The Man Who Ran Washington review: James Baker as Republican titan from an age long gone
James Addison Baker III served as White House chief of staff, treasury secretary and secretary of state. He helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, skippered George HW Bush’s win in 1988 and quarterbacked George W Bush to victory in the 2000 Florida recount. And yet he was warned by his father to avoid politics altogether.
The lesson did not take. Lured to the game and government service by the elder Bush, Baker emerged from his time in Washington as an American grandee, a living vestige of an era when politicians negotiated across the aisle. Back in the day, Time magazine called him the “Velvet Hammer”. The nickname stuck.
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, a husband and wife team, deliver a masterly biography, 720 highly informative pages. As the US stands mired in a cold civil war, heading for a presidential election, their book reminds us that things were not always like this.
As to be expected from the New York Times White House correspondent (Baker) and an editor and writer at the New Yorker (Glasser), The Man Who Ran Washington is meticulously researched. A multitude of endnotes evidences their labors. The authors interviewed their subject, his family, a former driver, social peers and contemporaries. They plowed through libraries and archives.
Their tone is respectful and admiring, but not reverential. They tag Baker for his penchant for buffing his image, for distancing himself from trouble, and for having his loyalty questioned by members of the Bush family after defeat by Bill Clinton. Yet The Man
Who Ran Washington records Baker’s triumphs, of which there were many.
Along with Michael Deaver and Ed Meese, for example, he kept Reagan’s first term on track. Of note, the book captures how an “unflappable and in command” Baker briefed members of the president’s staff after John Hinckley’s assassination attempt. Suffice to say, the distance between Baker and Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s latest chief of staff, must be measured in light years.
As Reagan’s treasury secretary, Baker helped midwife tax reform, which removed the working poor from the tax rolls but cut marginal rates for the wealthy and curbed tax deductions too. It was a markedly bipartisan endeavor. Baker, a Texas preppy via Princeton, had to work with Dan Rostenkowski, a Democrat from Chicago and chairman of the House ways and means committee. Goals trumped personas.
Rightly, the authors see Baker’s time as secretary of state as his most significant contribution. On his watch, the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc fragmented, the Berlin Wall fell, the cold war came to a halt.
Baker also helped his boss assemble a meaningful coalition against Saddam Hussein, an alliance against Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Even China, Russia, Egypt and Syria were at least nominally on board.
Beyond that, Baker was highly attuned to domestic politics. He urged the president to obtain congressional approval for military action, overriding Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, as well as the president’s counsel and chief of staff.
“We wanted everybody in the boat in case this thing went bad,” said Janet Mullins, Baker’s congressional liaison. “Baker got it. Bush had to be convinced.”
Baker bet right. Both the House and Senate gave Bush the green light. That the Democrats controlled both chambers ultimately did not matter.
The Man Who Ran Washington is not hagiography. The authors record a clash between Baker and Andrew Carpendale, a speechwriter, over the manuscript of Baker’s 1995 memoir, The Politics of Diplomacy, and what fell to the cutting room floor. Carpendale lost that battle but The Man Who Ran Washington records his words.
Baker “manages to do as an author what he did so well in over 12 years in power in Washington: glorify his own successes, avoid any hint of failure, and skirt the truth”, Carpendale wrote, in a caustic pre-publication memo to Baker. Not surprisingly, the two men stopped speaking.
Baker can get things wrong – for example, when pushing for a settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians when no one appeared particularly enthused by the prospect. Speaking in 2015, he expressed his disappointment with Benjamin Netanyahu and ruefully observed: “The chance of a two-state solution seems even slimmer, given his reversal on the issue.”
Going back in time, Baker had branded Netanyahu as persona non grata at Foggy Bottom. These days, Oman and the United Emirates are normalizing their relations with Israel. Meanwhile, Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the US and a close friend of Bush and Baker, castigates the Palestinians.
Baker was better at diplomacy and wire-pulling than as a candidate himself. In 1978, he ran for Texas attorney general – and lost by 10 points to Mark White, a Democrat. Four years later, White was elected Texas governor. Baker contemplated a bid for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, then wisely declined to proceed. He is not a natural glad-hander.
Unexplored by the authors is Baker’s role in the Republican party’s growing discomfort with America’s changing majority. In 1976, Baker ran Gerald Ford’s losing presidential campaign, and the idea surfaced that a recount might be demanded in Ohio. Baker squashed the idea because Ford had lost the popular vote.
Nearly a quarter-of-a century later, Baker led the younger Bush to victory in a post-election legal battle in Florida, despite the candidate trailing Al Gore by more than a half-million votes nationally.
These days, Republicans muse about state legislatures usurping the public’s right to elect the president and Senator Mike Lee of Utah tweets about how the US is not a democracy.
At 90, Baker is acutely aware of his own mortality. Glasser and Peter Baker record how they accompanied him to his family burial plot. He “had always known where he came from”, they write, “and he had always known where he would end up. It was everything in between that came as a surprise.”
The Man Who Ran Washington is a fitting bookend to a life lived well.
Back in the day, Time magazine called him the 'Velvet Hammer'. The nickname stuck