To you today by your television provider. History and biography is sponsored by wells fargo. Im Judy Woodruff and im thrilled to be joining these three amazing authors to today. You see them on the screen, they are george packer, whose latest book our man, Richard Holbrook and the American Century and susan lasser and peter baker just this fall, the man who ran washington. The life and times of james a baker the third. Two brilliant books about too complicated and fascinating man. They were born at a decade apart. Baker in houston in 1930, holbrook in manhattan in 1941. Acre republican trained as warrior. Holbrook a democrat Foreign Service officer,student of foreignpolicy. Their lives have very different trajectories but they both ended up in washington where they became major power players. Peter picking up on it, this is a man with ambition and it was even before he came to washington. It was he was part of a family of an aristocracy, his family basically builds moderninstant. They were expected to do great things. He had a father who imparted on him the legacy of his family, bakers were tasked and one thing they were not meant to do waspolitics. He was told dont do politics and thats the time he finally breaks away from his fathers domination over him and the rules change at 840 when the governments great family tragedy, his first wife dies of cancer and he ran to houston course to help him up. Named George Hw Bush that you were off on a whole odyssey that really i think put them in the center of global events. Im going to be going back and forth again, the stories of the book are so rich and we could go in so many directions but i want to try to leave these stories together. George packer, richardholbrook , i use the word complicated and it doesntbegin to do justice. But why did you want to write about him and talk about his ambition, what drove him and frankly the backdrop, the First Quarter of the book is about vietnam. So he died in december2010. It was actually sitting in Hillary Clintons office, the secretary of state office was the big finale and high drama characteristic of him. A few weeks later he offered me his personal papers and i knew holbrook was dead, not very well and i said i had a chance to explore aflamboyant , mesmerizing, maddening character whose career covered a half century from kennedy to obama from vietnam to afghanistan. And look, his diaries and letters another paper so i said yes,without really quite knowing why i just said yes. , it seems as as i began to read those letters and as you say judy he beganhis career in South Vietnam , actually in the mekong delta the war was at its hottest in 1963. And as soon as ibegan reading his letters , from the nihon delta to his first wife i knew i had made the right choice because hewas such a good writer really was so intelligent, so observant and funny. And arrogant and just a guy who could fill a book and maybe more so his ambition was an engine, a kind of dynamic engine was from the very start, it got him into very high places and throw some triumphs and also in the end i think cost him a great deal. Friendships, relationships and maybe his own Hearts Desire which was to rise to the top of his field. People found him to the two difficult and abrasive of a person and his ambition would never keep it in check. Demonic engine, what a great gem. Susan peter, talk about jim baker and how he, i mean he came to washington. He ran the campaign for against Ronald Reagan for George Hw Bush and got Ronald Reagan chosen to be his white house chief of staff. And he did it with the most successfulpersonnel job. Of this modern time. How didhe do it. Thats a great question because he didnt really have a background that suggests he was going to be. He had been a lawyer up until age 44 and ran gerald Ford Campaign and 1976, there were no republicans of his generation at that point, the Previous Group had been convicted, sent off to jail so it opened up a world for people like jim baker, scowcroft and a whole new generation of people. In this case i think the example of a president that is Ronald Reagan, it made sense for him. He was an outsider coming into washington but he did one ofto get things done. He had the Organizational Skills to run a white house and understand washington jim baker , remarkably the guy who ran not just one but two campaigns against him in 1976 and 87 step down ended up instead being a smart choice on his part. And susan, what was that quality in jim baker that got him chosen for that job, that made him as successful as he was. Of course he was treasury secretary, pulled out this day tax plan which as we know we havent seen anything really like to make sense. During the reagan years. But what was it about him that hold it all together . You know, jim baker, the question everybody asks is he would give you this sort of folksy plan and hell tell you, you know, my family prevents for poor performance but we all know pretty well washington is full of ambitious lawyers. And certainly its true that jim baker was assiduous to the point of obsessive when it came to getting the job done and he was famous for staying in the white house until you return and his phone calls from everyone, every member ofcongress. Long after he knew they had already gone home sometimes. This was preinternet era but obviously there are plenty of people know their breaks and are extremely well prepared but certainly one aspect of this, i think peter and i found in working on the book that in the end, for jim baker, success was really the only option. He was assessed with wedding and i think the hyper competitiveness is part of what he had in common with George Hw Bush. And how they bonded on the Tennis Courts and by the way there are stories about how they came to be teamed up but i think one simple answer, picture i was looking at the other day of jim baker went into a wall for george a gw bush jonah and the singles champion usingcountry club. It was james in the third George Hw Bush wanted to you with a winner theres no question about that. Jim and his father exerted this overweening power over his early years. He his dad, literally took this kind of competitiveness into him. They joked and called him the warning jim baker would go and play tennis message, and when he was done and he got done playing his bat his father would make and stay on the court and keep practicing and i think thatshow we would all go through life. Baker and holbrook, those men overweening ambition, both had a sense of insecurity with how they were perceived by others but the difference was that jim baker i think was this enormous selfdiscipline where holbrook and away, this character who emerges in georgia is wonderful and powerful book and baker just had a discipline that was beaten into him and that, he never could have done itwhile his dad was still alive. It was only after his dad passed on the scene he gave up on the familytradition and went to washington. George, pick up on. Theres so much as wiki saying about holbrook, his area was Foreign Policy, it was understanding the world people talk about what a brilliant, another version of the Henry Kissinger and i dont know if you saw himin his take on the world as a diplomat. And how did he combine that with getting things done in washington . So if you things, personal of overlapping themes between peters book in mind. One is ambition and one is tennis. Holbrook played a ton of tennis and i have the feeling that he rose up through the hierarchy in saigon and in washington by whipping people on the tennis court or by being so competitive they had respected. The first anthony closest friend and beer in Foreign Service in saigon and they were of a friend for 10 years and that friendship mysteriously is integrated with great consequences for them and for us Foreign Policy i think later when they were working together on bosnia under billclinton. Then he starts playing tennis against west moreland and Maxwell Taylor in saigon and eventually got to Bobby Kennedy in washington and this is how holbrook maneuvered and work his way to the best dinner tables in georgetown, the rest of them holding april, he revered this postwar generation of american statesman from April Herrington to george kennan, clark the third, george marshall. He thought of them as the model for him. He wanted to be just like them. The problem was he was a very different man that he did not belong to the aristocracy. He was jewish although he never talked about it and kind of had an outsiders one and even business that kept getting in his way as well as being a way for him to push otherpeople aside and get ahead. And the times change, before politics this was falling apart during holbrooks career in the wake of vietnam. This was no longer that group of wise men who simply could be called upon by president s. Holbrook was forever trying to get to the top of the mountain really love mountain climbingstories. And always just falling short of the summit. I had this line, he got to the highest base camp imaginable but he never ever assault on the summitfailed and partly because history change. He was not, he didnt have what inclined, it was more of an operative. He would make this in Foreign Countries in bosnia for example. At times change holbrook was not out to smoothly ride his way to the top. He wasnt self disciplined like baker. As susan said. He wasundisciplined. He was transparent. His appetites and insecurities were all on the surface. He thought he was playing people when in fact they saw right through him and in the end the relationship that failed him was the one with barack obama because he desperately wanted to work closely with him, to be trusted by him and obama never liked him and in the end he died to some degree of a broken heart with a sense of failure atthe end of his life. Identically on the parallels between these two men who were different in a lot of ways and yet ambition one of the commonalities. I think both were relentless, ive been looking for so many things to explore, looking for ways in which their lives intersected. They obviously knew of each other, maybe knew each other better but looking at the area of the balkans, baker was there in the administration at the end of the cold war. The balkans, i remember he said we dont have a dog in the fight and then later that became the place for Richard Holbrookes greatest triumph. Its a place, but it may be a way george to look at what was it about the balkans that led to Richard Holbrookes strengths and weaknesses . We dont have a dog in that fight was crucial because it set up james bakers worldview and his view of american Foreign Policy, he looked at the balkans and just saw a hopeless agent slavic struggle that we could never understand and had noted big business getting involved in. A very close effort to try to negotiate with most of which and other balkan leaders at the beginning of the war and he botched it, the war happened anyway. Bill clinton inherited it at the terrible state in bosnia. Its not bakers finest hour and it shows something about the limits of his cold eyed realism because the difference is holbrook had a passionate sense that america had to be involved in bosnias of the world that if we let the countrybleed , it would eventually become our problem. It would possibly rupture the Transatlantic Alliance. It was not a no consequence. Weactually did have a dog in the fight. He committed himself to that and he did it in a way that showed he really did care about other countries and people in places whose names we cant pronounce who are suffering in civil war and has refugeesand in floods and famine this was something that characterized him throughout his career. He had passionate. Street that was activated by the suffering in the balkans as was his very son of postwar harriman patterson, kennan says that america had really and so he didnt want to stop until he had a deal and as peter mentioned is exactly what bosnia brought out in him. The same qualities did not work in other places. But in bosnia all holbrookes strengths came together and he achieved what his claim to history was. And susan, listening to you, im thinking about how baker looked back on the balkans at the end and another period, the first iraqi war in 1990, the first gulf war where in writing the book he wanted to take out references to, there was a line in there about maybe we should have stayed longer, we could have donesomething. Saying he didntwant that in their. Literally suggesting he felt maybe mistakes weremade. I think jim baker was a pragmatist and a realist but became by that lived experience. He was not a filter, he was not all about opposing democracy agenda on the world. Baker was essentially very calculated about where he thought war was possible, he wasgoing to jump on. Whereas he was going to be pretty disciplined and at the beginning of the bush presidency when he became secretary of state state he didnt want to become secretary of state at all area there was no deal there and he understood he had to focus on, its part of the reason why some of the peers were suspicious of him. He was going to have his own very political will in what he could accomplish and he wasnt going to put this on arrest so he went looking for a deal that is the key to understanding his foreignpolicy worldview. More than even a kind of 19th century or an idea that he was a rigid kind of racist, he wasnt. He was very much willing to assert power in the world. Nobody was quite sure but that new power would be. The world was falling apart in 1989 through 1991. And george, talk a little bit about holbrookes view of all that and how he maneuvered. You talk about the balkans but how did he maneuver in the aftermath, in the postcold war era. I think holbrook would not have been masterful as baker was at the moment of the fall of the berlin wall and the dissolution of the soviet union. Holbrook in a weird way never showed much interest in the greatest foreignpolicy issues of his life which was the cold war. I think he found the soviet union maybe just to abstracts, to static. Not enough was happening, nuclear arms was something he could never have gotten interested in area his intensity and attention were always directed towards particular countries where there was conflict. And where there was suffering. Vietnam, bosnia, afghanistan. Once the cold war ended, i think holbrook saw the opportunity for democrats to reenter the foreignpolicy arena. He had been started by the vietnam as was every democrat of his generation, both by having been involved in the war and by being targets for thinking that we needed to get out it was the issue he ended up in area so he was always looking over his right shoulder about an attack from the hawks. Once the cold war ended there was a sense that pressure was off and i think he had an outsized idea of what america could do as the sole superpower. He wanted to be involved not just in bosnia but in kosovo, in cyprus, and congo, not with military power but certainly as a kind of allpurpose negotiator at the horn of africa. There were all these small wars going on in the 90s as countries were disintegrating and holbrook found them all irresistible so in a way, baker is more i think of a kissinger figure who has a sort of large view of what was possible, what was not and of foreignpolicy and geopolitics whereas holbrook was more of an operative who would go in and try to solve particular problems. In the postworld war ii era he was at his best and maybe at his most obsessive and got himself into some troubles that he had a hard time getting out of the. Peter, id like you topick up on that. There was one line im down about baker. In the end when you were writing about how much he wanted to be seen as a diplomat. Again, working on the book but im quoting, he was after all obsessive, no matter how much he tried to fight straitjacket but the fixer world events area its i mean, george is saying james baker was in some respects more like Henry Kissinger but there was a difference. There was a difference that right. Baker in the sense that they took on big things. Figures wasnt moved by pictures of suffering. He never thought it was worth his time. He was very capitalleading in that sense. He didnt have a great world strategy, a worldview, a political view of things. He would not get into a discussion with you about a treaty. He was in the end a lawyer who knew how to negotiate. A political operative who knew how to get an ministration through, Campaign Leader who negotiates the base with the other team and the great downfall of his life, the thing that crossed in the most was when he had negotiated the madrid peace talks and brought the coalition together for the gulf war and as the unification of germany and then his friend george bush followed him back to the white house, he needed baker to come back once again to resume the role of a fixer and this was a crushing blow for baker. He couldnt stand the idea of suddenly worrying about fundraising again and these were the great issues of the day. In fact through the fall as he was once again in the white house managing alosing campaign. It felt like he wasnt really in it he said why are you doing anything and you got to get on your feet, he was convinced that baker wasnt really all in or thought that he was trying to avoid this rift between baker and bush in those two years to resolve. But youre right, the fixer was the thing hewanted to transcend in the end , he couldnt escape. I was covering washington then and i remember he waited around for months or baker to get into the campaign. The problem that they were having. Talk about the ambition of holbrooks case, largerthanlife pluses, largerthanlife flaws. What was it about him that in the end you think kept him from realigning after marquis really wanted to be secretary of state. You mentioned what happened between him andpresident obama. What was it about him . In 1996, he had just achieved his greatest triumph was which was the beijing peace talks and bill clinton was reelected and had to decide who would replace Warren Christopher. And it came down to Richard Holbrook and madeleine albright. And clinton was actually moving towards holbrook because he said hes really brilliant, and he has a great mind and knows more, is relentless. Hillary clinton wanted her husband to pick the first female secretary of state which raised decisively but in the end, clinton said al gore i dont think holbrook has the selfawareness to keep kinship from becoming toxic. This was clintons very shrewd analysis of holbrooks character. Holbrook understood the person across the table brilliantly whether it was milosevic or bill clinton. He didnt know himself very well. He couldnt laugh athimself. He couldnt see himself as others were seeinghim. There was a lifelong blindness to his own flaws in his own character that i think was a fatal flaw. It meant he could negotiate, but when there was an obstacle that lay within himself, he didnt know how to get around and that was what undid hisrelationship with barack obama. Holbrooke was driving obama crazy with his lecturing and talking about vietnam like this Ancient Mariner coming to grab the young sailor by the lapels and say you must listen to me, ivebeen there and obama couldnt stand it. So none of his charms and talents were working with this sterling young president who you wanted to impress and thats the reason why i think he never got that job to his Hearts Desire,secretary of state. Actually i wanted to ask you one question if i could. So Warren Christopher became the counterpart to james baker in the score. How do you think holbrook wouldve done against baker . One of the interesting things going back to that recount was Many Democrats who said to me that we knew that al gore was toasted as soon as we heard bacon had been in involved. I think people were well aware even at the time and even before the recount of the differences between those two men but here is the thing, one of christophers great mistakes actually were sitting down and we were told the story in the book of the two of them sitting down for this first meeting and this dramatic moment, election is undecided and what will happen in florida and christopher is blocked off a whole amount of time to sit there and think they will rollup and we will get down to business as negotiating but jim baker was there to win. I dont think that fundamentally i think was where his experience as a corporate lawyer for decades came into it so i think it was an asymmetry there before walbrook and baker the dead calm from his understanding of what a highstakes legal venture this was and he understood he wanted to get out of the Florida Court and he had again a calculated and disciplined sense of what it took and he wasnt going to he had no interest in sitting there and figured out what was in the mind of al gore or Warren Christopher . That might have made it hard for holbrooke to negotiate in this particular situation and you have to come back to do you have the respect to command your own team . I think that was one of bakers Hidden Assets in dealing with bush and certainly those two, peter and i have had the debate about this, or they the close of secretary of state and president ever or were they the closest and friendliest secretary of state and president since madison and jefferson . He thanks ever but im not so sure because im not an expert but. Is this what goes on at your dinner table . [laughter] i know baker wouldve appreciated holbrooke as a worthy adversary and did bait partner and he recognizes his excellence and by the way, at a very sexist time women, men, he liked to play tennis against a good player. He would have known holbrooke for a good player. Is a great thought experiment to think about what it would have been baker versus holbrooke. Peter, pick up on georges and let me ask you, in the end Richard Holbrooke did not really know himself and does jim baker know him . Great question for he is not reflective person and not an introspective guy and i loved doing his book because he was over also we live subject and george didnt. We got the chance to ask him all these questions and the truth is hes not somebody who will open up his psychological profile to you and really expose himself in that way but he is super disciplined but he did give us access to his papers in his papers arent, again, like holbrookes letters from vietnam and they werent expressive in that way but there were clues here or there and one thought that was human was this tragedy we mentioned earlier were his first wife died from cancer in he gave us a letter that he i saw that. It was a stunning. He writes to his friend george bush and his friend george bush will move from house to the run for senate and trying to get baker to run for his house seat and baker writes a letter stating why hes not going to make the campaign and says to his friend george the reason why is because his wife is dying and even she doesnt know it and the doctors havent told and this is in the air aware maybe that was okay when the husband was told on the wife wasnt and he said to his frien even at the time but he said i cant do it because my wife is dying and i havent told her or my kids and i havent told my mother and the one thing he tells is george bush bid that is a friendship that is, in fact, powerful and transformative and that is human. To have him give up that letter i think showed us inside in a way we hadnt. We also give us another letter and his wife is, dying wife mary stuart writes a letter because she does know shes dying and she hides it in the house and he even to this day when they hand them letter 50 years later its a very powerful, human story, powerful story, not psychological open and the way holbrooke was our think georges character study of holbrooke is so rich in threedimensional and he is a human person and nonaudit monologue. He had all the advantages of been able to talk to baker and not having Richard Holbrooke looking over my soldier and in fact he would not have given me his papers at all and all the people who talk to me didnt have to worry about what he would say once he found out what they had said to me. For me, this had to be the story of a man who has come undone and thats how i was able to write it honestly. [crowd boos] well, thats an important distinction. Both holbrooke and baker to bring it back to this question is extremely astute in different ways at managing their images both their critics would say that that was one of their biggest skills talking to reporters that had People Like Us where we had an extreme sensitivity towards their own image due to what you pointed out, the great sources for us in writing this book actually was looking at what baker deleted from his memoirs as his state department and time in public life because it is often the stage managing other image and the part they dont want to tell you that are as revealing as anything else. I would say that jim baker is not a diarist and not, you know keeping his personal historian around to document things and we did have the benefit of talking to a subject late in life and he just turned 90 this year and is written to memoirs of his own and i found him to be surprisingly candid with us, especially about his family. You know, you get a certain level of selfawareness by the time you are 90 and if you could talk about how you called your dad the warden and how your father micromanaged you so much that even after you were a marine veteran and graduated from college you agreed not only to go to the law school that he insisted that you go to but the sign up for the fraternity would because that was the fraternity his father thought a member of his family should be entered he was willing to get surprisingly personal in a way that i think helps us understand that its not just resume and that you have to look at those personal qualities what made him able to tackle a series of washingtons hardest jobs in a way that no one else has done in such a compressed period of time in the modern era. I want to finally ask you all about todays washington and how im interested, george, to know how you think holbrooke would be able to function in washington of today but what it would be like if the city has changed and people peter, you know, jim baker, what does he think of what is going on now . And we know that this interview will be released in september so time will pass in another month or so but george, what about that . I thank you would have been at sea. He was shaped, as i have said by the postwar, his dna was the architect of the postwar world. The influences that he never stopped comparing himself to and today first of all, trumps washington would be just a mindboggling alien and appalling place for Richard Holbrooke. Everything that trump does in Foreign Policy is the opposite of what Richard Holbrooke would do. Everything. I cant think of a single move trump is made that holbrooke would have agreed with. And vice versa. He would have been writing columns for the Washington Post and he wouldve been denouncing the isolationism in America First and he would have been talking the importance of the Transatlantic Alliance and nato and our allies in asia and during the pandemic i think he wouldve been a brilliant organizer of other countries to find a cooperative response and that was the kind of thing he excelled at and he put hivaids as an issue before the Un Security Council so he understood that disease could could be a threat to our national security. I think in a way wouldve been daniel waited and out to sea. He would not have known how to function. Social media at wouldve brought out all his worst qualities and none of the best and he wouldnt, you know, the schmoozing and seducing of the reporters, mental schmoozing he excelled at isnt something that is so easily done and matter so much anymore so i think it wouldve been an alien world for him and he would have felt as if the golden age was gone. Peter, james baker is a republican and watching closely what is going on. Yet, i think he finds the trump world maddening. Its the antithesis of everything he believes about government and politics and trump is tearing down basically both the architecture of world the Republican Party when baker spent a lifetime building up when i covered the impeachment trial of President Trump and i went through bigger files i found this number i had not knows before because baker kept his integrity at least the appearance of ethical behavior and so much to him that he kept a file of all the instances of what people thought were crossing a line so he would keep a record in one of the memos was about four republican congressmen coming to george bush at the end of 1992 campaign saying you are losing and you need to ask britain and russia for help understanding about bill clintons overseas activity when he was young and baker and busch said no. That cross the light we do not ask foreign powers for help in our domestic elections. I remember looking at that and was struck by it because its such a contrast to what we are covering during the day. Look, to peters point is well taken but tim baker was the on trump in many ways and yet he could not disavow him. I sat down with him a few days before the tourney 16 election and he was a man stricken. He was absolutely in pain and tortured over what to do about donald trump. He told me donald trump doesnt believe anything i believe when it comes to Foreign Policy and he is saying crazy things and in fact, he told me he thought donald trump was nuts and yet he couldnt bring himself to project the parties nominee. Jim baker came out of a time in washington convinced that the only way to wield power is from the inside and hes just not man who thanks theres any efficacy whatsoever in being an outside howling and complaining. That no one will take you seriously and know this is the struggle, a Republican Party under trump and then, i think a window into the parties sold to watch jim baker wrestle with donald trump who, on a personal level, is the exact opposite of him and yet fakers never brought himself to publicly denounce trump and to disavow the turn in a Republican Party that he spent his whole life working in a different direction. Fascinating. All fascinating. Endlessly fascinating and these two men who clearly helped shape washington with such enduring legacies. The books cannot be more important right now and i want to again thank these amazing authors, george packer, author of our man Richard Holbrooke, the end of the morgan century and Susan Glasser and peter baker, the man who ran washington, the life and times of names baker. Thank you all three for just an extraordinary conversation. Thank you, judy. Thank you so much, judy. Weeknights this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight we focus on covert operation. First, former fbi special agent talks about the early years of the war on terror. Then, Chris Whipple talks former cia directors to provide an inside look at the intelligence organizations operations. Later the book the great secret which looks back at the seeking of 17 allied tips in italy december 1943. That starts at 8 00 p. M. Easte eastern, enjoy book tv this week and every weekend on cspan2. You are watching tv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Good evening everyone paid my name is connor moran and director of the books possible. Thank you so much for being here tonight. We are absolutely delighted to be hosting larry tied for his book, demagogue, about center joe mccarthy and later this evening he will appear with john nichols many of us know for his role at the Capital Times as associated editor. We couldnt be more delighted to be hosting these events for you all spring and summer long here on our podcast channel and want to take a moment to s