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The Man Who Ran Washington
The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
3 of 4 copies available
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.
Jacket photograph: James Addison Baker, III by Michael Arthur Worden Evans, c. 1984. Gelatin silver print. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Portrait Project, Inc.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 29, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593169469
- File size: 766010 KB
- Duration: 26:35:51
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This political biography is a surprise. Not only is James A. Baker III's life story fascinating, but this book is also written in an engaging and accessible style. It is eminently suited to audio. With Michael Quinlan narrating, the audiobook offers driveway moments political junkies will love and others will enjoy and learn from. Baker is described as an accidental political savant who went from high-powered Texas attorney to the height of political power as White House chief of staff, secretary of state, and manager of five Republican presidential campaigns. Quinlan's tone, like the book's, ranges from easygoing to deadly serious. He injects a bit of a Texas accent into Baker's quotes with mixed success, but that's a small criticism. R.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from February 24, 2020
A bygone era of bipartisan pragmatism and statesmanship is elegized in this sprawling biography of the leading advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Husband and wife journalists Baker (no relation) and Glasser (coauthors, Kremlin Rising) style James Baker as possibly “the ultimate Washington player,” noting that he shepherded landmark tax cuts through Democratic congresses as Reagan’s chief of staff and treasury secretary; negotiated the dismantling of the Soviet empire and German reunification as Bush’s secretary of state; and organized bruising political warfare while managing presidential campaigns and masterminding George W. Bush’s strategy in the 2000 election dispute. There’s plenty of West Wing backstabbing, situational ethics, and profane tirades in the authors’ vibrant narrative as Baker (aka the “Velvet Hammer”) outmaneuvers rival White House power brokers and authorizes attack ads against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. But in their telling, Baker also champions a relatively enlightened establishment politics, sidelining right-wing Republican zealots, forging relationships with liberal congressmen and communist reformers, and crafting workable domestic and international initiatives. The contrast with the current White House is pointed, resulting in an engrossing study of a kind of government leadership that readers may conclude is both obsolete and sorely needed.
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