James Baker Forever
Genteel, old-money Houstonian. Suave citizen of the world. Above-it-all statesman. Partisan knife-fighter. Big-picture visionary. Detail-obsessed consigliere. He’s all of these things. Still.
(Page 2 of 3)
The Hill-and-Princeton component of Baker’s life has always befuddled both Texans and the many writers who have profiled him over the years. It seemed odd, or at least contradictory, that someone from Houston would attend such bastions of Northeastern society; to naive journalists, it seemed that Hill and Princeton had somehow given Baker the polish that he lacked as a cowboy-boot-wearing, Red-Man-chewing Texan. As it happens, I also attended both Hill and Princeton (as did my father, who was a friend of Baker’s). I claim no particular expertise here, but I have an insider’s sense of the culture of both schools. Hill was a solid, traditional Eastern boarding school that, if it did not have quite the gilded national reputation of Andover or Exeter, still managed to place large numbers of its students at the nation’s best colleges. It was the school of choice for many leading Texas families, including the Basses, Hunts, and Elkinses. Going East to school was never strange among the River Oaks crowd in Houston; it just didn’t match the stereotype that Easterners liked to apply to Texans. Among Baker’s social peers in Houston, fully half went to prep school and college in the East.
These schools offered the sort of rigorous academics that most Texas institutions did not. But wealthy Houstonians were also after a moral and social education for their children, and those values at Hill and Princeton were, as far as I can tell, almost identical to their own upper-class, Southern standards. They are, in no particular order: gentility, which means, above all, being nice to people, especially people who are not as rich or as smart or as professionally advanced as you are; good manners, which are another form of thoughtfulness and are ideally delivered with wit and style (a simple "Yes, sir" won’t do—think of Barbara Bush’s elegant, funny, self-aware thank-you notes); strict honesty with others, except when it will unnecessarily hurt their feelings (my great-aunt used to say that "little white lies are written on the ledger of heaven in invisible ink"); humility, coupled with a belief in God; a rejection of conspicuous materialism (expensive cars, flashy houses,and talk of how much one makes are for the nouveau riche); and the ability to account for oneself to one’s elders. Those are ideals, of course. Plenty of preppies are godless, thoughtless, egocentric louts. But as much as his enemies would like to believe otherwise, Baker strikes me as a fair reflection of these principles. Over the years, I’ve read a number of times how amazing it was that he could survive in Washington and still be a nice guy and a straight shooter; how, in a scandal-ridden political era, he stayed scrupulously clean and honest. My reaction is, Well, he’s a Hill boy. He believed all that stuff.
Baker returned from college and the Marines, went to the University of Texas law school, and then set about taking his rightful place in Houston society. Because he was forbidden by a nepotism rule to work at Baker Botts while his father was a partner there, he joined a comparably stuffy Houston firm, Andrews and Kurth. He started in trial law, left it because he didn’t much like the fact that people lied so often in that line of work, took up business law, and rose quickly to partner. On the side, he followed the family model as well. He made a string of successful investments, was the president of a real estate firm, helped organize a brokerage house, and co-founded an oil-well servicing business that he and other investors sold for a handsome profit. He became wealthy in his own right well in advance of his considerable inheritance. His life was everything it ought to have been. He and his wife, Mary Stuart, had four sons, he hunted quail and turkey on his ranch in Pearsall, played tennis at Houston Country Club, and had absolutely no interest in politics (On election days, he often preferred hunting to voting). There was only one thing wrong with this picture: He was becoming bored with law. And his restlessness would soon cause him to abandon his comfortable Houston life.
Three events conspired to propel him into the career that his family, who saw politics as a dirty, corrupting business, had always warned him against: a chance friendship with a transplanted Easterner named George H. W. Bush, the death of his wife, and the death, three years later, of his father. The principal catalyst was Mary’s succumbing to cancer in 1970, which left him alone, at age forty, with four young sons. Partly to help Baker get over his grief and partly because he himself needed help, Bush recruited him to work in his 1970 Senate campaign against Lloyd Bentsen. Bush lost, though he won the vote in Houston, the one place Baker had organized for him. Bush soon moved East to run the Republican party and then the CIA, and he helped Baker land a job in 1975 as Under Secretary of Commerce in the Ford administration. (Baker’s father, who would have strongly opposed such a move, was two years dead.) In that position, Baker was noticed by Dick Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff, and Ford then asked him to manage his 1976 presidential campaign. Baker took over a disorganized, demoralized campaign that was down thirty points in the polls and came within a point of winning. Though he still lived in Houston—in 1973 he had married Susan Garrett Winston, one of his late wife’s best friends and a daughter of storied Texas rancher Whispering Jack Garrett—and he still practiced law at Andrews and Kurth, his life was changing fast.
In 1978 Baker, now obsessed with politics and with a dawning sense of how good he was at it, ran for Texas attorney general, lost, and was then recruited to manage Bush’s 1980 presidential bid. With Baker running the show, Bush beat Reagan in six straight primaries before reality set in. Baker persuaded a reluctant Bush to bow out gracefully, more or less forcing Reagan to choose Bush as his running mate. After infuriating Bush by telling the press that his California campaign was out of money, he had gathered a roomful of people to persuade Bush to quit. "I told him, ’You have a great shot at being vice president,’" says Baker, smiling at the recollection as he sits at a rough-hewn table at his Wyoming ranch house. "He said, ’I don’t want to be vice president.’ And I said, ’Well, if you keep going, you are likely to blow that shot.’" Bush later grumbled to Time, "Yeah, Jimmy was right. Why is Jimmy always right?" Baker—now on everybody’s political radar screen—was appointed Reagan’s campaign manager and then chief of staff; he was one of a famous troika of staffers (the others were Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver) who fought bitterly for control of the White House. Baker, who was credited with many of Reagan’s stunning early legislative victories, found his White House job brutally hard. "I am not sure it is not the worst job in Washington," he says.
But he was extremely adept at it; around this time, he acquired the nickname the Velvet Hammer—a nod to his ability to bludgeon opponents without making enemies. Baker’s troubles were compounded by the fact that the Republican right, sensing that he was not a True Believer—some even said he had hijacked the Reagan revolution in the name of political expediency—did not like or trust him. After running Reagan’s successful campaign in 1984, he escaped a second term as chief of staff by swapping jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan. Four years later he and Bush were reunited in another presidential campaign. This time they won, and Bush rewarded Baker with the most powerful position in the Cabinet and one he coveted: Secretary of State. In that job Baker became a key negotiator in the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, and along with Bush, he put together the unprecedented coalition that liberated Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.
Baker’s luck finally ran out in 1992, when Bush, with Baker as his chief of staff and campaign manager, lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton. It was not a pretty defeat. Bush had seemed unorganized and unfocused and unable to respond to an economic recession. Baker had been blissfully happy at the State Department; Bush yanked him back into the role that had made him successful in politics in the first place, insisting that he run a difficult and ill-fated campaign. "I hated to leave that job," says Baker. "The only time I can remember losing my composure was when I said good-bye to the people at State. It was an emotional moment." The loss left him, at the age of 62 and for the first time in twelve years, suddenly without an obvious professional move.
THE VIEW FROM THE LARGE PICTURE window of the Bunk Mahal is of 9,200-foot Chimney Butte, encircled in haze from fires somewhere beyond the Tetons. The quiet up here is unearthly. Inside, surrounded by a forest of antlers, Baker and I eat lunch. This consists of ham and turkey cold cuts, bread, and pickles that he has foraged from the refrigerator. We make our own sandwiches, passing the mustard and pickles back and forth, and then we talk. He is a remarkably easy person to talk to. There are many moments, when he is going on about his family or his ranch, that his personality seems to have no edges at all. This is an illusion, of course. Baker is full of opinions, many of them mischievous, and all of the mischievous ones are not for publication. He is fierce in defense of his own actions, blunt in his criticism of former colleagues. He almost always requests that the latter be kept off the record or, as he says, "not out of my mouth." He was known as the leading Washington spinmeister of his day and received consistently favorable press from the Capitol press corps, which he assiduously courted. He has not lost this ability; it’s hard not to like him.
I ask Baker to talk about the days after Bush’s crushing defeat, how a man with his résumé—in effect one of the leading Republican mandarins of our time—chooses what he is going to do after public office. The answer, in part, is that the opportunities came to him. In the months of November and December of 1992, he was besieged by organizations trying to persuade him to join them. Many, including Rice University, Baker Botts, and Andrews and Kurth, called on him at the White House. "I got a lot of offers," he says, "from many of the leading corporations in the country. But I decided two things. I was going to go back to Houston, to Baker Botts, and I wasn’t going to sit on a lot of boards. I can give one speech and make more than what my retainer would be for a year on a board, with no liability. So I agreed to sit on two boards of Baker Botts’s choosing [EDS and Reliant Energy]." He would not, as lawyers say, "keep time," and he refused to lobby. He was off the clock, a senior partner whose main job was to advise major clients of the firm. Baker could have done so many things, and he could have lived anywhere he wanted to. Joining Baker Botts meant that he would return to Houston and to that destiny he had abandoned back in the seventies out of boredom. It meant the return of a prodigal whose only real sin was to be restless.
My Library
