘Well, there are a lot of cables that went out under my name.’ ” In fact there was no cable, he repeated. “So if I’d been thoroughly honest about it I would have been nailing April Glaspie and I was trying not to.”
What Baker meant was that Glaspie had no time to obtain specific instructions after Hussein summoned her. But that was a bit disingenuous; she was, in fact, operating on instructions that she had received in Baker’s name, just a day earlier. Later in retirement, long after the heat of the moment had passed, Baker was less sensitive about the matter and more willing to exonerate Glaspie. “She didn’t do anything wrong in my opinion,” he said. “It all happened very quickly. He hauled her in and she was just parroting what our policy” had been to that point. Did she get a raw deal? “I thought she did. She was blamed for something. She was just articulating what our standard policy was.”
Glaspie, for her part, seemed less forgiving of Baker. Asked in an interview with an Arab news outlet nearly eighteen years later what she thought about the “blame from Baker,” she pointedly did not say what she thought of the secretary of state, offering praise instead for Bush. The idea that she had given Hussein a green light, she added, “was invented by Tariq Aziz,” the Iraqi foreign minister. “Obviously I did not give Saddam any such idea that we would not interfere in a border dispute,” she said. “What I did tell him was he must not interfere in Kuwait or anywhere else.”
She acknowledged that he might not have taken her message seriously enough. “I am quite happy to take the blame,” she said. “Perhaps I was not able to make Saddam believe that we would do what we said we would do, but in all honesty, I don’t think anybody in the world could have persuaded him.” For his part, Aziz later said he did not take her message as a green light. “She didn’t tell us in the sense that we concluded that the Americans will not retaliate,” he said.
Then again, even the Americans had no idea whether they would or not. Baker believed in prior preparation, but there was no plan for this. Going to war with Iraq was not then, nor had it ever been, on the agenda.
AT THE TIME, in fact, both Bush and Baker were extremely defensive. Hussein’s swift takeover of Kuwait seemed another catastrophe at a moment when the administration was struggling with its worst political crisis yet. Indeed, while Baker was preoccupied with the unraveling of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the president had spent the summer in an escalating Republican feud that Baker had tried to warn him about.
In December 1988, just a month after the election and weeks before Bush would move into the White House, Baker had ridden up Massachusetts Avenue to the vice presidential residence for a meeting of the new domestic policy team, including Dan Quayle, John Sununu, Nick Brady, and Bob Teeter. Dick Darman, taking over as budget director, was scheduled to go over the nation’s increasingly precarious finances.
Baker was there mainly in his capacity as Bush’s friend and adviser. He suspected that some of the people in the room, including Brady and Teeter, had plans to talk Bush into breaking his read-my-lips vow against new taxes. Even though Darman had harbored deep doubts about the pledge, Baker understood that now that it was made, it would be politically self-destructive to renounce it right out of the gate.
“Watch these guys,” he whispered to Quayle. “They’re going to try to get him to raise taxes.”
Once the discussion began, Teeter turned to Bush. “In the end, you will have no choice,” he said. “You will have to raise taxes.”
Baker jumped in, not deferring even though it was no longer his area of responsibility. “We don’t need to do that this year,” he said.
His response was telling. Baker was not objecting on philosophical grounds. The architect of Reagan’s 1982 tax increase was hardly allergic to raising levies if fiscally necessary and politically palatable. Instead, he was protesting the poor timing and the obvious damage to Bush’s credibility if he were seen as reversing his most memorable campaign promise so quickly after taking office. But by the summer of 1990, as Baker was jetting around the world negotiating the new boundaries of Europe, the president agreed during budget negotiations with Democrats to consider a tax hike along with spending cuts to bring down the deficit. Sununu tried to cover for the broken campaign promise by arguing that they would only consider tax revenue increases, as opposed to tax rate increases, which in theory could mean additional money for the treasury generated by economic growth or better enforcement of the existing tax code.
Even Baker, the master of the wordsmithing sleight-of-hand, did not think this would convince the country. Seeing Darman in the White House parking lot after the creative explanation of new taxes, Baker stuck his head in his old deputy’s car.
“Too cute by half, Dick,” he said. Then he added, “You’ve bought yourself about ten days.”
As Darman later noted, Baker’s “prediction was closer to correct than the president’s.”
By the late summer, the backlash to the shift on taxes was brutal. Bush’s approval ratings were plummeting and his own party leaders were close to open rebellion. When headlines on August 2, the day of the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, referenced a “crisis” engulfing the Bush presidency, it had nothing to do with the Middle East. That fall, after days of closed-door talks at Andrews Air Force Base by negotiators for both parties, Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget agreement to bring down the deficit by $500 billion over five years, a deal that included higher taxes on gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, and luxury items such as yachts. “He cut the deal because he was getting ready to go to war with Saddam,” Dan Quayle said later. “He had to get a deal. He just felt very uncomfortable not having a budget.” But the belligerent House Republican whip Newt Gingrich, after initially signing on, bolted and led the conservative opposition, infuriating Bush and Darman, who saw it as treachery. “He hated Newt after what he saw as the betrayal,” recalled Jonathan Darman, the budget director’s son. The agreement passed narrowly, with most Republicans abandoning their president.
In the years to come, the agreement would make a considerable difference in reining in the budget deficit, leading to better economic times and contributing to a balanced budget during the presidency of Bush’s successor. In the annals of history, it would come to be seen as a mark of Bush’s political courage. But at the time, in Baker’s suite on the seventh floor of the State Department, it was viewed as a political disaster. “We just saw the train wreck coming,” Janet Mullins recalled. “Once it was done, I remember sitting in the inner offices with Baker and just going, ‘Fuck, we are dead, this is unexplainable.’ ”
For Baker, it was another reminder of why he was glad to be secretary of state.
BAKER DID NOT WANT to go to war. Arriving back from Moscow, Baker, by nature cautious, risk-averse, and always wary of pulling the United States into a foreign quagmire, made it to Camp David that August weekend in time to discuss with Bush and his national security team how to respond. Bush had already ordered American warships to head to the Persian Gulf while freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti money in the United States. He was particularly worried that Iraq would now strike Saudi Arabia.
William Webster, the CIA director, reported that Iraq had 100,000 troops in Kuwait and some of them were massing near the Saudi border. General Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the United States Central Command and a burly, brusque officer straight from central casting, outlined Operations Plan 90-1002 to defend Saudi Arabia, but said it would take seventeen weeks to deploy 250,000 American troops. If they decided to eject Iraq from Kuwait, that would require a far larger force and as much as eight to twelve months to assemble.
At this point, the main goal of what would be called Operation Desert Shield was to guard the Saudi oil fields. No one was ready to commit to reversing the occupation of Kuwait with military force. No one, that is, except for Bush. When he returned from Camp David aboard Marine One, the president landed on the South Lawn to find reporters waiting for him.
“This will not stand,” Bush told them, jabbing his finger with emphasis, “this aggression against Kuwait.”
Colin Powell, the Joint Chiefs chairman, watching on television at home, was startled. Will not stand? That was far more definitive than anything the administration had decided to do. In that moment, Powell felt that Bush had effectively declared war on Iraq. Brent Scowcroft, watching with Dan Quayle in the Cabinet Room of the White House, was also surprised and bothered.
“What’s the matter, Brent?” Quayle asked.
“That was a little stronger than I thought,” he said.
Bush came in. “How’d I do?” he asked.
“Well,” Scowcroft answered, “I could have done without that line.”
Baker too realized that Bush had set a new policy with his tough-guy sentence and worried about what it would mean. While later he would call it “arguably the most famous—and courageous—line of his presidency,” at the time Baker feared that Bush was committing himself to more than the United States was ready to handle.
When Powell came to see Baker soon after Bush’s remarks, he was in a similar frame of mind. Powell respected Baker from their time in the Reagan administration, deeming him “one smart son of a bitch,” and the two shared a wariness about the prospect of a major military clash. Iraq had the world’s fourth-largest army and much more recent combat experience than America’s forces. Moreover, Iraq had used chemical weapons during the Iran war, demonstrating a willingness to violate the international rules of war that would automatically raise the stakes for American troops sent to fight in the desert. Powell wanted to talk about containment, an idea that Baker too was entertaining. For the nation’s chief diplomat, this was a chance to prove that diplomacy could resolve a crisis.
Baker did not confine his reservations about the emerging plan to Powell. He was blunt with the president too, even when he saw where Bush was inexorably headed. He had run presidential campaigns for the last four election cycles and he did not want Bush to end up as a one-term president. “I know you’re aware of the fact that this has all the ingredients that brought down three of the last five presidents—a hostage crisis, body bags and a full-fledged economic recession caused by forty-dollar oil,” he told Bush at one point. Bush got the message. “Jim Baker is worried that we will get bogged down in another Vietnam,” he later recorded in his diary, “and lose the support of the people and have the Bush presidency destroyed.”
But Bush seemed determined. He was going to make it clear to Hussein that Saudi Arabia would receive American protection. He had already given that message to the kingdom’s colorful, wired ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. A onetime fighter pilot who spoke colloquial English and loved the Dallas Cowboys, Bandar now embedded himself inside Bush’s team, becoming what one historian later called “a de facto member of the National Security Council.” The Saudis viewed the Americans skeptically, recalling that Jimmy Carter once sent a squadron of F-15s when the kingdom felt threatened by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, only for it to be revealed that the fighter jets were unarmed. They also considered Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of the Marines from Beirut in 1983 to have been a sign of America’s irresolve. But Bush assured Bandar personally of his commitment to defending the kingdom. By August 7, he decided to send thousands of American soldiers, the biggest gamble of his presidency.
Was America headed toward a full-blown war? Despite Baker’s efforts, it sure seemed that way later in August when an Iraqi ship, the Khanaqin, was spotted heading to Yemen in violation of United Nations sanctions imposed to cut off Hussein’s oil revenue after the invasion. After an American warship fired warning shots, Hussein’s government said there would be “grave consequences” if the ship were fired upon again. Baker was at his ranch in Wyoming while Bush was in Kennebunkport as a series of phone calls ensued to figure out what to do. From London, Margaret Thatcher urged Bush to intercept the ship and sink it if necessary. Cheney agreed, as did Scowcroft. “Everybody said you’ve got to take that ship out or you’re going to be seen to be a wimp,” Baker recalled.
But Baker had been talking with Eduard Shevardnadze, trying to get the Soviets to sign on to a new United Nations resolution threatening force to enforce the blockade. From Moscow, Shevardnadze pleaded with Baker not to take action against the ship at least for a few days. Otherwise, he feared, Gorbachev might find it politically impossible to go along with the proposed resolution. “We want one fact at our disposal to show Iraq is not complying,” Shevardnadze told Baker by phone. From Wyoming, testing the limits of the State Department communications team that had set up a satellite on a rock outside the front porch of his off-the-grid ranch house, Baker pushed Bush strongly to hold off.
Others disagreed, including Thatcher. She did not think much of Baker. She saw him as an operator, someone who cared only about the politics of a situation. She was already at odds with him over German reunification and she blamed him for what she saw as an increasing American tilt away from its old friend Britain. “Jim Baker’s many abilities lay in the area of ‘fixing,’ ” she said. “He had a mixed record of this.” She considered the Plaza and Louvre Accords on currency rates to be disastrous decisions “with highly deleterious effects,” as she put it. “Now at the State Department, Jim Baker and his team brought a similar, allegedly ‘pragmatic’ problem-solving approach to bear on U.S. foreign policy.”
But once again, Baker convinced Bush to follow his advice. Bush decided to hold off firing on the ship so as not to chance disrupting the collaboration with Moscow. He called Thatcher to let her know.
“Well, all right, George,” she replied archly, “but this is no time to go wobbly.”
The Khanaqin made it to port but Hussein never challenged the blockade again and, more important, the Soviets voted for the United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force to stop ships violating the cordon, just as Baker had hoped. For Baker, this was “the crunch point” of the crisis. If he had any chance of resolving it without American kids being sent into combat, he would have to preserve the unique Soviet-American alliance he was forging.
But Bush had already staked his credibility and that of the country on the confrontation with Iraq. He began huddling regularly with what became known as the Gang of Eight—Bush, Baker, Cheney, Powell, Scowcroft, Dan Quayle, John Sununu, and Robert Gates—debating diplomatic and economic options even as more troops kept flooding to the region and the likelihood of military action seemed to grow.
On a cold, rainy fall day during one of the periodic meetings of the Gang of Eight at Camp David, Baker shared a golf cart with a pensive Quayle.
“Jim, what do you really think about it?” Quayle asked.
“I don’t know,” Baker asked. “It’s a big gamble.”
Quayle looked at Baker, his mind on the next election. “Would you put your presidency on the line for this?” he asked Baker.
“Neither one of us,” Quayle said later, “had an answer to that.”
AS WAS SO OFTEN the case, the crisis abroad came amid another crisis at home. This time it was Baker’s daughter, Elizabeth Winston, who in the fall of 1990 was living at the Menninger Clinic, the leading specialty psychiatric hospital in Houston, trying to recover from post-traumatic stress.
Twenty-nine years old, Winston had endured a bizarre series of episodes for years that she could never fully explain. During a college debate, she passed out several minutes into the program for no apparent reason. In law school at the University of Texas at Austin, she blanked out onstage when she got up to read part of a paper, stood there for a few minutes without uttering a word, then simply said thank you very much and walked off. She felt extreme sensitivity to light and sound and found herself regularly “self-medicating” with alcohol and partying.
Susan Baker noticed a troubling disconnect. Winston would talk with her mother about coming up to Washington to visit and then a week later, when asked if she had made arrangements, not remember the original conversation. During a law school exam, Winston heard the bell ring ending the test time and discovered she had not even opened her blue book. “It was at that point I realized something weird was going on,” she said. “I went to a friend’s house and said, ‘I need some help.’ ” Winston visited a psychoanalyst in Houston and he determined that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress stemming from her chaotic childhood with her alcoholic father, Jimbo Winston. The psychoanalyst recommended she check in to the Menninger Clinic, where she stayed for six months, essentially unlearning all of the defense mechanisms she had created as a child to protect herself. “For the first time in my life, I really had a sense of hope,” she said.
Baker did not visit during those six months, nor did anyone from the family. The arrival of the secretary of state would have invariably involved an entourage and ruined any sense of anonymity that Winston had there. But Baker checked in even as he jetted from capital to capital. “He was as supportive as he could be,” she said later. “All I felt from him in that situation was unconditional support.”
Most of Baker’s staff had little idea any of this was going on. Baker did not exactly confide his personal problems in them, nor did he invite aides to confide theirs in him. He could be gregarious and charming, intuitive about other people and their needs in the course of a negotiation, but utterly indifferent to the personal lives of the people he worked with the most. “Jim really is an enigma to anybody who isn’t his family,” said Colin Powell, who spent lots of time with Baker in the White House Situation Room. In reality, this was true even to some who were in his family. “Look at Baker’s relationship with his sons—this is not Mr. Warm and Fuzzy,” Robert Zoellick would later point out.
Zoellick was arguably Baker’s most important adviser at the State Department and architect of his signature diplomatic ventures. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he was the fastidious “minister without portfolio” who worked so hard he carried his own cheese, crackers, and raisins on the road because there was never enough time for room service. Yet not even he was invited to see the secretary outside of their all-consuming work hours. “I don’t think until later he even knew what my home state was; he didn’t meet my wife,” Zoellick said. “It was all business.” Relations even with his closest advisers were formal. “He never said to me, ‘Call me Jim,’ ” Zoellick said. “So I just refer to him as ‘Secretary Baker.’ ” Sometimes people go to friends at work for reassurance, Zoellick noted. “You don’t go to Baker for that. You’ll get a cold, calculating view,” he said. “If you want emotional support, you have a wife or a dog.”
Baker’s relationship with Susan had evolved since the early days of the Reagan administration when she felt abandoned at home to deal with a tumultuous family life. With all of the children other than Mary-Bonner now grown, Susan often accompanied Baker on his trips around the world. She loved poring through his briefing books and hearing his end of conversations and then talking about them afterward. She sometimes picked up intelligence from her separate meetings with spouses of other ministers.
But when Susan was not around, Baker remained inside his armor. Only occasionally did he let his guard down. During a flight back to Washington from a meeting at Bush’s home in Kennebunkport that fall, Baker seemed in an unusually contemplative mood. He turned to Richard Haass, an NSC aide traveling with him, and asked how old he was.
“Thirty-nine,” Haass said.
“A good age,” Baker mused. “I remember where I was twenty years ago. It was a rough time. My four children had just lost their mother. I didn’t know if I could make it. Men just aren’t equipped to provide kids what it is they need.”
The conversation turned back to Iraq for a few minutes, then Haass brought up a story in that day’s newspaper mentioning that Baker had once been considered for baseball commissioner.
Baker confirmed that was true.
Did he regret not taking it?
No, he said, only George Will, the baseball-loving columnist, ever told him that he had made the wrong choice.
“I’ve been secretary of the treasury and now secretary of state,” Baker said. “That’s not bad.”
AFTER A SWING THROUGH the Middle East building solidarity against Iraq among its Arab neighbors, Baker flew to Helsinki to join Bush for a hurriedly arranged summit with Gorbachev on September 9 to coordinate the response to Saddam Hussein’s aggression. The joint statement a month earlier would mean nothing if Moscow now went its own way.
On the plane ride, Baker had Dennis Ross draft a new joint statement, one with more teeth than the last one, to demonstrate that the two superpowers remained united in the face of Hussein’s intransigence. While Bush met privately with Gorbachev, Baker sat down with Shevardnadze. Baker quickly gleaned that the Soviets were planning to hold their cooperation in the emerging coalition hostage to their long-standing desire for an international peace conference to work on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Having just come from the region, Baker knew that would infuriate the Saudis and Egyptians because it would, in effect, validate Hussein’s actions and make him a hero on the Arab street for forcing the world to confront Israel.
“Eduard, that would be a disaster,” Baker protested. “It would look like Saddam had delivered, that he would have gotten something nobody else could have.”
Shevardnadze finally acquiesced. “Okay,” he said, “but let’s talk about peace in some way.”
Baker showed him the draft statement that Ross had written and Shevardnadze seemed to accept it. But when Baker then met with Bush, it was clear that Gorbachev had pushed the president even harder on the proposed Middle East peace conference—and that Bush seemed inclined to go along.
Ross, operating on little sleep, interrupted the president with a heated objection, “impassioned almost to the point of intemperance,” as Baker put it later.
“You can’t do that,” Ross told Bush. “This will absolutely undercut what we’re trying to do. We’ll put the moderate Arabs in a position where Saddam is delivering for the Palestinians and they’re not. If we create linkage, he can claim victory. And if he does that, we will have undermined our friends in the area and we are going to face a Middle East that is far more dangerous than we’ve ever seen.”
Bush was startled at the outburst and appeared ready to get angry, but Baker intervened to save Ross. “You are wrong on this and Dennis is right,” Baker told his old friend, with a directness that few others would dare employ to a president’s face. Baker pointed out that they already had a draft that Shevardnadze had agreed to and he echoed Ross in saying that a statement like the one Gorbachev wanted “would be a big victory” for Hussein.
“Well, I am afraid we’re going to find we have to do this,” Bush said. “We need a joint statement and Gorbachev is going to want that in there.”
“We’ve already got a draft and it’s not even mentioned,” Baker said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I’ve got to worry about it,” Bush shot back sharply. “I put all those kids out there. Nobody else did it. I did it. And I’ve got to take every step to be sure that I don’t put their lives at risk needlessly. If I can get them out of there without fighting, I’ll do it.”
The room went quiet. There laid out for all to hear was a president’s anguish at the prospect of war. His assembled advisers did not know what to say.
Finally, John Sununu broke the silence. “Well, maybe we can put a reference to an international conference in there,” he said.
Baker snapped. “Get off of it, John,” he said.
A weary Bush gave in. “Look, Jimmy,” he said, “if you can get the statement without it, fine.”
The testy back-and-forth in Helsinki captured the dynamics of the Baker-Bush relationship as this latest crisis hit. Baker had long since stopped thinking of himself as Bush’s little brother and, while respectful of the president, did not feel the need to be overly deferential. After all, Baker was the one on those long flights crisscrossing the world and he was the one who had a better feel for what the allies could accept and what they could not. Bush, under the pressure of ordering hundreds of thousands of troops to the Middle East for a possible war, was less attuned to the nuances of the coalition that his secretary of state was assembling and more eager to get along with his interlocutor, in this case Gorbachev. But when pressed, Bush was willing to accept Baker’s guidance.
Indeed, when the two sat down with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, Bush all but turned over the discussion of the draft statement to Baker. Aides on the two sides had finessed the issue by including vague language about working together after the Iraq crisis was settled “to resolve all remaining conflicts in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.” Sitting in the meeting, Gorbachev accepted it but had some thoughts about the wording.
Bush called on Baker to address the changes. “Why don’t you just do it with Jimmy?” the president told Gorbachev.
Empowered, Baker settled on language with Gorbachev. But before the meeting was over, Ross quietly informed Baker that the proposed Mideast peace conference was no longer their only problem. Soviet hard-liners had prepared another draft of the statement that dropped the demand for an unconditional withdrawal by Hussein and watered down the threat of additional steps if he did not comply.
Baker abruptly interrupted the ongoing meeting to expose the end run. “Mr. President, isn’t this what you have agreed to?” Baker asked Gorbachev, reading the draft they had already worked out.
“Da,” Gorbachev confirmed.
That finally ended the matter. But as they left Helsinki, Bush and Baker made a private commitment to Gorbachev that, although they would not say so in the public statement, they would work on an Arab-Israeli peace conference after Kuwait was liberated. It was the same type of maneuver that Baker had employed many times on Capitol Hill, a private concession that appears nowhere in the public record. It worked internationally too. And for now, the tactic was enough to keep Gorbachev on the team.
As he flew back to Washington, Bush called Baker from Air Force One. Thank you, he told his secretary of state, for saving him from making a mistake.
BAKER’S OWN MISTAKE came a few weeks later. As American troops continued to pour into the region, the Bush administration was still trying to convince the public why a conflict halfway around the world between two Arab states, neither of them democracies, mattered to them.
During a meeting with Canada’s foreign minister in Bermuda, the famously on-message Baker slipped and, rather than repeating the high-minded case that he and Bush had been articulating, reduced the matter to far cruder terms. “To bring it down to the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs,” Baker said. “If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s jobs. Because an economic recession worldwide, caused by the control of one nation, one dictator, if you will, of the West’s economic lifeline will result in the loss of jobs on the part of American citizens.”
The explanation, which came to be known as Baker’s “jobs, jobs, jobs” news conference, rattled the White House. While he meant that the energy-rich Middle East held the key to the world economy and therefore its fate mattered to the United States, the way he put it came across as an obnoxious combination of greed and crass domestic politics. Brent Scowcroft groaned. “I knew what he was trying to say,” Scowcroft said, “but the way he put it sounded like the whole dispute was simply commercialism.”
Baker was already in hot water in the West Wing because of a Thomas Friedman article on the front page of The New York Times a few days earlier portraying the secretary of state as the mature hand restraining a president too eager for war, “a brake on any immediate impulse to use military force.” While making the point that their differences were a matter of degree rather than outright disagreement, Friedman astutely identified Baker’s approach to the crisis. “Mr. Baker is a calculating pragmatist, who assesses any particular foreign-policy issue based on a complex equation of what he feels is the national interest, what seems possible, what will serve Mr. Bush’s interests, what can be sold to the public, how it will be received on Capitol Hill and finally, how it will affect James Baker.” As far as some of Baker’s White House colleagues were concerned, Friedman’s factors were right, although maybe not always in that order.
The Friedman article and the “jobs, jobs, jobs” comment focused more attention on Baker than he wanted amid the ongoing debate over what to do about Iraq. Mary McGrory, the liberal columnist for The Washington Post, who was both despised and avidly read by the president, made matters worse, referring to Baker a couple days after the ill-fated news conference as “the ablest of the president’s men” and “the most seductive secretary of state since Henry A. Kissinger.” She portrayed him as a formidable spinner of reporters on his official plane who until now had managed to elude responsibility for setbacks with the same Teflon that coated his previous boss. “Some scribes have rudely noted that Baker ducks the blame for dirty campaigns or bad policy—as in the case of the Iraq aggression, which some 500,000 Americans eventually may be committed to stopping,” she wrote. “But Baker’s job security is the best in the city.”
On that, she was right. Bush needed Baker and, while irritated, was hardly about to push him away. Baker was flying around the world creating a coalition against Iraq and soliciting financial contributions from other nations so that the United States would not bear the entire cost of military operations. His “tin cup trip” would ultimately bring in $53.7 billion from other nations to offset costs of $61.1 billion. At one point, administration officials worried that Baker would be too successful and the United States would actually make a profit from the war.
While Washington gossiped over his role in the administration’s war council, Baker was racing through Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to line up support for another United Nations resolution, this time to enforce with military means the previous call on Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. In effect, the resolution would pave the way for Operation Desert Shield to become Operation Desert Storm if Bush opted to forcibly eject Iraq from Kuwait. It was important that Baker secure votes and pass the resolution by the end of November since the United States occupied the rotating presidency of the Security Council that month—and taking over next would be Yemen, an ally of Iraq.
In London, Margaret Thatcher argued that such a resolution was unnecessary and would set a bad precedent by implying that United Nations member states could not take action on their own moral authority, but Baker maintained that he and Bush needed international approval to convince the American public. The key votes would be the Soviet Union and China, both of which had veto power on the Security Council.
Baker met Qian Qichen, the Chinese foreign minister, during a stop in Cairo and pressed for a yes vote, or failing that at least an abstention. Still subject to international isolation following the Tiananmen Square massacre, China more than anything wanted out of the penalty box. Baker offered a way: if Beijing voted for the resolution, he would invite Qian to Washington for a meeting with Bush, an encounter that would be valuable for the Chinese. If Beijing abstained, Qian could come to Washington for a meeting with Baker. The Chinese promised to think about it.
When he reached Moscow, however, Baker found himself blindsided by an announcement back in Washington that the president had decided to double American forces in the Persian Gulf. Baker was livid, fearing that his careful statecraft was being upstaged by Pentagon deployment schedules and that the Soviets would think his trip to consult with them was a sham since the decision to go to war had clearly already been made. Baker lashed out at Richard Haass, who was on the secretary’s plane as a liaison to the White House.
“Why the hell do I have an NSC guy here with me if the White House is going to do things that undermine my trip?” Baker barked.
Haass had also been blindsided by the news, but he was a convenient target for Baker’s ire. “He nearly threw me off the plane at 36,000 feet,” Haass recalled later. “He dropped about twenty-six F-bombs in the course of about one minute.”
Baker sat down with Shevardnadze the next day. Once again, the friendship they had developed would prove crucial to the outcome. While aggravated by Hussein, the Soviets had always been categorically opposed to the United Nations authorizing military action against one of its members, particularly one that had been a Moscow client state for so long. When Baker handed Shevardnadze a draft resolution with the phrase “use of force” in it, the foreign minister said it would never be acceptable.
Baker’s years of experience at finding ways around political and diplomatic roadblocks now kicked in. What about some sort of euphemism for force? Would that make it easier to swallow? He pulled out a pen and tried one, two, three, four, five possible alternatives before settling on “all necessary means.” That was vague enough that the Soviets could tell their anti-American hard-liners that it could include sanctions or other measures, while Baker, sitting in the chair as president of the United Nations Security Council, could use his prerogative after the vote to make clear for the record that the United States interpreted the phrase to include force. Shevardnadze insisted the resolution include a six-week delay before becoming operative to allow a final attempt at diplomacy. Baker agreed.
Now Baker needed to get Gorbachev on board. Shevardnadze got on the telephone with Gorbachev and pressed him to agree, then raced out to his dacha outside Moscow to lobby further before Baker could get there. “Gorbachev is close but not there yet,” Baker cabled back to Washington. By the time Baker arrived at the dacha, Gorbachev was open to the “all necessary means” language.
“The first thing we must do is stick together,” he told Baker. “If we let a thug like this get away with what he’s done, then there will be no hope for the kind of new international reality that we would like to see.”
But they were not fooling themselves about what was coming. “Mr. Secretary, you know you can’t back off once you start down the road,” Shevardnadze told Baker. “You will have to implement the resolution” if Iraq did not comply.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Baker said.
TO SIGNAL the day’s importance, Baker flew to New York to personally take the American seat at the Security Council on November 29. By this point, he had finished an extraordinary diplomatic blitz, racing 100,000 miles around the world in ten weeks on the old Boeing 707 and holding more than two hundred meetings with heads of state and foreign ministers to forge a coalition against Iraq. He had coaxed and wheedled and bluffed and intimidated, the tactic depending on the target, then took a Halcion for a few hours of sleep and prepared to do it all over again. He was not above lubricating where necessary—debt forgiveness for Egypt, textile trade concessions for Turkey. This was just the sort of thing Baker knew how to do. He had signed up wavering convention delegates for Gerald Ford in 1976. He had found a way to get tax reform through Congress. A deal was a deal and trading was part of it. Rounding up votes for war was not, in the end, all that different.
As Baker opened the debate over the “all necessary means” resolution, he drew a parallel to the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. This time, he was the one throwing around the Munich references. “History now has given us another chance,” Baker said. “With the Cold War behind us, we now have the chance to build a world which was envisioned by this organization, by the founders of the United Nations.” He added: “We must not let the United Nations go the way of the League of Nations.”
United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 set a deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and, while the measure did not overtly threaten military force if Iraq refused, Baker made clear that was how the phrase “all necessary means” would be interpreted. “If Iraq does not reverse its course peacefully,” he said, “then other necessary measures, including the use of force, should be authorized.”
Then he sat back and listened to his fellow foreign ministers make their speeches. The outcome was not in doubt—Baker had seen to that—but he found it hard sitting through the endless orations. Countries had been warned, however; you were either with Baker or against him on this one and if you were against him, he had no intention of letting it slide. When Yemen’s ambassador sternly rebuked the United States and declared that he would vote against the resolution, Baker passed a note to Robert Kimmitt suggesting that he would cut off American aid to Yemen in retaliation. “Yemen’s perm. rep. just enjoyed about $200 to $250 million worth of applause for that speech,” Baker wrote, adding that he would take it up with a couple of aides: “I want to talk to Kelly and Reggie about our aid program to Yemen.” It was not an idle threat; Baker later canceled all military cooperation, nonhumanitarian aid, and even the Peace Corps program in Yemen, while slashing development assistance nearly to zero. “Baker would have happily cut off the entire relationship,” said David Mack, a deputy assistant secretary of state for the region. “Together with a few other administration officials, I managed, through a little bit of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare, to keep a very shaky, very slim relationship with Yemen.”
Speaking for China, Qian Qichen warned against “hasty actions” that could lead to war. Baker scribbled down another observation, this one just for himself. “China can’t go for military means—except in case of traffic jams—like the one in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989,” he wrote derisively.
But none of that changed the final result. At 5:32 p.m., the council approved the resolution 12 to 2 with one abstention. Cuba joined Yemen in voting no, while China abstained, the first time it had failed to support a measure against Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait. Still, so long as China did not use its veto to block the action, it did not matter. “An historic moment,” Kimmitt wrote Baker. “Congratulations!”
Baker savored the victory. He had accomplished what his doubters said he could not, forging an unlikely consensus in the most fractious international forum in the world. Not since the Korean War had the United Nations taken such a momentous step to impose its will on a dangerous rogue state.
In a holding room at the United Nations, Baker received a call from Bush offering congratulations. But the president was already thinking ahead.
“I want to talk to you about an idea I have,” he told Baker.
BAKER MET with Bush and Scowcroft in the Oval Office the next day. The president wanted to make a dramatic, last-minute gesture of peace before going to war. The best way to do that was to publicly propose sending Baker to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein sometime between December 15 and January 15 while the president would agree to receive Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, at the White House.
Scowcroft was dubious, but Baker was eager to make the trip, still seeing a chance to get out of the crisis without resorting to force. “He was more willing to reach out, more willing to take a chance than I was,” said Scowcroft. Even if Baker could not make the trip happen, the proposal itself was useful. By making such an offer, they would demonstrate to the world that they went the extra mile to avoid bloodshed—and they might be able to win a vote in Congress authorizing force by showcasing Hussein’s recalcitrance. Still, the proposal was announced without even Baker’s top advisers being informed in advance and many of them thought it was a mistake, a sign of weakness or a chance for Hussein to muddy the waters.
The way forward was not yet clear. War seemed imminent, but not everyone on Bush’s team thought he needed a congressional vote to authorize it or that he should seek one. The Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war but it had not exercised that authority since World War II. Instead, presidents since then had taken the country to war by relying on their inherent authority as commander in chief or on more general votes by lawmakers. Dick Cheney, among others, urged Bush not to go to Congress despite—or perhaps because of—his own ten years of service in the House. John Sununu thought they should ignore Congress, and Boyden Gray, the White House counsel, maintained that Bush did not need a vote constitutionally. But Baker thought Bush did need a vote, not constitutionally but politically. Better to have buy-in by lawmakers before hostilities opened; otherwise they would more readily turn against the president the minute the fighting got tough. “We wanted everybody in the boat in case this thing went bad,” said Janet Mullins, Baker’s legislative chief. “Baker got it. Bush had to be convinced.”
Within hours of announcing his offer to send Baker to Baghdad, the president hosted congressional leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House to discuss the crisis and seek their support. After an opening statement, Bush turned the meeting over to Baker, who argued that lawmakers would actually help the cause of peace by voting for war.
“The threat of force is not the same as the use of force,” Baker said. “You’ve got to give us the threat as a diplomatic tool.”
Democratic leaders pushed the president to stick with sanctions for as long as a year, but Bush and Baker maintained sanctions alone would not work.
Ever looking for the angle, Baker asked the Democrats if Congress would authorize offensive operations so long as they were limited to air power. Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic majority leader, said no.
Baker was not surprised. He knew better than anyone in the administration that a vote in favor of a war resolution was anything but a given. He had a secret back channel to the Democrats in the Senate: Janet Mullins was quietly dating Mitchell. Baker’s legislative liaison was not only getting real-time information from Republican leaders through her day job, she knew what was happening on the Democratic side and she shared her intelligence with her boss.
During a meeting to discuss a possible congressional resolution, she made clear that the odds were against them. “I’m like, guys, we don’t have the votes,” she recalled. “If we have the vote today, we would lose.” Not everyone listened to her. “Sununu was like, ‘Oh, bullshit.’ ”
Mullins’s relationship with Mitchell caused consternation in the Oval Office. “Bush did not like Mitchell, and when he found out that we were dating he was not happy and there were a couple conversations about, ‘Do you think she can be trusted?’ ” Mullins recalled. “That never occurred to Baker. Baker knew me better than 41 knew me, and Baker saw the advantages right away.” Baker joked about it, but understood when Mitchell was sending messages through Mullins. “He also was perfectly comfortable knowing that I was not going to compromise the administration for the sake of pillow talk,” she said.
Mullins’s relationship with Mitchell underscored the differences between Baker and Bush. For Bush, it was a question of loyalty; you were either on the team or you were not. For Baker, it was about how this could be turned to his own benefit; any edge was useful. “Bush never got the strategic advantage that could come from that,” Mullins said. “Baker got that almost immediately.” In the runup to the war vote, her connection to Mitchell was so useful that she could tell Baker when senators were playing both sides. She informed Baker, for example, that while Al Gore had told Bob Dole, the Republican leader, that he would vote for war, he was secretly reassuring Mitchell that he would oppose it. Mitchell’s late-night handicapping had convinced Mullins there was more work to be done. “That’s part of why I knew how much we didn’t have the votes,” she said.
While Baker was trying to make a partner out of Mitchell, he lost another partner overseas, one who had been critically important to him. On December 20, Eduard Shevardnadze shocked both Moscow and Washington by abruptly stepping down as foreign minister, warning darkly as he left that “dictatorship is coming.” His resignation was meant as a signal to Gorbachev that the Soviet leader was cozying up too much to the hard-liners in an effort to save himself.
Shevardnadze had not given Baker a heads-up, so the secretary of state was caught off guard like everyone else. The loss of his friend and fishing partner, the counterpart he had invested so much in and accomplished so much with, was devastating. Baker interpreted it as an ominous sign of what was to come: “Hard-liners are taking over.”