A little more than a week before the 2016 presidential election, Jim Baker was obsessing over what to do about Donald Trump. Baker’s wife, daughters, and closest advisers were urging Baker to vote against him. Baker’s best friend, former president George H. W. Bush, his partner for nearly a half century on the tennis courts, on the campaign trail, and on the world stage, had made it clear that he would vote against Trump. So had Bush’s son, former president George W. Bush, and other members of the Bush family.
Throughout the long, nasty campaign, Trump had been attacking the Bushes and pretty much everything they—and Baker—stood for. Trump had asked for an endorsement and Baker had refused, but he still was not sure what to do in the privacy of the voting booth. He saw the modern Republican Party as a global bulwark of open markets, free enterprise, and the American way of life. He had helped to build it and he was used to winning. Now Trump, vain and bombastic, a flashy New York real estate mogul who boasted of grabbing women’s private parts and seemed like a sure loser, threatened to upend all that. But Trump was the party’s nominee, and Baker, late in life, remained a party man.
We sat down with Baker in his favorite suite at the Willard Hotel, the ornate Victorian landmark barely a block away from the White House. Baker was eighty-six years old at the time, although you would not have known it. He wore his customary dark suit with money-green tie, a habit he picked up when he became secretary of the treasury in Ronald Reagan’s second term and had continued ever since. A courtly lawyer with a Texas twang, a perpetual twinkle in his eye, and an ear for gossip, Baker dominated both American politics and policymaking through much of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s with a mastery rarely seen before or since. But for the last several years, over the course of dozens of hours of interviews, it had become clear that Baker thought the country had gone seriously off course. “The point of holding power is to get things done and accomplish things,” he told us once in the summer of 2014, his voice rising almost an octave in exasperation. He pressed that point whenever the current generation called for advice, which they still did fairly often, but he seemed mystified that the message was not getting through. “The argument I’ve been making,” he said, “is that we’re not leading.”
Now, on that Halloween morning in 2016, Trump seemed like a catastrophic herald of the system’s breakdown. “The guy is nuts,” Baker sighed as we talked in the sunny oval sitting room of his suite. “He’s crazy. I will not endorse him. I’ve said that publicly. I’ve told him that.” Trump was promising a destructive end to the Washington-led world order that Baker and others had spent a generation designing. He disparaged long-standing alliances, vowed to rip up free trade pacts, decried American leadership outside its borders, casually embraced a new nuclear arms race, and sought to reverse the globalization that had defined international politics and economics since the end of World War II. He opposed just about everything that Baker and the modern Republican Party supported and Baker ticked them off for us again that morning: “He’s against free trade. He’s talking about NATO being a failed alliance. He’s dumping all over NAFTA,” the trade pact with Mexico and Canada that Baker had helped set in motion. Baker still backed it, as did the vast bulk of his party. “That was a hell of a deal,” he said, shaking his head. Yet in Trump’s view, the leaders of the past—Baker and his contemporaries—had bungled their chance and squandered American greatness. Trump’s campaign, as quixotic as it originally seemed, had tapped into a powerful strain of resentment with his pledge to blow up Washington and remake it in his own image. He promised to drain the very swamp on which the Willard stood.
Voting against Trump should have been an easy call for Baker. Trump, after all, was “a guy who’s his own worst enemy,” as Baker reminded us. “He can’t keep his mouth shut.” But Baker also was not quite ready to walk away from the party to which he had devoted so many years. He knew what it felt like when political power shifted and he knew that it was much better to be on the winning side. He had fought against the Reagan Revolution inside the Republican Party on behalf of Gerald Ford and George Bush, then became the revolution’s most capable executor as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. As Bush’s secretary of state, he had watched the unraveling of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, another revolution that Baker did not start but figured out how to channel. The lesson he had taken from these events was simple and it was clear: When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.
When it came to Trump and the nationalist-populist backlash that he represented, however, Baker just could not decide. It was only days before the election, and he went back and forth. At the end of our long conversation, after touching on Middle East peacemaking and the inner machinations of the Bush White House and the bipartisan prayer group he used to attend on Capitol Hill, we circled back to the subject at hand.
Could Jim Baker, the very definition of the establishment, really vote for Donald Trump?
Baker looked stricken. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t voted for him yet.”
DELEGATE HUNTER, campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, and secretary of state, James Addison Baker III played a leading role in some of the most critical junctures in modern American history. For a quarter century, every Republican president relied on Baker to manage his campaign, his White House, his world. Baker brought them to power or helped them stay there, then steered them through the momentous events that followed. He was Washington’s indispensable man.
Any chronicle of the modern presidency would find Baker at the heart of virtually every chapter, for his was an unmatched case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late-twentieth-century America and into the first decade of the twenty-first. He was the campaign operative who secured the Republican nomination for Gerald Ford against a relentless challenge from the right by Ronald Reagan in 1976, then four years later managed George Bush’s first presidential campaign, which proved successful enough to earn Bush the vice presidency and Baker a spot by the new president’s side. He set up and ran Reagan’s White House as chief of staff for four years, securing many of the achievements that shaped the legacy of the fortieth president. In Reagan’s second term, with nothing more than an undergraduate course in economics, he took over as secretary of the treasury and rewrote the American tax code from top to bottom in collaboration with leading Democrats. He returned to the campaign trail in 1988 to win the presidency for Bush in a harshly negative election that foreshadowed some of the political nastiness of races to come, then switched back into statesman mode as America’s top diplomat, from which perch he effectively managed the most tumultuous period in international politics since World War II.
Over the following few years, as Washington presided over the end of the Cold War, Baker shaped a new American approach to a reordered world. Through it all, he was the archetype of a style of American politics and governance that today seems lost, an approach focused on compromise over confrontation, deal-making over disagreement and pragmatism over purity. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War and brokered the reunification of Germany in the heart of Europe. He was the “gold standard” among White House chiefs of staff, as virtually everyone put it, and went on to become the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. In short, he was the un-Trump.
We had set out to write a biography about Baker during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the nation was already starkly divided but Trump’s ascendance was still unthinkable. As we interviewed Baker and his contemporaries for the book, the increasingly real prospect of a President Trump suggested an even more urgent reason for the project than we had originally envisioned: the unraveling of the political system that Baker had learned to operate so skillfully, at just the moment when the post–Cold War international order that he and his generation had established was fraying. At least to start, a book about Baker had seemed like escapism, offering an opportunity to time-travel back to Washington at the tail end of the Cold War, as the fractious 1980s evolved into a 1990s when America, suddenly, reigned supreme. That was Baker’s moment. Freedom, and McDonald’s, had come to Red Square; apartheid had ended peacefully in South Africa. History was not over, but it was definitely happening, right there for everyone to see on twenty-four-hour cable news. Although that did not erase the partisan conflicts and bitter discord roiling American politics through the Reagan years, and the city had its usual supply of hypocrites and charlatans, demagogues and dilettantes, it was a far more optimistic Washington than today’s angry, anxious capital, a Washington where getting things done was not just possible but required.
Baker seemed to us the representative of that time; certainly, he was the uniquely successful exemplar of it, a hard-edged partisan who nonetheless believed in bipartisanship and thought elections required a record to run on, not merely a provocative position to tweet. But if Baker’s Washington was a more functional, fundamentally more civil place, it was still a capital whose currency was power, populated by political animals for whom access, influence, and image were paramount. Baker was one of them. He was calculating and canny and opportunistic in all the ways that reflected the city whose top jobs he had conquered, one by one. He did not question its injustices, or the insularity of a world populated by white men who looked and sounded like him. Then again, neither did he come to Washington to fight the culture war that animated so many of his fellow Republicans. As our conversation on the eve of Trump’s election suggested, Baker had not become the ultimate Washington player because of his ideological fervor, but because, better than anyone of his generation, he figured out how to wield the levers of power. His doctrine was deal-making. Real deals, ones that stuck, deals that changed the world. And you cannot make deals and get things done while criticizing from the outside. Baker knew that. You have to be on the inside. You have to be allowed to play the game before you can win it.
“WASHINGTON LOVES the ones who grease its gears. But history only remembers the ones who shift them,” the late Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams wrote of Baker. The man she profiled in the Post’s Style section upon his ascension to secretary of state in January 1989 was confident in his stature in the imperial capital at its twilight-of-the-Cold-War apogee, yet insecure enough to wake up each morning ready for battle to prove it. He represented the city’s ideal of itself, a relentless but nonetheless patrician competitor willing to drink a Scotch with his rivals after hours, an Ivy League country-clubber equally at home in tennis whites or toting a shotgun to a duck blind in predawn Texas. This Baker was a master of Washington at the end of almost a decade at its heights; he was smooth and smart and disciplined, “a man in whom drive is more important than destination,” as Williams wrote, but also a gentleman for whom recklessness was as inconceivable as incivility. Baker was a “player,” the capital’s ultimate accolade, and no matter what the game, he figured out a way to come out on top. As Haley Barbour, who worked in the Reagan White House with Baker and went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee and governor of Mississippi, observed to us, “In the two-party system, purity is the enemy of victory, and Jim Baker was a winner.”
Williams, though, had not been entirely right about Baker. Her impeccable eye caught the man who yearned to be more than just the staffer in the gray pinstriped suit behind Ronald Reagan in all those Oval Office pictures. But she missed how much the moment mattered too. Baker was no mere fixer. He was a doer as well, at a time when that was still possible in American politics. The end of the Cold War was a period of unparalleled American power. It was also, and we tend to forget this because of how it turned out, a moment of great risk. The gears were shifting. Politicians did not have the present-day luxury of permanent feuding as a substitute for action. Baker’s skill set turned out to be suited for the era. He excelled not just in the Washington arts of self-promotion, palace intrigue, and blame-shifting (although he was world-class at all of them), but also in putting them into service for the real art of the deal, whether it was saving Social Security with congressional Democrats or persuading Soviet leaders to allow two Germanys to become one again or jaw-boning Arab sheikhs into contributing so much money for the liberation of Kuwait that the Gulf War against Iraq became the first American conflict to nearly turn a profit.
He divided problems into three categories, according to David Gergen, a former adviser from his White House days: easy; hard but doable; and impossible. The first category he left to others, the last he wrote off, and the middle is where he focused his energies. As inconceivable as it seems amid our state of endless partisan warfare, getting things done was in fact the currency of the realm in the Washington of Baker’s era and this is what drove him with a ruthless focus and confidence that infuriated others who were ideologically purer and far less effective. Washington has and always will be a town that struggles between outcomes and principles; it is a place where compromise is both necessary and invariably suspect. Did Baker actually stand for anything other than his own advancement? Was it just power for power’s sake? What would he be willing to give up to cut a deal? His critics were not the only ones to wonder. But what was remarkable about Baker was the extent to which his deals stuck.
At the end of his run, when the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union was no more, when colleagues from the Reagan White House were out of the power game entirely or writing bitter memoirs about the Iran-contra scandal, Baker had somehow escaped the humbling comedown that is usually a part of the Washington narrative. Instead, Baker’s reputation only grew in the years of gridlock and dysfunction that followed, and he has more recently become a figure of surprisingly bipartisan nostalgia for a different time and a different sort of leadership. “He was the most important unelected official since World War II,” the former national security adviser Tom Donilon, a Democrat, told us.
Many have compared Baker at his height to the Wise Men of earlier Washington eras, pillars of the postwar establishment such as Dean Acheson. But Baker flourished in a succession of jobs that not even an Acheson could have imagined. Clark Clifford, the legendary Democratic fixer for decades in the capital, built his reputation off a four-year tour as counsel in Harry S. Truman’s White House before returning to office for a short stint as Lyndon B. Johnson’s defense secretary. In more recent times, political strategists such as James Carville, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod became household names after running one or two White House campaigns. Baker ran five. He also ran three cabinet departments, the achievement he preferred to highlight.
Baker always longed to be a statesman, not a hack. When Time magazine put him on the cover along with a Democratic operative under the word “Handlers,” Baker hated it. But by the time he was called out of political retirement in Texas to help his best friend’s son in the Florida recount that followed the too-close-to-call 2000 presidential election, Baker’s reputation was so formidable that Democrats knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection. And lose they did. “Baker somehow understood the billiards of politics, understood the ricochets,” said Hedrick Smith, who followed him in the 1980s for The New York Times. “He understood how balls careened off each other.” Baker knew when not to exercise power, too, whether it was letting his outmaneuvered White House rival Ed Meese save face with a symbolic but meaningless title or avoiding the temptation to gloat to the Soviets about their geopolitical humiliation.
For an operative who lived in fear that Marjorie Williams had been right, that he was just a glorified gear greaser after all, it was a record that few would match. In a city where powerful staffers are celebrated but also understood to be basking merely in the reflected glory of their presidential patrons, Baker transcended his many titles. He was not defined by his era; he helped to define it.
IN THE COURSE of writing this book over the last seven years, we conducted more than two hundred interviews with Baker, his family and friends, his admirers and detractors, and many of today’s Washington players in both parties who expressed awe at Baker’s accomplishments—and wanted to know how he had done it. What was Baker’s secret, the clue to how an obscure corporate lawyer could come to the capital, their capital, and succeed at a series of the hardest, most consequential jobs in the world?
The answer that Baker himself would give to this inevitable question was both practiced and unsatisfying. He would grin and summon a Texas accent and talk about his father’s maxim, the one that was beaten into him when he was a privileged mama’s boy in Depression-era Houston. “Prior preparation prevents poor performance” became such a familiar mantra to those who worked with, and for, Baker over the years that they were not surprised when the Five Ps became the centerpiece of his post-Washington political memoir, “Work Hard, Study…and Keep Out of Politics!”—itself titled after one of his grandfather’s most memorable sayings.
Washington is filled with careful lawyers who do their homework and stay up late cramming for meetings. No doubt Baker excelled at this. He was legendary for not going home from the office when he was Reagan’s chief of staff until he had returned every last phone call from irate members of Congress and importuning journalists alike (and also for the neat pre-email trick of making many of the calls so late at night that he knew the recipients would no longer be at their desks to pick up the phone). But he was far from the only workaholic in a city where identity and status derive from one’s position and not the other way around.
Still, Baker’s work ethic and preparation were formidable. He was fanatically competitive and fanatically well organized. In his eighties, preparing to take us on a tour of the Houston neighborhoods where he grew up, lived, and worked for the entirety of his life outside Washington, Baker greeted us in the back of his black sport-utility vehicle with a yellow legal pad scratched full of notes. It turned out to be a carefully constructed itinerary of every place he wanted to show us. Baker was not satisfied, however. He had already driven the route in advance of our visit and decided to make a few last modifications. The man was and is a perfectionist.
But that too hardly explained his ability to navigate the upper reaches of Washington as it recovered from the anger and malaise of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis to regroup for the last gasps of the Cold War. And besides, you could study his early history forever and come away concluding that Baker was not actually very well prepared for the challenges of leading the greatest superpower the world has yet known through the volatile late twentieth century, when both its domestic politics and its international position would be fundamentally transformed. Baker came to Washington and won its highest prizes not because of what he studied or what he knew. He was not a war hero or a sage expert on balance-of-power politics. Nor did he get there on the basis of his family name or wealth, although his early years were marked by the benefits of both.
In many ways, in fact, it is hard to distinguish Baker’s life from those of many other late-twentieth-century American worthies. As the unilateral rule of the predominantly white male American gentry was coming to an end, Baker could have been the emblem of a Cold War fraternity on its way out. A Texan by birth and breeding later pedigreed in the halls of Princeton, Baker crossed easily between the worlds of Western frontier and East Coast clubs. He favored tailored shirts with “JAB III” monograms and would rarely be seen at work with so much as his tie loosened. He also wore cowboy boots and chewed Red Man tobacco and thought nothing of spitting into a Styrofoam cup in the middle of meetings on tax policy. He was rich, but not as rich as people thought. When on vacation, he could usually be found shooting quail in South Texas or fishing the Silver Creek near his ranch in Wyoming. He kept a bottle of Chivas Regal in a desk drawer for an afternoon drink when needed. He swore profusely and told dirty jokes. “Did you get laid last night?” he would ask his young advance man, Ed Rogers, each morning when they were on the road together during the Reagan years. It was not a throwaway line. “He’d look me in the eye and want an answer,” Rogers recalled.
A lawyer from a storied clan of lawyers who spent the first few decades of his professional life tending to the business disputes of the oilmen and bankers who ruled Houston, Baker did not come to American politics animated by a desire to save the world or even much of a worldview at all, and most of what the law had taught him before he entered public life was about the perils of risk-taking. He was profoundly careful—“Mr. Caution,” his close adviser, Margaret Tutwiler, dubbed him. “A shrink would have a field day with Jim Baker,” Tutwiler observed. “The man is so realistic, without emotion, that even though he’s an emotional, sensitive guy, sometimes it’s so clinical. But he lives in the real, real world. He does not delude himself over fairy tales.” Dispassionate and ever to the point, Baker brought discipline and endless handwritten lists to the challenge of running the world. He was “somebody who likes making order out of chaos,” as his son Will Winston put it. He defined himself as the opposite of an ideologue. “I didn’t have any overarching paradigm for politics,” Baker told us as he reflected on his career years later. “My view was you try to get things done.”
It was in the doing, then, that Baker excelled, in his genius ability to read what others required in a situation and find a way to give some version of that to them while still walking away from the table with whatever prize he sought. Baker was a compulsive winner, but he also had a way of making rivals feel like they had not entirely been defeated. “The Velvet Hammer,” his cousin Preston Moore called him, and Baker was much more pleased when Time used that phrase to headline another cover story about him, this time referring to him not as The Handler but as “a gentleman who hates to lose.” Anyone who had ever tangled with him knew that was true. Baker was that way because of who he was and where he came from, and it was his strange luck, and the country’s, that he happened to be ready to leave his hometown and legal career behind at just the moment when the entire Republican elite had been decimated by Richard Nixon’s Watergate disaster.
And here the story was rich, complex, and surprising in ways we did not expect. The man who would dominate Washington turned out to be an accidental political savant. He did not spend his childhood obsessing over electoral votes or memorizing congressional district boundaries. His Texas clan had viewed politics as a dirty business ever since the Civil War, when the family patriarch, a slave-holding Alabama émigré, had been booted out of a Texas judgeship after the Confederacy’s defeat. “This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power,” noted David Gergen. “It just came naturally to him.”
A nominal Democrat until the 1970s, Baker never would have come to Washington if not for tennis, the preppy old boys’ network, and a family tragedy. And even then it might not have happened if his domineering micromanager of a father had still been alive, for his dad, a stickler who billed his son if he had more than one soda at the country club as a child, who dictated which law school he should attend, and who even decreed what kind of car he should drive long after his son was already a married man with children of his own, had strictly enforced the ban on all things political.
That Baker’s success was the kind that books would be written about was hardly foreseeable. He never even began working in Washington until he was already in his forties, starting his climb to the top from the obscurity of a political appointment in the Commerce Department. Yet his just might be the most consequential middle-age career switch in modern American politics. His timing, if accidental, was also impeccable: The gears were changing in history, and Baker would get his chance to move them. He was truly the Man Who Ran Washington back when Washington still ran the world.
But that is getting ahead of the story, which, as any good tale of America’s capital should, begins far away, in this case a Houston mansion in the early days of a decade marked by crisis.