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.”
The argument I’ve been making is that we are not leading.
The lesson he had taken from these events was simple and it was clear: When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.
In Reagan’s 2nd term, with nothing more than an undergraduate course in economics, he took over as secretary of treasury and rewrote then American tax code from top to bottom in collaboration with the leading Democrats.
He was the “gold standard” among WH chiefs of staff, and went on to become the most consequential Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger.
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 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. You have to be on the inside. You have to be allowed to play the game before you can win it.
Washington loves the one who greases its gears. But history only remembers the ones who shift them.
The man she profiled upon his ascension to Secretary of State in 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 was smooth and smart and disciplined, “a man in whom drive is more important than destination,” 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.
In the 2-party system, purity is the enemy of victory, and Jim Baker was a winner.
He divided problems into 3 categories: easy; hard but doable; and impossible. The 1st he left to others, the last he wrote off, and the middle is where he focused his energies.
Prior preparation prevents poor performance.
Washington is filled with careful lawyers who do their homework and stay up late cramming for meetings. No doubt Baker excelled at this. Baker’s work ethic and preparation were formidable. He was fanatically competitive and fanatically well organized.
“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.” He defied himself as the opposite of an ideologue. “I didn’t have any overarching paradigm for politics. 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 his rivals feel like they had not entirely been defeated.
This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power. It just came naturally to him.
The world that Jimmy was born into had been shaped, to a remarkable degree, by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. He lived in a neighborhood of their design, in the shadow of a great new institution of higher learning that they had built and whose affairs they oversaw. He would grow up to play tennis and swim and hunt at clubs they had helped to found.
Privilege was his birthright, but it came with formidable demands of duty and discipline.
Darling, I had to be a good storyteller because we didn’t have movies or radio. We didn’t have anything and if you wanted a beau, you had to be able to — if you want to entertain friends, you had to really be able to tell a story.
The funeral procession stretched 2 miles long as much of Houston turned out to pay respects.
In words that could have described himself later in life, Baker added: “Bevin was not interested in theories, but in practicalities. He knew that when men were unemployed they wanted bread and work, not an oration on the coming revolution. Bevin believed in solving the problems of the present before tackling the problems of the future. The solution of the immediate difficulty outweighed consideration of the long-term goal.”
He was a “friend maker,” the kind of person who would meet someone during the day and bring him home for dinner that night unannounced, much to the chagrin of his wife, Barbara, who was left scrambling to add another plate at the table.
He learned to be thorough and careful, and never to submit a briefing memo that he was not sure was accurate and complete.
He told me that every young man can make of his life what he himself wants to make of it. He pointed out that nothing you ever acquire or achieve means anything to you unless you have worked for it; and that if you have worked for it, the sense of satisfaction and achievement which results can carry you through the rough times that every man experiences in one form or another.
We in this country have been going through a long, dark night of self-criticism. We have been telling ourselves that America has tried to run the world, that it is corrupt, that many of our institutions have failed us and need to be “dismantled” under the guise of “reform.” Confession may be good for the soul, but there comes a time when too much confession makes us weaker rather than stronger.
Sure we make mistakes, but who in the world doesn’t?
He had a great eye for how to actually get things done in the capital and disdain the preening lightweights who flocked to it. Washington, he said once, was a city full of cocker spaniels who would rather be petted than wield power. “Maybe we hit it off because he knew I would rather wield power.”
That Baker was chosen was a reflection of not just his adept networking in the short time he had been in Washington but how decimated the Republican Party had been by Watergate. An entire generation of up-and-coming operatives had been essentially wiped out by their association with Nixon and the party was left to regroup with a new and untested cadre.
Baker had an advantage over the Reagan forces — he had the best-known building in the world, the WH, to use as an asset and he did not hesitate to employ it. He brought 8 delegates from Pennsylvania to meet with Ford in the Oval Office. He brought uncommitted delegates from Virginia to see the president in the Blue Room. He gave away seats to state dinners for Australia’s visiting leader.
But Baker rejected those who asked for jobs in exchange for their votes and set aside a special folder where he saved 18 of the crassest, most inappropriate requests in case he never needed to prove that he did not make illicit trades for votes, the start of a career-long habit of filing away documents showing unethical proposals he had rebuffed.
Paradoxically, because Carter did not raise Watergate in the most watched moments of the campaign, that made it harder for Ford to address the issue and put it to rest. He and his team did not want to raise it themselves.
He was not the most natural candidate in the world. He was earnest in a corporate sort of way, obviously prepared on the issues and a steady, hardworking, reassuring presence. But he was not a born glad-hander like his friend George Bush. He did not rouse an audience to passion. He talked a little too fast and could be too lawyerly. He was impressive, not inspiring.
One smart thing about Jim Baker is that he doesn’t waste a lot of time on guilt. In fact, he doesn’t waste any time on it.
Harsh, to be sure, but a fair reckoning of how Bush was seen in the months before the next presidential contest, if not the reality of who he was. Baker knew that there was no point tin believing your own spin. Better to tell the truth, at least to yourself, and he was right about Bush’s challenges.
He wrote out his own formula, the one that would set a plodding candidate on the path no national office and remain Baker’s strategy for decades of campaigns to come: “Key to winning is: Start early & develop an organization better than any of the opponents. McGovern did it. Nixon did it. Carter did it. Primary elections are won by organization! — almost regardless of candidate.”
There are no amateurs in politics. Everybody is an expert.
Bush was the only person Baker knew who was as preternaturally driven as he was. “He is the most competitive guy you ever met.”
Finding a way to satisfy Meese would be Baker’s first priority. So he did what lawyers do. He sat down with Meese and the two drafted a contract — in this, a one-page list of duties split between them so there would be no misunderstandings later. It turned out that his negotiating skills translated from law to politics as Baker crafted a way for a rival to swallow a defeat by making it look like it was not one.
But what Meese and other newcomers to Washington did not understand was that Baker had kept control of all the levers of power that mattered most. Meese had the status of a cabinet member, but Baker knew that provided little beyond bragging rights. “In the WH, cabinet rank doesn’t mean a thing. What mattered was that you have the power, whether you have the rank or not.” And Baker had the power.
He would be in charge of the paper, the schedule, the hiring and firing, the press and legislative affairs of offices — in other words, the parts of a WH that really shaped a presidency. Nothing would get to Reagan without Baker seeing it first and no one would work for the president without Baker signing off.
Baker was determined not to let anything like that happen to him. He had seen how Washington chewed up and spit out would-be power brokers. It was a tough city. Hubris was an occupational hazard. The media was always ready to pounce. One day you were the man next to the POTUS, the next you were cast aside, no longer relevant, perhaps even humiliated.
Restore power and authority to the executive branch.
Orderly schedules and orderly paper flow is the way you protect the president.
Most valuable asset in DC is time of Ronald Reagan.
Keep a low profile. Talk to the press always on background. If you become a major public figure you lose credibility, feathering your own nest rather than serving the president.
He was a winner and Baker liked winning. “Jim had tremendous respect for the fact of how he got to the WH, the fact that he got there, the fact that he looked at what he wanted to achieve and could make that decision.”
Reagan’s easygoing exterior, of course, masked a man of driving ambition and more calculation than his public image suggested. “He was the most warmly ruthless man I’ve ever seen.” Reagan was intensely impersonal, distant not only from his staff but also from his children, in ways that resonated with Baker. “He wasn’t buddy-buddy with anybody.”
Those bastards in the NSC want to get us in a war in Central America. And you and I have to keep them out of it.
As he settled into his job, Baker came to understand pretty quickly what his real role was. When Smith asked him one day what was the most importantly skill for a WH chief of staff, Baker did not use any of the phrases his predecessors had offered up. He did not mention high-minded concepts like loyalty or being an honest broker.
“Shit detector. It’s my job to keep the president from getting into trouble — and when he gets into trouble to get him out of it.”
As important as any factor in Baker’s rise was his assiduous courtship of journalists. Baker recognized, as Meese and others did not, that power in Washington was driven in part by the perception of power and that no on did more to create or preserve that perception than the media.
The 34-year-old former congressman was a onetime Marxist who was turned off by antiwar violence and concluded that “the left was inherently totalitarian.”
As a negotiator, he always looked for ways to satisfy his counterparts’ concerns — or more precisely, ways to let his counterparts publicly demonstrate that their concerns had been addressed — without giving up the substance of what he was trying to secure.
History would later obscure this period amid gauzy revisionist narratives of the Reagan era, but that’s not how it looked at the time. The recession was the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression to that point and the comparisons were certainly not helping Reagan politically.
One way or another, the episode spoke volumes about how Baker operated. Either he cunningly took credit for something he actually opposed in order to pocket a chit or he contemptuously arranged for a fake promotion to rid himself of a troublesome aide who was never to be genuinely allowed to perform the duties assigned.
I’m a lawyer and I’m cautious by nature. I’m a cross-the-Ts and dot-the-Is person.
Baker was the chief of staff but someone had clearly pulled an end run around him and gotten to the old man.
Baker got to know Ronald Reagan long before the myth of Ronald Reagan was created. In fact, he helped create the myth. But he never fooled himself into believing it. In the years and decades that followed Reagan’s time in office, his admirers would transform him from a successful president to a political saint, reimagining him as an ideal leader, the Republican answer to Reagan’s childhood idol FDR.
As congenial as he was, he charmed people rather than connected with them, rarely letting others in.
Reagan may have advanced a divisive ideology, but the wrapped it in a warm and grandfatherly package that resonated.
“I can’t make a fool of myself any longer, Jim. This budget is so bad, it’s beyond the pale.”
Baker responded with icy coldness. “You do that and you’ll stab the president right in the back. Let me remind you of something, my friend. He stuck by you. Now you stick by him. You’ve made as many mistakes as the rest of us around here. So stick that unwarranted pride of yours right up your ass and get back in the trenches with the rest of us.”
If the aftermath of the midterm defeat, he was at the nadir of his presidency, his approval rating sliding to a dismal 35%. Hypothetical matchups against leading Democrats showed him losing.
Reagan has always expressed the best aspect of populism, which is optimism about people. He has always scorned the elitist view of mankind, which is pessimism about people.
Baker took a jaundiced view of the difference between campaigning and governing. A memo prepared for him anticipated the possibility of a flip-flop on taxes, noting that 3 other presidents in the last century had made major promises during the campaign that they would not keep after taking office.
The president insisted that he had “no plans” to raise taxes — Washington code for keeping his options open — and said he would do so only if the government, after cutting everything possible, was still spending more than it was taking in.
That effectively settled the matter and underscored another rule of politics. Candidates or elected officials are given the benefit of the doubt on issues where they are associated with taking a strong ideological stance. Because Reagan was seen as a tax cutter, voters forgave him when he raised taxes, assuming he must have had no choice.
In classic Baker fashion, he spent the following days methodical weighing the pros and cons, and carefully saved the arguments in his file.
Finally, he had transcended his role of fixer. Finally, he was no longer staff. He was, in Washington terms, a Principal.
In the Reagan era, nearly everyone agreed that the tax code was a disaster. It was pockmarked with lucrative breaks for industries whose lobbyists had adeptly worked the halls of the Capitol, reflecting the power of special interests to game the system.
All of this was no accident. Business had invested huge amounts of cash in the 2 political parties. By the time Baker set his sights on the issue, political action committees were contributing 8 times as much money to congressional candidates as they were a decade earlier. Every major industry had a champion on the panels and every major tax break had someone who stood to lose and would fight to protect their interests. The status quo was held in place by powerful political gravity.
It proposed reducing tax rates by abolishing nearly all deductions, including popular ones favored by many taxpayers and businesses. In effect, it was the way a theoretician, freed of any political considerations, might have designed the tax code.
Darman agreed. He was ready for a bigger role and eager to take on tax reform. In a memo he had written before Baker’s job swap, Darman had already identified an overhaul of the tax code as a possible domestic initiative for the second term. For a policy wonk, getting the chance to design and enact it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Philosophy was out. Politics was in. The question Baker kept asking in one form or another was not Is this the best way to do this? but Can this pass? The challenge was all the more daunting because the plan not only had to lower rates while closing loop-holes, but Reagan had made clear that it could not change the bottom line amount of money brought into government coffers. The total tax revenues would have to remain the same. In the vernacular of Washington, this was called “revenue neutral” and it would be the major challenge in crafting a final plan-every decision keeping one tax break would require a tradeoff to make up for the lost revenue.
The agreement worked. By the next day, the dollar slid by about 5 percent and reached its lowest level against the Japanese yen in nearly four years. Between 1985 and 1987, the dollar depreciated by 40 percent. The plan worked so well that just seventeen months later, Baker and his counterparts got together again to apply the brakes.
Baker bridled at the congressman’s tone, interpreting the letter as classic Washington ass-covering, a way for Kemp to create a document trail that he could later point to in order to prove that he had spoken out against a flawed final product. “If you are again ‘astonished’ by what you read in the newspaper, please just pick up the phone,” Baker wrote back. “We’ll only get from here to where we both want to go if we talk directly—not as if we are merely trying to establish a written record.”
It would pit the idea of a parent’s right to shield children from mature themes against traditions of free speech and artistic independence. And it would make Susan an unlikely leader in the culture wars of the decade while defining her image as either a righteous crusader against an increasingly coarse society or an uptight prude moralizing to a younger generation.
Baker, knowing the pact was a top priority for the president, jumped in with a mix of power politics, smooth diplomacy, and locker room talk that broke the ice. The good-old-boy persona he sometimes pulled out for such moments perplexed his Canadian interlocutors, who nicknamed him Texas Crude for his sharp tongue. But they recognized Baker was someone who could get things done. “He was very much at ease representing the raw power of the United States.“
“The congressional people are arguing that this would be a dilution of their sovereignty, the constitutional sovereignty that they have in terms of international trade,” Baker said.
“Look, Jim,” Mulroney said, “when you joined NATO, you surrendered a little sovereignty. When you join the U.N.—we all surrender a little sovereignty for the greater good.”
“I’m going to say, ‘Now Ron, how is it that the United States can agree to a nuclear reduction deal with their worst enemy, the Soviet Union, and they can’t agree to a free trade agreement with their best friend, the Canadians?’”