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.
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The second thing he did was go to work with his old Houston friend Bob Mosbacher, the former Secretary of Commerce under Bush, as a consultant for Enron. This was years before there was even a hint of trouble at the company. The work consisted mainly of writing papers on the political situations in countries where Enron was doing business and occasionally working on foreign projects. "We were given a base fee, and then we were given a shot at a success fee if the project worked out," says Baker. "My recollection is that we never got a success fee." Baker was not thrilled with the work or the money, and he and Mosbacher severed the relationship in 1994, after approximately fifteen months. "Enron had a very large success fee component in what they did," he says. "That is my view of one of their problems. They were paying people to put contracts on the books, whether they were good contracts or not."
The other moneymaking job Baker took was as a partner in the Carlyle Group, a large private-equity firm based in Washington, D.C. This was a far less conventional thing to do. Carlyle’s business is basically using other people’s capital to buy companies. It turns them around, sells them, and pays a handsome return (an average of 34 percent per year in the nineties) to investors. It is extremely successful, and has done $16 billion worth of this work. It is also deeply controversial for three main reasons: Its portfolio of companies makes it the eleventh-largest defense contractor in America, meaning it has significant business with the U.S. government; its clients include major strategic U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia; and its employees include Baker, George H. W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former director of the Office of Management and Budget Richard Darman, and former British prime minister John Major. Many people do not like the idea of such an intimate intermingling of politics, private capital, and national security. Baker thinks such criticism is unfair. "A lot of people bitch about it," he says with obvious annoyance. "They think former government officials who have given ten or fifteen years to their country shouldn’t be able to go out in the private sector and earn money. I simply don’t buy that." What Baker does for Carlyle, mainly, is give speeches. "They will put on a dinner, and I stand up and talk about geopolitics or maybe the political situation in the United States," he says. "I never make a pitch for money." One of Baker’s meetings, for instance, took place in early 2001 with a group of wealthy investors in London. The topic? The Florida recount.
It was something he knew a good deal about. On November 8, 2000, the day after the inconclusive presidential election, Texas governor George W. Bush called Baker to ask him if he would take charge of Florida, where Al Gore had dispatched former Secretary of State Warren Christopher to look after his interests in the ongoing vote recount. It was in many ways an extraordinary phone call. During his presidential campaign, Bush had gone out of his way not to seem dependent on his father’s old political operatives, Cheney notwithstanding. And now, in his hour of greatest peril, he was recruiting Daddy’s main man, the Republican wartime consigliere without peer in the past half century. When I ask Baker why Bush chose him, he seems surprised that it would even occur to me to ask. "Where else," he says, "was he going to find (a) a family friend, (b) a former Secretary of State, (c) someone who has run five presidential election campaigns, and (d) someone who has been a lifetime lawyer? If the Democrats had not gone to Christopher, I don’t know who the Republicans might have gone to. But Gore made a big thing out of it."
Florida was a screeching catfight for which, as Baker so succinctly pointed out, he was uniquely suited. He was put in charge of more than one hundred Republican lawyers who were working on the recount. With Bush’s blessing, he also became the sole media front man for the Republican operation. This latter role—meaning that Baker and only Baker spoke for the Republicans in Florida—made him the most partisan face in America. It was Baker who thundered at the Democrats on the nightly news shows, accusing them of trying to "destroy . . . the traditional process for selecting our presidents" and fighting every attempt they made to hold a recount beyond the machine recount that Bush had already won.
For the period of a little over a month in Florida, he was also every bit as good as his reputation said he was. Perhaps the smartest thing he did was see that the Republicans’ chance for victory would be diminished if the field of play was the largely Democrat-appointed state courts. "The first thing I concluded," he says, "is that we had a very tough row to hoe if we couldn’t get into federal court." He knew that Florida’s Supreme Court would vote with the Democrats, he says, because he had hunted wild turkeys every year with former Florida governor Lawton Chiles, a staunch Democrat who had appointed most of the justices. "I knew their political leanings," he says, "and furthermore, Dexter Douglass, Gore’s lead lawyer in Florida, had recommended the justices to Chiles for appointment." Indeed, as he had predicted, the Republicans failed in their attempt to stop the recount in the Florida Supreme Court. In the end, the case was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that all recounts had to stop.
To many Democrats, of course, what Baker had helped engineer was a political nightmare, a national election in which the loser of the popular vote was handed the election by a partisan judiciary. Regardless, it was Jim Baker who, on the night of December 12, 2000, called George W. Bush and became the first to say, "Congratulations, Mr. President-elect." And with that, like Cincinnatus, he went back to being a private citizen.
THE WORK BAKER IS MOST passionate about since leaving public office is his position as honorary chairman of the Baker Institute. Founded in 1993, its primary mission has been "to build bridges between the world of action and the world of ideas." In practice, this means publishing papers, sponsoring research fellows, and putting on programs, conferences, and speeches on subjects that affect government policy, all the while remaining politically neutral. Last year, for instance, the institute hosted conferences on Latin America, energy, space travel, and the global climate. In December 2002 a widely publicized paper on post-war Iraq published by the institute accurately predicted, contrary to what the Bush administration had long maintained, that there would not be enough Iraqi oil to pay for the country’s redevelopment. The institute is best known for its work in the fields of energy and the Middle East, and it has indeed forged a determinedly nonpartisan, nonpolitical reputation. It has been run since its founding by one of Baker’s State Department colleagues, Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to both Israel and Syria.
In its relatively brief existence, the institute has been notable for its prodigious ability to raise money and an equally prodigious ability to draw famous speakers to its programs and conferences. Both have much to do with the presence of Baker. He personally arranged the visits of Putin and Mandela, and a large chunk of the money—an endowment of $46 million and an annual budget of $5 million—has come from prominent Houston friends such as Bob McNair, the energy mogul who owns the Houston Texans, and Charles Duncan, the heir to a coffee fortune.
That money, which is staggering for such a recently minted think tank, has enabled the Baker Institute to do what others cannot—maintain its independence and pursue broad areas of scholarship. Baker’s imprimatur, plus his political connections, gives the institute a clear cachet, while its partnerships and affiliations with such blue-chip think tanks as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars—again, the result of Baker’s connections—have helped it gain prestige, at least in some quarters. "The Baker Institute is recognized as a sterling center for public-policy research and dialogue," says Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman from Indiana who is the president and director of the Wilson center. Yet James McGann, who studies think tanks as a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Philadelphia, doesn’t rank it quite so high. "I don’t see the institute as being in the top ten or even top twenty-five right now," he says. "They may be someday, but are they mentioned or talked about in the same breath as the Brookings Institution or the Cato Institute? Absolutely not."
Nor has Baker’s role in the institute been universally embraced. During the Florida recount, there was considerable discontent on the Rice campus over just what the man for whom a major building and an organization had been named stood for. "Am I the only one who feels that it’s not a good thing for the biggest gun in Rice’s PR arsenal to be the most visible Republican hatchet man of the hour?" wrote arts editor Robert Reichle, of the Rice Thresher. Some of the faculty were upset too, though Rice’s president, Malcolm Gillis, says he wasn’t bothered by what Baker had done. "I got a lot of e-mails about it," he told me. "What I said to them was, we all recognize that Secretary Baker has a private life. We don’t put restrictions on anybody’s private life here, faculty or students. What Secretary Baker does with his private life is beside the point." Says Baker simply: "I tell people that in agreeing to have my name on the institute, I didn’t give up my individual right to participate in politics."
HERE IN THE WYOMING HIGH COUNTRY, watching trout rise in the creek, all that seems far away. Baker has a good life now, and he does exactly what he pleases, which means hunting, fishing, and golfing whenever he wants to. He and Susan, who had plenty of difficulty merging two families (at one point they had three children in the seventh grade), describe this as "a golden time." And there is just enough statecraft in his life to keep him occupied. At the request of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Baker accepted the job of trying to negotiate a settlement to the conflict in the Western Sahara, which he has been working hard at for the past seven years. He does this without pay. His title is Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General of the U.N. He occasionally fills in for Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice at international events, keeps up with all of his Reagan-Bush era pals, and chats from time to time with W., at whose behest he traveled this year to the Republic of Georgia to try to persuade another old friend, President Eduard Shevardnadze, and the parties who oppose him to hold free and fair elections. He dismisses talk that he had been considered for the job as the ranking American civilian administrator in Iraq, which Paul Bremer now holds, or that he is being eyed as a replacement for Powell at State, but rumors persist.
Then there is the legacy, which is fast abuilding: Baker’s institute is rich, well loved by the people at Rice and in Houston, and successful. Baker is thrilled with it. They are renovating his office there, even though his main office will continue to be at Baker Botts. From his window, he will be able to see a chunk of the Berlin Wall he helped tear down, a monument made of a piece of twisted steel and concrete covered with graffiti—a stark, tangible reminder of his former life, before he came home.
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