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

A little more than a week before the 2016 presidential election, Jim Baker was obsessing over what to do about Donald Trump. Bakers wife, daughters, and closest advisers were urging Baker to vote against him. Bakers 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 Bushs 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 theyand Bakerstood 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 womens private parts and seemed like a sure loser, threatened to upend all that. But Trump was the partys 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 Reagans 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 Ive been making, he said, is that were not leading.

Now, on that Halloween morning in 2016, Trump seemed like a catastrophic herald of the systems breakdown. The guy is nuts, Baker sighed as we talked in the sunny oval sitting room of his suite. Hes crazy. I will not endorse him. Ive said that publicly. Ive 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: Hes against free trade. Hes talking about NATO being a failed alliance. Hes 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 Trumps view, the leaders of the pastBaker and his contemporarieshad bungled their chance and squandered American greatness. Trumps 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 whos his own worst enemy, as Baker reminded us. He cant 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 revolutions most capable executor as Reagans White House chief of staff. As Bushs 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.