James Baker

• 1. Introduction

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  James Addison Baker III was born on the 28th of April 1930 at 1216 Bissonnet Street in Houston, Texas, into a family that had shaped the city's legal landscape for generations. His great-grandfather founded the law firm Baker Botts in 1871. His father, known to Baker and his friends as "The Warden," was a strict disciplinarian who relied on corporal punishment and who handed down an aphorism Baker would later call a gift he thought about "almost every day of his adult life": prior preparation prevents poor performance. The Warden also forbade his son from ever getting involved in politics, believing it was unseemly. Baker later named his memoir after that prohibition.

  What followed was one of the most consequential careers in modern American political history. Baker served as White House chief of staff under two presidents, as secretary of the treasury, and as secretary of state. He ran presidential campaigns that won and campaigns that lost. He helped end the Cold War, managed the Gulf War coalition, and led the legal team that decided the 2000 presidential election. And yet he spent much of his career insisting he was not really a politician at all.

  The tension between the world his father forbade and the one Baker built sits at the center of his story.

• 2. The Warden's Son

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  Baker Botts, the firm Baker's great-grandfather founded in 1871, had a no-nepotism rule when James Baker graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. Baker and his father asked the partners for an exception. The partners voted no. Baker had to build his career elsewhere, spending the years from 1957 to 1980 at Andrews, Kurth, Campbell, and Bradley.

  His time at Andrews Kurth was shaped by the oil and gas economy of Texas. The firm's most important client was the tycoon Howard Hughes, though Baker himself never worked with Hughes in any detail. Baker's own clients included Petro-Tex Chemical Corporation and the oil-rich heirs of Shanghai Pierce. He described himself as a workaholic who worked six to seven days a week. His only significant breaks, by his own account, were for tennis and occasional hunting trips.

  Despite that professional independence, Baker's father continued to support him financially well into adulthood, providing money for his first house, parts of his children's education, a station wagon, and assistance building a new house. When Baker wanted to purchase a parcel of South Texas land in 1968 that his father considered worthless, his father refused. His mother quietly granted the money over the father's objections. Baker named the property Rockpile Ranch in deference to his father's doubts.

  The father who forbade politics was himself a registered Democrat in one-party Texas, even as he vehemently opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, believing Roosevelt a class traitor who had wronged wealthy Americans. Baker grew up in that same contradiction, registered as a Democrat but voting for the Republican presidential candidate throughout his twenties and thirties.

• 3. A Reluctant Politician

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  Baker's first real political work came through grief. His first wife, Mary Stuart McHenry, was diagnosed with cancer in the lead-up to the 1970 Texas Senate race. Baker had been weighing whether to run for the House seat his friend George H.W. Bush was vacating. He decided not to run as her illness worsened. She died in February 1970. Bush then encouraged Baker to manage Harris County operations for the Senate campaign instead.

  Bush lost that Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen, 53 percent to 47 percent. But Baker had found his calling in political operations rather than elected office. By 1972, he was Finance Chair for Texas in Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. In 1975, his connection to Bush, then the U.S. ambassador to China, brought Baker to the attention of Commerce Secretary Rogers Morton, who appointed him under secretary of commerce.

  Baker ran his own race only once, in 1978, for Texas attorney general. He ran on the slogan "Texas needs a lawyer, not a politician, for attorney general." Houston Chronicle political reporter Jim Barlow, who led the paper's coverage of the race over a 15-year career, called Baker "the worst retail politician" he had encountered. Baker lost by 11 points to Mark White. He never sought elected office again.

  What Baker excelled at was the mechanics of campaigns that other people ran. In 1976, managing Gerald Ford's delegate fight against Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Baker's team won the floor vote 1,187 to 1,070. The New York Times called him a "Miracle Man." His floor team included Paul Manafort.

• 4. The Troika

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  On the night of the 29th of October 1980, after Ronald Reagan's successful performance in his debate against Jimmy Carter, Reagan campaign consultant Stuart Spencer proposed that Baker should be Reagan's chief of staff if Reagan won. Spencer felt Baker would be a less provocative choice than hardliner Edwin Meese, who had worked with Reagan throughout his campaigns and governorship. Nancy Reagan and aide Michael Deaver supported the suggestion. Reagan announced Baker as his choice the morning after his election victory.

  Baker and Meese then divided their responsibilities in an informal power-sharing arrangement that became known as the Troika. Baker would be chief of staff, handling day-to-day access to the president and negotiations. Meese would be counselor, directing policy. Michael Deaver would oversee the administration's image. The three together controlled access to Reagan, effectively holding veto power over hiring and firing. Reagan acted only on their unanimous consent.

  In practice, Baker accumulated more power than the arrangement implied. Reagan biographer Max Boot argued that Baker managed to "run circles around Meese," whom Baker privately called "Pillsbury Doughboy." Lou Cannon, who covered the White House for The Washington Post, called Baker "key" to the Troika's proper functioning. Ford and Bush advisor Brent Scowcroft referred to Baker as "co-president, in a way." In 1992, Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams called Baker "the most powerful chief of staff in political memory."

  The arrangement was not without resistance. Conservatives distrusted Baker from the start. Clymer Wright of Houston wrote to Republicans urging Reagan to dismiss Baker, calling him a "usurper." Reagan rejected the request directly, writing that he himself was in charge and that Baker was following Reagan's own initiative. In January 1983, Interior Secretary James G. Watt pioneered the slogan "Let Reagan be Reagan" as a barb directed at Baker and Bush.

• 5. Treasury and the Plaza Accord

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  Baker left the White House in 1985 in a job-swap with Donald Regan, a former Merrill Lynch executive who had been serving as treasury secretary. Regan proposed the exchange, believing the White House position would grant him greater power. Baker was confirmed as secretary of the treasury on the 29th of January 1985, with a unanimous 95-0 vote in the Senate.

  Baker brought his longtime aide Richard Darman to the Treasury as deputy secretary. Reporters at the Wall Street Journal described the Baker tenure as effectively the Baker-Darman Treasury, with "Darmanesque" tactics referring to anything particularly "sneaky and conniving." Darman chafed at the outsized credit Baker received and resented being known as a "Baker aide." Baker also brought Margaret Tutwiler and John F.W. Rogers from his White House staff.

  In September 1985, Baker convened a meeting of finance ministers from Japan, France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The parties agreed to sell their stores of American currency to engineer a 10-12 percent depreciation in the dollar, which Baker believed had hampered domestic industries and worsened American trade deficits. To avoid speculation, Baker kept most of the Reagan administration out of the loop, including the secretaries of state and commerce. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Japanese Vice Minister of Finance Toyoo Gyohten later described the Plaza Accord as a "coup de grace" that sent a strong signal to guide the market.

  In October 1987, Baker made statements suggesting the U.S. would not defend the dollar against the Deutsche mark after West Germany raised its interest rates. The New York Times of the 18th of October 1987 described the comments as an "abrupt shift" and warned they might "erode markets." The following day, the 19th of October, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6 percent in a single session. The event became known as Black Monday. The Brady Commission investigation that followed assigned Baker only a peripheral role in the crash, finding that computer technology, group psychology, and somewhat inflated stock valuations were at least as responsible.

• 6. Cold War's End

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  President George H.W. Bush announced Baker as his choice for secretary of state the day after his 1988 election victory. The Senate confirmed Baker on the 25th of January 1989. At the State Department, Baker worked with National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Bush himself. He appointed Lawrence Eagleburger as his deputy secretary of state.

  Baker's tenure coincided with one of the most consequential periods in modern history. He presided over U.S. foreign policy during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, frequently working with Soviet counterparts Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Bessmertnykh. Baker was the first American official to enter East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1991, the German reunification process he helped oversee was complete.

  In negotiations over German reunification, Baker told Shevardnadze and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that "there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east." Russian President Vladimir Putin later used that statement to argue for the justness of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent conflict in Ukraine. Gorbachev explicitly rejected this interpretation, saying that "everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify his political obligation was done." Gorbachev dated NATO's eastward expansion to 1993 and said it did not connect to prior promises.

  Baker also organized the coalition that fought the 1991 Gulf War. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Baker and the administration secured UN Resolution 678 authorizing military intervention. Baker spent ten weeks traveling roughly 100,000 miles, visiting the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries to build political and financial support. He also helped organize the Madrid Conference of 1991, convened to address issues between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

• 7. After Government

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  Baker left government in 1993 after Bush lost re-election to Bill Clinton. He returned to Baker Botts, which had by then revised the nepotism rule that had originally blocked him. He also joined the private equity firm the Carlyle Group and signed on as a consultant to Enron.

  The Enron relationship later became a source of controversy. The Enron Corporation hired Baker within a month of his departure from the White House, and the arrangement allowed him to invest in projects he developed. Baker's work for the company centered partly on a deal negotiated during a 1993 trip to Kuwait, where he and Bush were receiving medals for their Gulf War service. Baker worked the margins of that trip to pursue an agreement that would allow Enron to restore an energy plant destroyed during the Iraqi invasion. A September 1993 report by journalist Seymour Hersh questioned whether former officials were using their government service as leverage for private contracts. Baker confronted Hersh, and maintained that his intention was only to "help an American company." He departed Enron in 1995. As late as November 2001, after Enron had publicly admitted to falsifying years of financial reporting, Baker arranged for Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to accept the Enron Award for Distinguished Public Service at a public ceremony.

  Baker's work with the Carlyle Group proved similarly contentious. Carlyle co-founder David Rubinstein described Baker as one of the firm's prominent "access capitalists," a term writer Michael Lewis applied to Baker and former Cabinet-level officials Frank Carlucci and Richard Darman. An investigation published by The Nation in 2004 implicated Baker in Carlyle's efforts to secure a billion dollars in Kuwaiti government investment, raising conflict-of-interest concerns given Baker's simultaneous role as a presidential envoy on Iraqi debt relief. In 2005, Rubinstein asked Baker to leave the organization. To soften the departure, Rubinstein offered to time it to Baker's 75th birthday.

  When the 2000 presidential election reached its Florida recount, Baker managed George W. Bush's legal team in the state. His team of roughly 30 people included lawyers who would later be appointed to government positions, among them John Bolton, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. When the Supreme Court's opinion was faxed to campaign headquarters and former Bush clerk Ted Cruz confirmed its meaning, Baker became the first to congratulate Bush as president-elect.

• 8. The Baker Institute

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  Rice University approached Baker about a public policy institute after he gave a commencement address there in 1991. Political science professor Richard Stoll suggested Baker as a candidate for the role should Bush lose re-election. On the 14th of January 1993, a week before the end of Bush's presidency, Rice announced that Baker would join the board and that the university would create a public policy institute in his name.

  The connection between Baker and Rice ran deeper than it might appear. Baker's grandfather was the personal lawyer for William Marsh Rice, the university's namesake. Baker's grandfather chaired the Board of Trustees from its 1891 charter until his death in 1941 and was himself the namesake for Baker College, Rice's first residential college.

  Around its 10th anniversary, Texas Monthly writer S.C. Gwynne described the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy as "notable for its prodigious ability to raise money and an equally prodigious ability to draw famous speakers to its programs and conferences." Speakers have included Mikhail Gorbachev in 1997, Nelson Mandela in 1999, Vladimir Putin in 2001, and Barack Obama in 2018, the last of whom appeared alongside Baker himself for the organization's 25th anniversary. Baker also appeared with Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger for the 30th anniversary in 2023.

  The institute irregularly grants the James A. Baker III Prize for Excellence in Leadership. Recipients have included Colin Powell in 2007, Marguerite Barankitse in 2017, Brian Mulroney in 2019, Austin Tice in 2022, and Condoleezza Rice in 2024. Following Henry Kissinger's death in 2023, Baker became the oldest living former United States secretary of state and the last surviving secretary of state to have served in the 20th century.