In March 2016, Baker flew to California for a memorial service that would eventually bring him together with Donald Trump for the first time since the Reagan era. Baker was eighty-six years old by this point and much in demand on the funeral circuit, the “eulogist in chief,” as he had taken to calling himself. This one was for Nancy Reagan, who helped bring him into her husband’s White House and transformed his life. In his short speech, Baker paid tribute to the former first lady as President Reagan’s “closest adviser,” the vigilant “eyes and ears” of his White House, who was as “tough as a Marine drill sergeant” in service of her Ronnie. Baker was loyal to those who had been loyal to him and Nancy Reagan had been a patron he never forgot. Without her, he would have been just another corporate lawyer on the make in national politics. But with her support, and that of her husband, Baker had started as a staffer and ended up as a statesman.
At the VIP lunch afterward, though, the focus was on current-day politics and the strange nature of the moment. Trump was barreling toward the Republican nomination. He had demolished George Bush’s son Jeb Bush, who had served two terms as governor of Florida and started the 2016 campaign as the front-runner only to be torn down by Trump, branded a low-energy tool of an outdated party establishment. Trump had derided Jeb’s father and brother as well, the two presidents Baker had helped into office and with whom he was as closely identified as a family member. On his way out of the race, Jeb had warned—presciently, as it turned out—that Trump was a chaos candidate who would become a chaos president. But Baker was not ready to give up on the Republican Party just because it was embracing this crude outsider.
At the lunch, in a private room at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum where the service was held, Baker found himself with George Shultz, Newt Gingrich, and Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian prime minister who had served alongside Reagan in the 1980s. “I see some eerie parallels to the way Reagan came up and the way Trump is coming up,” Baker told them. Not that Trump and Reagan were precisely the same, but they were both disruptors feared by the establishment, and entertainers before they were politicians. They both appealed to disaffected Rust Belt Democrats who saw in their make-America-great-again nationalism a reason to break with the recessionary politics of the recent past. “We thought he was a grade-B movie actor, Bedtime for Bonzo, he was going to get us in a nuclear war, and we were scared to death,” Baker reflected. “And look at the people he brought into the Republican Party and then I see somewhat the same kind of phenomenon at work here.”
As it happened, Mulroney was friendly with Trump, a neighbor in Palm Beach, Florida. When he got home, Mulroney called Trump and told him about what Baker had said. “I think that you should put in a call to Jim Baker and visit with him,” Mulroney told him. “He’ll give you nothing but the straight talk and good advice.” Baker, he knew, was the antithesis of Trump’s boorish personality but Mulroney hoped the candidate might take a little guidance from the most prominent Republican wise man.
Trump agreed and had his aide Hope Hicks call Baker’s office to set up a telephone call. Baker and Trump ended up talking for twenty minutes.
“I really think you need to be thinking about pivoting to becoming more presidential,” Baker told him.
“I hear that a lot,” Trump said. “But when I’m under attack, I have to fight back.” And as far as Trump was concerned, he was always under attack.
Not long after their phone conversation, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, called Baker. Manafort, who had worked for Baker during the 1976 Republican convention before going on to a long, controversial, and ultimately criminal career as a big-spending lobbyist for an array of Russian-aligned interests, asked Baker to meet with Trump. Baker agreed, reasoning that he had met with other Republican candidates. One afternoon, he slipped into the offices of a Washington law firm that worked for Trump’s campaign and the two sat down for about twenty-five minutes. Baker handed Trump a two-page list of suggestions for what to do now that he was becoming the nominee.
“You do not need to abandon your outsider/rebel persona. But you do need to bring on board other voters if you expect to win,” Baker’s memo said. Stop attacking people who might be allies, Baker urged. Don’t feed the “shoot-from-the-lip big mouth” narrative he had developed. Reach out to women, minorities, and establishment Republicans. Steer clear of isolationism, embrace a more balanced immigration plan, stop talking about getting rid of NATO, do not advocate a new arms race. Baker recommended following his examples in negotiating the Social Security deal of 1983 and tax reform of 1986. “These suggestions,” Baker concluded, “come to you from one who, at the age of 86, doesn’t want anything except a Republican president in 2017 who is like the four I was privileged to have served.”
The meeting was supposed to be off the record, but it naturally leaked almost immediately. That was why Baker gave Trump the two-page sheet, so that the campaign people could not spin the meeting as a quasi-endorsement. Baker had, in effect, laid out conditions for his support, conditions that Trump would never meet. Baker was recommending that Trump abandon the political formula that had taken him to the brink of the Republican nomination, that had enabled him to triumph over sixteen other GOP candidates. He would not pivot to the center, as the presidential candidates of Baker’s day had invariably done. In fact, he would not try to appeal to the undecided middle of Americans, then or ever. He did not care about being presidential. He would never be like the four Republican presidents Baker had served.
Even Baker’s flirtation with Trump caused heartache among his friends and family. He got a call one day from Tom Brokaw, the now-retired NBC anchor who had become a close friend to him. “Jim, you do not want to do this,” Brokaw warned him. “You served your country nobly and your party admirably and you’re at an age and stage, I’m telling you, as a friend, that this is not a good move.”
Baker agreed not to endorse until he had thought it over. He was hardly convinced by Trump. “He’s probably his own worst enemy,” Baker reflected to us one day shortly before the Republican convention. “I don’t think he’s disciplined enough to do what he needs to do.” But, Baker added, “I’m a Republican and I will tell you this—I’ve always believed at the end of the day there has to be a really overriding reason why you wouldn’t support the nominee of your party.”
Baker had a ready-made excuse to vote against Trump given the candidate’s personal vilification of the Bushes. The Bush family loathed Trump. One day when we stopped by to visit, Barbara Bush scrunched her face in horror at the thought of Trump as president. “We’re talking about ego that knows no bounds,” she said. Months later, she wrote in Jeb’s name on her ballot rather than vote for her party’s nominee. When Election Day arrived, the two former presidents likewise both voted against Trump—Bush 41 casting his ballot for Hillary Clinton, Bush 43 for “none of the above.”
Yet Baker could not bring himself to. His compromise was not to publicly come out for Trump—no statement, no joint appearance. But in the privacy of the voting booth, Baker voted for Trump. “I’m a conservative,” he explained almost with a shrug. Better to have a conservative in the Oval Office than a liberal, “even if he’s crazy.”
SHOULD THIS HAVE surprised anyone? It did many of Baker’s friends and admirers. In recent years, Baker had come to personify an era in American politics when serious figures in both parties could put aside their differences in a crisis, bargain, and lead. He was seen as a representative of a time when Washington was still capable of coming together despite its ideological divisions, a Washington that now seemed gone. “The current sorry spectacle conjures nostalgia for James Baker,” Harper’s magazine lamented in Barack Obama’s second term. “Time to talk to a wise man, someone from the days when government worked,” Peggy Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal around the same time. In 2015, PBS produced a documentary entitled James Baker: The Man Who Made Washington Work, narrated by Brokaw. At a star-studded charity tribute to Baker at the Kennedy Center in Washington—notably sponsored by every living president and every living secretary of state, regardless of political party—Obama summed it up in a video shown to the audience. “You represent,” he said, “what we need now more than ever.”
But this was all before Trump. Trump is many things, one of which has been an extraordinary X-ray into the soul of others as they react to him and the challenges he poses to the American political system. In Baker’s case, Trump had revealed the limits of the mythology that had grown up around the man. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. But in the end, he was a Republican and that, he told us, was how he wanted to be remembered. His struggle reflected the larger one by the party he had helped build. Once anathema to its leaders, Trump effectively captured the party, forcing it to toe the line, with dissidents crushed or exiled. Much more than in Baker’s time, Washington had become a place of tribes, with a permanent war of us against them.
But party loyalty was only part of the answer. For Baker, the decision to vote for Trump was as much about staying inside the tent. What he had learned in a lifetime of wielding power was that on the outside you had none. Becoming a Never Trumper would have meant giving up whatever modest influence he had left; whether he actually needed it anymore was not the point. Baker had succeeded by working within institutions, not by blowing them up. He worked fundamentally with the world as he found it. Baker never challenged the iron rule of his father and grandfather; he became a corporate lawyer and settled into a life of privilege and duty as a pillar of Houston. Had his first wife not died, perhaps he would have remained there.
Still, the ambivalence we found in all our conversations with Baker about Trump was real too. He was personally offended by the sheer incompetence of the man even more than by the outrageous tweets and statements. When we spoke with him shortly after the inauguration in 2017, Baker found the chaos of the opening days unforgivable. Mexico was never going to pay for Trump’s border wall. Why would he keep saying that it would? His failure to hire an effective staff grated on Baker. He cringed at the insults to overseas allies and the rise of the same “America First” brand of isolationism and protectionism he had urged Bush to take on in 1992. For a man acutely conscious of the lines of propriety, the myriad ethical scandals surrounding Trump were head spinning, even as they ensnared old associates like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Nor was he encouraged when his old nemesis William Barr was tapped for a return engagement as attorney general.
Baker had recommended his friend Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, to become secretary of state. “I’m hopeful Trump will listen to him,” Baker told us. Trump did not. Tillerson was eventually cast aside, as were so many others. Every few months, we sat down again and Baker would roll his eyes or make a face when asked about the latest Trump outrage. Baker the Handler, much as he hated being called that, seemed to imagine that in the right hands Trump could be managed, but no such handler emerged. Baker could hardly believe it when Trump said he “fell in love” with North Korea’s dictator or tweeted in the middle of a special counsel investigation. Baker kept telling himself it was worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts, and deregulation.
At one point over lunch in the summer of 2019, he confessed that he could potentially see himself voting for former Vice President Joe Biden if he won the Democratic nomination in 2020. By the fall, though, he had changed his mind again. “Don’t say that I will vote for Biden,” he told us. “I will vote for the Republican, I really will. I won’t leave my party. You can say my party has left me because the head of it has. But I think it’s important, the big picture.” The big picture, he said, was Republicans controlling the executive branch.
Even Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to obtain help against his domestic rivals failed to change Baker’s calculus. The man who refused to seek foreign help during the 1992 campaign disapproved of Trump’s scheme to gain incriminating information on Biden and other Democrats. “Egregious. Inappropriate. Wrong,” he said of the behavior that resulted in the president’s impeachment, then added, “Not a crime.” The Senate, he assumed correctly, would not convict. “But boy, it’s hard to defend the antics,” he allowed. “That’s the only way to say it.”
Within a couple months, he stopped even trying. As the country was suddenly ravaged in early 2020 by a devastating coronavirus pandemic that Trump had blithely predicted would simply vanish on its own, Baker went into isolation with Susan at Rockpile Ranch, where he celebrated his ninetieth birthday via a video call with his family. The economy collapsed and millions were put out of work in the worst such crisis since the Great Depression of Baker’s youth. The police killing of an unarmed black man touched off street demonstrations and unrest unlike any in a half century. William Barr busied himself intervening in criminal cases to help Trump’s friends. Trump fell way behind Biden in the polls. And Baker decided he had nothing more to say about any of it. At long last, he opted to keep out of politics as his grandfather had urged so many years ago.
THE IRONY, of course, was that Baker was an actual dealmaker, while Trump just played one on television. Unlike the forty-fifth president, Baker understood what it meant to get the other side to say yes. He did not view negotiation as a zero-sum exercise in which the only acceptable outcome was grinding someone else into dust. And even after leaving office, he never stopped looking for deals, for ways to make two seemingly irreconcilable positions reconcile. During the second Bush administration, he served as co-chairman of bipartisan commissions to reform the election system and to revamp war powers; his partner in the first was Jimmy Carter, the man he helped run two campaigns against, and his partner in the second was Warren Christopher, his adversary in Florida at the end of another campaign. In 2012, Baker found a way to keep the Episcopal Church of Texas from seceding from the national church over its support for same-sex marriage, letting individual parishes set their own policy for a transitional period. In 2016, he brokered an agreement ending a years-long stalemate over a monument to Dwight Eisenhower in Washington. And in 2017, he teamed up with other Republicans to propose a carbon tax plan to fight climate change.
His zeal for a deal was never as much about the details as about getting to the signature. To his critics, that was a form of cynical opportunism rooted in self-aggrandizement over principle. To his admirers, it was the foundation for progress in a polarized world. As time passed, some of his deals came under question. After Vladimir Putin rose to power in Russia, the former KGB officer pushed a revisionist history of the recent past in which the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe had needlessly antagonized Moscow and driven it away from the West. Baker was a key figure in Putin’s argument because he had told Mikhail Gorbachev during German reunification talks that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.” Many papers have been written, think tank panels convened, and op-eds published arguing that Baker had made a commitment as part of what one research group, the National Security Archive, called “a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials” that they did not live up to.
Never mind that it was Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who oversaw the absorption of Eastern Europe into the Atlantic Alliance years later, not Baker. Either way, it was a stretch to ascribe the worsening relations between Russia and the West to NATO’s membership drive. It is true that Baker at one point during German unification talks had suggested that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction but he was talking about East German territory and soon backed off that. No such commitment was included in the final treaty that resulted in the German merger. The accord held that foreign troops could not be stationed in the territory of East Germany but German troops assigned to NATO could be deployed there as soon as Soviet forces withdrew. Gorbachev himself said later that “the topic of NATO expansion was not discussed at all and it wasn’t brought up in those years,” although he did think the approach of the alliance to Russia’s front door was a “violation of the spirit” of reassurances.
A more difficult question emerges over the West’s failure to do more to help Russia make a transition from its broken Communist system to a functional capitalist democracy. Baker talked about assisting the new state, but he never managed to extract adequate help from Congress or the allies. Even within the administration there was resistance because, in Brent Scowcroft’s words, it seemed like “putting money down a rat hole.” Baker had a point, of course, that the American people were in no mood to spend the peace dividend on their former enemy. Could Baker and George Bush have changed that sentiment through more assertive leadership? Left largely on its own, the newly democratic Russia in the 1990s ushered in a crony form of capitalism in which well-connected oligarchs made off with valuable state assets while many ordinary Russians lost their life’s savings and the social safety net they had come to depend on. No wonder Russians soured on Western-style democracy and instead embraced Putin’s authoritarian promises to make Russia great again.
Baker likewise lives with the legacy of his electoral endeavors. While he made a name for himself as a bipartisan compromise artist in odd-numbered years, he spent even-numbered years overseeing campaigns that pushed the boundaries. There is arguably a straight line from the racial fearmongering of Willie Horton and the questioning of Clinton’s patriotism over his youthful Moscow trip to some of the uglier, nastier politics of today. Baker’s give-no-quarter strategy in the 2000 Florida recount produced what many Americans viewed as a politicized outcome in the Supreme Court. His critics see that election as forever tainted.
Baker expresses regret for none of it. “Willie Horton, you could make the argument,” he conceded. But when we spoke further about the 1988 campaign, Baker still wanted to argue his case, noting that Michael Dukakis did in fact run a furlough program and that the Horton ad was not aired by the Bush campaign itself. Would he have done anything differently? “Not a thing,” he said. “We won a big victory. The name of the game is to win ethically and I think we did.” He made the same argument about 1992, even when they did not win, and 2000, when they did. Indeed, he relished the tough-as-nails image generated by the Florida battle. When HBO aired the movie Recount in 2008 (with his actress daughter, Mary-Bonner Baker, appearing as a lawyer working for the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris), Tom Wilkinson played Baker as a ruthless, win-at-any-cost operative. Warren Christopher was depicted as a weak-kneed pushover. That was not especially helpful given that Baker at the time was co-chairing the war powers commission with Christopher. “I don’t think I’m anywhere near as Machiavellian as they made me out to be,” Baker said. But quietly he seemed to enjoy the portrayal.
AS THE END OF HIS ninth decade approached, he relished the opportunity to retreat to the Silver Creek Ranch in Wyoming, the remote spot two thousand miles from Washington that he and Susan had bought after the long, contentious 1988 campaign. On the rough dirt road leading up to the ranch was propped an old rusted door from a Model-T Ford with fading paint broadcasting its straightforward message to outsiders: “No Hunting or Fishing Allowed.” The property itself was home to trout, magpies, elk, wolves, and bears, reserved for Baker and his family to hunt and fish. From the 1905 mountaintop homesteader’s cabin where he and Susan stayed, Baker could peer out at the horizon in all directions without noticing any signs of human habitation.
Baker spent his summer days cruising across the open land in his Chevrolet Tahoe, past Tibble Rock, across from the jutting stone formation that his family dubbed the JAB Slab and through the meadow to check on his bear bait traps. Wearing a windbreaker with a Secret Service logo and the words “Jim Baker” stenciled on it, he took us on a tour one August day, speeding up and then braking seemingly at random to avoid hidden obstacles, completely familiar with every wrinkle in the land. “I know when to slow down and when to be careful,” he told us, a self-assessment that could have applied to his long career in politics and diplomacy as well.
This was his refuge from politics. He did not use email and had never looked at Twitter. For years, he did not even have a television at the ranch, which had power for only a few hours a day from a small generator that he and Susan argued about what time to turn off each night. It had been many years since the government removed the special satellite equipment he had used to speak with the president during the dangerous twilight days of the Cold War.
The family, while still troubled by divorces and other challenges, had long since gotten past the worst of times and come together. At one Thanksgiving, John Baker, the son who had vowed to break up his father’s second marriage but now had a job and a family of his own, said during the pre-dinner prayer, “I thank God that my parents didn't give up on me.”
Baker spent time exploring. At age eighty-nine, he took an eleven-day driving trip by himself through the Rocky Mountains. He traveled with two of his sons to France to retrace his father’s World War I experiences. He went fishing in the Russian Arctic and still drove out to the Eagle Lake Rod & Gun Club in Texas where, he liked to brag, he had been both the youngest member and now the oldest. He got together with the African American cousins he never knew he had until he went to Huntsville, Texas, one day, and met a distinguished-looking elderly black gentleman who told him that his name was James Baker too.
All the while, he worked to build the Baker Institute at Rice. For its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2018, he invited Barack Obama, who headlined a black-tie gala dinner in Houston. With Trump as the hate-tweeting context for their conversation, the Democratic former president and the Republican former secretary of state lamented the passing of a Washington where facts were facts and collective action had been hard, but still possible. “The responsible center in American politics has disappeared,” Baker said. Obama nodded vigorously. While he was in town, Obama asked to visit George H. W. Bush, who was declining fast. Baker took Obama to see his old partner.
The Bakers and the Bushes, late in life, had returned to the close friendship of their pre-Washington days. The struggles of politics, of jockeying for power and credit, were long gone. They were, quite simply, family. Baker visited regularly or took the ailing former president out for oysters on the half shell. When Bush, suffering from a form of Parkinson’s disease, was hospitalized at one point, Baker defied doctor’s orders by smuggling in a small bottle of Gray Goose, his friend’s favorite vodka. When Barbara Bush died in April 2018, Susan Baker gave one of the eulogies, recalling how the Bushes were the last ones outside the family to visit Baker’s first wife, her close friend Mary Stuart, before her death. As Susan returned to her seat, Baker, tears in his eyes, mouthed the words to her, “You made me cry.”
Three days after Obama’s visit, on the last day of November 2018, Baker stopped by Bush’s house to check on him. The ninety-four-year-old former president had stopped eating and was mostly sleeping. But he roused when Baker strode in.
“Where are we going, Bake?” he asked.
“We’re going to heaven,” Baker answered.
“That’s where I want to go,” Bush said.
Bush seemed to rally a bit, as he did again when Baker returned later in the day to see him. But as Baker and his wife were driving home that night after dinner with friends, he got a call urging him to come back. Baker rushed back to the house and found Bush fading fast. He held his friend’s hand and rubbed his feet. At 10:10 p.m., with both Bakers and a few other friends and relatives at his bedside, the forty-first president died.
It was the end of an extraordinary friendship, one that had propelled both Bush and Baker to heights of power that neither might have attained without the other. “Having someone there that you totally trusted was a good thing for me,” Bush told us before he died. In the end, the story of Bush and Baker is told by two bronze statues erected in recent years at opposite ends of a Houston park, facing each other for eternity.
In the days following Bush’s death, the elaborate ritual and choreography of a state funeral kicked in—the lying in state at the Capitol, the televised service at Washington National Cathedral, the train ride across Texas. At the Washington service, Trump showed up, neglecting to shake hands with most of the other presidents. He was given no speaking role but instead listened to others extolling Bush in terms that seemed to emphasize the contrast between the forty-first and forty-fifth presidents.
The next day, at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Baker offered his farewell, praising his friend’s “decency,” his “boundless kindness and consideration for others,” his “courage” and “compassion.” The contrast with the incumbent president was once again unmentioned and unmistakable.
As he came to his conclusion, Baker, the most disciplined and detached of men, choked up and struggled to finish. “We rejoice, Mr. President, that you are safely tucked in now and through the ages with God’s loving arms around you,” he said, his eyes welling with tears that few had ever seen, “because our glory, George, was to have you as our president and as such a friend.”
ON A WARM TEXAS AUTUMN DAY, Baker took us to his own grave. He was not ready for it yet, but it was ready for him, whenever the time would come. It was in Glenwood Cemetery, the premier resting place for Houston’s premier citizens. Located just a few miles from the home that Baker and his wife shared in their years after politics, its rolling ravines and curving pathways gave it the feel of a garden oasis in the middle of what had become a sprawling metropolis.
His father, the stern Warden of Baker’s youth, was already there alongside his mother. Nearby was his grandfather, Captain Baker, the savior of the Rice fortune who had led a group of prominent Houstonians to rescue the very same Glenwood Cemetery from receivership shortly after the turn of the century. Baker’s other grandparents were also there, as was Mary Stuart and her parents. Just two weeks after our visit, Baker’s sister, Bonner, passed away and was buried in the family plot. Two months after that, his cousin, Preston Moore, once as close to him as the brother he did not have, died in a car accident and was laid to rest in the next lot over.
“This is where I’ll be,” Baker told us, pointing to a well-manicured spot in the ground, just a few feet from his parents. It was part of a small plot surrounded by a low brick wall, with a simple “BAKER” plaque affixed to it. He leaned down to tidy up the leaves.
He seemed content. James Addison Baker III had always known where he came from and he had always known where he would end up. It was everything in between that came as a surprise.