Baker’s last days in the White House were tortured. He and his team in the West Wing could hear the banging of the hammers outside their windows erecting what they morbidly called “the gallows”—the bandstand on Pennsylvania Avenue for Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade. It was a dark time in a lame-duck presidency after an ignominious defeat. For Baker, the ten weeks between the election and the end of the administration were perhaps his toughest time in his public life.
The thrashing at the ballot box was bad enough. The strain with the Bush family was even worse. But on top of that, Baker now faced what he feared would be the unraveling of the reputation he had spent so many years polishing as an investigation was opened into the search of Clinton’s passport files. The State Department inspector general, a quasi-independent watchdog within the building, had decided to refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. Suddenly, Baker and his team found themselves under investigation, suspected of dirty dealings.
Baker was distraught. Always exceedingly protective of his public image, he saw this as the humiliating end of twelve years in the top ranks of government, twelve years marked largely by one success after another, all coming down to what he considered a petty affair. Baker decided he could not take it. He sat down and drafted a letter of resignation. Being chief of staff was no longer worth it. He had not even wanted the job this time around. On the Friday before Thanksgiving 1992, he took the letter to Bush in his private study.
He was ending his career in shame, Baker told his friend, and he did not want to cause problems for the president. “Who needs this?” Baker asked.
Bush felt for Baker, but thought resigning was an overreaction. He refused to accept the letter. As long as he was president, Baker would be in the White House right alongside him.
But Baker could not let it go. “Jim Baker is still all uptight about the passport mess and there is nothing else that he can think of,” Bush dictated to his diary a few weeks later. A few days after that, Bush returned again to Baker’s state of mind: “Jim Baker has lost all interest in what’s going on at the White House. There isn’t much for him to do and he’s worried about this passport deal still. He’s got a lawyer and the lawyer tells him that they can’t find anything that he could even be charged with and that it’s most unlikely a special prosecutor will be appointed. He seems relieved but still totally preoccupied.” Baker could hardly even concentrate on the farewell speeches they were trying to draft. “His heart isn’t in any of that,” Bush said. “It’s just gone.”
By happenstance, the law authorizing independent counsels was due to expire in mid-December, meaning that William Barr, the attorney general, had to decide by then whether to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the matter. As the deadline approached and Barr made no announcement, Baker and his aides thought that maybe they had escaped what they knew would be a costly and politically fraught ordeal. At dinner the night before the law was scheduled to lapse, Margaret Tutwiler and Janet Mullins were lifting glasses to toast their near-miss when suddenly word arrived—Barr had just requested the appointment of a prosecutor in the passport matter only hours before the deadline. He had acted on the recommendation of the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Robert S. Mueller III. Tutwiler and Mullins were crushed. So was Baker. “Baker is a nervous wreck,” Bush told his diary after Barr’s announcement. The next day, Bush added, “It’s ruining Jim Baker’s life. Of all the clean honorable decent guys to have his Christmas ruined by this guy, it’s too bad.”
Baker’s funk was noticed outside the White House. Under the headline “Missing and Presumed Injured,” Mary McGrory, the Washington Post columnist, wrote that Baker had vanished along with his hopes for a Nobel Peace Prize or the White House. “His disappearance is the talk of the town’s Christmas parties,” she said. “No Republican wishes to be quoted—Baker is much feared and respected—but the general feeling is that he has suffered grave damage to his reputation and his quest for the presidency.” She added that his relationship with Bush “is said to have cooled” and noted that Baker had hoped to be remembered as a statesman, not a political operative. “Now he may go down as a disdainful manager, a prime example of the Republican tendency to play dirty in politics.”
Bush, who secretly consumed the columns of McGrory and other critical writers while publicly denying that he cared about their opinions, cringed as he read this one. “An ugly editorial by Mary McGrory,” he told his diary, “and it will have Jim Baker climbing the wall.” He added, “Jim is so sensitive about his own coverage that he will be really upset.”
Joseph diGenova, a former United States attorney for the District of Columbia best known for investigating the capital’s crack-smoking mayor, Marion Barry, was tapped as the independent counsel to investigate the passport flap. Baker knew diGenova, a Republican “prosecutor with a politician’s flair for the spotlight,” as the Post had recently called him, and thought he would be fair. But Baker recognized that once an investigation began, anyone in its sights faced danger, whether or not they had done anything wrong initially.
Baker still carried the scars from the long controversy over the 1980 campaign debate book and he knew from painful experience that even a seemingly minor matter could grow into a legal nightmare. He warned his team about what they could expect. “What Baker made perfectly clear and became obvious to all of us, the uninitiated, from the get-go is that this wasn’t really about whether you did anything wrong in the first place,” Mullins said. “This is a witch hunt.”
Whether or not it was a witch hunt, the independent counsel statute was designed in a way that encouraged never-ending investigations in search of a crime. Under the law, an independent counsel essentially answered to no one and had no duties other than pursuing the assigned targets. Ordinary prosecutors with many issues on their plates had to make judgment calls about how much time and resources to devote to an investigation with thin prospects; an independent counsel had no such tradeoffs to worry about and, because any such investigation was by its very nature politically sensitive, there was great incentive to keep going rather than to let powerful figures off the hook.
Tutwiler, Mullins, and others suddenly had to find lawyers and were instructed not to talk with each other about the investigation. They knew they were not the real targets but could easily become collateral damage. “This wasn’t about me,” Mullins said. “It was about getting Baker.” Baker felt mortified to have put them in that position. “We had just lost, his best friend was hurting, he had loyal staff members who were very, very vulnerable in a situation they didn’t fully grasp,” Mullins said. “And I think there was probably—guilt is probably not the right word but a sense of responsibility that he’s the one who got this started.”
Baker was ready when the investigators came knocking. As he sat down with diGenova’s team, Baker pulled out a memo written contemporaneously documenting what he knew and when he knew it, effectively distancing himself from anything that might have crossed the line. The investigators were impressed. “At the end of the interview, we thought, ‘This is not his first rodeo,’ ” Michael Zeldin, diGenova’s deputy, said later. “He wrote that memo for self-protective purposes, knowing in some sense that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to prove otherwise.” The investigators left Baker’s office “thinking this guy understands the way Washington works and what you have to do to protect yourself.”
Even so, it would take three years for diGenova to investigate, three excruciating years for Baker and his circle. When the prosecutor finally did issue his report in November 1995, he cleared the Baker team, saying some of them had acted stupidly but not illegally. Indeed, diGenova went on to say that Barr should never have sought his appointment in the first place.
In his public remarks, diGenova expressed sympathy for those he had investigated. “Today, a Kafkaesque journey for a group of innocent Americans comes to an end,” he said. “They did things that were stupid, dumb and partisan,” he added, “but those things are not a crime.”
Rarely if ever had a special prosecutor expressed regret at his own appointment. Exoneration proved a huge relief to Baker as well as Tutwiler and Mullins, but it did not take them long to grow outraged at what they had been put through. They thought Barr should never have subjected them to it. Word got back to Barr that Baker was angry at him, so when he visited Houston for other reasons, the former attorney general stopped in to see his cabinet colleague to make amends.
“I just want you to know that the reason I appointed the independent counsel a day before the statute expired was because you would have been in worse shape with the public integrity section of the Justice Department,” Barr told Baker.
“I don’t believe that for one minute,” Baker shot back. “You should have had the balls to stand up,” Baker added, but “you caved to the pressure.”
Barr remembered that despite the dispute, Baker behaved like “a gentleman.” But even years after the fact, Barr thought he did the only thing he could have under the circumstances. “I still think it was the right call,” he said. Baker would never agree, or forgive.
AS HE PACKED UP his office in the West Wing under a cloud, Baker set about figuring out the rest of his life. After years devoted to public service, Baker knew one thing—he was ready to cash in. For all of his family’s onetime wealth, he had burned through much of his money during his years in government and figured it was time to refill the coffers. But he also knew that he did not want to become a lobbyist, one of those former somebodies who used to come see him asking for help during his years at the top. Baker cringed when he remembered Howard Baker, one of his successors as chief of staff, bringing clients to the Treasury Department. But beyond that, he was open to offers. Baker was a capitalist and ready to make a buck, even if it meant trading on his connections in capitals other than Washington. Many firms were already beating down his door.
One decision was easy: He and Susan planned to stay in Washington for another two and a half years before returning to Houston so that Mary-Bonner could graduate from National Cathedral School. After that, Baker was pretty sure he would return to Houston, the only other place he had ever lived aside from Washington and school. But he was conflicted when his old Houston law firm, Andrews Kurth, approached him about coming back more than a dozen years after leaving. The managing partner wrote a powerful, heartfelt letter appealing to him to return to the place that had been his professional home as a young man. But Baker Botts, the family firm of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, also came calling. Barred from starting his career there because of the firm’s nepotism rule, he now had the chance to end his career there. While his son Jamie—the fifth James Addison Baker and also now a practicing lawyer—was at the firm, the partners told Baker they would make a former-secretary-of-state exemption to the no-relatives policy.
Baker was not sure at first. “What would I be?” he asked Edward William Barnett, a law school classmate and the firm’s managing partner. “Would people accept me? What do they want me to do?” Barnett assured him he would not be doing run-of-the-mill legal work, just high-stakes rainmaking. Baker was clear about his no-lobbying policy and he would agree to go on only two corporate boards chosen by the firm. On the other hand, Baker said, he did not mind lobbying foreign governments on behalf of American companies. “I would be happy to do that if I could,” he said. But he warned, “I think you ought to explain to your partners that I am a depleting asset and whatever benefit I am to you, you got to get in the first two or three years. After that, people are going to forget me.” Barnett said he understood. They came to an agreement. Finally, at age sixty-four, Baker would join the family business.
His Houston friend Robert Mosbacher, the fundraiser who had gone on to serve as George Bush’s commerce secretary, let him know that the Enron Corporation, the nation’s largest natural gas company, based in their mutual hometown, wanted them both to join its board. Baker demurred. But Enron was persistent and Kenneth Lay, the firm’s chairman and chief executive officer and a friend of Bush’s, offered him a consulting contract instead to help the company develop projects around the world. At the time, Enron was seeking to build gas-fired plants or make deals in places where Baker might have particular sway, including Kuwait, Germany, and Russia. A month after leaving the White House, Baker signed on.
He also got a call from his old friend Robert Strauss, who told him a Democrat named David Rubenstein wanted to come see him. Baker agreed, so one day Rubenstein and two partners showed up at the White House. They knew the competition for Baker’s service was hot when they found the next person waiting to see the outgoing chief of staff after them was David Rockefeller.
Rubenstein was a remarkable Washington success story. The son of a post office mail sorter and a homemaker, he had parlayed a fierce discipline and work ethic into a job as a domestic policy aide in Jimmy Carter’s White House, where he was so committed that colleagues wondered whether he actually slept in his office. After leaving government, he transformed himself from a modestly paid public servant into a high-dollar private entrepreneur, trafficking in influence and access as cofounder of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm based in Washington.
While he would become a billionaire, Rubenstein was a famous ascetic—he did not drink, smoke, or eat meat. But he collected people and one of the people he was intent on collecting was Baker. Rubenstein made his pitch, explaining that he would not make Baker lobby or do anything else that would make him uncomfortable. He noted that he already had Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary under Ronald Reagan and Baker’s Princeton classmate, helping to run the firm. Baker was polite but not all that interested. A relatively young investment firm with just $100 million under management? He could do better.
Unwilling to take no for an answer, Rubenstein approached Dick Darman to see if Baker’s loyal consigliere could help persuade him. Darman told Rubenstein that he had made a mistake citing Carlucci as a draw; Baker and Carlucci did not get along particularly well, Darman explained. But the longtime Baker adviser agreed to talk with his old boss—and then asked whether there would be room for him to come too. Rubenstein quickly understood it was a package deal; if he wanted Baker, he would have to take Darman. He agreed. He would showcase Baker to attract wealthy clients who would be drawn to the former secretary’s star power. “It was a brilliant strategy that was about to make all of them very, very rich,” wrote Dan Briody in a history of Carlyle.
For Baker, it was a good deal—plenty of cash with little real responsibility. “I didn’t take up much of his time because I never asked him to ask for money,” Rubenstein explained. “He never brought a deal in, he never worked on a deal, and I never asked him to ask for money. So what did he do? Well, I would basically have lunches and dinners and invite people to come to them who were prospective investors or people like that and if you were invited to a dinner in London where David Rubenstein is going to be the featured speaker, you probably wouldn’t show up. If you’re invited to hear Jim Baker, the great man, you would probably show up.” He would take Baker once a year to the Middle East and once a year to Asia. In the Middle East, in particular, Baker was welcomed as royalty. “He was like a god there because he was the man who had saved the region to some extent,” Rubenstein said.
Another opportunity soon came Baker’s way as well, one that would prove irresistible given his family pedigree. George Rupp, the president of Rice University, reached out through intermediaries to see if Baker might be interested in establishing an institute at the Houston school. Preston Moore was asked to raise the idea with his cousin. At dinner at Baker’s house a few days later, as Susan served fish around a wooden table, Moore mentioned the proposal. Baker’s eyes lit up. This was, after all, the university founded and built from the ground up by Captain Baker with the William Marsh Rice estate he saved from turn-of-the-century fraudsters. “I knew what the answer was going to be,” Moore recalled. Baker wanted to establish not just another think tank but an institute that would marry the world of ideas with the world of action, finding ways to translate theoretical policy positions into tangible deeds. What else would better reflect his view of policy and politics?
Baker asked Dennis Ross to come run it, but Ross did not want to move to Houston and opted instead to work for the incoming Clinton administration on the unfinished business of Middle East peace. John Rogers, Baker’s longtime aide, agreed to help get it up and going and Baker then recruited Edward Djerejian, his former ambassador to Syria, to serve as the founding director. “Baker very cleverly approaches my wife and convinces her this is what we should be doing,” Djerejian recalled.
Financed in part by some of the former secretary’s wealthy friends, the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University was inaugurated in the fall of 1993. At the formal groundbreaking ceremony a year later, Baker managed to draw four former presidents.
IN APRIL 1993, Baker boarded a Kuwait Airways flight specially arranged by the Kuwaiti government to fly Bush, several members of his family, and several of his former aides to the country they had liberated two years earlier. Bush was brought to Kuwait to be honored for all he had done for the tiny nation-state. He was awarded its highest medal by Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah, the emir restored to his throne by American troops. It was a valedictory moment for Bush and Baker, who were treated as conquering heroes. Only later would anyone learn that Saddam Hussein had reportedly sent a hit squad to kill the former president while they were in the region, a plot that never materialized but which prompted President Bill Clinton to launch a missile strike in retaliation.
All Baker knew at the time was that the trip had gone well. And for him, it was not over. After George and Barbara boarded the plane to head home, Baker stayed behind. Over the next two days, he met with the prime minister and other Kuwaiti officials as part of Enron’s effort to win a contract to rebuild a 400-megawatt power plant at Shuaiba south of Kuwait City that had been destroyed by the Iraqis during the invasion, a project worth at least $600 million and possibly up to $1 billion. The competitor, a consortium led by Deutsche Babcock of Germany, had a bid that would cost Kuwait almost 50 percent less. But Enron had Baker, one of the heroes of the Gulf War. When he got together for breakfast with the Kuwaiti businessmen who were part of the Enron consortium, including a former foreign minister, they did not actually talk about the bid. That was not Baker’s role. “We discussed the liberation, et cetera,” the former foreign minister later said.
Still exceedingly sensitive about his reputation, Baker rejected the idea that he was making money off his time in public service, much less profiting off the war he had helped run. But of course he was, just as top officials from every administration in modern-day Washington had. No one was paying Baker millions of dollars because he had been a successful corporate lawyer in Texas. They were paying him millions of dollars because he had been secretary of the treasury and secretary of state—and might even be a presidential candidate soon. They did not want him to haggle over contracts or calculate bids. They wanted him to get people into the room, to tell stories, to backslap and reminisce and, eventually, to solve problems. He knew how things worked. He knew pretty much everyone who mattered. And Baker did not mind the perks that came with his new life. “There is nothing I enjoy more than having that jet at my disposal,” he once told his cousin Addison Baker Duncan.
It should hardly have surprised him, then, that he would be accused of capitalizing on the Gulf War. In September 1993, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a long piece in The New Yorker detailing Baker’s work in Kuwait on behalf of Enron’s bid for the power plant as well as the business dealings of Neil and Marvin Bush, two of the former president’s sons. The Enron deal seemed to cross lines of propriety. “In seeking contracts to rebuild Kuwait so soon after American men and women risked their lives there—in using their sacrifice as a kind of calling card—haven’t Baker, the two Bush sons, and the rest transgressed those bounds?” Hersh asked.
Baker later encountered Hersh on an airplane. “Seymour, you really tried to screw me on this,” he remembered telling him. “I was trying to help an American company. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Taken aback by Baker’s anger, Hersh mumbled something about doing his job.
Hersh was not the only one to find it all just a little unseemly. Just a month after the New Yorker article, The New Republic weighed in with its own piece, this time focused on Baker’s lucrative affiliation with Carlyle. David Rubenstein saw it first and sheepishly showed the article to Baker on a chartered jet heading to Europe in October. The cover included a cartoon drawing of Baker in front of a large bag of cash under the headline “The Access Capitalists: Influence-Peddling in the Nineties.” As Baker flipped through the magazine, he found the cover story by a young writer named Michael Lewis lumping him together with other former senior government officials lured by Rubenstein to open doors for him around the world.
“The Carlyle Group, in short, has become a kind of salon des refusés for the influence-peddling class,” Lewis wrote. “It offers a neat solution for people who don’t have a whole lot to sell besides their access, but who don’t want to appear to be selling their access.” The article quoted Rubenstein saying, “Let’s suppose you’re the CEO of GM and you get a call from Baker. You think, ‘Hey the former secretary of state wants to come out and have lunch with me. I’ll get the photographer out…have my picture taken.’ ” Rubenstein seemed particularly pleased to have scored Baker, telling Lewis that while other top former officials had the ability to call any chief executive in the country, “Baker just puts us in a different league.”
Baker fumed at the New Republic piece, blaming it on owner Martin Peretz, a strong supporter of Israel who did not care for the Bush administration’s approach to the Middle East. And he stiffened at the notion that he was exploiting his time in government. What was he supposed to do after stepping down? Be a hermit? “If the piece is suggesting that because you have held high political office, you are foreclosed from doing anything in business, I think that’s bullshit,” he said years later, as irritated about the criticism as he had been at the time.
The work sure was profitable, though. After years in public office, Baker was finally bringing home serious money. In the first nine months of 1994 alone, he earned $2.4 million from Baker Botts, Carlyle, Enron, paid speeches, and other income. Later that year, he collected $184,000 for a series of events over the course of a single week in Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. By the end of that first full year out of office, his honoraria for speaking engagements came close to $900,000.
Baker’s affiliation with Carlyle especially would make him a wealthy man, richer than his father or grandfather had ever been, and he would continue with the firm for more than a decade. But his arrangement with Enron would last only about two years. Baker was not earning the success fees he had thought he might and he later said that he felt queasy about the firm’s bookkeeping. “I came home one day to Susan and I said, ‘You know, honey, I don’t understand this, the way they do the accounting at Enron,’ ” he recalled.
By 1995, he left the firm, once again saved by his instinct for trouble or self-preservation. Six years later, the firm went bankrupt with $74 billion in losses, the largest such filing in American history at the time, and multiple investigations were opened into Enron’s finances. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, Lay’s successor as chief executive officer, were convicted of conspiracy and fraud. Baker could only shake his head, glad he had cut his ties long before.
BUT BAKER MISSED his old life. Was he really done with politics? The past three Republican presidents had all leaned on him when election time came around. Now that Bush was done with campaigning, Baker thought of himself in some ways as the natural heir. At least, Baker no longer had to worry about crossing his friend Bush or being pressed back into service as a mere staffer. He had the name recognition, the experience—why should he not try himself? Only a few months into Clinton’s presidency, Baker started exploring whether to run for president in 1996.
Baker had little doubt about his capacity to serve in the nation’s highest office. He understood the presidency intimately as few others did. He had arguably acted as a shadow president during Ronald Reagan’s first term and was often described as a virtual prime minister in Bush’s administration. However exaggerated those descriptions were, Baker had learned better than anyone else of his generation how to acquire and wield power in Washington. He had been tempted by the idea of the presidency for years—keeping all those you-should-run letters from the 1980s in a file folder—but this, he knew, was the moment. Either he ran now or his chance would pass forever.
“When you see these people up close, you say, ‘Wait a second, they’re not that much better than I am; how did this guy get to be president?’ ” said Rubenstein, who talked about the prospect with Baker. “As they say, nobody’s a hero to their valet, right? So you spend a lot of time in the White House and you know all the flaws of the person. So if you were chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and your best friend becomes president of the United States and you know what Reagan’s flaws were and you know what Bush’s flaws are and you certainly knew what Gerald Ford’s flaws were, why would you say that you, who people say walk on water in all these great jobs, why would you say you shouldn’t be president?”
In Washington, those who knew Baker considered him a potentially formidable president. Even before the 1992 election was over, The New York Times described him as one of about a half dozen potential candidates on “the A list” for Republicans in four years, along with his friend Dick Cheney and their mutual adversary, Dan Quayle. It was not hard, after all, to see Baker in the Oval Office in his own right, with his patrician mien, street savvy, commanding presence, and easy if controlled charm. What was hard to see was Baker as a candidate. His only run for public office, the Texas attorney general’s race in 1978, had not exactly ended in glory and ever since then he had served on campaign staffs or in appointed jobs. He had little natural touch for campaigning. He was not an inspiring speaker. He did not especially like glad-handing strangers. And he was from a generation that would never have imagined sharing with the public whether they wore boxers or briefs as Clinton had.
If Baker was going to run, one thing he had to do was figure out how to purge the 1992 defeat from his record. At the annual Bohemian Grove encampment north of San Francisco in July 1993, he made an effort to laugh it off with a joke: Bush asks Baker what he would do after the election and Baker replies, “essentially do nothing.” Bush then responds, “Hell, I thought that’s what you did during the campaign.”
It says much about what Baker had learned in his time in Washington that the joke, which had gone over well with the elite all-male audience where he told it, precipitated a lengthy, detailed debate inside his circle: Should he leak it? To Newsweek? What were the pros and cons? Andrew Carpendale, his State Department speechwriter, who had come to work for Baker in his new life, produced a full-page memo examining the merits, complete with three bullet points on why it would be beneficial to pass it to the magazine. Making the joke public would “show that you have a sense of humor about last fall, that you’re not shirking responsibility, and that your relationship with George Bush remains steadfast and strong,” Carpendale wrote. But Baker hesitated. The item never ran.
Baker began positioning himself in case he did run. As the 1994 midterm congressional elections approached, he campaigned for more than twenty Republican candidates around the country, including, of all people, Oliver North, who had nearly brought down Reagan and Bush during the Iran-contra affair. Convicted of lying to Congress, only to have the verdict overturned on a technicality, North was running for Senate in Virginia, a hero to the political right although still anathema to the party establishment. The state’s silver-haired senior Republican senator, John Warner, refused to support North in the general election, sponsoring an independent candidate instead. Even Reagan issued a letter denouncing North. But Baker campaigned for him nevertheless, an act of pandering to conservatives so brazen that Maureen Dowd deemed it “the surest sign yet that he was seriously considering running for president in 1996.”
North lost in November, but Republicans captured both houses of Congress anyway for the first time in forty years, providing a boost to the party heading toward 1996. They were a different breed of Republicans, though, and their leader was Newt Gingrich, the combative rebel who had pushed aside the long-reigning moderates and led the tax revolt against Bush that helped doom his presidency. In a revolutionary time inside his party, Baker was not much of a barricade stormer. When he gave a speech in Houston shortly after the midterm elections, teasing that he might run for president, he sounded out of touch with the new GOP zeitgeist as he talked about reaching across the aisle to Democrats. “In my view,” he said, “the political center is where you win elections.” Yet that was less and less the prevailing view.
As he explored the prospect, Baker examined the potential field. Bob Dole, the runner-up to Bush for the 1988 nomination, was the front-runner and early surveys showed him with 28 percent of the Republican vote. The only other potential candidate in double digits was Dan Quayle with 19 percent. Baker had just 4 percent, roughly the same as a passel of other possible contenders, including Dick Cheney. But Baker was not intimidated. Slowly, methodically, he took soundings for a possible campaign. He talked with political strategists such as Charlie Black to figure out what would be required. He thought through how much money he would need and how he could raise it. Some of his friends, like David Paton from Princeton, were enthusiastic and encouraged him to jump into the race. So did some of his close advisers, who believed he had all the right qualities of a president—seasoning, judgment, pragmatism, and the ability to see around corners.
But Baker found a lot of skepticism as well. David Rubenstein, Robert Zoellick, and Dennis Ross all thought that he would jeopardize his place in history as the secretary of state who helped end the Cold War. “You don’t want your legacy to be a failed presidential candidate and in this case someone who didn’t even get the nomination,” Ross remembered telling him. “He said to me, ‘Look, I can raise the money.’ I said, ‘That’s not the issue.’ I said, ‘John Connally raised the money. You’re never going to be the kind of person who’s going to open up in a way and there’s going to be a constant pressure to do that. It’s just not you.’ ”
Baker invited Andy Card, Bush’s former deputy chief of staff and transportation secretary, over to his office to talk about it. Card, like Ross, was skeptical: “What I told him was, ‘You’re standing on an amazing pedestal right now and it’s flattering to be on that pedestal. But if you do run for president right now, your opponents would have the most fun trying to knock you off the pedestal and I’m not sure you could get back on that pedestal.’ ” He knew it was the right advice politically, but Card said years later, “I regretted saying that right after I walked out of his office.” Baker, he thought, would have been a natural president.
One by one, Baker also talked with his eight children. Any campaign could potentially drag them into the unforgiving glare of publicity—their past drug use, divorces, and other difficulties. One of those he worried about most was Elizabeth Winston. He sat down with her at the Silver Creek Ranch and told her that her time at the Menninger Clinic would come up. Elizabeth said she was fine with that; she could help focus public attention on treatment. “I’ll be your poster child for it,” she told him.
For the frankest, most comprehensive assessment, Baker knew he could depend on Dick Darman and Margaret Tutwiler, who were the most trusted kind of Washington advisers, the ones who had the capacity to say things to him with bracing candor that others would not dare. In a pair of memos, they delivered on the candor, pointedly listing the tradeoffs as well as the possibilities of a presidential bid. Some of it was downright harsh. “First of all, you have passionate enemies far more than passionate supporters,” Darman wrote in his. “Fairly or not, there are lots of reporters who believe that you skated through Washington for fourteen years as the ‘velvet hammer’ hoodwinking the press through your skillful manipulation of the media. They are out to settle scores.” He noted that “the hardcore conservative wing of the party” despised Baker as did “the organized Jewish community.” His reputation could be sullied by a failed run, just as it was for another former secretary of state who ran for president. “You do not want to be the Al Haig of the 1996” election, Darman wrote, a line that was sure to resonate with Baker. He would also have to be ready for attacks on Enron and the Carlyle Group, the passport case and his alleged “fuck the Jews” remark. “Frankly, you do not like criticism and you get on the defensive easily,” Darman concluded. “I don’t blame you, it makes you a human being, but the list of charges that every presidential candidate must deal with from the personal to the substantive grows with each election and you need to be ready for it.”
In her own memo, Tutwiler echoed some of Darman’s thoughts and told Baker he had to wrestle with questions like “what do I want to do for this country” and “Safire’s old haunting question, ‘What does he believe in?’ ” She noted that his baggage included a lack of elective experience, the “silver spoon” issue, and the perception that you “only care about yourself.” Not to mention that he had no natural constituency. “Remember those in your economic bracket make up 1% of this country,” she reminded him. At the same time, she told him she thought he would be a good president and a better campaigner than most expected. And so what if you try and fail, she wrote: “Those people who respect, admire, and like you for you and not for your previous titles will still be your friends win or lose—all the rest is shallow and artificial to begin with.”
His advisers knew him well. Baker was not comfortable with the new politics of personal revelation, nor did he relish coming under attack. He had forged a formidable record as secretary of state and had a lot to lose from a failed campaign. There was a reason that Tutwiler had nicknamed him “Mr. Caution” all those years ago. And so, after months of deliberation, Baker opted against the race, putting an end to his never-off-the-ground campaign with an aside in the spring of 1995. “I’m over whatever short virus might have existed a year or so ago,” he said publicly. Baker did in fact still have the bug. He would not entirely give up wanting to be president, but he knew that he did not have the wherewithal to do what it took to get the prize. “If he were selected to be president, he would have done it,” David Paton said. “But he couldn’t imagine going around and spending his time campaigning and saying the same thing again and again and having to weigh his opinion against what was politically savvy.”
The simple truth was that Baker had accomplished too much to let it ride on a presidential campaign he was just as likely to lose. “What it came down to was, would he have rather been remembered as former secretary of state or as a failed presidential nominee?” his son Doug Baker said. “He was more comfortable with the former secretary of state.”
In later years, his father would blame exhaustion after so long at the highest levels of government and national campaign politics. “I knew I could do that job,” Baker said one day in retirement. “So why didn’t I run for president? Because I was too damn worn out. We talked about it. We thought about it. My numbers were 83 percent name identification. We could have raised the money. But look, five campaigns—”
At that point, Susan Baker, who had been listening patiently, interjected a note of realism as only a spouse can. “But honey,” she said, “the party was turning and it was getting much more conservative and they considered him very liberal.” Tired, yes, but already a product of a different, fading time.
Baker shrugged. In the end, he said, “you’ve got to want to have it.” And he did not want it enough to do what was required.
As it turned out, Dole did and asked Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to reach out to Baker to see if he would be willing to be his running mate. Baker called Bush to ask his opinion. Bush first checked with his eldest son, George W. Bush, who had been elected governor of Texas in 1994 and was now entertaining his own national aspirations. “Yeah, I think you ought to do it,” Bush told Baker, “and more importantly, George W. thinks you ought to.”
The idea never went anywhere. The party was moving on. At age sixty-six, Baker found his style of Republicanism on the wane. “He could probably have gotten the Democrat nomination,” Elizabeth Winston reflected. “He probably couldn’t have gotten the Republican nomination because he wasn’t far right enough.”
AS HE DEBATED his future, Baker was also busy defining his past. While making money at Carlyle and dabbling in presidential politics, he was at work on a book about his time as secretary of state, intent on following Winston Churchill’s maxim that “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” It would not be a classic memoir and in fact on one letter from his publisher Baker made a point of circling the word and scribbled “stop calling it a memoir” in the margin. It would be, instead, his argument for history.
Baker made clear to the publisher that he did not want to write about his time as a campaign operative and political fixer; he wanted to frame his place in posterity as the diplomat who helped end the Cold War, so the book would only cover his nearly four years as secretary of state. “He wanted to be remembered for being a statesman,” said Derek Chollet, an aide who worked on the book. “He didn’t want to be remembered for being a political guy.”
Baker set about the task with all the systematic organization and attention to detail that he brought to each of his government missions. He assembled a team, ordered up memos, collected documents, and researched books by other secretaries of state. To do the writing, he hired Tom DeFrank, the Newsweek correspondent who had first gotten to know Baker during the Ford campaign and was better wired in the Bush and Baker circles than perhaps any other journalist. Andrew Carpendale, the former State Department speechwriter, would oversee the project while Chollet, who had been in the State Department’s policy planning office, would conduct research. Margaret Tutwiler would consult on drafts and from time to time Baker would send memos seeking input from Robert Zoellick, Dennis Ross, Robert Kimmitt, and others.
Baker approached the project as if it were an arms control treaty, negotiating each page, each word. No point was too small to deliberate. The title was the subject of furious debate. Memos flew back and forth proposing various alternatives. Many of the nine or ten that were considered included some variation of the word whirlwind. But Janet Mullins did not like the word. “Connotes victim of events,” Baker jotted down as he took notes on her advice. “Everything I did was just accident. Was a witness not a catalyst.” That struck too close to the right-place-right-time argument his critics made about his tenure—that he just happened to be there when the world changed, not that he had helped change it.
In the end, Baker opted for The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War & Peace, 1989–1992. By marrying the words politics and diplomacy, he made no pretense to grand geopolitical vision, à la Henry Kissinger, but brought his own background in campaigns to the task of managing the turbulent forces of his era. He was, after all, a fixer, no matter how much he tried to break out of that straitjacket, but a fixer who shaped world events. And why not? Diplomacy was the practice of politics on a global scale.
The politics that erupted over the drafting of the book for Baker were instructive in their own way. Carpendale, a onetime graduate student on Soviet and American politics under Dennis Ross at the University of California at Berkeley, was recruited to Bush’s 1988 campaign despite being a lifelong Democrat and eventually rose to become Baker’s chief speechwriter. “He was loud, he was boisterous, temperamentally about as opposite from Baker as you can imagine,” recalled Peter Bass, his housemate at the time. He clashed in particular with DeFrank, a seasoned journalist who did not appreciate being lectured by the younger man. They ended up quarreling repeatedly over how long the writing was taking.
But Carpendale’s biggest confrontation came with Baker himself over the former secretary’s determination to scrub the book as if it were just another political document. Even after dropping the idea of a presidential campaign, Baker had little interest in an overly candid reflection of his life and times. “He was still then very much in the mind-set of a Washington figure where everything you say will be used against you eventually,” Chollet said, “and so the caution was always there.”
Baker was especially sensitive about the Persian Gulf War, making sure to expurgate any sense of doubt or uncertainty about the outcome. He took his dark black felt pen and crossed out a passage conceding that Robert Gates, Paul Wolfowitz, and other officials had urged the administration to ground all Iraqi helicopters after the cease-fire and shoot down those violating the order. He slashed a section recalling public statements that he, George Bush, and Dick Cheney made at the time encouraging Saddam Hussein’s ouster. And finally he deleted this passage: “In retrospect, it may have been a tactical mistake to pull out of Iraq promptly and not exploit our military leverage. The Iraqi army was essentially prostrate at the time. If we had exerted a bit more pressure by slowing the pace of our withdrawal, it’s at least possible Saddam may have been removed from power one way or the other.”
The cleansing of the manuscript finally proved too much for Carpendale. He sat down at his computer to type out an angry dissent, the likes of which rarely reached Baker when he was secretary of state. “I want to register my vehement disagreement with several of the substantive changes you made in this chapter,” Carpendale wrote, citing the Iraq deletions. “In short, you’ve cut almost all the sophistication and nuance out of the chapter.” He went on. “It’s obvious where these cuts came from: Margaret. And it’s obvious why she would recommend them: they reveal a certain complexity to the post-war situation and imply that possibly we could have done things differently, even better. Undoubtedly, if she had her way, she’d do with this chapter what she recommended we do with the pre-August 2nd chapter: excise it from the book.”
Carpendale saved the most stinging rebuke for his conclusion. “You alone will have to bear the burden when the lead review in The New York Times Book Review begins something like this: ‘In a colorful and readable memoir, James A. Baker, III manages to do as an author what he did so well in over twelve years in power in Washington: glorify his own successes, avoid any hint of failure, and skirt the truth.’ ”
The clash finally played out one day in the office in a face-to-face blowup with Baker. “Andrew was saying something to him that was kind of disrespectful in some way and Baker just unloaded on him and I’m sitting there like, ‘Oh shit,’ ” Chollet recalled. Baker pointed out the window of his grand Baker Botts office, gesturing toward the White House not far away. “I was goddamn White House chief of staff,” Chollet remembered him erupting. “Don’t you tell me what to do!”
Of course, Carpendale lost the battle. Baker was not about to cloud his legacy by publicly entertaining second thoughts about the end of the Iraq War. Carpendale was disappointed but not surprised. He respected Baker but understood his flaws as well.
His forecast of a brutal reception for a sanitized book proved eerily prescient. When the Baker book was published in September 1995, clocking in at a dutiful, carefully crafted 672 pages, the former secretary of state picked up The New York Times and found words that almost seemed as if they had come from Carpendale’s memo.
“The man famous for spinning the message of the week is now spinning his own image for history,” wrote Michiko Kakutani, the newspaper’s famed book critic. “And yet, readers, like voters in the last presidential election, are unlikely to buy his message. In this case, it’s clear the diplomat is still a politician.”