Let's Find Common Ground - James Baker: The Art of Compromise. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

James Baker was at the center of American political power for three decades. His resume is exceedingly impressive— Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and White House Chief of Staff, twice. He ran five presidential campaigns. Baker's accomplishments were far-reaching— he helped end the cold war, reunify Germany, assembled the international coalition to fight the Gulf War, and negotiated the rewriting of the U.S. tax code. Quite simply, he was "The Man Who Ran Washington," which is the name of a highly-praised new book, co-authored by our guests, New York Times chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker (no relation), and his wife, Susan Glasser, staff correspondent for The New Yorker. In this episode, we discuss how Washington has become a more angry, and anxious place. We learn about Baker's track record of successful governance, his steely pragmatism, why the art of compromise is crucial to almost any negotiation between powerful rivals, his deep friendship with the first President Bush, and Baker's opinion of Donald Trump.

This episode is about the power of compromise, and why that can be crucial to making progress. It's a style of leadership and decision-making that runs counter to much of what we see in Washington today. We discuss the remarkable career of James Baker, a man who was never elected to any major post, but was right at the center of American power for three decades. post but was right at the center of American power for three decades.

This is Let's Find Common Ground from Common Ground Committee. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Miltite. James Baker had a remarkable career, Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury and and White House Chief of Staff, twice. He helped end the Cold War and reunify Germany. Baker assembled the International Coalition to Fight the Gulf War, negotiated a rewrite of the U.S. tax code, and ran five presidential campaigns. In the words of a new book, he was the man who ran Washington. That book's co-authors, Peter Baker, no relation to the man he writes about, and his wife, Susan Glasser. Susan is staff correspondent for the New Yorker,

and she writes a weekly letter from Washington for the magazine. Peter is chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. Our first question goes to Susan. Why is it worth learning about Jim Baker now as a new administration is about to begin? Because his story is the story of Washington at a very different moment, at a moment not only when Washington ran the world, but also when it was forced to function in a different way. And the incentives in American politics have just changed so radically. For Peter and I, it was really an exercise in almost time travel.

We'll be able to emerge ourselves into sort of conjure up a moment, certainly not a coup by all moment, a very divisive moment in American domestic politics. But at the same time, one in which the two parties were forced and really even compelled to work together to get things done. And the incentives in American politics, the very definition of success, was actually getting stuff done. I mean, yeah, and it helped that he was a real pragmatist, right?

I mean, he was a master of compromise he wanted to get stuff done. Yeah, he didn't stand on ceremony. He didn't stand on ideology. He just wanted to check things off the list. He was a doer and a coppisher in that sense. While he was a conservative small seat from Texas, he didn't stand for flag flying off the cliff waiting to get everything when in fact you could get 80% of what you needed from a compromise.

He was a deal maker. He could put himself in the shoe and the other side of the table and say, okay, what does this person need to get to the point where he or she can say yes to what I mean? Well, it was particularly interesting, I think, for us to be working on this book. We were really immersing ourselves in the story, so when you was an actual deal moment, at the moment when we've been sort of listening for the last few years to all this sort of rhetoric coming out of the White House about, oh well we have this deal maker in the way that it was actually was never able or even interested for the most part in making any genuine deals. And so it really

was a very interesting juxtaposition on particularly the question of what constitutes a bipartisan deal, how do you work with adversaries? Jim Baker was able to work not only with Democrats in Congress throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, which was a political fact of life in Washington, but, you know, with Soviets, our main adversary, he managed to forge perhaps the closest and most productive relationship that existed in the 70 years of the Soviet Union between the United States and the Soviet Union. I'm really struck by Baker's pragmatism, his preparedness for each task and just how effective he was.

It's kind of remarkable, isn't it, compared with most other players in Washington, not only in his time, but also since then? Well, I think that's right. He was a very diligent student of the other side. And he understood that there were limits, but he understood where those lines were and how far he could push somebody up to that line without pushing them over. There's no point in blowing up a deal. It would be the purpose of that, from this point of view. Imagine today, a Jim Baker, to doing this COVID relief bill. We never would have seen eight months of dicking around with people suffered.

I mean, in the end, both sides dropped the major thing that they were trying to get in there and came to the middle, which is the obvious solution you would have gotten to back in April or May. Susan, Baker was a realist about others and himself. You've called him ruthlessly unsentimental. What's an example of that? Well, he was very cold-eyed when it came to politics, in part because he wasn't animated by a broader, perhaps,

ideological project. In part, just because I think the nature of how he works in his mind, he's a believer that, you know, lying to yourself and believing it is a cardinal sin. And, you know, Peter and I had the opportunity to review, not only to have many hours of interviews with Secretary Baker, but to have access to his papers both at Princeton and Rice. And, you know, you look at some of these memos in there from his closest advisors. And, you know, they were pretty brutal when he was considering running for president in

1996, which he ultimately did not do. I mean, you know, Margaret Tuttweiler, who'd been with with him forever and others wrote this memo that was just eviscerated him and correctly I think illuminated all of his weaknesses is that almost the polar opposite of the kind of slave-ish displays of loyalty we've seen as the requirement for high office in the last few years this is a guy you understood that you can't succeed in politics or in anything frankly unless you absolutely have a pretty ruthless understanding of where things are really at. And I think that was one of the

keys to his success. He was a sort of an A-plus person who was not only willing to, but in fact demanded to hire A-plus people and surround himself with similarly top-flight people and an awful lot of insecure people and awful lot of insecure people and awful lot of lesser people just aren't willing to do that. They aren't willing to tell it like it is and to have others tell it like it is to them. That sure sounds like a far cry from what's been happening recently where President Trump and leaders of both parties in Washington are so rigid in their approach and don't invite disagreement or compromise. Well, that's exactly right.

I mean, it's all very personal. You know, coming back to the COVID relief example, this is a president who didn't even bother to participate in the negotiations. And only after both houses of Congress and both parties actually voted for the bill, a bill negotiated by his own administration, did he suddenly interject himself and then made a test of loyalty, suddenly putting his own party at risk by saying either you go along with the bill you just approved or you go along with me and undo all the work you've just done. Again Baker would never have done that.

He also just, he had respect for the process, He had respect for the people participating in the process. He respected Dan Rostynkowski, who was the Democratic power broker from Illinois that he negotiated the tax overhaul with. He respected Jimmy Carter, even though, of course, he had run campaigns against Jimmy Carter and worked with Carter to help solve the contra-war, you know, that had been dominating Washington in 1980s. And so I think that sort of is very different than today where everything is a zero-sum game. Baker doesn't believe in zero-sum games. And in today's Washington, if you give anything up as part of negotiation, it means you're a sell-out, it means that you have, you know, you're insufficiently loyal to the person, in this case, the president

or to the cause. In a way, Baker is sort of the epitome of what Trump ran against, isn't he? Well, I think Trump would think that in the sense that he represents not only an establishment, a Republican Party establishment that he was very much defining himself in opposition to, but also in the sense that he represents what we used to think of as the core views of the modern Republican Party, which is to say a kind of internationalism, a belief in alliances, a belief in America's global presence and leadership in the world, and those things, free trade, were core to what Baker believed that he had accomplished in his time in public life.

Not to mention, his brand, when it came to the positions he held in Washington, especially White House Chief of Staff, was not just competent, but a form of sort of uber competence in the management and administration and functioning of government. So I can't think of a person who is more the polar opposite than what we've seen the last few years. He voted for Trump. What does Baker think of Donald Trump? Well, when Baker everything is a compromise and this way his compromise was he decided he was not going to endorse Trump. He was not going to do anything publicly for him. He didn't like the guy.

In our long conversations with him, he used words like nuts, crazy, clearly thinks this is kind of an embarrassing, carnival-barcour approach to leadership. And yet, as you point out, he voted for him. And that's a compromise was that in the privacy of the voting booth, he would still cast his balance for the Republican nominee Despite his own misgivings There are a lot of public office holders out there who don't like Donald Trump who think he's actually dishonest or

disingenuous or even dangerous in some fashion and yet have voted for him or at least he stood quietly As he did things that they didn't necessarily agree to and I think that speaks to the tribal nature of our moment here in politics. People pick sides. Explain that a little bit more, because I think many people would be surprised that such a strong critic of President Trump would still vote for him. Susan? Well, look, you know, first of all,

the book is not a celebration of Jim Daker or the party that he helped to lead, but a case study in power and how it's wielded. For him, especially someone you operated at the heights of Washington for so long, he suffers a form of congenital insiderism. He is a believer that access is everything in politics and that there's essentially no point in standing on the outside, you know, sort of pissing in, which is what he wouldn't say. And so I do think that that's part of his mindset, right, is the idea that criticism

is more valuable when levied in the context of being on the team. You both had many conversations with Jim Baker in recent years. What reason did he give for deciding to vote for Trump even as Baker criticized and even denigrated him? This is the struggle and the tension. What I would say is that we've had many readers and many interviewers ask us about this. In a way, it's been interesting and helpful to me to see our audience grapple with this question

because frankly, this is what Peter and I were grappling with for five years, right? You know, you're asking Jim Baker over and over and over again in effect the same question. And finally, I think we came to realize as biographers, if your subject gives you the same answer over and over and over again, you have to listen. He's telling you something.

What's he telling you? He's telling you he chose a partisan identity in the end of the age of 90. He's not accountable for Donald Trump. Now he's done his best to stay away from this. He's not helping them. They've asked him many times, by the way, to do things. He's not agreed to do it. But as an individual, it does say something

about the value that he placed on his individual vote. Perhaps it tells you a little bit about the media and the world in which he's living in Texas in retirement, that the surround sound was such that he would say things like, well, I don't like what the Democrats might possibly do, or they've gone too far left, or they're too extreme. And by the way, he said that to me, even on the eve of the 2016 election.

Well, I'm worried about what they might do in a Clinton presidency. And at least I know what this guy is about. It doesn't necessarily make sense, but I think it's interesting to understand, because frankly, 70 million people voted for Donald Trump, many of whom very likely shared Jim Baker's views about the erratic, unstable, and problematic nature of Trump, well nonetheless casting their votes for him. Peter, we're in the middle of a really difficult transition to a new president. What are some of the skills that Jim Baker brought to Washington that would be useful to the incoming administration?

We talk about Blue and Washington these days has instincts like Baker. I think actually Joe Biden is probably one of them. He's closer to that generation than a lot of today's Congress people and other politicians in Washington. I think Biden's inclination is to make deals. I think inclination is like Baker to try to reach across the aisle and try to find some way to bring people together. I don't know whether he's going to have the same success that Baker did because I think the incentive structure in Washington has changed so drastically that it may allude even the most skilled practitioner of common ground, right?

That in fact, the system resisted so strongly these days that it will be hard to overcome. But I think that there are a lot of these Americans actually agree on across party lines, infrastructure, and then we can talk about COVID. And there's a lot of different things where Biden could find some agreement with many Republicans if both parties want to do that.

We'll see. It's going to be interesting test for both parties. What is James Baker's view of how to exercise power? The first thing about Baker and power is he understood that you have to exercise it otherwise what's the point. And I do think in many ways that actually is the biggest contrast with today, where we, in fact, have had permanent campaigning and politicization of everything, almost a sort of constant media echo chamber approach to politics, that is quite different than his view

of what it was that he was doing in public life. You know, that's a kind of foundational difference from where we are right now. Well, how did Baker exercise power? He was a man of carrots and sticks, and absolutely not afraid to exact revenge, to play hardball. He understood the bureaucratic politics of Washington. One of my favorite stories in the book is a very particularly tough arms control negotiation in Moscow where he was brought in to be the closer after much dickering back and forth. And you always have politics on the inside, the hardliners in the Pentagon and in the Republican Party, the skeptics about the Cold War really ending.

That was a major dynamic that's often underappreciated in the end of the Cold War and something that both Bush and Baker really had to deal with because they were seen even at the time as moderates within their party or perhaps being overly willing to accommodate to Gorbachev. And there was this one sticky issue about the backfire bomber and how many of those were going to be agreed to. And Baker goes in, basically, refuses even the previous American bargaining position and essentially sticks it to the Soviets and refuses to give up until they agree to a much tougher deal than the one that had originally been on the table.

And the Americans are sort of mystified a little bit by why Baker has done this, you know, what's he doing? And he comes out and he basically says, I want you to go back and tell the Pentagon, the generals, this is what I did and screw them. And the real enemy in that negotiation was not the Soviet Union. It was the Pentagon. And, you know, so this is a guy who believed in being tough in all ways. And he was also extremely competitive.

He was a believer that winning creates its own logic and its own momentum. It's just that he wasn't a scorched earth kind of winner. You know, he understood that the other person needed to take away something too. Except on the tennis court, right? There's only one winner on a tennis game, right? Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. Coming up, a special ingredient in James Baker's exercise of power, his close and deeply loyal friendship

with the first President Bush. This is Let's Find Common Ground. Our podcast is produced by Common Ground Committee. Find out more about what we do at our website Find out more about what we do at our website, commongroundcommittee.org. And if you want to learn more about what we're discussing, join our Facebook group. It's an insider's look at our thinking and our future projects. Join the conversation.

Be it insider. Our Facebook group is distinct from common ground committees Facebook page. In the group, we discuss ideas and make suggestions. Now back to our interview with journalist Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Peter Baker and the first president Bush were close friends for nearly 60 years. Bush's family was from New England, Baker was a proud Texan. How tight were they?

George Bush changed his life. George Bush was a life. George Bush, you know, was a newly arrived Houstonian trying his hand in the oil field when he arrived in the late 50s. And he was directed to meet this young guy Jim Baker, who was a lawyer and at one of the big prominent firms in town. And they really forged a bond on the country club tennis courts in Houston and became in fact the doubles champions two years in a row they both to the end of their lives would sit there and tell you about those two doubles victories and they're still on the

wall of the Houston Country Club listing George Bush, James Baker as the winners. So that really became basis of their friendship. The families got together, the boys, in both sides, both families were relatively the same age. They played football and Thanksgiving and they got together for cocktails and Christmas. And it was a real friendship. It's totally different than any other American president and secretary of state you could think of in history, where their partnership in high office was preceded by years of non-political friendship that nothing to do with politics.

Remember Jim Baker, like George Bush, both sons of great privilege. Baker was born on the beginning of the Great Depression, and yet he was completely insulated from it. He was a fourth generation, taxing who, in fact, his birthright was to be one of the leaders of Houston, a city that his great grandfather had been friends with Sam Houston himself. His grandfather was probably one of the key institution builders of the city and he grew up knowing his grandfather and seeing what a legend in his own time that grandfather was. you know, his father was an extremely demanding, even micro-managing, a man of the very old school. So he in George Bush had that

sort of petition expectation and burden. And certainly Jim Baker never would have been Secretary of State if he hadn't met George Bush. But there's a strong argument that George Bush might never have been president had he not met Jim Baker. And so there was this interdependence over the decades between these two that it's really a remarkable story in its own right. James Baker ran George Bush's successful 1988 campaign against the Democrat Michael Ducakis, who at the time was governor of Massachusetts. There was a highly controversial ad running that campaign. I remember it well about Willie Horton, a black prisoner who was led out on a weekend pass

from jail and then raped a white woman. Many have said in the years since that that ad stoked racial fears about black crime. Does Jim Baker have any regrets about that? Yeah, it's a good question because that campaign, of course, was such a scorched-earth campaign. It wasn't Baker's ad. It was actually technically put up by a supposedly independent Republican outfit. The Bush campaign itself had talked about Willie Horton, but didn't use his name or face in their own ads, this sort of separate organizationorton, but didn't use his name or face in their own ads, this sort of separate organization to him, but they didn't stop it either. They didn't really write out their way to say, hey, we denounce her, you know, don't want

to have anything to do with this. And when we talked to Baker about that, that was sort of the one moment where he kind of allowed for some idea of regret. That, you know, maybe that ad went too far or whatever. And then he quickly says, but, you know, in in general You know, I'm proud of that campaign where we tough and and calling Decox's patriotism into question and all that Yeah, but that's what you had to do to win and I think that that's what it speaks to the duality of Baker's Roll and public life and in fact in that very election and you know one month after election after they've skewered Decox

Jim Baker was sat down in the apartment of Bob Strauss the former Democratic Party chairman to have dinner with Jim Wright the Democratic Speaker of the House talk about what they could do to solve the Central America problem that has so be deviled the Reagan administration. So for Baker there was this these two sides of politics the one where you were cut wrote and the one where you sat down to medials. What do you know about his views on rice and discrimination? You know, that was actually a big question for us. Not entirely fully answered, I must say.

What I would say is that number one, it clearly was on his animating issue, racial politics. He was not by and large, associated one way or the other with either the stoking of racial grievance or the fundamental civil rights transformation that marked his lifetime. It strikes me that his family at various times was seen as more progressive at least when it came to Houston wealthy white people. In fact, his grandfather, who I mentioned before, Captain Baker, white people. In fact, his grandfather, who I mentioned before, Captain Baker, was a kind of a progressive era reformer. His wife certainly was. You know, so it's a story of a white privilege entitled family in the South that neither led the change to end racism and discrimination in the South, nor seemed to be part of the racist reaction to it in many ways.

You're both journalists, Susan Eura commentator for the New Yorker and write about politics. Peter, you're a reporter at the White House for the New York Times. How important is it to try and be objective? I think we have kind of drifted away from the word objective because obviously human beings are not purely objective. We all bring our experiences and lifetimes to the table. I think the probably the better phrase these days

is fair, open-minded, you know, independent, detached. Those are words I would try to use as a reporter. And it is different than being a columnist who can be more local about what you think about things, your analysis of things. But as a reporter's my job to reflect various points of view, whether I agree with them or not, but not just to sit there and do it mechanically. But to try to, you know, it is still our job, and I think we've re-learned this lesson over the last four years, to help readers make sense of it by providing them the kind of facts and context that they can make their judgments correctly.

You know, objectivity or trying to avoid bias is not the same thing as 50% one side, 50% the other, he said, she said, you have to provide readers, I think, with enough information to draw their own judgments rather than just simply be snograpers. That's not our job. And it's a hard balance, trying to be fair to all sides. And yet not, there's been a lot of misinformation or untruths coming out of this White House the last four years. It's not our job to parent that.

It is our job to fact check when things are put out there to the public that are not true. And they still important that readers, and I would place to go where they can try to get information and analysis that's rooted not in a opinion, but in fact. Yeah, and I would say that's how I see my role. I mean, there are many columnists who are, you know, newspaper columnists who are there, really, as opinion writers. But what I've been trying to do in writing a weekly

letter from Washington for the New Yorker is, you know, certainly I have views and I'm expressing them. But I would say that for me as well, I at least view what I'm doing as much more independent and trying to offer analysis and perspective perhaps based on, you know, covering Washington for the last few decades. But I think it's really important at this partisan, hyperpartisan, and tribal moment to present people with a sort of someone who's willing to sort of call it in a straight forward, an independent-minded way. I think both of us are animated by really wanting to get at the truth in whatever way that we can and to do so outside of the prison of partisanship and

orthodoxies. Our podcast is called Let's Find Common Ground. What chance do you think Joe Biden has in helping the America find common ground? What do you think Joe Biden has in helping America find common ground? What do you think his chances of success are? Well, I would say at least that is a stated goal, which is a difference, right? I mean, what you've had the last four years is a president who didn't pretend to see common ground, didn't try to see common ground, in fact, played in the divisions of America. And that was, in fact played in the divisions of America, and that was in fact his political persona. That's part of the success on some level, rightly or wrongly, to play on our divisions,

racial, economic, gender, sexual orientation, cultural, and I think that that was one of those defining characteristics that was presidency, and that was different than I think we've seen in a long time. President Clinton talked about being a repairer of the breach. President Bush, 43, talked about being a night or not a divider. President Obama talked about a postpartisan era and bringing people together. Now, all three of them didn't live up

to those grand aspirations, but they at least gave voice to it. They gave voice to the idea that as president, it was their job to bring the country together. And that's not something you've heard in the last four years. Biden is a return to that bipartisan tradition that we saw prior to this president where at least you give voice to the notion that your job is to be a uniter in the country. So I think he'll try it. Now, again, I think, as Susan has said, the environment is so much different than it had been even just four or eight and twelve years ago. It has gotten progressively more toxic, progressively more polarized over

the years, not just because of Donald Trump, although he certainly is both a manifestation and a encourager of that. And that's going gonna challenge Biden. He's not obviously coming at this in a moment where there's a welcoming of that. I mean, he's not gonna have a kind of honeymoon other presidents have had from day one. Both of you have reported from overseas, but in recent years you've been in Washington, which is a city that's much more angry

and anxious than it once was. How do you think things might change with President Biden, who will be so different in style from Donald Trump? That's right. We've been experiencing something that I think has really certainly never in any of our lifetime occurred, which is essentially a cult of personality

fused with the most powerful office in the world. And, you know, that has meant that Trump by design has succeeded in occupying a really outsized portion of all of our, you know, sort of mental bandwidth for politics. And I think one of the, you know, key stories of his presidency is clearly that he was able to dominate and to roll over and to take over the Republican Party, at least the elected officials part of the Republican Party with much more success than we anticipated at the beginning of his presidency.

Look at how he would cycle through all of these officials in his own White House as well, and he would fire them, he would humiliate them. And yet, they were so terrified of being kicked out of his orbit permanently, that they would abase themselves further, even after being humiliated by Trump, and continue to want to be seen in his orbit enough, that they could profit off of that for the following few years. I mean, this is a remarkable dynamic in a country that at least prides itself or pretends to be something different, which is a rule of law based democracy.

And yet we saw, I think, that we are not made fundamentally of different stuff than people in countries that have very different and much more tragic political histories. The flip side is Biden is signaling in every way possible, I think, not only that he himself represents a return to a different tradition of American politics, as Peter has pointed out, but many of his appointments are very much drawn from the ranks of expertise. They're drawn from the ranks of a kind of professional governing class in which knowledge, skills, expertise, science are the foundations. Peter? I agree with everything she just said, of course.

I think, you know, I think, look, one of the things we're going to be testing in these next few years is what norms that were broken or changed in the last four years will be restored in which ones are now permanently gone. You know, President Alec Biden talks about returning to normalcy, and he talks about the importance of norms, but will he or other presidents that follow decide that Trump's precedent allows them to do things that otherwise had undenunthinkable, just as a small example. This isn't the biggest thing in the world, but President-elect Biden shows as his defense secretary. I recently retired four-star general. That's something we hadn't done in more than

a half century, and so Trump came along and busted that norm. Biden is basically saying, okay, I've got to bust that norm, too. Now, again, this is not the biggest norm that got dispensed within the last four years, but it does suggest that there will be a thinking in choosing. And it will be interesting to see, what Democrats decide, they want to get rid of as well in terms of norms using Trump as a justification,

or do they try, how much do they return to the status quo ante? And that's an important question, because we had sort of a consensus, a bipartisan consensus between the end of Watergate and the beginning of the front era, about where the rules were, where the lines were, and now we're gonna be,

now they're all very fuzzy and blurred and we'll see how they get redrawn. Thank you very much. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Thank you so much for having us and happy new year. Thank you. Our interview with New York Times Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Thank you so much for having us and happy new year. Thank you. Our interview with New York Times chief white has correspondent Peter Baker and his wife Susan Glasser, who's a staff correspondent with the New Yorker.

They're the co-authors of the book The Man Who Ran Washington. And again, Peter Baker is no relation to the man they wrote about. Yeah, and this book was years in the making. Both Pisha and Susan had a lot of meetings with Jim Baker and the book's been widely prized. Thanks for listening to our podcast. We release new shows every two weeks. This is Let's Find Common Ground.

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