DAVID RUBENSTEIN (DR): Do you miss the days when everything you did was on the front pages, making world policy? Or are you quite happy with what you’re doing now?
JAMES A. BAKER III (JB): I only miss our not having been reelected in ’92. We were getting a lot of things done, and we could have continued doing some things. But I have to tell you, life after politics is pretty dang good. You’re your own boss. You set your own schedule. You do what you want to do. There’s a lot to be said for that.
DR: Let’s talk about your career and how you came to be in the positions that you held. You are a native of Houston. Your family has been here for quite some time.
JB: Since 1872.
DR: To be precise. When you were growing up, did you want to be secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, or White House chief of staff?
JB: No, I was raised by a family that didn’t really participate in politics. Politics was thought of as a dirty business. Really good lawyers didn’t involve themselves in politics. I had a grandfather whose mantra for the young lawyers coming to work for Baker Botts, the family law firm, was “Work hard, study, and stay out of politics.” That’s the reason I used that title for my most recent book. I was pretty much apolitical.
DR: Were you a star athlete? Were you a student leader? What was your great interest?
JB: I was a reasonably decent athlete. I would not say I was a student leader. As a matter of fact, I almost flunked out of Princeton University my freshman year because I’d gone to a prep school in Pennsylvania, the Hill School, which was very strict. We couldn’t have dates. I couldn’t have girls visit there. When I got to Princeton and got all that freedom, and I could go to New York, I didn’t spend much time studying.
DR: You went into the marines, though, before you went to law school.
JB: That was a very maturing experience for me. I loved the Marine Corps, and I love it to this day. As you know, there’s no such thing as a former marine. When you’re a marine, you’re a marine.
DR: My father was in the marines. I understand it. After you finished your service, you came to the University of Texas School of Law. You did quite well. You were ready to join Baker Botts, the family firm. What happened?
JB: They had a nepotism rule, but I was hopeful. One day my dad came home from work, and he said, “Son, tomorrow the firm’s going to give some consideration to waiving the nepotism rule for you because you’ve got the grades, you’re on the law review, and so forth and so on, and you’re the fourth James A. Baker in a row that would practice there.”
He came home the next night, and he said, “Well, the firm decided not to waive the nepotism rule.” I was very down about that.
In retrospect, it was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. If I had succeeded, it would have been because my dad was there. And if I had failed, people would say, “Well, what do you expect? He’s only here because his dad is here.” So it was a good thing for me that they didn’t want me to come there.
DR: Growing up, your father was a tough taskmaster. He had a certain set of principles about preparation.
JB: He kept telling me, “Son, prior preparation prevents poor performance.” He called it the five p’s. It is a mantra that sort of got in my life. I could probably say, since we’re here at the Baker Institute, that I thought it might ought to be the six p’s: “Prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”
DR: Your father didn’t say that, but this is your addition to the family mantra?
JB: That’s right. It’s an amendment.
DR: So you’re practicing law. You’re minding your own business. You’re playing tennis with someone named George Herbert Walker Bush. And then all of a sudden, he asked you to help him in his campaign. That’s after your wife dies of breast cancer?
JB: That’s correct. She died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-eight. Barbara and George were the last non–family members to see her before she died. We were close even then. George came to me. He said, “Bake,” he said, “you need to take your mind off your grief and help me run for the Senate.”
I looked at him. I said, “Well, George, that’s a great idea except for two things. Number one, I don’t know anything about politics. And number two, I’m a Democrat.” “Well,” he said, “we can fix that latter problem.” And we did.
When I’m talking to a room full of Republicans, I say I got religion. When I’m talking to a mixed crowd, I say I switched parties.
DR: You switched parties and helped him in the 1970 election for the Senate.
JB: I’d been a little bit bitten by the political bug then. Not totally or completely. But they asked me to be state finance chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, and I did that.
DR: Then you were offered a chance to come to Washington when Gerald Ford was president. You were offered the position of deputy secretary of commerce. How did you quickly become somebody who was in charge of finding delegates for President Ford in his race in 1976 against Ronald Reagan?
JB: First of all, for the job of deputy secretary of commerce, they usually try to find a business-lawyer type. That’s what I had been. George Bush put in a big good word for me.
But the second tragedy struck after I’d been at Commerce for about six months—the second tragedy that changed my life. Jerry Ford’s delegate hunter in his campaign for the nomination against Ronald Reagan was killed in an automobile accident, and they needed a new delegate hunter. I didn’t know anything about delegate hunting, but I found out about it.
DR: To remind people, in 1976 Gerald Ford was president, but he had never been elected. He was going to run for election. His main opponent was Ronald Reagan. It came down to a very, very tight convention, and your job was to get the delegates for President Ford. And how did it go?
JB: That was the last truly contested national convention of either major political party in this country. It went right down to the last ballot. It was very tight. We were chasing a very small pool of uncommitted delegates. Reagan was very strong. He almost knocked off an incumbent president. But we were able to prevail. We used, I will say, the full resources of the White House to get there.
I used to tell people, “I’ve been to more state dinners than anybody in the world.” As a delegate hunter for President Ford, I used to bring uncommitted delegates to state dinners. Then I became secretary of state and had to go to every state dinner, which I did.
DR: The election is against Jimmy Carter, who is way ahead. Ford comes back. They have debates. But ultimately, Ford loses narrowly to Carter.
JB: That’s because you were in the White House advising him.
DR: Well, that was later, when he lost.
All right. You have now managed a campaign for president that lost. You decided to go back to Texas?
JB: Yes. I tell people, every time we lose an election I come back here. A lot of people stay up there in Washington. I don’t do that.
DR: You decided to run for attorney general of Texas.
JB: I’d been bitten by the political bug, because that convention was really close. It was very exciting. By the way, we only lost that election by 10,000 votes out of 81 million votes that had been cast. You turn 10,000 votes around in Iowa and Hawaii, Ford would have been president. Carter would never have been president.
I was bitten by the bug. But I had practiced law for eighteen years, and I was coming back here. I said to myself, “Maybe you ought to try your hand at this political game.”
DR: While you were campaigning, somebody came up to you and said, “You look like Jim Baker.”
JB: I had gotten a lot of press time as Ford’s national chairman. A lot of TV time. People used to recognize me, but they couldn’t really come up with a name. This guy one time did that. He said, “Anybody ever tell you that you look like Jim Baker?” I said, “Yes, often.” I thought, “Boy, this is a big deal.” Then the guy said, “Doesn’t it piss you off?” That’s when I realized, David, I wasn’t going to win that race.
DR: In 1978, you get a call from your friend George Bush, who says, “Guess what? I’m going to run for president. I want you to help manage my campaign.”
JB: That’s correct. I helped George Bush because he was my close friend.
DR: Ultimately, he did not get the nomination.
JB: No. Reagan got it.
DR: I don’t think you thought that George Bush was going to be picked as vice president.
JB: I was in the suite with Barbara and George and a few of our campaign staff. We thought it was all over when Walter Cronkite came out and said, “Ford is seriously considering joining the ticket with Reagan.”
DR: When Walter Cronkite said, “It would be like a co-presidency if Ford was the vice president for Reagan,” Reagan got upset with that. He said, “This isn’t going to work.” And he ultimately called George Bush.
JB: That’s correct. I took the call. It was Drew Lewis, who was working for Reagan. He said, “Governor Reagan would like to speak to Ambassador Bush.” I handed him the phone. He said, “Yes, sir? Yes, how are you? Yes, sir.” The only question I think Reagan asked him was, “Will you support my position on abortion?” And Ambassador Bush said, “Yes, sir. I will.”
DR: You were given the task by Ronald Reagan to help on the debates.
JB: To help negotiate the debates and help prepare for them.
DR: Was it difficult to prepare Reagan for the debates? People were not confident that he was a good debater.
JB: A lot of his close-in people didn’t want him to debate. I wanted him to. His pollster wanted him to. I believe Nancy wanted him to. I always thought he was terrific in front of the camera. The red light goes on, and he’s perfect.
DR: Reagan wins the election. What do you think you’re going to be offered, if anything?
JB: I don’t think. I don’t know. But I had heard that my name had surfaced as a potential White House chief of staff. I said, “That’s not possible. You don’t go to somebody who’s run two campaigns against you and make them your White House chief of staff.” And guess what? I don’t think it’ll ever happen again in American politics. Not the way we’re going today anyway.
DR: But Ronald Reagan did offer you the job, and you became chief of staff of the White House. Was it as much fun doing that job as it later is talking about it?
JB: It’s the worst job in government. I tell everybody that. I tell the people who have been nominated for that job, or appointed to that job, “You got the worst job in government, because you’re right at the intersection of politics and policy.”
For me, it was even worse because I was an interloper. I wasn’t a Californian.
They didn’t give me credit for being a conservative. I wasn’t a Reaganite. And there were a lot of people that tried to take me out. But the Gipper was always there for me. So was his wife. And so was Mike Deaver, and Stu Spencer, and a whole host of other people.
DR: Reagan was an amiable person. You found him to be quite easy to work for. It was said that you had to give him a joke every day. He liked to hear a joke every day.
JB: He loved it.
DR: He would give you a joke every day at the beginning of the day.
JB: He was the best joke-teller you ever heard. I can’t repeat them, though.
DR: You became secretary of the treasury. During that time, among other things, there was the most significant rewriting of the tax code we’d had for fifty years or so.
JB: In a revenue-neutral way. We didn’t grow the deficit to do it.
DR: The 1986 Tax Reform Act. How did you get that through? Congress was controlled by the Democrats in those days.
JB: President Reagan was very good about reaching across the aisle. We worked with the Democratic leadership in the House to make that happen. It wasn’t easy.
DR: You got that done. And then your friend George Herbert Walker Bush says he wants to run for president. Reagan’s two terms are going to be up. George Bush is vice president. And he asks you to help run his campaign. Were you reluctant to leave as secretary of the treasury to do that?
JB: I was going to do it if he asked me to. I didn’t like the idea of having to get back into the grubby nitty-gritty of politics.
DR: Bush is behind for quite a bit of the campaign. He catches up, wins. Then do you say, “I’m ready to go back to Houston?”
JB: No. He knew I wanted to be secretary of state.
DR: And he offered you that right away?
JB: The next day.
DR: As secretary of state, you had to deal with a number of problems. One of them was the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Your job was to go around and get the coalition put together and also to raise the money to pay for it. Was that hard to do?
JB: It’s the first and only time it’s ever been done. I tell people that it was a textbook example of the way to fight a war. You tell the world what you’re going to do. You get the world together with you to do it. You go do exactly what you said and nothing more, nothing less. You bring the troops home. And then you get other people to pay for it.
That’s never been done before. I don’t know when it’s going to be done again, but that’s the way to fight a war.
DR: The Cold War actually ends during George Bush’s presidency. The Berlin Wall falls. Why did you not recommend that Bush go over there to Berlin and kind of remind everybody we’d won the Cold War?
JB: And dance on the wall.
DR: That’s exactly right. Why not?
JB: This was President Bush’s decision, and it was absolutely the right decision. He got a lot of grief for it. If he had gloated and been triumphal, we would never have been able to conclude what we were able to subsequently conclude with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the two leaders of the Soviet Union who, by the way, made the decision not to use force to keep the empire together and whom history will treat very, very well, in my opinion.
DR: What do you think was the reason you were so successful? Was it that you were trained as a lawyer, that you were harder-working than everybody else, smarter, more clever, surrounded by better people?
JB: Lucky.
DR: A little bit more than that probably.
JB: I had wonderful parents who instilled a solid work ethic in me. And, by the way, I never wing it. I have always followed the “Prior preparation prevents poor performance” mantra. I think those things made a difference. I was brought up to believe that if you start something, you finish it, or you do everything you can to finish it. That sort of thing.
But I was there at a wonderful time. Here’s what I really think was the best thing for me: I had tremendous associates and assistants. They really performed beautifully. I was the beneficiary of a lot of that.
DR: In your time as secretary of state, who were the one or two most impressive foreign leaders you met?
JB: I dealt with some outstanding leaders. I think of Gorbachev. I think of Thatcher. I think of Shevardnadze—a former Soviet apparatchik who changed entirely.
DR: You met Gorbachev many times. You were impressed with his intellect and his abilities.
JB: Yes.
DR: He seems to have done an incredible job of actually changing the course of the world—maybe unintentionally to some extent.
JB: Much of it was unintentional.
DR: Does President Trump call you for advice very often?
JB: No. No.
DR: Some people watching might ask, “What are some words of advice for Congress or the administration from the great former secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, chief of staff Jim Baker?”
JB: We absolutely have to understand that one of the biggest threats facing our country and facing our democracy is the political dysfunction we have today. When I was there twenty-five years ago with Reagan, with Bush, with Ford, we reached across the aisle and we got things done. It happened with Carter. It happened with Clinton.
That doesn’t happen anymore. That’s truly tragic. There are a lot of reasons for it. But we need to cure that.
DR: Your great pleasures are still hunting and fishing.
JB: Yes. And I like playing golf. I still go to the office. I’m still a senior partner at Baker Botts. We have a mandatory retirement policy at age sixty-five, but there’s an exemption.
DR: For Bakers.
JB: If you have been chief of staff at the White House, secretary of the treasury, and secretary of state.
DR: Well, they should have that exemption. Let me just say that after you left government, I had the privilege of working with you for about fifteen years in business and other things. It was one of the great pleasures of my life, getting to see you up close, somebody I’d read about. I hope everybody else can follow your leadership and do the kind of job you did for our country. Thank you very much for your service.