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The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III Kindle Edition

by Peter Baker (Author), Susan Glasser (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 1,964 ratings

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BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The Washington Post • Fortune • Bloomberg

From two of America's most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world.

For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations.

A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush's best friend on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, Baker had never even worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford's campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan's White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker governed as the avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal-making over division, a lost art in today's fractured nation.

His story is a case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington and the world in the modern era--how it once worked and how it has transformed into an era of gridlock and polarization. This masterly biography by two brilliant observers of the American political scene is destined to become a classic.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A masterclass in political biography."
—The Economist

"An illuminating biographical portrait of Mr. Baker, one that describes the arc of his career and, along the way, tells us something about how executive power is wielded in the nation’s capital. . . often has the feel of a novel."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Enthralling, comprehensive . . . The authors rightly highlight the dimensions of Baker’s illustrious career that show so much about what is broken in the current American political system."
—The New York Times Book Review

“The Man Who Ran Washington . . . will rank alongside it as among the very best books about American political life in the late 20th century.”
—The Washington Post

"Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, a husband and wife team, deliver a masterly biography."
—The Guardian

"A fascinating look at political power."
—The New York Times

"Immensely informative, nuanced and judicious."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Enthralling."
—The Financial Times

"A sweeping history as well as an intimate biography, the book is also a fascinating study of how to acquire power in Washington and how to use it to maximum effect."
—Foreign Affairs

"Accomplished . . . Exhaustively reported and fluently written."
—Commentary

"American political culture is broken, but it hasn’t always been that way. James Addison Baker was —the consummate master at actually getting things done in Washington."
—Fortune

"Superlative."
—The American Conservative

“Nobody was better at getting things done than James A. Baker. In a book that is at once fascinating, coolly revealing, and at moments touching, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have given us a biography worthy of one of the most important figures of the late American Century. If you want to understand power in Washington—or anywhere, for that matter—this is the book for you.”
—Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, authors of The Wise Men

“To capture the sweep and relevance of one of the most influential figures in American life requires two of the great reporters and observers of our time. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have written a grand, precise, and engaging American tale that gallops from Houston Country Club to the convention floor, to the Oval Office and all over the globe, capturing James Baker’s ambition, influence, and style as well as telling the story of power and America at the end of an age.”
—John Dickerson, author of The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“A fascinating perspective on power and influence. . . in their nuanced portrait of Baker, he emerges as far more interesting than his taciturn image as White House chief of staff, secretary of state, secretary of treasury.”
—The National Book Review

“A riveting and, at times, moving read.”
—Derek Burney, Policy Magazine

“Baker and Glasser pull no punches . . . a delicious read for lovers of history.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

"If you love palace intrigue and are interested in the behind the scene workings of the executive branch of the federal government at its highest echelons, especially the Oval Office, then Baker’s and Glasser’s book about the extraordinary life of James Aldrich Baker III should be at the top of your reading list."
—New York Law Journal

“Exhaustively reported and fluently written, the book, appropriately for its subject, is a throwback. Like Theodore H. White’s Making of the President series, it celebrates the traditional arts of American politics and governing—not excluding strategic deception, faux histrionics, horse-trading, turf-guarding, lethal leaking, and ass-covering—all in a good cause.”
—Edward Kosner, Commentary Magazine

“Publication of the Baker biography could not have been better timed, because never has the Republican Party needed someone like Jim Baker as bad as it does today, with Donald Trump’s ham-handed, if not treasonous, attempts to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election.”
—The Hill

“Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s The Man Who Ran Washington is an erudite, searching, affectionate biography. Showcasing elegant writing, critical detachment, and encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. presidential history, every page glows with excellence. It’s an epic study of how one brazen Texan married the crude American political power dynamic with old-fashioned velvet diplomacy to help win the Cold War. A stunning achievement!”
—Douglas Brinkley, author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

“No one has ever captured James Baker’s historical importance and essential nature as well as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have in this superlatively reported history. This is a history not only of a man but of late twentieth century politics in America, and though there are some things I saw from a different angle, that isn't the point. The point is that a great history of a serious man has been produced, and deserves huzzahs and cheers.”
—Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of What I Saw at the Revolution

“The Man Who Ran Washington is a must-read tour de force of political history and biography. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, two of our best journalists and scholars, bring us the life of one of the nation’s most important secretaries of state and presidential counselors, showing James Baker near the center of more than thirty years of important American and world history.”
—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidents of War

"In the best of the biographic tradition, the authors tell of an important and consequential man in a consequential era."
—Neil Hassler, RealClearDefense

About the Author

PETER BAKER is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and author of Days of Fire and The Breach. SUSAN GLASSER is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its weekly "Letter from Trump's Washington" as well as a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, after which they wrote Kremlin Rising. Today they live in Washington, D.C., with their son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue
The Velvet Hammer

A little more than a week before the 2016 presidential election, Jim Baker was obsessing over what to do about Donald Trump. Baker’s wife, daughters, and closest advisers were urging Baker to vote against him. Baker’s best friend, former president George H. W. Bush, his partner for nearly a half century on the tennis courts, on the campaign trail, and on the world stage, had made it clear that he would vote against Trump. So had Bush’s son, former president George W. Bush, and other members of the Bush family.

Throughout the long, nasty campaign, Trump had been attacking the Bushes and pretty much everything they—and Baker—stood for. Trump had asked for an endorsement and Baker had refused, but he still was not sure what to do in the privacy of the voting booth. He saw the modern Republican Party as a global bulwark of open markets, free enterprise, and the American way of life. He had helped to build it and he was used to winning. Now Trump, vain and bombastic, a flashy New York real estate mogul who boasted of grabbing women’s private parts and seemed like a sure loser, threatened to upend all that. But Trump was the party’s nominee, and Baker, late in life, remained a party man.

We sat down with Baker in his favorite suite at the Willard Hotel, the ornate Victorian landmark barely a block away from the White House. Baker was eighty-six years old at the time, although you would not have known it. He wore his customary dark suit with money-green tie, a habit he picked up when he became secretary of the treasury in Ronald Reagan’s second term and had continued ever since. A courtly lawyer with a Texas twang, a perpetual twinkle in his eye, and an ear for gossip, Baker dominated both American politics and policymaking through much of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s with a mastery rarely seen before or since. But for the last several years, over the course of dozens of hours of interviews, 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,” he told us once in the summer of 2014, his voice rising almost an octave in exasperation. He pressed that point whenever the current generation called for advice, which they still did fairly often, but he seemed mystified that the message was not getting through. “The argument I’ve been making,” he said, “is that we’re not leading.”

Now, on that Halloween morning in 2016, Trump seemed like a catastrophic herald of the system’s breakdown. “The guy is nuts,” Baker sighed as we talked in the sunny oval sitting room of his suite. “He’s crazy. I will not endorse him. I’ve said that publicly. I’ve told him that.” Trump was promising a destructive end to the Washington-led world order that Baker and others had spent a generation designing. He disparaged long-standing alliances, vowed to rip up free trade pacts, decried American leadership outside its borders, casually embraced a new nuclear arms race, and sought to reverse the globalization that had defined international politics and economics since the end of World War II. He opposed just about everything that Baker and the modern Republican Party supported and Baker ticked them off for us again that morning: “He’s against free trade. He’s talking about NATO being a failed alliance. He’s dumping all over NAFTA,” the trade pact with Mexico and Canada that Baker had helped set in motion. Baker still backed it, as did the vast bulk of his party. “That was a hell of a deal,” he said, shaking his head. Yet in Trump’s view, the leaders of the past—Baker and his contemporaries—had bungled their chance and squandered American greatness. Trump’s campaign, as quixotic as it originally seemed, had tapped into a powerful strain of resentment with his pledge to blow up Washington and remake it in his own image. He promised to drain the very swamp on which the Willard stood.

Voting against Trump should have been an easy call for Baker. Trump, after all, was “a guy who’s his own worst enemy,” as Baker reminded us. “He can’t keep his mouth shut.” But Baker also was not quite ready to walk away from the party to which he had devoted so many years. He knew what it felt like when political power shifted and he knew that it was much better to be on the winning side. He had fought against the Reagan Revolution inside the Republican Party on behalf of Gerald Ford and George Bush, then became the revolution’s most capable executor as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. As Bush’s secretary of state, he had watched the unraveling of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, another revolution that Baker did not start but figured out how to channel. The lesson he had taken from these events was simple and it was clear: When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.

When it came to Trump and the nationalist-populist backlash that he represented, however, Baker just could not decide. It was only days before the election, and he went back and forth. At the end of our long conversation, after touching on Middle East peacemaking and the inner machinations of the Bush White House and the bipartisan prayer group he used to attend on Capitol Hill, we circled back to the subject at hand.

Could Jim Baker, the very definition of the establishment, really vote for Donald Trump?

Baker looked stricken. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t voted for him yet.”

Delegate hunter, campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, and secretary of state, James Addison Baker III played a leading role in some of the most critical junctures in modern American history. For a quarter century, every Republican president relied on Baker to manage his campaign, his White House, his world. Baker brought them to power or helped them stay there, then steered them through the momentous events that followed. He was Washington’s indispensable man.

Any chronicle of the modern presidency would find Baker at the heart of virtually every chapter, for his was an unmatched case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late-twentieth-century America and into the first decade of the twenty-first. He was the campaign operative who secured the Republican nomination for Gerald Ford against a relentless challenge from the right by Ronald Reagan in 1976, then four years later managed George Bush’s first presidential campaign, which proved successful enough to earn Bush the vice presidency and Baker a spot by the new president’s side. He set up and ran Reagan’s White House as chief of staff for four years, securing many of the achievements that shaped the legacy of the fortieth president. In Reagan’s second term, with nothing more than an undergraduate course in economics, he took over as secretary of the treasury and rewrote the American tax code from top to bottom in collaboration with leading Democrats. He returned to the campaign trail in 1988 to win the presidency for Bush in a harshly negative election that foreshadowed some of the political nastiness of races to come, then switched back into statesman mode as America’s top diplomat, from which perch he effectively managed the most tumultuous period in international politics since World War II.

Over the following few years, as Washington presided over the of the Cold War, Baker shaped a new American approach to a reordered world. Through it all, he was the archetype of a style of American politics and governance that today seems lost, an approach focused on compromise over confrontation, deal-making over disagreement and pragmatism over purity. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War and brokered the reunification of Germany in the heart of Europe. He was the “gold standard” among White House chiefs of staff, as virtually everyone put it, and went on to become the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. In short, he was the un-Trump.

We had set out to write a biography about Baker during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the nation was already starkly divided but Trump’s ascendance was still unthinkable. As we interviewed Baker and his contemporaries for the book, the increasingly real prospect of a President Trump suggested an even more urgent reason for the project than we had originally envisioned: the unraveling of the political system that Baker had learned to operate so skillfully, at just the moment when the post–Cold War international order that he and his generation had established was fraying. At least to start, a book about Baker had seemed like escapism, offering an opportunity to time-travel back to Washington at the tail end of the Cold War, as the fractious 1980s evolved into a 1990s when America, suddenly, reigned supreme. That was Baker’s moment. Freedom, and McDonald’s, had come to Red Square; apartheid had ended peacefully in South Africa. History was not over, but it was definitely happening, right there for everyone to see on twenty-four-hour cable news. Although that did not erase the partisan conflicts and bitter discord roiling American politics through the Reagan years, and the city had its usual supply of hypocrites and charlatans, demagogues and dilettantes, it was a far more optimistic Washington than today’s angry, anxious capital, a Washington where getting things done was not just possible but required.

Baker seemed to us the representative of that time; certainly, he was the uniquely successful exemplar of it, a hard-edged partisan who nonetheless believed in bipartisanship and thought elections required a record to run on, not merely a provocative position to tweet. But 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 was one of them. He was calculating and canny and opportunistic in all the ways that reflected the city whose top jobs he had conquered, one by one. He did not question its injustices, or the insularity of a world populated by white men who looked and sounded like him. Then again, neither did he come to Washington to fight the culture war that animated so many of his fellow Republicans. As our conversation on the eve of Trump’s election suggested, 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. Baker knew that. You have to be on the inside. You have to be allowed to play the game before you can win it.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07WR4MPSH
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (September 29, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 29, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 40033 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1028 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #378,058 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #125 in Practical Politics
- #516 in Biographies of Political Leaders
- #2,394 in Political Leader Biographies

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Peter Baker
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Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times responsible for covering President Trump and his administration and a political analyst for MSNBC. He has previously covered three other presidents for the Times and Washington Post -- Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He is the author of six books, including "The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton" and "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House." With his wife, Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker, he is the author of "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III," released in September by Doubleday.
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Susan Glasser
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Peter

A biography and a history exceptionally well done

Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2021

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My one criticism of the book as a physical item: soon before finishing it the spine broke. For such an elegant volume, I am surprised that the pages are glued, rather than stitched. Suddenly an entire section of the book came loose.

That said, I found this to be a remarkable journey through the life and work of a remarkable man. I found the section on Baker's involvement with the end of the Soviet Union to be particularly compelling. And we do see the Texas personality at work, from start to finish.

The book hearkens back to a time of statecraft and seriousness of purpose, something lacking in the US government for a long time, in my opinion. Yes, this volume makes clear the ongoing phenomemon of political expediency in making foreign policy and domestic decisions, but there also appears numerous examples of the State Department and the current admnistration in general truly wrestling with matters of significance, and doing so significantly, and not simply with eyes on the 24-hour news cycle. Granted, there was no full-blown news cycle of this nature earlier on in Baker's career.

Quite a few years ago I had the privilege of visiting the Baker Institute at Rice University. Now I would like to go back.

To those who have read it, have you been able to decode/decipher the strange typo/editorial error on page 560: "I don't think anybody else could have done this," said F dson"?

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Michael D Moore

Excellent!

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2023

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Remarkable, well researched book on one of the most remarkable men in our history. This is the best biography I have read, and I've read plenty of books of this type.

Jim Baker made innumerable contributions to the United States in his various role in 5 different administrations. This is a must read book for anyone interested in the progress of our country since the Nixon administration.

Peter Baker and Susan Bladder are outstanding authors, I have read many of their books so far, and enjoy Susan's contributions to the New Yorker magazine. Excellent book, well researched and a must read for anyone interested in current events!

4 people found this helpful

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Pseudo D

get it done

Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2020

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Peter Baker has written books on Presidents Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama and contributed to one
on the history of impeachment. He covers Trump for the NY Times along with Maggie Haberman
and others, and is generally fair. His wife Susan Glasser founded Politico, probably the most important
of the new online journals, and now is with the New Yorker. The New Yorker is very liberal and generally
not a fan of President Trump under David Remnick. They do TV separately with MSNBC and CNN.

Jim Baker, no relation, was the first secretary of state that I knew. So it was surprising for me to
learn that foreign policy was not his specialty (it was that of Bush 43, who had served in the
military, UN, CIA etc.). He was not a specialist in languages, but was street smart and could read
body language and emotions. This was in contrast with Kissinger and Nixon, who were very book
smart. The authors interviewed Baker a lot, but this is not an authorized biography because he
didn't review the finished product. They also relied a lot upon Margaret Tutwiler.

Baker's friendship with Bush Sr. went way back, decades before they became prominent politicians.
Beginning in the 70s, we are introduced to the GOP establishment with figures like Gerald Ford,
Bob Dole, Al Haig, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Baker campaigned against Reagan twice, for
Ford in 1976 and Bush in '80. But when Reagan won, he became the chief of staff and part of the
"troika" with Deaver and Regan, eventually becoming the most influential of the competing factions.

As a figure of the establishment, he emphasized getting things done, and contributed to Reagan's
working with Speaker Tip O'Neill, who was as liberal as the Gipper was conservative. He knew the
political history of LBJ when he was a Senate leader working with Eisenhower, and then Sen. Everett
Dirksen doing the same with LBJ. Baker was not trusted by the more ideological Reaganites, but
was affirmed by Reagan as a true Reaganite at the end of his service. Later in the Reagan administrations,
Baker served as Treasury secretary, and so the book's emphasis moves to economic issues, taxes and
the stock market, along with Iran-Contra.

Baker was a strong partisan, but in multiple directions-against the Democrats but also the more
conservative Republicans, such as Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, who had an infectious
intellectual passion unbounded by his field of responsibility. On the international level, Maggie
Thatcher generally pulled Reagan and Bush Sr. toward more hardline views. This is understandable-
with Germany's reunification, it was only a few decades after the attacks on Britain. As Bush's
secretary of state, the book turns to the all-important end of the Cold War on all its levels
with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The election of 88 brings the "Read My Lips" speech written by Peggy
Noonan (along with 1000 points of light and kinder gentler), Lee Atwater and Willie Horton.
As a kid I often heard about "Reagan and Bush" but they were two very different men with
different strengths and weaknesses.

It's a fascinating book as the different eras bring up the names of the various politicians and journalists
who were part of the scenery. In the 2000 election with the Florida recount, Baker negotiated with
Warren Christopher, his successor as Secretary of State for Bill Clinton. Another thing I learned was
that Dick Cheney, while one of the hawks for the first Gulf War, was not as rigid as he was in his later
days. This would be an interesting thing to explore. The authors also have great respect for Condi
Rice throughout her career.

In the Obama era, Baker lamented the loss of the solid center. With Trump's defeat of Jeb, most of
the Bush clan were very anti-Trump. Baker remained a loyal Republican through all the different
iterations, and was not a never-Trumper in 2016. But as 2020 came along he finally followed his
grandfather's advice and stayed away from politics! The saga continues with Trump's covid hospitalization
and this week's contentious debate.

57 people found this helpful

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Brian S.

Excellent bio

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2022

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Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have written a top-notch biography of James Baker. The book is exceptionally well researched, very well written, and very readable.

One potential issue is the respect the authors seem to have for James Baker. However, I don't think the bias (if any) is particularly significant. It's clear that James Baker was talented and influential, but he wasn't perfect.

The notes are primarily for sourcing purposes, but thorough details are provided when appropriate. There's also a fine bibliography.

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Michael J. Bernaski

A realistic portrayal that inspires, entertains and teaches

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2020

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I listened to the audio book while reading the hardcover -- loved the focus this allowed. Voice matched the tone of the narrative. Wonderfully written. About a complex character who lived in interesting times and seemed to come to appreciate his own contradictions. In today's world where we seem to have to choose between ideology and effectiveness -- it is encouraging to hear of an individual who found a way to blend the two pragmatically. I hope there is a JAB III in the wings -- and that she or he brings civility and compromise back to leadership. Like all great biographies, this book taught me a few things about myself. Thank you Peter and Susan.

2 people found this helpful

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G. Ortiz

Very well told history of a very important person.

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2021

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I can't think of a book that is as well written as this book. I found it very easy to get into almost from the first page. I usually take months to read the average book I purchase but I find it hard to put down and just want to keep reading. Maybe we need more husband and wife authors. Many thanks for the great book. Maybe I am somewhat biased as I am in my 70's and lived through much of the era the book covers and I always had the highest regard for James Baker. This book explains why many people fell the same way.

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Robert T. Hoeckel

The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Reviewed in Germany on April 20, 2024

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very informative

Amazon Customer

Excellent book and so well written.

Reviewed in Canada on June 13, 2021

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A real inside look at Washington's ultimate "insider"! Takes one right into the workings, both good and bad, of the Oval Office. Jim Bakes is a very exceptional guy!!

Marcelo Jardim

James A Baker III ( Jim ) is a Statesmam & Diplomatist of the highest caliber & competence .

Reviewed in Brazil on November 22, 2020

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Impecável . Um Estadista da mais alta qualidade .Homem da confiança dos Presidentes Reagan & George H W Bush .

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Sean L Downey

SL Downey

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2021

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