At night, before going home after a day of diplomacy, Baker would relax in his seventh-floor State Department office with a few of his more politically minded aides to chew over the latest developments on the domestic front. Bush was heading into 1992 with hopes of winning a second term, but the president’s sky-high poll ratings had already faded into the distant past.
The sheen of victory in Kuwait had worn off and, with the Soviet Union now wiped off the map, many Americans were focusing on their own troubles. The economy was sagging. Bush was facing fire from the right, the left, and the middle. He was making political mistakes, giving ammunition to his enemies. Even worse, what Baker knew, and most others in the president’s circle did not, was just how much a thyroid condition called Graves’ disease was taking a toll on Bush, who was having trouble summoning his usual energy. In his office at night, Baker and his advisers would lament what they all saw as the screwups by the White House.
“Is there something that we can do?” Janet Mullins would ask Baker.
“This is not my thing,” Baker would answer. “I can’t get in the middle of this.”
In fact, Baker could have intervened but he had no desire to descend back into the muck of political campaigning. He had run four presidential races by this point and had finally graduated, he thought, from fixer to statesman. Over the last three years, he had occupied the world stage at a time of profound change. He had presided over the end of the Cold War, helped reunify Germany, assembled a grand coalition to thwart the territorial schemes of a dictator, and organized a landmark Middle East peace conference. So while he watched the emerging campaign with the interest of a veteran—and the scorn of a been-there, done-that second-guesser—he desperately wanted to stay out of it.
Bush did not want to admit that he needed Baker any more than Baker wanted to dive back in. The president was a proud man and there was a part of him that resented the Georgetown cocktail chatter that Baker was the power behind his presidency. The doubles partners from the Houston Country Club had teamed up to run the world, but the subtle rivalry that had always shadowed the relationship kept both of them from making the decision that almost everyone else figured was inevitable. If Bush was to win a second term, the widespread consensus was that Baker had to help make it happen. The only people stopping that were Bush and Baker.
Any hopes that Baker harbored of avoiding the campaign probably evaporated when his partner in the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. If Atwater were able to oversee the 1992 campaign, then maybe Baker would not have to. But Atwater was dying and no longer able to run anything. In fact, his battle with cancer produced a remarkable late-in-life epiphany. Facing death, Atwater expressed regret for his take-no-prisoners approach to politics, even apologizing to Michael Dukakis. “In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate,’ ” Atwater told Life magazine in a confessional article. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.” He went on to agree that Bush captured the presidency on the back of a relentlessly negative campaign that was unworthy of the country. “In part because of our successful manipulation of his campaign themes, George Bush won handily,” he said. The article was accompanied by photographs of Atwater, swollen from steroids and visibly ill, that shocked his friends.
By the spring of 1991, shortly after his fortieth birthday, Atwater was dead. He was buried in Columbia, South Carolina, wearing a jogging suit and holding a photo of his three daughters and a copy of Red Hot & Blue, a 1989 record album he cut with B.B. King and a roster of other all-star performers. Baker gave a eulogy at the memorial service. Atwater was “Machiavellian,” Baker said, “in the very best sense of that term.” He was “a pol’s pol” who waged campaigns “by pushing it to the edge wholeheartedly and unabashedly, just the way he played guitar and just the way he lived.” Baker added that he found it “hard to imagine a self-professed bad boy like Lee up there with the angels. But I am convinced that’s exactly where Lee is and that the angels are simply going to have to adjust.”
Still, Atwater’s regrets were not Baker’s. If the dying hatchet man had second thoughts about swinging the axe in 1988, his boss claimed to have none, at least none that he cared to share. Atwater was no rogue operator. Any bark-stripping he did with the permission, if not at the explicit direction, of Baker and Bush. And while Baker may have been too polished to use the sort of coarse language Atwater did, he saw nothing wrong with his approach to campaigns.
The question was whether he would do it all over again. Bush was slow to get started in putting his reelection operation together, determined to postpone the day he would go from being president to being a candidate again. Baker and other friends urged him to get going. They could see that Bush was making the climb more difficult for himself. As Susan Baker recalled it, “We were pulling our hair out.” But when she urged Baker to step in, he resisted. “I would say to my husband, ‘Honey, you’ve got to do something,’ ” she said. Baker, she added, would answer, “My brief is so big. Other people have to do that.”
Reluctantly, Baker finally agreed to sit down with Bush for a private meeting in the living quarters of the White House just a few weeks after the Madrid conference and a few days before Thanksgiving 1991 to talk through the emerging campaign. They debated structure for the reelection organization. They talked about pushing out Treasury Secretary Nick Brady and making him general chairman of the campaign, to be replaced by a known, respected figure or business leader to send a signal to the markets. But Baker scribbled on his notepad: “(NOT RGD),” ruling out his longtime right-hand Dick Darman. And they talked about the White House chief of staff.
John Sununu had increasingly become the focus of widespread discontent among Bush’s confidants, not just for mishandling the budget deal but for an imperious management style and a tin ear for politics. Curt and combative, Sununu styled himself as the “pit bull” of the White House and had alienated many of his colleagues and fellow Republicans around town. He drew fire for using government aircraft for personal trips and once taking a government car all the way to New York for a stamp auction. Worse, he angered Bush’s inner circle and family when he blamed the president for ad-libbing remarks about credit card rates that sent the stock market into a downward spin, rather than taking the responsibility himself as a good chief of staff was supposed to do. Bush had not consulted Baker on the selection of Sununu in the first place but the secretary of state had been telling his friend for some time that it was time to cut the chief of staff loose. Bush had resisted. It went against his nature to throw people overboard. But Baker came back at him again, as did others.
Finally, the president commissioned George W. Bush to speak with six or seven family confidants on the pretense of gathering thoughts on the coming campaign but in reality to evaluate the chief of staff. The results were not positive. Reluctantly, the president realized that Baker was right and it was time for Sununu to go. In their meeting in the living quarters, Bush and Baker discussed how to handle it. Bush could move Sununu over to the campaign or the Republican National Committee, he could give him a cabinet spot like transportation secretary, or he could encourage the chief of staff to go home to New Hampshire and run for the Senate. More important was who would take over the White House. Bush and Baker talked about a few names, including longtime advisers like Craig Fuller, Fred Malek, and Will Ball. Baker, hoping to forestall being asked himself, proposed his friend Dick Cheney, who after all had done the job once before under Ford. But of course Baker’s name came up as well. In the notes he took, Baker scribbled out conditions. “JABIII—for 1 year only—part-time,” he wrote, and then added “DO BOTH,” presumably meaning both running the White House and the campaign to improve coordination.
First, they would have to drop the hammer on Sununu. Never one for unpleasantness, the president tasked his son with delivering the message, which he did just before Thanksgiving. But Sununu did not take the hint and instead tried to fight back. It took three more emissaries from the Oval Office until Sununu finally got the message and resigned.
Baker sent Sununu a condolence note later that same day, a gesture that was either gracious or disingenuous or perhaps a little of both. “You have just done a very selfless thing by submitting your resignation to the president,” Baker wrote Sununu. “It is not fair to you that it came to this but you have done the right thing by the president.”
Baker had worked to get Sununu out but the victory came with the risk that he would be forced to come back as White House chief of staff himself. Baker had no interest so he pushed again for Cheney. When it came up at Camp David, Bush was willing to entertain it. Brent Scowcroft, who was also at the presidential retreat, called Cheney to ask if he would be open to a shift. “I’ve got major stuff I’m doing over here,” Cheney replied, referring to his Pentagon post. “No, the answer’s no.”
Cheney understood what had happened—his friend Baker “threw me under the bus.” In fact, he later heard that Baker had actually been in the room with Scowcroft when he called. “If Bush had called me and asked me, I would have had no choice,” Cheney said. But he had no problem turning down Scowcroft—and Baker. With Cheney out and Baker resistant, Bush finally tapped Sam Skinner, a lawyer from Illinois serving as transportation secretary.
Bush was to some extent a victim of his own success—and Baker’s. With the world situation looking brighter, Americans were wondering what the president was doing for them at home. Bush had assembled a significant record in domestic policy to take onto the campaign trail, having signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act and new versions of the Civil Rights Act and Clean Air Act. But many Americans were more focused on the deteriorating economy. Bush was also in trouble on his right flank for breaking his famous “read my lips, no new taxes” campaign pledge.
Anger over the broken pledge generated a conservative challenge against Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination by Patrick Buchanan, a syndicated columnist and former Nixon and Reagan White House official whose self-branded pitchfork populism was aimed at upending the party establishment. A pugnacious brawler who loved mixing it up with fellow Republicans as much as Democrats, Buchanan decried “global bureaucrats,” proposed building a “Buchanan Fence” along the border with Mexico, and made “America First” his campaign slogan.
Baker quietly pushed Bush to take on Buchanan’s worldview. One day he sent the president a David Broder piece from The Washington Post in which the columnist suggested it would be “a wonderful fight for Bush” to have. Baker told Bush that he agreed. “I think it is important to your re-election that you run an offensive campaign based upon your strengths—one of which is leading America’s leadership of the rest of the world!” Baker wrote in a cover note. “History shows us the dangers of isolationism and protectionism—both from a security & political standpoint and an economic one. (Remember the 30s?) The ‘Put America First’ argument is a phoney one. The way you Put America First is to maintain and not apologize for our engagement abroad.”
Few gave Buchanan much chance of victory, but Bush was vulnerable following a recession that was pushing unemployment up to a high of 7.4 percent and left many Americans feeling that the president was more interested in what was happening overseas than at home. Bush struggled to pivot, admitting that he had failed to realize the economy was in a “freefall.” But he was stilted and seemed out of touch. At one point, reading from notes prepared by his staff, he spoke out loud the stage directions he had been given. “Message: I care,” he said. The message was not received. Baker was flying home from arms control talks in Moscow when he heard news that stunned the political world. Buchanan had mounted a strong showing against Bush in the New Hampshire primary, winning 38 percent of the vote against the incumbent president’s 53 percent. “That was a wakeup call,” Skinner said later.
With Buchanan at his heels, Bush disavowed the budget deal that included new taxes. “Listen,” Bush told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution during the Georgia primary, “if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t do what I did then for a lot of reasons, including political reasons.”
Baker was aghast at Bush’s reversal. “That admission is the worst political mistake I’ve ever seen,” he said shortly afterward. Dick Darman felt abandoned by the president. To him, the deal was not a mistake, it was an act of leadership. Darman went to Bush to offer his resignation, which was rejected. But he remained bitter for years about the episode—including at his mentor, Baker, who he thought had opportunistically tried to present himself, after the fact, as a voice against the deal at the expense of Bush and Darman.
Baker was right about the politics, though. Renouncing the budget deal only made Bush look feckless and underscored how far he had fallen since the Gulf War victory. Back then, with the highest approval rating of any sitting president in the history of polling, he had seemed so formidable that first-tier Democrats with national profiles including Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Mario Cuomo, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia all opted not to run against him. Instead, the Democratic field was filled with lesser-known lawmakers such as Senators Tom Harkin of Iowa and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and former senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts; Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the first African American ever elected to lead a state; retread candidates like former governor Jerry Brown of California and former senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota; and a backwater-Southern governor named Bill Clinton.
AT FORTY-FIVE, William Jefferson Clinton positioned himself as a generational agent of change, calling himself a New Democrat and promising that his formula of optimistic post–Cold War centrism and experience governing the conservative state of Arkansas would restore electability to a party that had lost five of the last six contests for the White House. A Yale Law School graduate and Rhodes Scholar, he nonetheless connected with everyday voters with his up-from-poverty life story and feel-your-pain empathy. He was not a stirring orator, but he had a youthful magnetism and roguish charm that captivated audiences.
A native of Hope, Arkansas, he would cleverly brand himself as the Man from Hope, selling his upbeat vision to an electorate craving inspiration. With no experience on the world stage, he focused on the recession. At his Little Rock campaign headquarters, his strategist, James Carville, hung a sign on the wall reminding everyone of the candidate’s priorities:
CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME.
THE ECONOMY, STUPID
DON’T FORGET HEALTH CARE.
Before he could get the chance to take on Bush, Clinton had to overcome his biggest obstacle: himself. None of the other Democratic candidates could compete in terms of raw political talent, but he had outsized flaws too that could bring him down. When a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers sold her story of a twelve-year extramarital affair with him to the Star supermarket tabloid and produced tapes of Clinton telling her to deny it, the candidate’s future suddenly looked bleak. While womanizing by presidents and would-be presidents had been discreetly ignored in the past, the media environment had changed since Gary Hart’s campaign imploded over his visit to the Monkey Business with Donna Rice; Clinton would get no pass for his sexual adventures. To save his campaign, Clinton went on 60 Minutes on CBS, with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by his side, as he vaguely admitted “causing pain in my marriage.”
But that was not the end of the scandals. He also had to deal with questions about dodging military service in Vietnam. A letter he had written in 1969 thanking the head of his university’s Reserve Officer Training Corps for “saving me from the draft” gave the impression that he had pulled strings to avoid the war. He also had to fend off questions about drug use, admitting that he had tried marijuana while studying in England but insisting to no small amount of mockery that “I didn’t inhale.”
In effect, Clinton seemed to embody the baby boom generation—the libertine sexuality, the casual drug use, the feminist wife working as a lawyer, the lack of military service, the antiwar activism, the shaggy-haired pictures from school. For Bush and Baker and the older generation, there could hardly be a sharper contrast. Baker saw Clinton as sleazy. A straight arrow who never so much as loosened his tie in the White House, Baker was offended at the very notion of Clinton as president. But while his aides assumed that the Arkansas Democrat could never win the nomination, much less the general election, Baker warned against underestimating Clinton.
Indeed, through sheer grit and a relentless focus on the economic woes of voters, Clinton pushed through controversies that would have taken down a lesser candidate. Tom Harkin’s victory in his home state of Iowa was written off, making the New Hampshire primary the first real contest of the year. While Paul Tsongas’s eventual win there was likewise discounted because he came from next-door Massachusetts, Clinton’s surprise second-place finish was treated as if he had actually won. At his election night party, he dubbed himself the “Comeback Kid.” After trading victories in the next few contests with his rivals, Clinton finally secured the nomination by sweeping most of the Southern Super Tuesday states. Even though weakened by scandal, he presented a powerful threat to Bush—a Southern centrist Democrat during a recession amid public discontent with the direction of the country. He was “our worst political nightmare,” in the words of Fred Steeper, the pollster for Bush’s reelection campaign.
But Clinton would not be the only one to take on Bush. Ross Perot, an eccentric Texas billionaire with a penchant for publicity and a folksy critique of the president, jumped into the race as an independent candidate. Powered by his personal fortune and a growing popular disenchantment with the political status quo, he aimed to upend the two-party system that had enjoyed a monopoly on power in the United States for most of its history. Kicking off his candidacy on Larry King Live on CNN, Perot made clear that his would be an unconventional campaign, jumping from talk show to talk show while an army of supporters got his name on the ballot in all fifty states. He tapped into some of the same zeal for change as Clinton, promising to fix a broken system. “I’ll be like a mechanic who’s under the hood, working on the engine,” Perot vowed.
By spring, with the help of Baker’s old nemesis from the Reagan White House, Ed Rollins, Perot was actually leading polls in the three-way race, becoming the most potent independent presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose comeback attempt in 1912. Baker considered Perot “weird” and even unstable, but he also saw him as a threat to steal away Republican votes that would otherwise go to Bush. What Baker did not know was that in private Perot was a big fan of his, even telling a friend that “if Jim Baker would just step up to the plate and the president would step down and say, ‘Jim Baker’s my favored successor,’ I wouldn’t even think about it.” But of course, Bush was not stepping down.
AT A TIME when Baker was seen as the one figure who could save the White House for the Republicans, he also was costing Bush with a key constituency. One morning in March, he woke up to see a screaming headline on the cover of the New York Post: “BAKER’S 4-LETTER INSULT: Sec’y of State Rips Jews in Meeting at White House.” Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York turned tabloid columnist, wrote that during a recent White House meeting Baker had responded to criticism of his tough approach to Israel by saying, “F—’em. They didn’t vote for us.” After “they,” Koch or his editor inserted the words “the Jews” in brackets to explain what Baker presumably meant. As the quote spread, it would be repeated by others without the brackets, shortened to “Fuck the Jews,” an even cruder version than Koch originally alleged.
The real story behind the inflammatory comment stemmed from Baker’s long-running feud with Jack Kemp, who had told Koch about the episode. The White House and State Department quickly denied that Baker had said it, but William Safire, the New York Times columnist, followed with a piece saying that Baker had actually said something like it on two different occasions. Neither Koch nor Safire named a source, but the former mayor later acknowledged in a book that Kemp was the one who tipped him off.
Baker insisted the story was distorted at best. As he remembered it, the president’s team was discussing a controversial policy in the Oval Office.
“Well, AIPAC won’t like that,” someone said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“Screw them, they don’t vote for us,” Baker recalled replying.
In this telling, the target of his ire was an interest group, not Jews as a whole. “It was a political comment,” Baker said, “not an anti-Semitic comment, not a slur.”
Kemp had a different recollection. Asked about it years later, he remembered arriving at the White House one day and encountering Baker.
Kemp was in a light mood. “Hey Jimmy, I’ve got my Jim Baker green tie on,” he joked.
Baker, however, did not seem amused. “Kemp, you’re always trying to conduct not only housing policy but Treasury policy and Federal Reserve Board policy and State Department policy,” he replied in Kemp’s version.
Kemp, thinking Baker was just joking with him, said, “Well, somebody’s got to do it, Jim.”
Then they started arguing for real. Eventually, Kemp referred to his own Jewish roots. “Well, you’re going to want me to campaign in the Jewish community for Bush’s reelection,” Kemp recalled saying.
“Well, they don’t vote for us,” he said Baker replied.
Kemp’s G-rated version did not repeat the four-letter word. But either way, he said Baker’s sentiment “got mischaracterized” by Koch and others as being anti-Israel. “I know he didn’t mean it that way,” Kemp said.
At the time, however, Baker was forced into serious damage control. “Nothing could be further from the truth than that story and nothing could be further from my beliefs or values,” he wrote to Melvin Salberg and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. Representative Ben Gilman, a Republican from New York, told Baker that “irate constituents” were telling him that “as a result of your alleged statement they would not vote Republican in November.” Gilman noted that 30 percent to 40 percent of Jews voted for Republicans. “I respectfully suggest that no potential source for votes should be summarily dismissed.”
Bush came to Baker’s defense. “I don’t accept that Jim would say such a thing,” he wrote Koch in a two-page letter. “He is working relentlessly to find a solution to a difficult problem—one that will benefit Israel and the cause of peace in the Middle East. He would not have had any White House meeting on the subject of loan guarantees except in my presence; and, Ed, I never ever heard such ugliness out of Jim Baker.” Signing it “Warm Regards,” Bush passed along greetings from Barbara in a handwritten note at the bottom: “P.S. In spite of this ‘flap’ your #1 fan remains BPB—she sends her best.” A few days later, clearly hoping to ease the sting, Bush offered Baker and his family forty-eight hours at Camp David to get away.
After reading the Koch column, Foxman called Baker’s good friend from Texas, Robert Strauss, now the ambassador to Moscow, and asked him what he made of the situation. While vouching for Baker, Strauss nonetheless told Foxman he had heard Baker tell jokes about Jews. It was just the way Baker was. Foxman decided to take the high road and let it go. “I don’t believe he was an anti-Semite,” he said years later. “That was part of the baggage that he carried.”
Kemp later apologized to Baker and the two ostensibly made up, but the damage was done. Whatever Baker actually said, the line “fuck the Jews” would forever be cited by Israel’s supporters as evidence of his supposed hostility to Israel. In June, Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party was swept out of office in elections, a direct result, in his supporters’ view, of Baker’s refusal to provide the $10 billion for housing. “Shamir lost the election in part because he couldn’t get the loan guarantee,” said Moshe Arens. The money for resettling Soviet Jews was the one key political issue in Israel that year, Arens remembered, and the calculus of Israeli voters was simple: “if Shamir couldn’t do it, better get somebody else who could do it.”
That, in fact, was exactly the impression Baker wanted to leave with Israel. “Baker was determined not to do anything that might help Shamir,” Dennis Ross remembered. Baker even rejected a compromise Ross had negotiated with Zalman Shoval, the Israeli ambassador, to provide just a single year’s worth of loan guarantees, worth $2 billion, in exchange for greater assurances that the money would not be used for settlement construction.
Replacing Shamir was Yitzhak Rabin, leader of the Labor Party, who was far more open to the land-for-peace approach. Now Baker had a new partner waiting in the Middle East—if he could ever get the time to go back there.
AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, the world had not stopped for America’s political season. Baker was managing the new post-Soviet reality, trying to forge a working relationship with Boris Yeltsin and figure out how to maneuver the fifteen new nations that had emerged from the wreckage of the old union into a firm alliance with the West. With nuclear missiles stationed in four of those new states, he was working to persuade Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to give up their arsenals and hand them over to Russia so that the United States was not suddenly dealing with four nuclear powers in place of one. He finalized a second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START 2, bringing down both American and Russian nuclear arsenals even further, a landmark pact that Bush and Yeltsin signed in June. He was also trying to move the Middle East peace process that he had midwifed to the next stage.
Then there was the collapsing Yugoslavia, which was descending deeper into civil war and ethnic cleansing. Baker’s conclusion that the United States did not have a dog in that fight in the Balkans continued to drive administration policy despite growing atrocities. He rationalized that he had more than enough issues to confront, so the strategy was to leave the crisis to the Europeans to manage. It was their backyard, after all. “They wanted the lead, we gave them the lead,” Baker reflected in retirement. “Should we have done that? Maybe not. Maybe we should have kept it. But I’ll tell you, we had a hell of a lot of stuff on our plate.” Among those pressing him at the time to take more of a leadership role was Margaret Tutwiler, who as with Tiananmen Square was deeply affected by the pictures of slaughter emerging from the Balkans. “Who’s to say she might not have been right about Yugoslavia?” Baker allowed.
In the end, the wars would drag on for nearly a decade. Altogether, an estimated 140,000 people died and 4 million were displaced before the guns fell silent. The State Department desk officer in charge of Balkans policy resigned in protest in the summer of 1992, declaring that “the administration at high levels in the State Department and White House doesn’t really want to get involved.” Baker’s response to a genocide in the making, he said, had been “ineffective” and “counterproductive.” In the view of many, it was one of the darkest stains on Baker’s record, a sign of his calculated or even cynical approach of only taking on problems he perceived as winners.
His detachment reflected the Bush team’s drift away from statecraft back to electioneering. “The last year of the administration, it lost its footing a little bit,” said Richard Haass, the aide to Brent Scowcroft. In part, he attributed that to the politics of the moment. As Bush faced increasing criticism on the campaign trail that he was more absorbed by foreign policy than events at home, neither he nor Baker would find it politically advantageous to be immersed in a major crisis in Europe. “The tennis equivalent would have been running away from your backhand,” Haass said, “but the problem was foreign policy was the strength of the administration, so I thought it was a mistake to run away from it.”
That was not how it seemed in the White House, where a low-grade sense of panic was settling in even after Bush, calling on all the ample advantages of incumbency, finally overcame Patrick Buchanan to secure the Republican nomination. The truth was the primary challenge had exposed him as vulnerable. His campaign was a mess. And so, increasingly, was Bush himself. Suffering from his thyroid condition, Bush could muster enough energy to get through the day, but not enough to think creatively, to use his imagination. Baker’s team thought that Bush should announce a “Domestic Storm” to match the ambition of his foreign policy, but the president’s campaign operation was too scattershot to come up with a compelling plan. Sam Skinner seemed ill suited for the role of chief of staff in the midst of a campaign. Bush had decreed that the reelection bid would be run outside the White House, leaving Skinner trying to manage the government separate from the political operation, with little coordination between the two. Skinner quickly found himself quarreling with Dick Darman, an accomplished bureaucratic knife fighter. By April, even Skinner had come to the conclusion that he should be replaced. His choice? The same as everyone else’s. “I talked to the president about Baker coming back,” Skinner said later. “I think everybody thought early on, why doesn’t Jim come back and do it right away?”
Baker was hearing that from practically all quarters. “It’s a bit unfair for your friends and admirers like myself to lean on you about the President’s campaign,” Gerry Bemiss, an old friend of his and Bush’s, wrote to Baker in May. “But I suppose a lot of us think the President is in very bad shape and believe that your particular toughness and ability is necessary to salvaging the situation. From my viewpoint the Pres is in a miserable fix.” Baker’s cabinet colleague, Lynn Martin, the labor secretary and a veteran politician who had served in Congress, sent him a teasing, but also pleading, letter. “Your personality is improving,” she wrote. “You’re even getting better looking. But you’d become a ‘10’ with a slight job shift, please.” At the Pentagon, Colin Powell, overstepping his bounds as a uniformed general, asked Dick Cheney why that had not happened yet. “Dick, don’t you see?” he asked. “It’s not going well. It’s all screwed up.” Cheney mumbled that he knew but then changed the subject. Even Dan Quayle, no friend of Baker’s, thought the old handler was needed. The vice president approached Bush about it in the spring around the same time as Skinner. “You need to ask Baker to come over and be chief of staff,” the vice president told him. Bush’s answer was maddeningly passive: “He’ll do it when he thinks it’s right.”
Baker would never think it was right. Bush would not ask and Baker would not volunteer. The standoff rubbed some around Bush the wrong way. “I think they felt like Jim shouldn’t have had to be begged,” Powell said. But Baker was deeply reluctant. “He didn’t want to leave the State Department to go back to the White House,” said his son John Baker. “He really wanted to have people view him as a statesman, not a politician, and his view was if he went back to the White House he was always going to be viewed as a politician. That was a tough time for him. He knew he needed to help his friend but by the same token he really wanted to finish out his tour at the State Department.”
So much so that he concocted schemes to get out of having to return to the White House. After Yitzhak Rabin’s victory in Israel, Baker asked Dennis Ross if it would be possible to go on an extended trip to the Middle East to try to broker a major diplomatic breakthrough. If he were engaged in such a venture, Baker reasoned, then Bush could hardly ask him to leave the State Department. But Ross told him it would take Rabin a while to establish his government and by the time he did, it would be too late to avoid being summoned back to the White House. Baker embarked on a short trip to the Middle East anyway and Ross suggested what he called “one last Hail Mary”—Baker could invite regional leaders to a Washington summit in the first week of September, including Rabin, King Fahd, King Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Hafez al-Assad. During a stop in Damascus, Baker pitched the idea to Assad, who said he would think about it. But weeks went by without a reply, effectively killing the idea.
The final act in this drama followed the pattern from four years earlier. With Democrats gathering for their convention in New York to nominate Bill Clinton, Baker invited Bush to go fishing in Wyoming, this time at Baker’s own Silver Creek Ranch, where they would be blissfully out of touch. The two spent several days on the water with their sons Jamie Baker and Jeb Bush, a welcome relief from the tension of the previous few months. The air was clear and fresh, the weather warm, the politics far away. But one day, Bush asked Jamie and Jeb to excuse Baker and him. Baker sat down in a chair and Bush sank into the couch opposite him.
“You know,” Bush said, “I think I really need some help.”
It was the question Baker knew was coming but had dreaded for months.
And of course, he said yes. What else could he do?
AT THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, Clinton tapped Al Gore as his running mate, assembling a next-generation ticket of two forty-something sons of the New South. The selection of Gore was awkward for Baker since their wives were such good friends and collaborators in the record album labeling project. The Clinton-Gore team breathed fresh energy into the campaign, so much so that Ross Perot, who had been leading in polls not long before, abruptly dropped out of the race, declaring that “the Democratic Party has revitalized itself.”
When word of Perot’s withdrawal reached Baker at the Wyoming ranch, he rushed down to the creek where Bush was fishing to share the news. He brought with him a satellite telephone and urged the president to call Perot immediately to try to win him over to their side. “Tell him you share his principles and values,” Baker implored. “You hope he will support you.”
Bush made the call, standing in a field by the stream in his fishing vest. Then they tried to patch him through to the White House press corps, which was staying a couple of hours away, to publicly appeal to Perot’s supporters. But the line was scratchy, so they finally gave up and put the reporters on a bus to bring them to an air base near the ranch where Bush delivered the message on camera.
When they returned from the fishing trip, Baker was still not quite ready to reveal his own change of assignment. Even close friends, like David Paton, were kept in the dark at first. Paton, in fact, had other ideas for his old roommate. “The president is obviously tired, distracted and perplexed,” Paton wrote Baker as the Republican National Convention approached. “He has won a fine place in history and must quit the scene before he blows his record.” Instead, Paton said, the party should nominate Baker. “Our country deserves you as its next president, goddamnit. Just four little months of rubber chicken and loudspeakers, you can do it easily.”
Baker laughed it off as another missive from the “Daffy Doc,” as he and the other Princeton roommates lovingly called Paton. But the truth was Paton had touched on an unresolved tension inside Baker. He cherished his relationship with Bush and revered him in a profound way. But he was frustrated with how Bush had let the situation get so out of control that he was on the verge of losing. Baker had quietly grown less impressed with Bush’s political skills. There was a part of Baker that could not help thinking he could do it better himself. And he recognized that by leaving the State Department and returning to a staff job, he could jeopardize that possibility down the road. “In coming back, he knew very well that he would lose his potential to be a presidential candidate,” said his cousin Addison Baker Duncan.
Baker, of course, would not displace his friend on the 1992 ticket. But Dan Quayle was another matter. With Bush trailing in the polls by 24 percentage points following the Democratic convention, a shake-up was the only way for Bush to present himself as an agent of change. It was not really fair to Quayle, Baker knew. He had been a loyal soldier. And for a long while, Baker had thought the possible benefit of a change on the ticket was not worth the risk. But with time running short and the odds worsening, Baker came to the conclusion that for the campaign to win, Quayle should go. So did others. Bob Teeter, the campaign chairman, commissioned a secret poll in July showing that Bush could gain a net of 4 to 6 percentage points if he pushed Quayle off the ticket, a significant bump if the race were tight. Teeter even tested possible replacements, including Colin Powell, who would be the first African American ever on a major party ticket, and Baker himself. Baker polled better than Quayle; Powell polled better than both of them. But Powell wanted no part of it and when he found out about the surreptitious research, he called Quayle to make clear he had nothing to do with it. But there was a full-on campaign to dump Quayle. Others pushing Bush to drop him included Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. For his part, George W. Bush urged his father to replace Quayle with Dick Cheney. “I was just thinking of ways to help change the dynamic of a campaign that I thought was sinking,” he said years later. “It had nothing to do with Quayle.”
In his final weeks as secretary of state, Baker convened secret meetings at his Foxhall Road house to discuss how to dump Quayle. Baker knew the president would never explicitly push Quayle off the ticket—Bush felt he owed him better than that. But years later, Baker told the ghostwriter of his political memoir that the meetings were held “with George’s knowledge and blessing” (although Baker refused to let that be published in his book). “Forty-one wanted him off, but didn’t want to fire him,” Baker confided to the ghostwriter. “He wanted him to take himself out.” So the vice president would have to be convinced to do it on his own, to take one for the team. Baker and his allies thought that maybe they could get someone close to the president to approach Quayle and make clear it was time to go. Barbara Bush came to mind. “I told the president our first choice—the first lady,” Baker informed the ghostwriter. Bush rejected the choice out of hand. “She’s too close to me,” he said. So were George W. and, for that matter, Baker himself, ruling out two other potential emissaries.
Baker never talked about the matter directly with Quayle but the vice president understood from newspaper speculation that he was in jeopardy. He had no intention of volunteering himself off the ticket. After days of twisting in the wind, Quayle finally forced the issue by going to see Bush to ask if the president wanted to replace him as his running mate. Bush could not bring himself to say yes. After the meeting, Quayle was asked by a reporter from The Washington Post if he would remain on the ticket. “Yes,” Quayle answered, effectively putting an end to the coup attempt. With the die cast, Baker distanced himself from the effort. A White House official told the Post that “Baker had agreed that replacing Quayle, even if the move was orchestrated to make it look like Quayle’s decision, would be a political mistake.” In fact, the opposite was true.
ON AUGUST 13, Bush summoned his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, to the Oval Office and confirmed the worst-kept secret in town—Baker would be coming back to the White House as chief of staff and would run the reelection campaign from the West Wing. Fitzwater, like other top Bush aides, was relieved. “It was exciting to think that the old Baker efficiency was coming back to the White House,” he wrote later.
Baker, of course, had already planned the rollout of the announcement in characteristically methodical fashion. Bush handed Fitzwater a written statement that Baker or his staff had obviously written. Just then, the phone in the Oval Office rang. Baker was on the line. Bush motioned for Fitzwater to get on the extension.
“Marlin, has the president laid this out for you?” Baker asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Take a look at the statement,” Baker said. Then, teasingly, he added, “It has a lot of good things about me. You may want to tone it down.”
Fitzwater laughed. “Sure,” he said.
Bush jumped in. “See if it says anything good about me,” he said.
“It gives him some credit,” Baker said.
The jocular patter hinted at the relationship between the two men heading into this crucial period—at once lighthearted and affectionate yet edgy. Bush had to swallow his pride to ask Baker to come back and Baker had to swallow his ambition to say yes. He was giving up his platform as the world’s most prominent diplomat to get back into the grubby business of electioneering. He would now become the only person ever to serve as White House chief of staff for two different presidents.
At the State Department, Baker gathered employees in the auditorium for a farewell speech that reviewed the accomplishments of the past three and a half years. All told, Baker had spent 283 days of his tenure out of the country, hunting for deals and heading off catastrophes as the Cold War melted away, logging more than 700,000 miles on his plane. Most of his time abroad was in Europe or the Middle East. In four years, he made just three stops in all of sub-Saharan Africa and five in Latin America, not counting Mexico. By comparison, he made twenty-nine stops in the Soviet Union and its successor states, as well as thirteen in Britain, eleven in Germany, and nine in France. Once he settled on a goal of Middle East peace, he concentrated his time there, including twelve visits each to Syria and Egypt, ten to Israel, and nine to Saudi Arabia. His twenty-three days straight on the road in the summer of 1991 trying to set up the Madrid conference was the second-longest single trip taken by any secretary of state in modern times, just behind Henry Kissinger’s marathon shuttle diplomacy in the region during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Along the way, the world had changed—not because of him perhaps, but steered to some degree by him. The Soviet Union was no more. Eastern Europe was liberated. Germany was now one country again. Iraq was back in a box. Nicaragua’s contra war was over. Panama’s dictator was out of power. Israel was talking with its neighbors. Freedom was on the rise and nuclear arsenals were on the decline. A planet defined for four decades by a twilight struggle between two superpowers on hair-trigger alert was transforming itself. Not all the signs were encouraging. Yugoslavia was trapped in an orgy of ethnic hatred and bloodletting, Saddam Hussein was still in power, the Middle East had yet to find true reconciliation, and no clear strategy had been developed to help Russia evolve into a functioning capitalist democracy. But for Baker, there was more than enough to take pride in even as he unwillingly gave up the job that had absorbed him like no other.
The day he stepped down was perhaps the most painful he had experienced in public life—and the only one where he nearly lost his composure in public as he struggled to make it through his prepared remarks extolling the diplomats and their shared role navigating a “whirlwind of history.” At the end, Baker received a standing ovation and waved his goodbye, ducking into an elevator, his eyes welling with tears. He had lunch with Dick Darman, Robert Zoellick, and Janet Mullins, then left the building at 2 p.m., went home to pack, and caught a 4:05 p.m. flight to Denver before switching to Jackson, Wyoming, for a rest at his ranch.
The applause in the State Department auditorium was genuine. The foreign service had been leery of Baker when he arrived and for years many resented his reliance on his close-knit team. But as he departed, many appreciated the fact that with Baker, the State Department had been at the center of the action in a way it often was not. “Jim,” Bush wrote him in a note. “As I listened to that thunderous applause at State just now, I realized just how much you are giving up to come here. I am so very grateful. Get some rest. I’m glad we will be side by side in the battle ahead.—Your Friend, George.”
The battle, of course, was not one Baker wanted to wage. He was tired of being a partisan warrior. Yet there was no one better at it, at least not in Bush’s Republican Party. “That was the cruelest turn of the wheel,” observed Aaron David Miller, the Middle East adviser. “It’s almost as if he couldn’t escape it in part because he was viewed to be so central, so irreplaceable, so necessary, that having become the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger in several years, with the world cooperating, he was forced back into the political game under very disadvantageous, unhappy circumstances.” But this was the deal that Baker had made and, better than anyone, he knew that a deal always came with a price. As Miller reflected, “He couldn’t escape his friendship with Bush, couldn’t escape the political world, couldn’t escape the four-year run of the electoral cycle.”
BAKER’S RETURN to politics did not get off to a promising start. At the Republican National Convention in Houston just four days later, Patrick Buchanan was given a prime-time speaking slot, an effort at inclusion to bind the wounds of a rough nomination fight. But even as Buchanan dutifully pledged his support for Bush, he used the nationally televised platform to declare a “cultural war” in America, focusing on the sorts of divisive social issues that made Bush and Baker cringe.
Buchanan said the other side stood for “abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units” and other ideas he deemed radical. Bill Clinton’s centrist message at the Democratic convention was fake, Buchanan added, “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.” As Baker watched in consternation, he knew this was hardly the message to win over America’s swing voters.
Baker had washed his hands of the convention, which had been largely planned before he arrived on the scene. “You can bet your life Jimmy Baker won’t be left holding the bag,” Bush groused privately, a revealing comment hinting at years of resentment of his friend’s remarkable ability to stay out of sight when things went wrong. But now Baker had to get serious. He could not disavow responsibility anymore and he had just ten weeks to turn the campaign around. Baker moved back into the corner office of the West Wing that he had occupied for four years accompanied once again by his plug-in unit. Four of his most trusted advisers at the State Department—Robert Zoellick, Dennis Ross, Margaret Tutwiler, and Janet Mullins—came with him to the White House. Larry Eagleburger was left behind to serve as acting secretary of state, a caretaker until Baker could return if they did manage to win a second term.
The Bush White House quickly discovered that Baker operated mainly through his own team, as he had throughout his meteoric Washington career. Dan Quayle, whose office was next door to the chief of staff’s suite, noticed that Baker had the couch in his outer office removed “so that people couldn’t hang around” while the door was closed when Baker’s team met, creating “an us-versus-them atmosphere.” Baker and his circle disparaged the old White House regime that in their view had botched things up so badly, privately referring to them as the Politburo. For their part, some of the West Wing staff resented the disdainful newcomers.
But Baker was genuinely shocked to discover how bad things were for the campaign, which heading into the final stretch had already burned through much of its money. The advertising effort was flagging. There was no clear theme as the fall sprint to Election Day opened. As he moved in, Baker insisted on more discipline and focus to the slipshod enterprise, convening meetings every day at 6 p.m. to coordinate White House and campaign activities and messaging. He pared attendance at key sessions from an unwieldy high of forty-three hangers-on to a tighter, more manageable ten participants. He insisted that Bush give him complete control of his schedule, right down to when the president would get a haircut. And his mere presence demanded better behavior. Dick Darman, a forceful, abrasive, table-pounding presence who had been at war with Sam Skinner before Baker’s return, suddenly reverted to a deferential right-hand man. “When you got in a meeting with Baker, Darman was the polite little boy with his hands folded listening and was just another staffer,” recalled Thomas Scully, a Darman aide.
To win, Baker knew that Bush had to persuade voters that he would do for America what he had done for the world, so Baker had his team develop an “Agenda for American Renewal,” bringing together the president’s trade and fiscal proposals into a single economic package. Bush would unveil the blueprint for this “Domestic Storm” at the Detroit Economic Club on September 10 and Baker would go on television to promote it.
But when the time came, Baker backed out of the public appearances and dispatched Nick Brady, the treasury secretary, instead. Baker reasoned that with all the glowing press he had been getting, taking on a high profile would feed the impression that he was really the one calling the shots, the “deputy president” theory again. Yet his decision to stay out of sight had the opposite effect—without Baker out front, the media did not take the economic plan as seriously as it would have had he invested his considerable credibility in it. Many in the White House saw Baker’s absence as a desire not to be publicly associated with a losing effort or perhaps to preserve his image as a once and future secretary of state rather than a partisan hack. He did not do a single interview or television appearance in his first six weeks back at the White House.
His profile inside the building was often not much higher. Baker skipped some of the staff meetings in his office, leaving them to Zoellick to run. During the meetings he did attend, he sometimes seemed distracted, staring off into space. It was so clear that he did not want to be there. One White House official complained to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times that “Baker’s been MIA.” In a cheeky article that imagined the White House as a live-action version of the Clue board game, Dowd depicted Baker “hiding in the conference room with a candlestick.”
Although Baker had run rings around Democrats in debate negotiations during previous campaigns, this time he handed off the task to Bob Teeter. Even when he approved letters, Baker insisted that aides take his name off them and put Teeter’s on. At one point when Baker was referred to as the campaign manager, he sought a correction—he was the White House chief of staff. In the end, Teeter agreed to three debates, one of which would be a town-hall-style event—a format clearly more advantageous to Bill Clinton with his talk show style of politics and facility with words.
Quayle thought Baker’s abrogation of responsibility for the debates was “pathetic,” tossing away the one last chance Bush had to turn things around. In his view, Baker once again cared more about Baker than anyone else, even his great friend, the president. “Jim Baker told people what an impossible job he had,” Quayle said later. “He set things up so that, if we managed to win, he would look like Houdini, whereas if we lost, as he seemed to expect, nobody would be able to blame him.”
Quayle of course was already a decided adversary by this point. But even Baker’s closest advisers like Tutwiler, Zoellick, and Darman could hardly help noticing Baker’s disengagement. Several of them confronted him about it.
“What are you doing?” one of them demanded. You need to be engaged.
“I’m engaged,” he insisted. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“No, you’re not,” the aide scolded.
The aide even called Susan Baker to see if she could intervene. “We’re in trouble. We need help.”
Help was not on the way.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, Baker got a call out of the blue from Ross Perot asking to see him in secret. After checking with Bush, Baker invited the Texas businessman to his Foxhall Road house. When Perot arrived, he spun out a far-fetched story about how the Bush administration had been targeting him and tried to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. He accused George W. Bush of investigating Perot’s children. He theorized that Republicans had kept Gennifer Flowers in a warehouse to spring on Clinton when the time was ripe. That was the real reason he had dropped out, Perot claimed—Republican dirty tricks.
Baker rejected the accusations. “Ross, that’s just bullshit,” he said. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Well, it’s happening and I just felt you needed to know about it so you can take whatever action you think is necessary and you can tell the president.”
To Baker, the whole thing was loony. Perot, the “juggy-eared prick,” as Baker called him, had long been known for promoting wild conspiracy theories. Baker filled in Bush, who recorded the account of Perot’s rant in his diary. “He waxed very emotional about the dirty tricks by the Republican Party—same old story,” Bush dictated. But Baker realized Perot, by laying out his grievances against Bush and the Republicans, was setting the stage for the unthinkable—jumping back into the campaign. And that is what he did just weeks before Election Day.
So now there would be three onstage for the debates. Bush’s presidency would ride on the outcome. Baker’s team prepared for the showdowns with the sort of precision that had worked in the past. Recalling that the president had once been tripped up by seeming unfamiliar with a supermarket scanner, Baker’s team pulled together a briefing book to keep him from looking out of touch again. Among other things, they drilled him on the prices of basic items he might be asked about, such as a dozen eggs (99 cents), a pound of hamburger ($1.59), a loaf of bread (59 cents), a quart of milk (92 cents), and a gallon of gasoline ($1.16).
They also tried to get him to speak in language that would resonate with everyday Americans, providing him a list of “effective” and “not effective” phrases.
Effective: “Open new markets.” Ineffective: “Free trade.”
Effective: “Put criminals behind bars.” Ineffective: “Exclusionary rule.”
Effective: “Stop outrageous lawsuits.” Ineffective: “Legal reform.”
Finally, under ineffective, it listed “capital gains tax cut.” Under effective in that category, the briefing book bowed to political reality. It said, “[Nothing].”
On October 11, Bush and Baker flew to St. Louis for the first debate at Washington University, trailing badly and in need of a jolt. When Bush took the stage, however, the best he could offer was not a new plan but a new job for Baker. If he won, the president said, he would make Baker his economic czar in the second term. “What I’m going to do is say to Jim Baker when this campaign is over, ‘All right, let’s sit down now. You do in domestic affairs what you’ve done in foreign affairs. Be the kind of economic coordinator of all the domestic side of the house,’ ” Bush said. Watching with the rest of the campaign team, Baker was shocked. “Shit, we never talked about that,” he recalled thinking. That was not what Baker wanted to do even if they could pull off an upset and win a second term. It was a stunning move, one intended to trade on Baker’s stature but that in fact betrayed Bush’s own weakness. After all, just a week earlier, Bush had told Larry King on CNN that Baker would be returning as secretary of state in a second term. As the political journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover later wrote, the surprise new assignment was “an incredible acknowledgment that his chief of staff had more credibility with the American people than he had himself.” George Stephanopoulos, a young aide to Clinton, mocked the new arrangement, telling reporters that Bush was offering up “his handler-in-chief as a new de facto president,” adding, “The big question is: Will James Baker offer George Bush a substantial policy role in his administration?”
The backlash stung. The campaign had scheduled Baker to give a speech on the second-term economic program, but over the next two weeks, it was postponed, revived, and canceled again as he uncharacteristically squirmed in the limelight. Already eager to avoid drawing too much attention to himself as the campaign headed toward seeming defeat, Baker argued that giving the speech would only draw more man-behind-the-throne coverage. When he was given a draft of the address, he demurred. “I like the speech,” he said, “but the president should be giving it.”
His vanishing act hardly went unnoticed. Among those angry at Baker for not stepping up was Barbara Bush, who took to calling him “the Invisible Man.” When Baker stopped by the White House residence one night, she lit into him for not publicly standing up for her husband. “She was all over me about that,” Baker recalled. Finally, the president meekly came to his defense. “Barb, get off his case,” he told the first lady. But she was not the only family member furious with a savior who was not saving the president.
AS BAD AS the first debate had been, it would only get worse for Bush at the second debate, set in Richmond, Virginia, on October 15. Uncomfortable with the town-hall format, the first of its kind in presidential election history, Bush at one point was caught on camera stealing a glance at his wristwatch as if he were bored or eager to get the event over with. Clinton, on the other hand, was in his element, roaming the stage and responding directly to the “average citizens” recruited to pose questions.
When a woman asked, “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives,” Bush stumbled. The wording of the question confused him. He did not seem to understand at first that she was really asking how he himself had been affected by the recession, but instead started to discuss the debt itself, reflecting on its impact on interest rates.
“You, on a personal basis,” the woman insisted. “How has it affected you?”
Bush seemed befuddled. “Help me with the question and I’ll try to answer it.”
She explained that friends of hers had been laid off.
Finally understanding, Bush sounded defensive, sensing that he was under attack for being an elitist far removed from the pain many Americans were enduring.
“Everybody cares if people aren’t doing well,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s fair to say, you haven’t had cancer, therefore you don’t know what it’s like.”
Clinton had no problem with the question, walking right up to the edge of the stage to talk with the woman. This was his moment and he knew what to do with it. Empathy was his brand.
“In my state, when people lose their jobs, there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names,” he said. “When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them.”
Perot too hammered Bush for being oblivious to the experience of everyday Americans. He focused attention on the new North American Free Trade Agreement that Bush had negotiated in August, a pact that would essentially take the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement that Baker had brokered during the Reagan administration and bring in Mexico. That “giant sucking sound,” Perot said, would be the sound of American jobs heading south.
By the third debate in East Lansing, Michigan, on October 19, Clinton was openly mocking Bush’s plan to turn the economy over to Baker.
“The person responsible for domestic economic policy in my administration will be Bill Clinton,” the Democrat said.
“That’s what worries me,” Bush shot back.
It was a good riposte but Clinton’s zinger still drew blood. No matter what Bush did, he could not convince a disenchanted public that he had a plan for a second term. When the three debates were over, only 15 percent believed Bush had won, while 39 percent said Clinton had prevailed and 31 percent picked Perot. Some in Bush’s circle blamed it on Baker for outsourcing debate negotiations and effectively saddling his candidate with a format that did not play to his strengths. But in truth, Bush himself had lost and not only at the town hall.
Anxious to turn things around, Baker suddenly found an odd opportunity presented to him. Two days after the final debate, at the urging of Senator Arlen Specter, Baker got on the phone with Ken Langone, the cofounder of Home Depot and one of Perot’s best friends. He proposed a far-fetched idea—Perot would drop out and support Bush for reelection if put in charge of the economic portfolio in the second term. Baker could go back to the State Department after all.
Baker was wary. Had Langone actually talked with Perot about this?
“The man and I are very close,” Langone assured him. He would not make the call unless he could deliver Perot. “The president’s in trouble but he and Perot could be a dream team.”
Baker informed Langone that it was illegal to trade a federal position for election support.
Langone suggested Bush could agree to “consult with Ross” on top economic appointments like the secretaries of treasury, commerce, and labor.
After they hung up, Langone reached out to Perot. The candidate told him that he had just gotten a call from someone at Goldman Sachs asking if he would drop out to support Bush. Langone concluded that Baker had leaked their conversation. “Ken, you can’t trust these people,” Perot said.
Langone called Baker at home that night and mentioned the Goldman Sachs call. Baker was confused, noting that he had never worked at Goldman Sachs. Either way, Langone said Perot had told him that if “those people” had any specific proposals, he would listen. But Baker concluded that Langone was “impetuous” and “sounded flaky,” so he told him they would be better off not pursuing it. They were desperate, yes, but not enough to get in bed with Perot.
With time running short, Bush’s only real recourse was to bring Clinton down. In a takeoff of James Carville’s now famous maxim, someone wrote on a blackboard at campaign headquarters on Fifteenth Street, “Taxes and Trust, Stupid.” Turning to some of the same sharp tactics that had worked against Michael Dukakis four years earlier, Baker’s operation depicted Clinton as an unpatriotic, even un-American, liberal. While Bush ruled out attacks on Clinton’s sex life, his team focused attention on the challenger’s participation in a demonstration against the Vietnam War while in Britain for his Rhodes Scholarship. They insinuated nefarious motives behind a trip Clinton took in that era to Moscow and even pursued rumors that while in England he may have sought to revoke his American citizenship to avoid the draft.
At a campaign meeting at the White House early one morning in September, Bob Teeter raised the citizenship question. Journalists had filed requests for the Clinton passport file under the Freedom of Information Act. Baker asked Janet Mullins to check with the State Department on the status of the requests. Within a few hours, though, the alarm bell in his head that usually warned him of political danger finally went off and he reached out to Boyden Gray, the White House counsel. After checking with the Justice Department, Gray told Baker that releasing passport information could violate federal privacy law.
Baker quickly had Caron Jackson, his assistant, summon Mullins and Margaret Tutwiler back to his office. They found Baker standing in a tense and formal way and they quickly realized that it was an “on-the-record meeting,” one meant to establish a record of deniability.
“I just need you to know it was inappropriate and you should not act on anything on Clinton’s passports,” Baker told the aides, in Mullins’s recollection.
Tutwiler and Mullins left the office rolling their eyes. “We were like, ‘Okay, I get what that was about,’ ” Mullins said later. “It was clearly a CYA.” Baker was covering his ass.
Even so, in response to the Freedom of Information Act requests, State Department officials did eventually check the files and found nothing to verify the gossip.
Some of Bush’s supporters were not willing to give it up. On October 6, four conservative Republican congressmen showed up in the Oval Office to urge the president to reach out to foreign governments for help. That was a line Baker was not willing to cross. “They wanted us to contact the Russians or the British to seek information on Bill Clinton’s trip to Moscow,” Baker later wrote in a memo to the file. “I said we absolutely could not do that.”
Even without foreign assistance, the public attacks on Clinton may have been paying off anyway. Bush, who had governed as a picture of WASP rectitude, once again shed his gentlemanly reserve to slash at his Democratic challenger and his running mate. “My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos,” Bush said scornfully. The tough-guy nastiness may have been forced and unnatural, but he knew from 1988 that negative politics worked. By the end of October, Bush had trimmed his deficit to about 5 percentage points.
If Bush was indeed building toward a late comeback, however, it came to an abrupt halt the Friday before the election when Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, released a new indictment of Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary, in the Iran-contra affair. The indictment referenced notes taken by Weinberger that undercut Bush’s long-standing insistence that he had not known about the internal opposition to trading arms for hostages. “ ’86 Weinberger Notes Contradict Bush Account on Iran Arms Deal,” a New York Times headline declared. “Bush Stance, Iran-Contra Notes At Odds,” reported The Washington Post. The prosecutor’s October Surprise came at the worst possible moment for the president.
Appearing on Larry King Live, his campaign’s favorite venue for softball interviews, Bush insisted there was nothing new in the court documents. George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton aide, telephoned into the show’s call line to challenge the president’s veracity. Walsh’s office denied any political motivation in the indictment, but the timing just four days before the election convinced the Bush camp that the prosecutor was trying to sway the outcome.
Baker was furious. The Bush momentum was dead.
AT THE HOUSTONIAN HOTEL on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Baker joined Bush and his family as they awaited the public’s verdict. After Bush got a haircut, it fell to Baker to deliver the bad news as the first wave of exit polls came in—Pennsylvania and Ohio looked bad, then more bad news from New Jersey and Michigan. “It looks like a blowout,” Bush told his diary.
As the evening wore on, state after state that had gone Republican four years earlier switched to the Democrats, including California and the Pacific Northwest, New England, and even significant sections of the South. Bush held on to just eighteen states, fewer than half as many as in 1988. Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent for Bush, the lowest for any incumbent president since William Howard Taft lost the three-way contest in 1912. The margin was even wider in the Electoral College, with Clinton capturing 370 votes to 168 for Bush. Perot took a whopping 19 percent of the popular vote, although he captured no states and therefore no electoral votes. Bush was crushed.
For Baker, it would always be an article of faith that Perot had cost them the election. “Had we not had Ross Perot, we would have won,” Baker often said. Polling suggests otherwise. If Perot had not been in the race, 38 percent of his voters told interviewers as they left polling stations on Election Day that they would have voted for Bush and 38 percent said they would have voted for Clinton, with the rest generally saying they would not have voted at all. Of the eleven states that Bush lost by 5 percentage points or less, he would have had to flip ten of them to change the outcome in the Electoral College, a tall order to say the least.
There was no question, of course, that Perot had made Bush his main target in an effort that at times seemed more like a vendetta than a campaign. But Clinton was still beating Bush in the polls even during the several months that Perot had dropped out of the race and it was a one-on-one contest. Baker understood that their problems went beyond Perot—that Perot was a symptom, not a cause. Baker believed that the campaign had made a mistake not to go to Congress with a Domestic Storm economic program at the beginning of 1992. By the time they focused on it, it was too late. More broadly, after three straight terms, Baker concluded that the Republicans had simply worn out their welcome. Clinton represented a new generation pointing to the future. Bush was part of the same crowd that had been running Washington now for twelve years. “People were tired of us,” Baker said.
When it was all over, Bush and Baker and their families looked for consolation. “Afterward, Barbara and I finished with all our tears, we said to each other, ‘Well, our guys are going to live longer, that’s the upside,’ ” said Susan Baker. But Jim Baker and his colleagues nursed grudges against those they blamed for helping to bring down Bush. At the top of their list was Lawrence Walsh, whose indictment of Weinberger seemed like a dastardly final blow and, indeed, was thrown out by a judge weeks after the election. Inside the White House, Baker went so far as to raise the question of whether Walsh himself had broken a law prohibiting government officials from trying to influence an election, an idea that ultimately led nowhere. Instead, Bush had his revenge by issuing last-minute pardons to Caspar Weinberger on previous charges as well as five other former Reagan-era government officials who had been prosecuted by Walsh, a decision that the independent counsel condemned as the completion of “the Iran-contra cover-up.”
The election left another strain that was harder to resolve. The decades-long friendship between Baker and the Bush family was no longer the same. In the weeks after the election, recriminations followed Baker, as even some of Bush’s closest family members piled on. Baker, they said, had lost his edge; he had never fully committed to the mission, he was too worried about his own reputation.
The most upset were Barbara Bush and George W. Bush. At various points over the years, Barbara had chafed at what she saw as Baker’s opportunism, never forgetting that he had forced her husband to drop out of the 1980 presidential contest against Ronald Reagan and later took a job running Reagan’s White House. This time around, as she and her son saw it, Baker had never invested in the campaign—he had resisted coming back to the White House until it was too late and even when he did come back, he acted as if it was someone else’s mess that he was not going to be able to clean up.
“Everybody’s emotions were raw,” recalled Baker’s son John. “Sometimes you say things, whether you meant them or not, you probably shouldn’t have said them.” It was “a fraught period,” as Brent Scowcroft remembered it. “There was some sentiment,” he said, “that Baker had had enough being in the shadow of the president and it was time for him to start going on his own.”
Whatever his private feelings, George Bush himself never expressed the same bitterness toward Baker as his wife and son did. “Losing is hard, losing is tough,” Baker observed. But “he never exhibited anything but love and appreciation to me.” Dennis Ross suspected that Bush understood that he had put his friend in a no-win situation and therefore did not hold it against him. “I think Bush felt a certain degree of guilt because he knew that Baker didn’t want to do this,” Ross said. “He knew the only reason he would do it was because he was asking him to do it and so while the family felt that way, Bush didn’t feel that way.”
The hard feelings would fade over time and so would the memories of them. In the years before she died, Barbara Bush said she had no recollection of any recriminations against Baker, nor did she even recall calling him the Invisible Man. “I don’t remember being upset with anybody,” she said. “I was amused occasionally, but not upset—but not with Jimmy.” Likewise, George W. Bush would also deny any ill will. His ire was directed at the campaign more generally, he said, not at Baker. “I was really frustrated because I could smell impending doom,” the younger Bush said. In Dallas, where he was living at the time, the president’s son saw people he considered natural supporters of his father putting Perot bumper stickers on their cars, which stuck with him. “I felt like the campaign was adrift, and so I was frustrated,” Bush said. “But I wasn’t angry at Baker. Nor did I blame Baker. How could you blame Baker?” What about resisting for so long the move from State? “Could he have come over earlier and made a difference?” Bush mused. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s one of these things where the whole thing was doomed from the beginning.”
But at the time, in the moment, the tension was hard to miss. Baker watched the elder George Bush struggle with the sting of rejection and knew that he had failed to save his friend’s presidency. After twenty-two years of working to advance Bush’s political career, Baker saw his service as the family’s consigliere coming to an end. He was sixty-two years old. It was time to figure out what would come next. It was time to see if there was a future for Baker beyond Bush. He would always be close to the Bush family, but no longer would he be the one to rush to the rescue when times turned tough.
Or would he?