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