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Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!

Author: James Baker
Publisher: Northwestern University Press • 2008 • 496 pages
Work Hard, Study...and Keep Out of Politics!

One of George W. Bush’s most remarkable accomplishments has been to burnish the reputations of his Republican predecessors. The longer Bush is in office, the better they look by comparison. Even realist foreign policy doctrine, revered by Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush and scorned for decades by the right as a synonym for pusillanimity, has begun to make something of a comeback within the ranks of the party, as William F. Buckley Jr. and George F. Will, among others, look askance at the neoconservative crusade that has issued in the Iraq imbroglio.

It would hardly be surprising if James A. Baker III felt a certain measure of vindication about this unexpected turn of events. Though the ruthlessly efficient Baker preserved — or, if you prefer, secured — Bush’s victory in Florida during the contentious 2000 presidential election, he has always been condemned by the right as a moderate. Like many officials from the first Bush administration, including the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Baker was exiled to the sidelines as the younger Bush embraced the right. Unlike Scowcroft, however, Baker has maintained a studied silence about the current Bush administration.

That doesn’t change in “Work Hard, Study … and Keep Out of Politics!” (written with Steve Fiffer). Anyone looking for yet another Republican apostate to denounce Bush should look elsewhere. But there’s no need to worry: the stiletto once wielded so deftly by Baker in Washington has not gone dull. Baker, who has already discussed the end of the cold war in an earlier book called “The Politics of Diplomacy,” here offers a more personal account that implicitly contrasts the past with the present, and is the more telling for its restraint. He focuses on his years as a political operative and official in the Ford, Reagan and Bush 1 administrations to draw lessons about the importance of planning ahead in running political campaigns and governments. Though his memoir may at some points envelop the Reagan years in a nostalgic haze, it provides an extraordinarily illuminating account of the decades-old Republican feud between old-money power brokers and true believers. Ultimately, it shows how he successfully kept the right in check — and what happens when someone doesn’t.

Baker’s pragmatic approach can probably be traced to the fact that money, not the political barricades, was what always interested his forebears: the title of his memoir was the motto of James Addison Baker, his grandfather and the family patriarch, who ran a law firm in Houston and helped transform that city into the capital of the American oil industry. The young Baker dutifully followed in the legal footsteps of his elders, but after the sudden death of his first wife, he was eager for a distraction. In 1970, he dropped out of the Democratic Party and signed on with the Republicans in order to join his longtime tennis doubles partner’s campaign for the United States Senate. It failed, but “from that time forward,” Baker writes, “I was hooked on politics and forever linked with the candidate, George Herbert Walker Bush.” Baker, who chafed at continuing to work as a corporate lawyer, didn’t get his big break until 1975, when Bush helped him land his first Washington job as under secretary of commerce in the Ford administration. Soon enough, the political smarts Baker displayed in dealing with unions and trade issues caught the eye of the White House, which tapped him to lead the hunt for swing delegates during the 1976 Republican primary fight against Ronald Reagan, who depicted Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger as soft on the Red menace.

Baker sent out biographical questionnaires to the delegates and relentlessly stalked the uncommitteds, convinced “the contest would go to the outfit that did the best job of corralling its own herd while picking off strays from the other side.” He picked them off. A grateful Ford promoted Baker to run his campaign against Jimmy Carter, but no amount of political savvy could rescue Ford from his serial self-inflicted wounds.

When Bush ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Baker was in his element. As his campaign manager, Baker drew on a network of contacts to raise money and, in an imitation of the 1976 Carter strategy, plotted to reduce the cluttered field to Reagan versus Bush as rapidly as possible. He succeeded. By sending out one million pieces of mail in the final week before the Iowa caucuses and making thousands of telephone calls, Baker outfoxed the Reagan forces, allowing Bush to score an upset victory. “Hell,” said Charles Black, a Reagan political operative, “I didn’t know it was gonna be a primary.” But the tidal wave of the resurgent right soon washed over the Bush forces, and Bush’s only political life preserver was to accept Reagan’s offer of the vice-presidential nomination. It was a telling moment. Where Dwight Eisenhower had deigned to offer the vice presidency to Richard Nixon, now the right was the master and the Eastern Establishment the supplicant.

Still, Baker, against all the odds, managed to insinuate himself into the Reagan camp by offering unsolicited advice about the coming election to Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey, and to the Gipper himself. Even though Baker had led primary battles against him, Reagan recognized his talents and named him White House chief of staff. The right was apoplectic: it accused Baker of being a Trojan horse for the Eastern Establishment and of selling out its social agenda on abortion, school prayer and other hot-button issues. Baker knows better: he quotes Reagan as telling him, “Jim, I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than to go over the cliff with my flag flying.” Together with Michael Deaver and Ed Meese, Baker formed a “troika” that exercised firm control. According to him, this system gave Reagan “a functional administrative system to keep things moving, plus a useful way to hear competing views on important issues.”

It was no accident that after Baker left to head the Treasury Department, Reagan’s second term almost ended in disaster. Had Baker remained in the White House and become national security adviser, he would have unquestionably quashed the cabal that ended up hijacking Central American and Middle Eastern policy. Reagan wrote in his memoir, “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.” Instead, the lunatics took charge of the asylum, dragging a befuddled Reagan into the arms-for-hostages deal, which turned into the Iran-contra affair — a reckless endeavor prefiguring, in many ways, the ideological zealotry that, on a far grander scale, has mired the United States in Iraq.

As George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, Baker remained the object of the right’s ire. Bush’s refusal to continue on to Baghdad, reluctance to intervene in Bosnia and criticism of Israel were laid at the doorstep of realists like Baker, whose record was, in truth, not unblemished. Baker’s realpolitik could curdle into cynical indifference when it came to the Balkans. But there is a difference between making mistakes and wholesale ineptitude. Only recently has George W. Bush reached out to Baker, acceding to his appointment as co-chairman of a high-level nonpartisan commission on Iraq. By now, however, it’s unlikely that even this faithful retainer can once more pull Bush’s chestnuts out of the fire.

Book Review from The New York Times, by Jacob Heilbrunn

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