Recording:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, inside the ICE House, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
The New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote a piece last week that, to use a somewhat overwrought phrase, spoke to me. But this one really did in the form of speeches by Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. News reports from Walter Cronkite and TV ads from Richard Nixon among many others. Manjoo's piece was titled 'Go Live in Another Decade, I Recommend it.' And he said and I quote, "On and off over the last few years, on nights and weekends and vacations, I jump into my digital DeLorean and take up residence in earlier times. Make my way slowly through the 1960s and then the 70s accompanied by an unending library of historical documents and pop cultural artifacts I found online.
Josh King:
Those who've listened to this show for a while know I do something similar with my collection of yellowing it mildewy Time Magazines spanning the late 70s to the early 90s. The then that periodical delivered by our mailman to my parents house every Tuesday, leading to an afternoon among the Strobe Talbott cover stories, the Hugh Sidey essays, the Diana Walker photographs, and also the alluring advertisements for Hennessy cognac and Marlboro cigarettes. A snifter in my hand in front of a crackling fire and a day on horseback at the ranch, a butt hanging from my mouth all in my mind. What a healthy lifestyle I had.
Josh King:
Over the span of 600 pages or so, my favorite decades came roaring back this summer, in a form of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, by two of my favorite writers Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser. Like the Top Gun Reboot and the new James Bond film, Peter and Susan's book was originally slated to come out much earlier in the year but COVID threw a wrench in those plans. And it's not like the author's didn't have plenty of other work to do in the late spring and summer besides promoting a book. But it's given me extra time to savor their writing and this most welcome return to a time when partisanship was still prevalent but true patriotism and pragmatic compromise were still in fashion in the nation's capital. My conversation with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser is coming up right after this.
Recording:
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Josh King:
I owe a lot to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Peter is currently the Chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. But back when he held a similar job at the Washington Post in the 1990s, we traveled around the world together on Air Force One, and he kept me company on many endless days sitting in a 615 passenger van outside the fence of one golf course or another on pooled duty. Keeping that stog vigil in case anything untoward happened to the President of the United States. Peter is also the author of Obama, The Call of History, Days of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House and The Breach, Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton.
Josh King:
And you can read Susan Glasser's Letter from Trump's Washington each week in The New Yorker, where she's a staff writer chronicling the four years of the 45th President's first term. It might be seen as a debilitating job, but as Susan wrote last week, we have to keep writing it down, every last word of it. Back when Susan was the founding editor of POLITICO Magazine, I sent her a pitch for a deep dive into the worst political event in history, Dukakis and the Tank, which Susan bid at and then helped me hone it into something readable, which eventually turned into my book off script, An Advance Man’s Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide. Peter and Susan, I owe you a lot as does this country. I hope this conversation is but a small down payment on that debt. Welcome inside the ICE House.
Peter Baker:
Thank you very much for having us. It's been a long time since those pool vans but some of us are still in those vans. At least you've escaped and done bigger and better things.
Josh King:
I know you are Peter. I read this co-byline piece in The New Yorker that you both wrote this week, The Private Trump Angst of the Republican Icon which basically answers the question that readers and interviewers will want to ask you after reading The Man Who Ran Washington, but since you'll be answering it about 1000 times on other shows and podcasts, I'll save it for the end if we even get to it. I really want to travel back to that high watermark of Jim Baker's influence on American Politics, Governance and Diplomacy, to a time when many thought our system worked a lot better. But first, why was 2020 a time to go back and write a biography of a Secretary of the Treasury who served from 1985 to 1988 and a Secretary of State who served from 89 to 92?
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having us, Josh. We're just delighted to be with you today. Look, we did not intend for this to be a 2020 book. We embarked on this project seven years ago, in the misty era of the Obama years. Even at that time, I think there was a sense that this was a project that would be looking backward to a time when Washington worked in some fundamental way that it had already started not working. Dysfunction and gridlock are not unique to the Trump era or to 2020 and many of the crises that have now converged into this national, whatever this year were already evident in some ways during the Obama years.
Susan B. Glasser:
And I think Peter and I thought, just like you that this was an opportunity to time travel, an opportunity to write a big book about Washington that told us something about how Washington worked when Washington ran the world. That Baker fundamentally, tells the story of a particular moment in time. That is, from the end of Watergate to the end of the Cold War. That time was already passed seven years ago and it seems even more definitively passed today.
Josh King:
The book, guys, was based on 25 interviews with Secretary Baker spanning as you wrote 70 hours along with one sit down, I guess, with his 106 year old nanny, which I'm be curious to see what you got out of that interview among so many others. Secretary Baker, now 90 years old, and given that my own dad is 89, I can't imagine what those 70 hours were like. So why don't you tell me hearing from this person, now looking back at that period from the end of Watergate to the end of the Cold War, Susan, how lucid and engaged he was between the age of 83 until the age of 90.
Susan B. Glasser:
What's remarkable about him is that he's not only physically as strong as an oak tree, and I should say that, actually both Secretary Baker and his wife Susan, in her upper 80s as well, recently contracted COVID-19. They have both recovered now from it. I think they had a nasty case but it didn't send them to the hospital. He's already gone back hunting and fishing, which tells you a lot about his physical durability. But Peter and I were certainly struck by his mental acuity, even well into his 80s. And also just his energy, stamina and zealousness right to the end. He was famous, at the height of his Washington powers, for really being a master of preparation, a master of discipline, wanting to know everything, really knowing his brief, he would carry around omnipresent yellow legal pads and write everything down. We found that still to be the case even now. He was remarkably well informed, by the way, for a man who never has used email up until this day.
Josh King:
Through the book, you also get a sense, and I'm going to get to this, but his cultivation of media relationships and perhaps a desire on his own part to put a quota on his career. How did the project begin?
Peter Baker:
Well, I think that's exactly right. Josh, you're right. He wanted to put a quota on his career. The story actually is, we were in Texas in 2013, actually promoting my book on Bush and Cheney. We had been talking about who out there... We were thinking only a good project who has not been the subject of a big biography, and it really stunned us when we woke up and realized that nobody had ever written a book on this guy who had been, not only Secretary of State during really the most interesting moment in our modern times, arguably, but also ran five presidential campaigns. Imagine Kissinger and Karl Rove rolled into one, you don't see that very often. It blew us away that nobody had done this and so we approached Baker, we had a friend who's an intermediary, said he had talked to Baker recently that Baker was interested in cooperating if anybody wanted to do it.
Peter Baker:
So we had a marriage of interest. I think he had written two memoirs of his own, but I think he really wanted to have his story told by somebody else. I think he understood that to be a truly historic figure, and he would like to see himself that way, that somebody else has to write a biography. Somebody who's independent, and not on your staff, not a ghostwriter, not his own memoirs, but somebody else, and he opened his doors to us in a really powerful way. From the very beginning, he made a promise to us that he would be open and he would not try to direct us or steer us in any way, force us to write one way or the other. It was not an authorized book.
Peter Baker:
But he opened his archives without any restrictions in the end, he gave us interviews without any restrictions in the end, and I think he lived up to his word. He really did. He was he was an open book. Even if not introspective guy, but he didn't try to put anything off limits, including very, very painful subjects of his family's own experiences. I was really struck by that.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, and what's notable about that is it actually he is a very canny and calculating steward of his own image. So actually, one of the more interesting things in the course of working on the book was finding in the archives at Princeton, which he generously gave us access to before opening them up to others, that he, in fact, had censored essentially, from his own memoirs, even relatively anodyne details, and there were just these fascinating memos back and forth with his staff and the people who were helping him write his memoirs. Huge knockdown fights about what to put in there as he tried to sanitize his own version of his history. Therefore, we were all the more grateful that he did not engage in that kind of back and forth contest at all.
Josh King:
One, I'd probe a little bit more on the Princeton archives angle, because I mentioned in my introduction, my ongoing emerging in Time magazines in the 1980s, you went deep into the archives of Princeton as well as the presidential libraries of Ford, Reagan and Bush Senior. Given the materials that you work with every day, Peter, the transcripts of Trump's press conferences, Kaley McEnany briefings, Susan, the way you pull out the nuggets every week to create the letter from Washington, what was the time warp like for you personally, to delve into these old documents, the Larry speaks briefings and all of the other memos that you imagine going back and forth. This is more depth, more thought, than this sort of by the seat of your pants presidency that you're both covering now?
Peter Baker:
Right. Well, put aside Trump for one second, and just going back to the archives and seeing all these documents, as you know, because you've done this kind of work. And you go back in history to re-look at things we think we know and discover how much we didn't. To see what it was really going on behind the scenes that didn't get captured in the days newspapers. Having done the White House now for four presidents, one thing I've learned is how little we actually know. I think we maybe captured 10, 15%, 20 at most of what's really going on in a given time. Only the years later when the archives open, and the memoirs are written, and the oral histories are taken, we really can't begin to flesh it out. So for us, for me, anyway, it was such a pleasure to peel back that layer of artifice and spin and fakery, to look at what was happening behind the scenes. I really enjoyed. That's a lot of fun for a reporter really, in some ways that made this, for me, the most fun experience I've had in a long time.
Peter Baker:
Now you add Trump to that, and I agree with you, there's something really refreshing to time travel back to this period when, it wasn't that it was perfect by any stretch. It was partisan. It could be nasty. The Dukakis campaign, obviously, against Bush showed that it was not exactly beam ball. But there's something about it that just was more sensible. When the election was over, the election was over. People wanted to get some stuff done. Baker sat down after the 1982 midterms and redid the whole social security system with the Democrats. He sat down with the Democrats in the second term of Reagan to redo the whole tax code. He sat down with the Democrats at early Bush to solve the Contra war. You can't even imagine that happening today. I think it is a different world today, and I have to say it was refreshing to go back and visit in the [inaudible 00:15:26].
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, and I do think, I was particularly call out the invaluable collections of oral histories that various organizations have done. The Miller Center, UVA is one example for that, because they're catching people like Baker or people who worked in other white houses not that long after they've been in these jobs. But there's an expectation and a level of candor, about the motivations, about the internal politics, about just the factors that went into some of these decisions that I found really, really bracing and refreshing and really helpful in writing history. The other thing is, certainly looking at the early years of someone like Jim Baker.
Susan B. Glasser:
One of my favorite, and I think in some ways oddly revelatory things, were the files and files that he had of paperwork. They were notes from his father, a very, very controlling person. And one of the things we learned the most about, actually, was how did Jim Baker get to be Jim Baker? And the answer really lies in this very upstanding a family of Houston lawyers, of which he was the fourth generation. Although his name is James Baker III that's a whole different story. His father was a stern taskmaster, a demanding man of the old school, he was so strict that Baker and his friends called him The Warden growing up. I found the poignancy of these notes, Baker was not from an oil family, they were lawyers, they were very well off but they weren't like super gazillionaires. He was a partner in a different law firm than the family law firm.
Susan B. Glasser:
He relied on his father for certain amounts of cash even well into his married adult life. His dad would send him these notes, "Here's a check for $25 to pay for your wife's birthday present. Here's 30 bucks to buy a new Brooks Brother's suit." He even paid the fees for one of the children to be born from the obstetrician. He was contributing to the family station wagon. Is the sort of portrait of upper middle class life in post war Houston, in which there's this very controlling, demanding dynamic going on. And I found that to be really revelatory in trying to understand who is this person?
Josh King:
You talk about these labels that people get that sometimes find their way into the chapter headings of your book, The Man Who Ran Washington. You mentioned The Warden as the name that they gave to James Baker's father. This morning, Susan, I went and looked at one of those Time covers from, I think it was October 3rd 1988. This is about two weeks after the famous Dukakis and Atkinson in Sterling Heights, Michigan. It shows on the left John Sasso, Dukakis's campaign chairman, and on the right, Baker, who was Bush 41's. The headline is, 'The Battle of the Handlers.' Come on, the cover of Time Magazine that should be the pinnacle of one's career, Baker hated it, didn't he?
Peter Baker:
He hated it. Yeah, he hated it because he didn't want to be a handler at that point.
Susan B. Glasser:
He wanted to be a statesman.
Peter Baker:
He wanted to be a statesman. He just come off being Secretary of Treasury and he was negotiating big, monstrously important financial issues, the whole tax code, the international currency rates, and now suddenly he was a handler. And the last thing he wants. You're right. That Time magazine cover graded on it. But there was another one, I think you're about to probably tell us about, is that right? The next one?
Josh King:
Well, we could go to the wimp factor of course, if that's-
Peter Baker:
There's that one though but there's also another-
Susan B. Glasser:
But he on the cover, Baker himself was on the cover of Time magazine again, and he liked this other one a lot better.
Peter Baker:
Right. That was called The Velvet Hammer.
Josh King:
The Velvet Hammer, of course.
Susan B. Glasser:
A nickname that his cousin had given to him and Baker just love this description of himself as the Secretary of State. He had finally broken back out of campaign strategy and back into the big time as George H.W. Bush is Secretary of State. We found that the velvet hammer actually was an excellent description of Baker that applied not just to his tenure as Secretary of State, but arguably to a lot of what he did.
Josh King:
I know I saw it this morning, and I was competing like, "Which Time Magazine am I going to bring up with Susan and Peter?" We're going to get to the Secretary of State period in a few minutes. I still want to stick with, let's call it late 1980 or early '81. By my count, of course, it's not a very difficult count. But President Trump said four chiefs of staff so far in the less than four years into his presidency. During that same length of time, President Reagan had one, James A. Baker III who served for four years and 15 days. What was the biological makeup of this man from Houston? You mentioned a little bit in relationship with his father, the discipline that he instilled that allowed him that level of longevity. What was the secret sauce that allowed him to stay relatively unscathed in those first four years, 80 to 85 when the likes of Ed Meese and Mike Deaver faltered?
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, I think first of all your right to spotlight his discipline and endurance, because clearly it was a pretty grueling thing to be operating in the Ronald Reagan White House. I think before the current White House, it might be almost a byword for backstabbing entry and [inaudible 00:21:08] shuffles. Absolutely. He called it the [Beep 00:21:12]. There were enemies everywhere. He literally was so desperate to get out at one point from being White House Chief of Staff that he spent untold hours engineering a massive reorganization in which they would force out the National Security Adviser, who was one of his internal rivals.
Susan B. Glasser:
He would install himself as National Security Adviser and his ally in the palace intrigue, Michael Deaver would take the spot as the White House Chief of Staff. They had it all organized, this essentially internal coup. They got Reagan himself to sign off on it, they handed him a piece of paper with the announcement that Reagan would soon go down to the White House briefing room and read to the press corps. All that was left was for Reagan to go down to the situation room and inform the rest of the National Security team that they were about to be unceremoniously dumped.
Susan B. Glasser:
Then Baker made a key mistake, perhaps, through exhaustion, who knows, but he failed to accompany Reagan to the meeting in the situation room. So William Clark, when he was informed, not only of his own exit but that he would be replaced by Baker whom he considered at this point, probably a mortal enemy, rallied opposition to Baker and Deaver in the room, Reagan heard this barrage from his own advisers felt that he couldn't go through with it, came back upstairs and reluctantly called Baker and Deaver into the room and said, "Fellas, I've got a revolt on my hands." It was really tough going inside the Reagan White House. But this is also the scene, I think of probably, Baker's real mastery of the levers of power in Washington.
Susan B. Glasser:
And that starts immediately after the 1980 election in which he is entering into this world of Reagan loyalists and insiders as a total outsider. He was the guy who ran George Bush's campaign, he was not trusted by them, and yet his appointment as Chief of Staff was engineered. But Reagan was very hands off and left him to deal with people like Ed Meese, who were seen as the real keepers of the Reagan flame and, Peter, he did this masterful thing when he wrote down what the responsibilities would be for each of them.
Peter Baker:
Yeah, it was a fascinating moment because in fact, Baker understood what really mattered, what didn't matter. He didn't have all that much Washington experience himself, but he had a pretty intuitive sense of the way this town worked. So they had a piece of paper, two columns, Meese got one column, he got the other. He says, "Meese, you're in charge of policy, you're the counselor, you've the title of council the president, and you have cabinet rank." And Meese loved that. Cabinet rank seemed really big deal.
Peter Baker:
Baker obviously take care of the legislative office, the press office, communications office and the paperwork. The staff secretaries, "You don't worry about that. And I'll have the Chief of Staff's office in the corner." Well, Baker had just pulled one over on Meese without Meese even really realizing it. Because Baker understood what Meese didn't, which is the cabinet rank met nothing. It's irrelevant really in Washington, it's a great title, doesn't tell you anything. But controlling the paperwork, and the press, and the legislative functions, that's real power in Washington. And having the Chief of Staff's office, which is where the meetings would be held meant that you were the host. So at the beginning this Troika, this this threesome, Baker, Deaver and Meese, which was seen to be three people writing the White House, very quickly became Baker as the first among equals.
Josh King:
And that contract also had one other so important proviso in it, maybe written in longhand itself, which was essentially with that contract, Meese gave up the ability to walk into the Oval Office himself.
Peter Baker:
Exactly right.
Susan B. Glasser:
And that was amazing because he added that into the agreement, and it was one of his biggest concessions. He didn't seem to understand it. He added, "I will have the right to go to any of Reagan's meetings." And Baker said, "Sure, absolutely, that's great. For symbolism, for parallelism, I'll just put that in my column as well." So that meant that Meese gave up the ability to meet alone with Ronald Reagan.
Josh King:
The level of preparation that Baker exhibits throughout of his life, up to and including, I guess, the first tour of Houston, he gave the both of you of the places that he grew up, handwriting down all the places he wanted to show you on a yellow legal pad. That goes so far back, Susan and Peter, it even go to his daily conversations with his advanced man Edd Rogers, who asked every day, "Did you get laid last night?" And Rogers says to himself and maybe his recollection to you, "Baker really wanted to know."
Peter Baker:
He's a [inaudible 00:25:53] gossip. The truth is one of the coins of the realm in Washington is information. Baker loved gossiping. He want to know what people was going on? Who was sleeping with whom? Who was up? Who is down? Walt Mossberg who's now the great tech columnist told us the other today. That Baker wanted to know when he switched beats? Why he was switching beats? And actually sign one of the staffers to figure it out. I mean, this is something that Baker-
Susan B. Glasser:
Because by the way, he thought he got demoted.
Josh King:
I read that whole thread, Mossberg was [crosstalk 00:26:21] great story.
Peter Baker:
[inaudible 00:26:22] is the opposite of boss [inaudible 00:26:24] said they actually sent him a note later saying, "You were right and I was wrong." But they wanted to know stuff and so yeah, he would quiz Ed Rogers, "Did you get laid last night?" And it was part of where he operated. If he knew more than you did, he was going to get ahead.
Josh King:
There's a famous piece of video that I watched this morning, at least it's famous around here at the New York Stock Exchange. President Reagan with his new Chief of Staff, Don Reagan, at the podium of the New York Stock Exchange, they're ringing the opening bell, it's March 28th 1985. This is just a few months after the famous jobs switch in which Baker and Regan flipped roles, Baker becoming Treasury Secretary, while Regan took over the White House. Why was Baker so good at hanging on to that chief role while Reagan ran afoul of the First Lady and didn't make it past two years?
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, I think you gave a little bit of the answer right there, which is rule number one of the Reagan White House was, don't screw with Nancy Reagan. And she was an enormous power in the internal workings of that White House. And I think one of Jim Baker's, the keys to his success was that he... She liked him from the very beginning and was a particular favorite of his and that obviously smoothed away for him. And there were a few examples in the book, where actually he didn't need to appeal directly to Nancy Reagan. That there was no other way to solve something. I think the other thing that's interesting about that Reagan to Baker switch is something we just talked about, in regards to Ed Meese, the vein gloriousness of some of the others in Reagan's circle, and their desire to elevate themselves and big titles and big offices. And I think Reagan thought of himself as a principal and not as a staffer. And the key to Baker was he tired of it, but he understood that the job was Chief of Staff. And that staff was an integral part of the title.
Josh King:
As hard as it was for Baker to stay in control of everything that was happening in the West Wing, it was even harder for him at home. And you alluded to this in the first couple things that we talked about, but you offer up the moving correspondence regarding the cancer that took the life of Baker's first wife, Mary Stewart and his subsequent marriage to Susan creating, as you write this real life Brady bunch of seven kids in the household around 1973, which is the same time that the ABC show was captivating these primetime households. But not all was sanguine for Jim and Susan as it was for Mike and Carol, was it?
Peter Baker:
Now exactly, this kind of Quentin Tarantino version, where the family is unhappy and dysfunctional and angry and upset. I think a lot of the boys were... He would tell you he didn't handle it well. That they got married without telling the kids they were doing it, just pop it on them, that what didn't go over well. The boys weren't happy that their mom was being replaced. And they put all seven kids at the time into a relatively small house where they were sharing very limited space. And it was a small house, but for seven kids it was small. And I think there was a lot of dysfunction at that time.
Peter Baker:
One of the boys vowed to rake up the marriage. Some of the other kids were caught up in drugs or got in trouble in school. It was stressful. It was very stressful. And Baker had from... What Susan talked about as father, Baker's view of fatherhood is distant and imperious, not engaged and the same way we think of today's parental responsibilities. And I think he didn't know how to handle it. And I think it took a long time until they got to... They got their hands around it. One of the things that helped, was that Baker and Susan Baker had a child of their own, Mary Bonner who came along. And what they would tell you is that helped to start knit the family together to bring people under one family in effect.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, and the other thing that is really remarkable and I did not really know any of this story until we embarked on this biography. But in many ways, it was that family tragedy and the death of his first wife that opened the way for Baker to come to Washington and in some ways, he didn't get here to DC until he was 40. It's the world's most successful midlife career switch. But his wife's death, I think it accelerated already essentially a fatigue with the very constrained and narrow life that he led in Texas. It was a successful life, obviously, he was a man of great privilege. But in the end, it wasn't a big enough stage for someone like Tim Baker, even though his father, grandfather, great grandfather before them, were adamant that the family should essentially stay in their lane, focus on the law, focus on being civic boosters of Houston and don't have anything at all to do with politics. They say politics is dirty business.
Susan B. Glasser:
Baker because of his friendship with George HW Bush forged on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, they were both extremely competitive players, they loved to win. Baker had already won the singles title a couple years in a row before Bush showed up as an ambitious, preppy, young oilman into Houston. So of course, he was thrilled to be partnered with the club champion on the doubles court. But they became very, very close and they really bonded over this tragic death of Mary Stewart. And in fact, the book has this extraordinary letter that Baker wrote Bush about Mary Stewart and her condition in which she confesses that she's been given a fatal cancer diagnosis and he's told no one, not even his mother, certainly not as children, not even his wife, this was... Tells you something about the situation with both medicine and husbands in the late 1960s.
Susan B. Glasser:
They certainly were not the way they are today. But it also tells you something about how close Bush and Baker were, which would be invaluable later in life as they enter politics. And it also, the context of the letter that's relevant here was that actually, he would... Baker was already considering maybe he should go into politics himself. And so it wasn't that the idea of Washington and politics came from nowhere after his wife died, but more, I think it accelerated his desire to build the kind of life that he himself wanted and to break away from the constraints that had shaped his world for the first 40 years.
Josh King:
Talking about the closeness Susan, of the relationship between Bush and Baker, over the years even those who worked for Clinton and on the other side, we've developed this hagiography for George H.W. Bush, we gloss over that whisper that we've heard in the past about the Jennifer Fitzgerald story. But you go into it in rather deep detail as an example, not about Bush and Ms. Fitzgerald but of this passive aggressive way in which Baker dealt with some of his own problems, including Bush's older brother Jonathan and the meddling of Miss Fitzgerald. When all else fails, send the wife in to do the dirty work. Is that the way it is Peter?
Peter Baker:
Well, yeah, it really is. It doesn't happen in my household, by the way. But yeah, it's... So yeah, you're right, Jennifer Fitzgerald was a longtime staffer for Bush. And whatever you think of their relationship, she was not popular among other Bush staffers. She was seen as too controlling, she didn't distribute a speech she was supposed to distribute. Baker felt like she was taking on airs, "Who does she thinks she is? I'm the guy who's actually running the campaign." But he couldn't confront his friend George about it. He had a hard time bringing this up with him. And that, I think, also speaks to the type of relationship and the type of men they were in that moment in history.
Peter Baker:
And so you're right. And finally, he actually he left it to Susan Baker, who calls up George Bush and says, "You're going to lose Jimmy if you don't figure this out." And it's like, she really had her intervene. And by the way, he's standing there listening to her while she's on the phone, it's very passive aggressive, as you say. And it's not like and he's really not a passive aggressive guy, he's a pretty a assertive fella in most instances. But in this one instance, he just couldn't confront Bush himself.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, and I think that tells you in a way, actually, how close he was to Bush, this was a relationship he valued more than any other. Actually, at the early stages, in fact, it really was more of an older brother, younger brother kind of thing. And remember, George H.W. Bush had been his heroic aviator in World War II, Jim Baker was too young to have served in World War II, he was in the military but he was in the Marines after the war. And so, he really was a little dazzled by Bush. And now they're running this national campaign together and he didn't have a big record of challenging his father, for example, face to face. So I imagine that it would have been very painful for him to try to figure out how to deal with his friend not treating him in the right way.
Peter Baker:
Yeah. But then on the other hand, he's also the only guy who can tell him hard things too, like to get out.
Josh King:
One of the things that jumped out at me was this antipathy that Senator Bob Dole had toward Bush, which was colorfully brought to life by something Dole said to him after the disastrous 1980 debate in Nashua, "I'll get you someday you [Beep 00:35:53] Nazi." You quote, Dole is saying from a book that Craig Shirley wrote. But then you add Dole sanctum, "You're never going to forget this." Which your end notes say came from your interview with Baker. This really brings the hatchet man to life. But for a guy so careful about [inaudible 00:36:08] his image, even now. Did it surprise you to hear Baker coming down on Dole like that?
Peter Baker:
Well, I think he was just telling the story. I mean, one thing about these interviews we do with Baker is he was pretty open about the things that happening warts and all, if you will. And I think he enjoys the story. Because at this point, this distance of time, you're allowed to tell the colorful stories and not worry about pissing off people like Bob Dole. But yeah, it was a tense moment. This is the moment when Reagan shows up bush in New Hampshire and said, "Let's have all the candidates on stage." And Bush thought he had finally a one on one chance at Reagan. And really in a way killed the remainder of Bush's candidacy. He'd come off of Iowa with the win and now suddenly, he was embarrassed and look weak because of Reagan. And Dole was a willing partner of Reagan in doing so, so with a tense moment.
Peter Baker:
But I also think about the time when Baker, a few months later, has to tell his friend, "It's time to cut the cord. You're not going to win. And if you don't get out now, you're going to ruin your only chance of being vice president." That, "Reagan will eventually resent it if you keep your campaign going longer than it's really viable." And Baker saw that and Bush didn't. And it was a tense moment, Bush called him [crosstalk 00:37:24].
Josh King:
After the California Leak.
Peter Baker:
Exactly that Baker basically admitted to David Broder from the Washington Post that he was closing down the California Office because they don't have any money. And Bush reads it in the paper and it seems like a sign from Baker saying, "Hey, it's over." And it really was and it was up to Baker to tell Bush the unpleasant truth.
Susan B. Glasser:
The family was very resentful of that. And again, it shows that some of the most complicated politics in any political career are the internal politics. So maybe that served him well when he got to the Reagan White House a few months later.
Josh King:
A few months later, Susan. By '81, Baker is Reagan's Chief of Staff. It's not an easy fit, either based on the type of people that Baker brought into his administration like David Gergen and that crowd, which are more Bush types than Reagan, your arch conservatives. But also between the boss himself and his chief, you know that Mike Deaver said Reagan could be elegant and self mocking, but does not give much back in the way of introspection. The same could be said true of Baker. So based on the idea that Baker has always questioned about his Reagan credentials, how did they develop this report?
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, it is a great question, because obviously, Jim Baker was not an avatar of the ideological revolution inside the Republican Party that Reagan today is still considered the patron saint of. In fact, Baker had run, not one, but two campaigns against Reagan. His start in politics was in 1976, in running the delegate counting operation for Jerry Ford, which Ford beat Reagan on the floor of the convention and then being elevated to run the fall campaign for Ford and then he did it again for Bush. So he was seen as the establishment figure fighting the conservative ideological revolution.
Susan B. Glasser:
Now, what Baker will say, and it's a polished answer at this point is, "Well, Reagan was much more pragmatic than people give him credit for. He actually wanted to get things done. I'd rather get 80% done and leave 20% on the table, then go over the cliff with my flag flying. And that obviously suited Baker's skill set very much. Baker was ultimately a pragmatist, he was extremely strategic and disciplined, which was a very good fit with both the political and the media moment in Washington. This was a time when you could control the narrative much more. So having someone like Baker, who was very disciplined and could say, "Let's keep our eyes on the prize here, we've got to get the economic turnaround of the country, we're not going to win reelection." That was really what he was focused on as Reagan's Chief of Staff and obviously that was a successful strategy.
Susan B. Glasser:
For example, he had, I don't know if it was a sixth sense or whatever. But even at the very beginning of the Reagan administration, he was really worried about the national security zealotry of some of Reagan's advisors and he wanted to stay the heck out of the very ideological shadow boxing with the Soviets in Latin America. And he worried about something that of course, would dramatically come to be true in the second Reagan term with the Iran-Contra scandal, he wanted to keep breaking out of that mess. So maybe Reagan just identified in him someone who could really get stuff done and valued that aspect.
Susan B. Glasser:
Remember also that as you said already, Reagan didn't like to get his hands dirty. He was the opposite of a micro-manager. So in that sense, having someone like Baker, who was willing to do all those unpleasant tasks for him and to take on the personnel, for example, would have been a great relief to someone like Ronald Reagan.
Josh King:
Getting that deal done with Ed Meese and that handwritten piece on the contract was one thing, but dealing with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, another thing entirely, explained how Baker's self assigned role of ship detector, as he explained to Hedrick Smith evolved and how it came to a head on that tumultuous afternoon of March 30th 1981.
Peter Baker:
Yeah, that's a great question. So of course, why your listeners might not even remember this. It's so long ago, but it was a most cataclysmic day of 1981 in some ways when President Reagan was shot outside of the Washington Hilton Hotel here in Washington, DC. He wasn't killed, but he was injured in a way that people didn't even realize at first. His Secret Service shoves him in the car and they think they've gotten away without being shot, only then do they discover on the way back to the White House that there's blood. And Baker is in charge of the White House that day, the phone, he's got open line to the hospital and suddenly he's the one in charge. Bush is out of town, he's in Texas on a speech. They're only really 70 days into this administration. Baker doesn't really know all these people even yet and they really rise to the occasion to calm, he's orderly, he's unflappable. He goes to the hospital, he sees Reagan.
Peter Baker:
When they come to the big decision whether to invoke the 25th amendment and declare that the presidency has shifted as an acting basis to Bush, it's Baker who takes two other aides into the closet at the hospital and says, "No, we shouldn't do this." Partly because he didn't want to cause any questions about Reagan's authority. And partly because he also knew it would be bad for his friend Bush, if it looked like Bush was taking too much on. And especially for him Baker, if it looked like he was helping his friend take over for the sainted Reagan at that point. So I think that that day for him was establishing day.
Peter Baker:
By contrast, Al Haig, goes to brief room and declares that he's the one in charge and he muffs the Constitution by saying, "Gentlemen, in the Constitution, you have, the President, the Vice President and then the Secretary of State." Mixing up this order of succession, which is actually written statute, not in the Constitution anyway. And looking like he was grasping for power and he was on a sweaty and looked... It made people feel uncomfortable rather than reassured. And that was the beginning of the end for Al Haig. He actually ends up sticking around for another year. But Baker and Deaver in particular, made his life hell, they decided that he was no good, that he was causing problems, that they didn't like his imperiousness. And in effect, they drove him out in some ways of office by a series of making his life difficult.
Josh King:
You write that. As important as any factor in Baker's rise was his assiduous courtship of the media, which I suppose was at work as much in the last seven years with Baker, as we talked about as it was during the Reagan years of themselves. I got a sense of how you worked in the Clinton White House, Peter, but as we head to the break, can you take off your Baker biographers hat and share how that view of the way Baker used to manage the press compares with today. Peter, you're still in the briefing room and in those pools every day. How did it work back then? And how does it work today now? Do you have back channel conversations with Jared and Ivanka or Secretary Pompeo, that they are trying to carve their place in history that we'll only know about in 25 years?
Peter Baker:
Yeah, that's a great question. No, not the same. It's definitely not the same. Baker made a point of answering every reporter's phone call by the close of business and sometimes he waited until late. But if you didn't particularly want to talk to him, but he always returned their call. I have spoken to a Chief of Staff in this White House a handful of times basically, even though as you point out and before them. And I speak to the Press Secretary almost very rarely, honestly. In your White House and the Clinton White House, I spoke to Mike McCurry every single day. I would always make a point toward the end of the day at the Washington Post calling McCurry or later Joe Lockhart, saying, "Hey, what's going on? Is there anything I'm missing? Trying to square the circle on some story I was writing." And they dealt with you. And they yelled at you when they didn't like your stories. And they cooperated when they thought it was in their interest.
Peter Baker:
But they basically had a pretty professional relationship with you, just like I think Baker and his team did with the press during his era. This is a different kind of White House, its enemy, the people, it's fake news, it's all this kind of stuff. And there are some who deal with you. And there are some who tried to help but it's a very different White House in a lot of ways, obviously.
Josh King:
After the break, we move from the Reagan years to the Bush years and more with Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, authors of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III that's right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, authors of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. We're talking about Jim Baker's rise and his work for the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Now we'll turn our attention to his time with his successor, the 41st POTUS, George H.W. Bush in his pivotal role, installing his son George W. as the 43rd. The four years that Jim Baker served as chief of staff were not as smooth as nearly 40 years of history have papered over guys. There was this time halfway through that he tried to bail out and serve as National Security Adviser and install Mike Deaver that we talked about earlier.
Josh King:
Reagan later wrote, "My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as National Security Adviser, I suppose was a turning point for my administration, although I had no idea at the time how significant it would prove to be." So Baker finally did maneuver himself into a new job in Reagan's second term. One of baker's tellings is and it was reflected this way in your book, it was Don Reagan's idea, "Let's switch jobs." Is it really as simple as that? What did you find out? Because it seems like one of the simplest little stories in old time Washington, but I can't imagine that it was that much of a snap of the fingers that Reagan nodded in a scent and was done, announced that very day.
Peter Baker:
Yeah, look, I mean, the truth in Washington is sometimes stories really are as simple as that. And they're unlikely implausible and very human. And this is a situation where Reagan was pissed at the White House and didn't like his job and Baker was exhausted and desperate for a way out. And they were sitting there basically [inaudible 00:48:55] to each other one day, after the re-election in 1984. And Reagan says, "Hey, why don't you take my job and I'll take your job." And Reagan saw it in being, putting himself in the center of power, being the prime minister in effect, if you will. Because he saw how Baker really did run the show.
Peter Baker:
And for Baker, that it was an escape from a pressure cooker job that he was exhausted from and also a chance to be a principal, to be a member of the cabinet. Because US Secretary is the number two cabinet slot, remember. And so for him was appeal even though he didn't have particularly a strong economics background as Susan has pointed out a couple times. He only really took one college level economic class, didn't even do all that great in it. But he was a natural thing at power. And so that's how they did, they presented to Reagan and Reagan just let it happen, as you point out to his own regret later.
Josh King:
There's other stories, too, that are sort of sound as simple as that. And I wanted to see what your understanding was from Secretary Baker and talking to him. It sounds more like out of a biography of Theodore Roosevelt than James Baker. But tell me about the four day horse riding and fishing trip of these two men, the Treasury Secretary and the Vice President outside Cody, Wyoming in 1988. Just two guys out for horseback ride.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, that's right. On a well timed escape from reality really is what it was. This was in the summer of 1988. It first of all tells you how our campaigning has changed such that it was seen as a good idea for the Vice President who was running to succeed Ronald Reagan, that he should just take a break entirely from the campaign trail during the Democratic National Convention, that would put Michael Dukakis, formerly as the nominee in 1988. Bush was having a hard time actually, in his campaign. And coming out of that campaign convention season very famously... Actually, Dukakis was 17 points ahead of bush at that point and they executed in many ways, the greatest modern comeback in presidential politics really, of anyone's recent lifetime.
Susan B. Glasser:
And Jim Baker was Treasury Secretary at this point, but he was going to be roped in at the end of this idyllic Western camp out to come and run the campaign as he had run Bush's 1980 campaign. I think he had mixed feelings about it. But again, at least they were on the brink of these two best friends coming into power. And what's remarkable is that A, they're re-cementing their bond. B, it tells you so much about Jim Baker himself who he is. He's seen as a Texan, obviously, he himself but his family were even a form of Texas royalty. But I think Peter and I getting to know him just a little bit, we came to understand that actually, he's more of a man of the West in many ways than of the south. And that was where he, from childhood, found himself really in love with the grantor of the outdoors in Wyoming. He went on this incredible month long, adventure, hunting adventure, with his father actually when he was 14 years old.
Susan B. Glasser:
The father, who we've already said was pretty strict and controlling and yet let him start school late, in order to have this remarkable time out there in the Wyoming wilderness. He later bought a ranch in Wyoming with his wife, Susan, which remains his favorite escape to this day. And so he was taking Bush to his turf, to his really special place. And I think it's the key to understanding what came later and how the President and the Secretary of State, while there would be a friction and even a lot of friction at various times, had begun their real ascension to full power in Washington with this incredible bonding moment.
Josh King:
We saw news today about President Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale. And the Trump campaign seems now firmly in the hands of Bill Stepien with Jared Kushner somewhere not too far off in the shadows, but bring us back after that fishing trip in the summer of 88. And another big footing, James Baker coming into the Bush campaign and working alongside Lee Atwater, who had nurtured Bush's campaign up to that point. And Lee had grand plans and was going to hatch them with Willie Horton and the coming debates in September. But never were two people more different, James Baker and Lee Atwater, but they figured out how to get along.
Peter Baker:
That's right. Yeah, Lee Atwater was young and brash. And he was the next thing. And he thought that Baker coming in was a great challenge to his own authority in a really kind of old fashioned manhood kind of thing, and he was... Baker made it clear, "I don't want to do what you do. I don't want to be the guy deciding on the balloons at the convention. I want to be the big overall person in charge." He left Atwater in the same office, did not move him, he did not take away his title or anything like that. He tried to reassure Atwater that his company was to help him, not to take his place.
Peter Baker:
I think eventually, Atwater came around to realizing that Baker gave a lot of latitude, a lot of freedom. Baker I think, enjoyed having somebody else be the hatchet man, so he didn't have to be. He could be the courtly chairman even as he ran a pretty tough, as you know better than anybody, campaign. And eventually, it got to the point where the two of them were quite close when Atwater was later dying. In fact, it was Baker who gave a very emotional eulogy at the funeral and the two of them really did bond, but it was a tough relationship at first.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, and by the way, that's the other interesting thing. Is that Baker was able to preserve his reputation as a sort of courtly statesman in waiting, while not stopping Atwater from what counted as a scorched earth campaign at the time. Obviously, we're living in a moment where the incumbent president of the United States baselessly accuses his rival of illegal drug use. So it might be quaint by today's standards, but certainly, I'm struck by the fact that Baker never renounced the Willie Horton ad, that in fact, he actually approved a very negative campaign of which Willie Horton is remembered today because of its overt racial signaling in the contest.
Susan B. Glasser:
But there were other aspects of the assault on Dukakis' character that were remarkable and that were not worthy of the record that actually Baker and Bush then went on to compile in their four years in office, which I think was an enormous difference from the politics of today. But their actual campaigning really was beneath them in many ways. And they took Michael Dukakis, who was essentially a very well respected Massachusetts technocrat, certainly not a big ideologue by today's standards, and turned him into card carrying pledge of allegiance denying dangerous leftists and a member of the ACLU for goodness sake. So it really was a very nasty campaign and Baker was clear eyed. He was clear eyed about politics, he was clear eyed about negotiating. And he came in after that bucolic hunting trip in Wyoming, he came into the campaign, he realized they were screwed. And that when you're 17 points down, and the country thinks they already know you because you've been Vice President for eight years, there's only one way to win and that's to destroy your opponent and they proceeded to do that.
Josh King:
You talk about Baker as a statesman in waiting, he sure was, after Bush wins, you're right. The next day Bush announced his first appointment as President Elect, surprising exactly no one, by choosing as his Secretary of State, James Addison Baker III. How did that end up working out?
Susan B. Glasser:
Well it worked out very well, I would say, for both of them, for the world. In many ways hindsight is 20/20, and that's one of the dangers of history. And I think for Peter and I, that was one of the main impetuses of doing the book was our interest. In that incredible period when Baker was Secretary of State, which coincided with the tumultuous events that were the end of the Cold War and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. We spent four years traveling around the former Soviet Union as the Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post and it looks easy now. But the truth of the matter is, and this was I think reinforced in our research and writing of this book, it was not at all inevitable that German reunification, for example, would have occurred in the exact 10 month window in which from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989.
Susan B. Glasser:
Imagine had Gorbachev's position inside the Soviet Union become more tenuous more quickly, or had Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait had occurred earlier, or if there had not been a Jim Baker as US Secretary of State who came up with a fairly brilliant formulation for how to conduct the negotiations that included the four victorious World War II powers and the Soviets, but also gave the East Germans and the West Germans the ability to start to shape their own fate together. It really was a masterful bit of diplomacy right now at a time when, frankly, any even minor deals are almost inconceivable.
Josh King:
On May 10th 1989, Baker's 707 lands in Moscow. He is the principal, as you say, he does command a plane of the 89th Air Wing. As you mentioned, Susan, you've both lived and written extensively about the fall of the Soviet Union and ultimately the rise of Vladimir Putin. But at this point, we're still with Mikhail Gorbachev and we still got Boris Yeltsin to go. You write about this 45 minute disquisition on Perestroika that Gorbachev gives to Baker. From your own perspective, having lived there and knowing so many of the players involved, how did Baker's and Bush's management of Gorbachev personally ease the fall of the Soviet Union?
Susan B. Glasser:
I think there's no question about that bonding that they had both with Gorbachev and his extremely influential Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who was as much or more of a reformer actually, and a key Gorbachev ally in what was a very divided politburo at the time. And Baker and Shevardnadze bonded, including Baker resorting to his old move and actually inviting Shevardnadze to a very unique summit meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Bringing him to the West, right Peter?
Peter Baker:
Yeah, one of Baker's assistants told us about trying to translate the word 'waiters' into Russian so they could take him fishing. First of all, I think Baker was moved by Shevardnadze's candor on the flight out to Wyoming, in which he talked about how difficult the circumstances really were in the Soviet, in a way that diplomats don't often do. He really let his hat off. He really opened up in a way, off talking points. None of this old, "We will bury you," kind of Soviet rhetoric. It was a man talking about how his country was falling apart. And Baker really wanted to help Shevardnadze find a way forward, help the Soviets find a way forward through this period of reform. And the personal relationships, we denigrate them sometimes in well, diplomacy, because the greater forces of global change seem so big. But I think the personal relationship in that era between Bush and Gorbachev, between Baker and Shevardnadze, really made a big difference for a peaceful [inaudible 01:00:47]. It didn't have to be peaceful, and really, I think smooth way.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, the other reason that it mattered so much I think, is because there was an enormous debate raging in Washington throughout this period about how to assess Mikhail Gorbachev, especially within the Republican Party and the Hawks of the Reagan era, there was a deep rooted skepticism of Gorbachev. And in fact, actually a key figure in all of this and the National Security Council was someone who would go on to become a relative moderate Robert Gates, but who came out of the CIA at this time as their meeting Soviet expert and absolute hop, who was convinced that Gorbachev was not for real. There was enormous pressure that both Bush and Baker had to stare down within their own government. And so in that sense, assessing meeting with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, assessing them themselves, and believing that they were credible when they talked about both the crisis of the Soviet system and their desire to reform it. That was really... I think, led to probably the bravest part of their tenure in office, which was to make this leap forward into embracing Perestroika.
Peter Baker:
What point, Dick Cheney who was then the Defense Secretary, gives interview on CNN which he says, he dumps on Gorbachev. He says [inaudible 01:02:07] is going to make it, he's not going to succeed. Baker is furious. "How can you do that? That's not our policy, and is not your lane." His view was, "You stick to your lane, I'll take care of the diplomacy." So he calls up Cheney says, "Cheney, you're off the reservation." He's scolding him for getting outside his lanes of change, [inaudible 01:02:23] I get it. And then Baker, not willing to let that be enough, calls up [inaudible 01:02:29] and tells him basically to tell the press, Cheney is off the reservation and it's quoted to [inaudible 01:02:36], he says, "Dump on Dick with all alacrity". He and Cheney were good friends, but he was more than happy to toss him under the bus when he thought Cheney had drifted outside of his lane, because he did want to make sure the United States was seen as supportive of the changes that were happening and not undercut them the way he thought Cheney had done.
Josh King:
We're soon going to get very much into Dick Cheney's lane, it's the summer of 1990. Baker is in Mongolia of all places in Ulaanbaatar, when he learns that Iraqi troops were headed to Kuwait City to gobble up the entire country, giving Saddam Hussein 20% of the world's oil reserves. Looking back at what is now 30 years in the rear view mirror, Susan and Peter and your 70 hours of interviews with Secretary Baker, how does he think the Bush team managed the first Gulf War and how the Middle East has evolved since?
Susan B. Glasser:
It's really interesting. Two things. One, Bush and Baker in particular really saw this is actually the first big test of the emerging post cold war order. And in fact, flew from Mongolia to Moscow and made really an unprecedented joint statement with the Soviets condemning Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. And that really was something that the world had not seen since the end of World War II, which was the Soviets and the US, acting together jointly offering up a kind of leadership that suggested the world was no longer going to be divided into two, the sort of bipolarity of the Cold War era was over, number one.
Susan B. Glasser:
Number two, for Baker, he has a deep personal wariness about the use of force. He is, at heart I think much more of a diplomat, and his view of American leadership in the world is that it should be robust, but very rarely embarking upon the use of power. So he was worried even at the time, I think it was Bush himself far more than Baker, who was driving that militarized response to Saddam's invasion. That was not something that Baker, had he been president, might not have done it at all. And it certainly informed his skepticism about George W. Bush's later war in Iraq, which was not something that he supported. He was very wary both because he knew the Middle East very well, and I think he had a very justifiable skepticism about what that war would unleash. But also because I think at heart, he has a very restrained view of US military power and when it should be used and a very robust view of US diplomatic power and soft power, and when it should be used.
Josh King:
In five weeks, we're headed for an election day that will be the most decisive yet probably the most inconclusive in American history, at least on election day, and the days and weeks that follow. The next on that list was guys, of course 20 years ago, which found Secretary Baker right in the middle of it. How did Baker manage the Bush v.Gore recount? And what might his prescription be to address what will surely be a shit show on November 3rd?
Peter Baker:
Yeah, we may look back at Florida as the quaint old days. But at the time, it seemed like a really big deal because in fact, the entire presidency came down to this one state and a handful of votes, really just a few 100 votes. And Bush was ahead and he brought in Baker to be his major domo for the recount. And the Democrats told us we interviewed them about this but as soon as we learned that Baker was in charge, we knew we had lost. They had such respect for Baker as an operator, who managed not just a legal fight, but a political fight. And Baker, had a couple of key insights. One, they had to keep the lead throughout the entire time, if at any point Gore took the lead, they lost the moral high ground, people could say, "Well, it's been stolen from him."
Peter Baker:
As long as Bush had a lead, no matter how small, they can make the argument that, "We really run here and what the other guy's trying to do is change that." The second insight he had was, it's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Republicans naturally by dint of personal philosophy and theory don't like the federal courts to be involved in a state count like this, but Baker would throw that kind of philosophy out the window because in fact, the only way they're going to win is that they take the Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court is heavily Democratic. And so that challenged the orthodoxy of the Republicans that point. And he was right, and he was also I think, a pretty good... He was competitive, as soon as they say he's a super competitive guy when he shows for a meeting with Warren Christopher who's their Democratic, recount leader.
Peter Baker:
Christopher has his mutual way forward, Baker's like, "No, I'm here to win. Basically, Bush won and I'm here to preserve his victories, it's as simple as that. We don't have anything to talk about." The meeting was supposed to last couple hours, ended after just 20 minutes. So I think that, what you see now is 20, or five or 10, at least Floridas, and on steroids. And the difference, I think, by the way, is that back in 2000, not just in Baker, but in Bush and Gore, and the other people around, you had people who had fundamental respect for the system. They played tough, and a lot of people weren't happy with the outcome, but when the outcome was determined, everybody said okay, "Okay, we now accept it. We now are going to move forward, we're going to try to bring the people together."
Peter Baker:
Gore gave a very gracious speech at the end, Bush gave a very gracious speech at the end and neither one of them tried to blow up the system. I think we've got now, as a president, who's shown repeatedly he's willing to blow up the system, is willing to completely question the credibility of whatever result happens. And that in fact, that we're going to be left in the situation where at least part of the country, one way or the other may not ever believe in who wins unless there's such a landslide that nobody can question the outcome.
Josh King:
Which brings us I guess, to the issue that I hinted at, at the very beginning of the show and the subject of your essay for The New Yorker this week, and which most shows probably asked you about first, which is, despite what Secretary Baker has told you directly, what outcome do you think he would really like to see on election day?
Peter Baker:
That's a good question.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well I mean, look that is the conundrum here, right? So what we've just described here, this wonderful sort of very granular conversation about a life in Washington, sort of well played is the un-Trump, and yet we're faced in the course of working on the book, with this all happening against the backdrop of the rise of Donald Trump and his essentially hostile takeover of the Republican Party that Jim Baker spent his adult life helping to build. And Baker, obviously very close to the Bush family to this day, he would have seemed to have had for that reason, a built in rationale for not voting for Trump in 2016, for disavowing him throughout, and indeed he told us, from the very beginning, he didn't like Donald Trump, he thought he was nuts. That was a word he used. He thought he was crazy. That was a word he used. He thought he was hostile to the basic ideological principles of the Republican Party, that Baker subscribed to, whether that was free trade, or internationalism, or the very idea of not spending more than you make as a government.
Susan B. Glasser:
So he saw Trump as a threat to the Republican Party, he saw him as ideologically problematic, and he saw him as a man of bad character. And yet, after much hemming and hawing, Baker came up with a classic formula that was bound to satisfy no one, essentially, in 2016, which was that he wasn't going to endorse Donald Trump. But in the end, in the privacy of the voting booth, he says that he voted for him, despite what the Bush family did, despite what many members of his own family, many of them core Republicans did.
Susan B. Glasser:
And interestingly enough, we then spent the next four years as we finished the book, talking periodically with Secretary Baker about Trump. He was as disdainful as he had been before the 2016 election, he was very skeptical, and particularly offended at the sheer incompetence that had come through much of the administration. This was after all, the gold standard of White House Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, and so he seemed to be particularly dismayed by the lack of competent governing performance by the Trump administration. But he couldn't bring himself to disavow them publicly.
Peter Baker:
Having said that though, I have to say I'm going to say something that Baker has not told us, but I have to say... Taking the way you formed the question, I think that if Biden were to win, Baker would probably be more comfortable with that, even though he doesn't want to break with his Republican Party, because Biden is in a lot of ways like Baker, right? Biden is a mainstream Democrat. He's not too ideological. He has floated close to the center of wherever his party has been over the year which has changed. And Baker has too. Baker has sort of floated in the middle of his party, basically, over the years.
Peter Baker:
And I think Biden is the kind of Democrat, that Baker would recognize, as somebody he would sit down and make a deal with. I don't think Baker can make a deal with Trump. I don't know. But he could make a deal with Biden, and he knows Biden, he knows people like Biden. That's a kind of person from his generation, his type of politics. And I think that while he might not support him, I think he'd actually be very comfortable with him if he were president.
Susan B. Glasser:
Well, I think that might be true, but here's what I would say. That there's an element in wishful thinking. And people were really shocked, actually, when we wrote that in The New Yorker the other day, and we kept going back and back at Baker on this very question, of what do you think about Donald Trump? And what's interesting to me is that, I think eventually I came to realize we were looking for some kind of an answer that he wasn't going to give us and that, that was the answer. And he is a very smart man. And I came away very impressed with Baker, as a person and also as a political animal.
Susan B. Glasser:
And the bottom line is that had he wanted to support Joe Biden or to speak out more forcefully against Donald Trump, he would have done so. And so for me as a biographer, I do think listening to the subject is part of what we had to do. And Peter's right, look, his personal discomfort with Trump is real and he expressed it to us throughout the last five years. But in the end, he's had every chance in the world to speak out about Donald Trump and he chose not to.
Josh King:
We've been talking a lot about Baker's view, as it has been expressed to you over the last five years. Just as one final question about your own view of the world as it's evolved over the last five years. You gave up a plum life in 2017, with Peter serving as The New York Times Bureau Chief in Israel, and the foreign correspondents best kind of assignment, Susan, to come back to the swamp. Peter, I see your pool reports. Susan, I listen to your letter from Washington each week voiced with what feels like an increasing level of exasperation each week through the mouth of your alter voice Julia Whalen on Autumn. What happens in a second Trump term? Can you keep it up? And what would happen in a first Biden term? Would you cover that as well?
Peter Baker:
Well, at the moment I plan to, I don't know about Susan. I'll let her speak first. So I'm still just to see where this goes. I think the story is not quite over yet and I want to see how how far it goes. And if it ends up being Biden, I want to see that too. I want to see what comes next. Because I think that is also part of the story, is what happens after Trump, whether it be in January, or whether it be in five years from now. So I feel like I'm not done yet. We are going to try to write a book about the Trump presidency and Washington under Trump, so there's still a lot to be explored on that as well and check in with us about a year from now see how that's [inaudible 01:14:29].
Susan B. Glasser:
Look Josh, here's what I would say, it is an honor, and a privilege and a responsibility to cover a moment like this in American history. And it's not one that we anticipated. I think I can speak for most of us who are doing this. Peter and I, when we became foreign correspondents, and we went to the former Soviet Union, and we went to cover the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a sense of history happening to other people. It's been profoundly uncomfortable and disturbing, to have what feels like history happening to us here at home. And in some ways, the last few years have been for us, or at least for me, like being a foreign correspondent in your own land.
Susan B. Glasser:
I have spent most of my professional life in Washington, and it feels like a very disruptive moment here, a very different moment. And yet, at the same time, I would say the mission of journalism has never felt more clear. You started out so nicely, quoting what I what I wrote the other day about feeling that no matter what these disruptions are, that in fact, our mission of writing it all down every last, at times crazy, insane, disturbing word of it, that's the mission. And it is an honor and a privilege to be able to have this as our job. It really is. And just like, by the way, it was an honor and a privilege to get these insights from Jim Baker and to understand that whatever you personally think about him, he has this incredible wellspring of experience and understanding about Washington at a time when Washington worked in a way that fundamentally has broken down now.
Josh King:
Well, it has been an honor and a privilege to talk to both of you for such an extended period of time about such a great book. Thank you so much for joining us inside ICE House.
Peter Baker:
Thank you very much. It's been an honor and privilege to talk to you and what a great time. Thank you so much.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guests were Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, authors of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. If you liked what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off in the library of The New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Recording:
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