The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, Baker and Glasser - B+

"Delegate hunter, campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, secretary of state, James Addison Baker III played a leading role in some of the most critical junctures in modern American history." He was principled, but practical, with a fervor for "getting things done. He was born into a world of wealth in Houston in 1930." Privilege was his birthright, but it came with formidable demands of duty and discipline." The law firm  Baker Botts was founded by his great-grandfather after the Civil War. His grandfather was one of the builders of the city, a virtual pillar of the establishment. His father was a WWI hero as well as a tough taskmaster. Growing up, Jimmy had little interest in school, but rather preferred hunting and tennis. He was an indifferent student at Princeton and upon graduation in 1952, joined the Marines. A year later, he married Mary Stuart of Dayton, Ohio and Finch College. He graduated at the top of his class at UT Law School in 1957. Back in Houston, while starting a family and pursuing his law career, he became a doubles partner at the Houston Country Club with a young oil man, George Bush. His world fell apart in 1970 when his 38 year-old wife, mother of their four sons, died of cancer. Tiring of the law, he took up George Bush's suggestion that he get involved in politics. He remarried in 1973 to a good friend, recently divorced and with three children of her own. With the help of then- Ambassador to China Bush, he was appointed Undersecretary of the Commerce Dept. in 1975. A year later, he moved over to Ford's re-election campaign. He was instrumental in garnering the nomination for the president and then was made campaign manager. After Carter's election, Jim Baker returned to Texas to practice law. He took his one shot at electoral politics and ran for and lost the 1978 race for Texas Attorney General. He managed his best friends presidential run in 1980 and pulled off an upset of the frontrunner, Ronald Reagan, in Iowa. Throughout the primaries though, Reagan slowly pulled away. He withdrew Bush from the race in late May and maneuvered him to the VP nomination. He managed Reagan in the two debates, is considered to have out-negotiated Carter's men and was rewarded with the WH Chief of Staff job. As he was non dogmatic and much more establishment than Reagan's people, the conservatives were none too happy. Baker set out to, and did, master the job. When Reagan was shot in March, Baker handled the crisis skillfully and calmly. He courted journalists and was very solicitous to members of Congress. He shepherded the 1981 Tax Act through to passage. As the recession continued to clobber America, Reagan's poll ratings fell and the Republicans lost seats in the House in 1982. The following spring, the commission Baker designed to stave off problems with Social Security delivered a compromise satisfactory to both sides. At this point, all he wanted was out of the hardest job in Washington and harder in this administration because of the President's lack of focus and the backbiting by the hard right. The roaring economy of 1984 led to a Reagan landslide in November. When Don Regan proposed they swap the Treasury and WH Staff jobs to Baker, he jumped at it. At Treasury, he had a presidential mandate to redo the Internal Revenue Code. He led the charge and reconciled the competing political interests in support of the change. The 1986 Tax Reform Act was a monumental success that had true bipartisan support and could not have been accomplished without the skills and commitment of Rep. Rostenkowski and Sen. Packwood. Simultaneously, Baker arranged the Plaza Accord to bring down the price of the dollar. He had always worried that the crazies would start trouble in Central America, and right after the mid-terms Iran-Contra surfaced. Baker was behind the appointment of Alan Greenspan to the Fed. He worked out the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with the Canadian PM Brian Mulroney. Reagan turned a corner, and spent his final years negotiating with Secretary Gorbachev, and leaving office with some of his highest ratings. Jim Baker now turned his attention to his best friend, George Bush. The nomination was clinched in March. As he was reluctant to leave the Treasury, Baker put off joining the campaign until the summer, at which point Bush was trailing Dukakis by 17 points. Helped by the negative, over-the-top attacks orchestrated by Atwater and Ailes, Bush won handily. He asked Baker to be Secretary of State. The greatest issue of Bush's presidency was responding to Gorbachev's unwinding of the communist empire. In time, Bush ignored the right-wingers and fully embraced working with the Party Secretary and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. Baker met Shevardnadze in Paris, and then hosted him for a few days in Colorado. Shevardnadze painted a bleak picture of the crumbling USSR, and essentially asked for help holding off the Soviet hardliners. When the Wall fell in November, Gorbachev stood by and did not intervene. The US was shocked and had no plan, but both Bush and Baker were careful not to dance on the East's grave. The reunification of Germany was an incredibly complex issue. The West Germans simply wanted to move on and get it accomplished. Thatcher was opposed. The US proposed that the two Germanys work it out and let the four occupying powers chime in as needed. The USSR agreed and received Baker's assurance that NATO jurisdiction would not spread an inch east. In the spring, Lithuania declared its independence, and the E. Germans voted for a Parliament headed by Helmut Kohl's party. Changes were swift and unpredictable, and in both the US and the USSR, the cold warriors fought every concession. At a summit in Washington in May, Gorbachev conceded that a united Germany could choose to join any alliance it preferred. In September 1990, Germany was reunified and forty-five years after the end of WWII, the Four Powers relinquished their occupation rights. Immediately, another great crisis came to the forefront. The invasion of Kuwait would occupy the world's attention for the next year and a half. Baker traveled the world putting together the coalition that supported the US's leadership. He flew 100,000 miles in ten weeks and held 200 meetings. The Soviets reluctantly assented, and coalition forces booted the Iraqis from Kuwait. It was a clear-cut victory. He had promised Gorbachev he would try to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian puzzle and he did. At one point, he spent 23 consecutive days on the road and arranged for a conference of all interested parties in Madrid. That summer, 1991, saw the attempted coup against Gorbachev. The coup failed, but led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It formally ended on Christmas day, 1991. Suffering from Graves disease and a thyroid condition, Bush's last year was marked by a severe lack of energy on his part, a deteriorating economy, and disarray in the White House and in the reelection campaign. In mid-August 1992, Baker was back as Chief of Staff and helping the campaign. A disengaged Jim Baker couldn't help, and Bush was handily beaten by Bill Clinton. Unsure of what would come next, the 62-year-old Baker signed on with Baker Botts, where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had worked, and the Carlyle Group. He also began to explore a 1996 run for the presidency, but it did not come to pass. His next foray onto the national stage came in 2000 when he masterminded the younger Bush's post-election efforts in Florida. Once again, the fixer came through for the Bush family. Throughout the Bush 43 presidency, Baker took on various high-level assignments, even though he had been opposed to the 2nd Iraq war.  When his dear friend George Bush died in 2018, he was at his bedside. Today, he is 90 and his grave in a Houston cemetery awaits him. This book has been criticized as being hagiographic and it is a very valid criticism. It is extremely pro-Baker, and dismissive of both Reagan and Bush. But it is a truly great biography that sheds light on some fascinating times. I suspect history will be kind to Reagan because of his unwavering optimism and his fortitude in pursuing the Cold War. And whether Baker/ Bush will be credited for handling the collapse of the USSR, I do not know. But for those of us who remember the Wall going up, all that it symbolized for 38 years and the fact that it came down, the fact that eastern Europe was freed and that the USSR disintegrated without a shot being fired is still the most significant geopolitical event since 1945 and is an event that remains hard to fathom. The authors heap praise on Baker for "getting things done", and that he did. A text of 585 pages has worn me down, but I'm glad I persevered.