good evening. so i'm going to be the interrogator of this essence this session interviewing peter baker and susan glasser. peter baker is the chief white house correspondent for the new york times. he's the author of six books including obama the call of history days of fire bush and cheney in the white house and kremlin rising vladimir putin's russia and the end of revolution. susan b glosser is a staff writer at the new yorker. she has previously served as editor of politico during the 2016 election cycle. founding the founding editor of political magazine and editor in chief of foreign policy magazine. she's the author with her husband peter baker. of kremlin rising vladimir putin's russia and the end of revolution they are presently writing a book on the trump presidency. so we're all waiting in great anticipation for that. so with with that let's welcome peter baker and susan glasser and we'll sit down to a conversation. welcome back. welcome peter and susan. thank you. i want to begin but with a quote from george orwell. writing a book is a horrible exhausting struggle. like a long bout of some painful illness one would never undertake such a thing. if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. so peter and susan i want to understand what drove what demon drove you to spend seven years on on peter. on jim baker. i'm getting one of those bakers all the bakers now. there's no relationship is there. no relationship. so what demon drove you on? what demon drove us on well, thank you kai, and thank you to everyone for coming out today. it's really wonderful to be with you and especially someone who really knows what a biography is meant to be. i would say they're two different answers to that question because i can interpret it as what demon led us to spend seven years on the book versus what demon led us to write any book in any way and i have slightly different answers because actually we never intended of course as no one ever does to spend so long on this project and that definitely was a consequence of shall we say certain unpleasant recent events in the capital that left us otherwise engaged, but i will say speaking for myself if you're going to do something as all consuming as a book project like this one and a biography that's also the story of washington itself in many ways from you know in a period of time from the end of watergate really to the end of the cold war. i guess my national was we better do this together because otherwise we won't have anything to talk about. but i'm very very lucky obviously to have a partner who's a wonderful wonderful partner in in all things. oh gosh demons. ah, well, i always a demon that made us want to do we work we found baker particularly fascinating because not just his own story, which we can go through if we want about secretary of state at the end of the cold war reagan's chief of staff ran five presidential campaigns. that by itself would be really extraordinary. i think we also the demon that made us want to write it was the deem of washington in some ways like the history was a story of washington over the course of a generation, right? so it wasn't just the jim baker story. it was washington in this era and the era that contrasts so starkly with ours today, right chris. matthews here is written about reagan and tip o'neill. we that the today's washington is so radically different than the one in which jim baker was a giant was a colossus on the stage. they want to capture that we started as susan said, you know a long time before donald trump came along it wasn't trump who broke washington. it was already broken by the time he got there we can argue whether he, you know, bashed some more. but we started 2013 when obama was present and things in washington were already so sclerotic so dysfunctional that baker store we felt told us something about today as well as his time. i love this book it really, you know taught me things. i didn't know about particularly the reagan presidency. and about how power works in washington and it's you know, it's just a classic story of the sort of the man behind the scenes the fixer the guy who's making things work? the guy who pays attention to details and it's a story about the establishment, but sort of the end of the established establishment too, you know, there's this notion both on the left and the right. look who look very conspiratorially at the the washington establishment and my first book was a biography of one such figure sort of a predecessor of james baker who john jay mccloy who was known as the chairman of the foreign policy establishment. but in your account, i mean this is annette another generation the next generation of a power fixer and you write, you know with admiration but not uncritically. i mean, this is a very conservative lawyer who was associated with a lot of controversial issues, but i get a sort of sense from your narrative that you have a certain nostalgia for the old establishment for the you know, the when things worked, is that true or not. i mean there's a lot to unpack there. i would say first of all the interesting thing about baker story and actually it's very washington story in the sense that everybody almost everybody comes to washington and they're an outsider until they're an insider right and you know you think of who do you think of in the establishment now, right, you know think of like the clintons go back and you can read how many stories in 1993 about these crude, you know outsiders come to town from arkansas who don't know, you know, they're way around the silver, you know, and it's the nature of this place. it's a transient place it's a kind of place. it's long been remarked right where you you say well what do you do? you know, what's your job? you know, why did you come here? no one is assumed to be from washington. and so baker interestingly enough, and i don't think i think peter and i as he said we were attracted to this book because we saw in it the opportunity just because of the very unique nature of baker's career. we saw on at the opportunity to write about washington from a variety of different vantage points, right? he's in politics. he's running different campaigns, but he's also the secretary of state at the end of the cold war. we were in moscow together, you know, just 10 years after the end of the cold war. so i think that in and of itself we would have been interested to write a book about that, but what we discovered of course in working on the book and unpacking the story of baker's life is you know that he didn't even get to washington until he was in his mid 40s and in some ways right. it's actually the story of like the world's most successful mid-career change, you know, he was this conservative lawyer, you know from houston, texas from a family not just of lawyers, but he's you know, the son grandson and great-grandson of you know, really pillars of houston who helped to build the institutions of that city, right? and so they gave him a world of great privilege, but also a very constrained world so actually politics and washington was this act of rebellion and unlike mccoy, you know, the chairman of the establishment, you know, jim baker incredibly unlikely treasury secretary and and secretary of state, you know, he asked him a question about the treaty of westphalia, you know, and he's not, you know, the theory of offshore balancing or you know, a kiss and jerry and sense of what he brought to it. i was humbled in one of our early interviews with jim baker and i you know as a sort of russia hand right i really was excited to ask him about the soviet union and the fall the soviet union and i said well you know, what? what did you study? you know when you were princeton, you know, like what what what did you read about the soviet union or what was your you know formative thing and he looked at me kind of quizzically and he really brought me back to earth and he said well, you know susan my early experience at the soviet union was i had a tennis coach in houston who it's actually quite an interesting story who had been what they, you know called in those days still a white russian his family, you know had fled the russian revolution back in you know, i don't know if it was 1970 or you know, when and this guy has become almost like a second father to him. so that brought me back to earth in terms of that. so he was an establishment figure by inclination. he did go to an east coast prep school. he did go to princeton. he was not an academic not a student and a real late bloomer. yeah, no he in the early chapters of the book you paint a picture of sort of a young man who's filled with privilege and and he sort of personifies white male privilege in texas princeton. he just floats through life and he does what his father wants him to do and and yet he he emerges as you say mid-career in his 40s. he arrives in washington and five years later. he's running the white house. it's just an amazing transformation and he becomes this very hard. a hard line fixer who makes things work. it's just it's an extraordinary story. so let's turn to a little bit about your your sources and the methods and i i think you had like 70 hours of interviews with him. well, i mean ky, you know better than we do like and because you've done it both ways like a biographer. who has a subject who's still around the different tasks than a biographer who's working with somebody who isn't there to defend himself or herself? it's much easier to do the dead. yeah, but she's here and baker ain't dead he's 91. he's going strong. he is he's as sharp and and amazing today as he was in his prime. so yeah, we had a lot of time with him. he we went to him early on and said, okay, this is orange and doing are you interested in cooperating? this is not an authorized book. he did decide to cooperate with us. i think it's probably akin to your jimmy carter book, which we'll talk about tomorrow. he cooperated with us, but had no control over the book. he gave us plenty of interviews. he opened his archives to us including papers had never been seen before papers had never been open to the public for we interviewed his wife. we interviewed all eight of his children. we interviewed his nanny. who was 103 when we interviewed her passed away just the other day at 107. i think 180 just the other day remarkable. we interviewed president. and bush 41 and 43 president carter gave us an interview so we try to do as much as we could. i think we found that he was as open as we could imagine him being given these not interested introspective person. he didn't try to control us or control the book, which is odd because i think he made his bones in washington controlling the press or maybe he controls and we didn't understand it. that's always possible. he had a reputation as being such a smooth manager of the press that we were, you know handled without. yes. we didn't even handled now. i actually thought the pain we were worried about that word about that but actually found the papers is in illuminating is anything else right? because contemporaneous documents. he was a pack rat he saved everything going back to his letters home from summer camp when he was 14 and as a biographer as a writer journalist historian boy, that's a treasure trove now. why did access? look jim baker. i think really especially hitting his 90s. he remains very savvy and i think he understands very well that you if you're gunning for your place in history. you don't get to write the book yourself and he's already written a couple of his own memoirs. he did a big doorstop of a book called the politics of diplomacy, which was his account of being secretary of state very boring door stop of a book actually. the the other memoir is a livelier book, but it's definitely like the world as told to you know, he's given these anecdotes and retail them in a million, you know speeches and and the like and i think he really understood that you needed an independent work of history to shoot for your own place in it, and he's a very supremely self-confident person. that's part of what i think was the key to his success as you might imagine with somebody who held that array of jobs. there's a little bit of a, you know, kind of cult around him democrats as well as republicans in washington are very interested to understand and they will absolutely within like one sentence of you're working on jim baker. they will say to you. what's the secret of his success? what's the secret of his success? you know, we didn't find it. he will tell you this kind of very practice thing like well prior preparation prevents poor performance, you know, okay. yes. good job, right like everybody here knows you can be very very well prepared and that washington is a city filled with very well prepared lawyers who stay up late and you know read the briefing right? and obviously they don't have the success self-confidence and extreme competitiveness would be two of the other attributes. and so this self-confidence i think, you know was part of what me and him willing to engage so he was self-confident on the tennis court too. and that's where he sort of formed his relationship with george w. h bush bush, right. i mean let's talk about what happened there. i mean, that's really the beginnings of his political odyssey. that's right. i mean it actually had not had not been for the fact that the two of them met and became tennis partners at the houston country club in the late fifties and early 60s. he would never have been in politics. i think it's very likely to say and what makes the relationship is so extraordinary is i mean think about history what president and secretary of state have ever been close. before usually you know practical choices like cyrus vans thread muskie or maybe their arrival like hillary clinton was to barack obama. try to bring the country together the party together again or whatever. maybe you like your secretary of state if you don't these two guys were friends years before politics even entered the equation so much so that when jim bakker's first wife dies of cancer. she's dying of cancer. the one person that jim baker confines in the one person he can find it. he writes a letter which we have in the book. i don't think it's ever been published. he confis in george hw bush. he said i haven't told this to anybody. i haven't told this to my mother. i haven't told this to my children. i haven't told us to my wife. this is 1969. okay doctors, maybe not as open with wives as they were with husbands at that era. she knew by the way, but he knew and she said he says to george aw bush. my wife is dying of cancer, and i want to spend the next few months. just trying to make her life as good as possible. this is a friendship that is sealed. in something big and strong and powerful. so when we ask them about we asked bush we ask baker and they both describe each other like brothers. that doesn't mean of course they love each other all the time who of us doesn't always have some relationship problems with our siblings, right? there are sorts of things a sibling rivalry, so they had sibling rivalry arguably in office in politics. they were times when baker told bush things. he didn't want to hear like it was time to drop out in 1980. he wasn't going to win like maybe you shouldn't have picked johnson noon as your chief of staff or dan quayles your vice president. maybe you know, you shouldn't go around saying things like, you know, read my lips, you know, maybe there are times when most significantly the tension between them was biggest when 1992 comes along and bush once baker to come back from the state department to run his re-election campaign baker does so only very reluctantly and they lose. it's a bitter moment doug george w bush the son and barbara bush were very bitter at baker for not doing more in their view to save 41 and that put us, you know real wrinkle in the relationship, but just you know, we're a friendship ends or begins where it ends and on the day that george hw bush died in houston the person who came to his house not once not twice, but three times that day was jim baker the guy who was standing there at his bedside when the 41st president united states died rubbing his feet. was jim baker that's a friendship that goes beyond politics in a way. we haven't seen i think in the modern time anyway, right? no, it's really interesting. you know, he that he he as you said he probably wouldn't have gone into politics as such except for bush. he wasn't a political animal in texas until he was 40. he once ran for what attorney general and lost it ran a very uninspired campaign boring campaign. but then he's brought to white to to washington and then when reagan becomes president and gets into trouble. he's brought into the white house and he's sort of you describe his job as the -- detector. that's right. and you know hands-on pragmatic. he works with. democrats and republicans, but he's really tough. is that a good description? well, you know, his cousin actually came up with this great description of him and his cousin said he was the velvet hammer and that became then the cover of time magazine probably the you know, the cover that really kind of cemented bakers image in the national consciousness rate as like the smooth fixer who was a hammer, he was incredibly hard-nosed and we can talk about you know, the 1988 campaign or any of the very partisan things that he did but yet he had an ability to a unique ability to make deals and i and that's the other thing. i didn't mention right so he certainly was this. ultra-competitive supremely self-confident figure but he was almost a compulsive. thing to make deals and it's funny because we just spent four years right with somebody who is like proclaiming himself to be the ultimately deal maker at while not making deals baker in our experience with him. this is just part of his wiring that this was something he was naturally suited to do at a moment in washington and in our politics when there was a need and a route to success that went through making deals in that way remember that the entire time that ronald reagan was president that george hw bush was president democrats controlled at least one house of congress and in many cases, they controlled both the senate and the house and so baker understood that deal making it involved dealing with democrats on capitol hill it involved ultimately for him as secretary of state dealing with soviets right although at times he would tell you that actually, you know, negotiating the reunification of germany that margaret thatcher was actually as big of an obstacle. me how gorbachev was in making that deal. but so that's part of this character that i think we were so interested to examine because the question is you know, is it the moment or is it the person and in this particular case it almost certainly was both things like many people as you might imagine say, well, you know, we need a jim baker today, you know, the structures of politics are just fundamentally different now than they were at that time and certainly he was able to make tough deals and he was naturally i think smart about politics both the politics in the room and national politics, but you know, even he couldn't overcome the structural shifts in our democracy that have led us to the situation. we're in now. so let's discuss some of the controversies that he was involved in. i'm going to like read a list of five or six and and you focus on what you think. is that most interesting. there's debate gate where he's involved in periphally in the stealing of jimmy carter's debate briefing books. there's iran contra which might not have happened if reagan had appointed him as national security advisory suggests. um, there's you know bush's pardons of casper weinberger and others involved in the iran contra cover-up. there's the 1988 election and the whole willie horton thing where baker really enables and empowers lee atwater. this ruthless political operator invented you know that kind of hardline politics he the 1991 gulf war the 2011 election in florida here, which he's deeply involved with. i mean, it's a it's an amazing list. no, i want to cover all that in 30 seconds or so. you know, everything's really interesting about baker was he was he was adamantly he was sorry where it's not right word, but he was religiously determined to protect his reputation, right he cared a lot about whether people thought he was a man of integrity a man of ethics and it this is again the fourth person to carry the name james addison baker and so there was a burden on him not to embarrass the family. so when things came up that were scandals that he might have had a hand in or he might not have had a hand in he was particularly good a keeping at a distance and sometimes to the point where his own friends including you know in the bush family thought maybe too much so but it mattered to him it seared him when somebody suggested anything untoward by him. you mentioned the briefing book thing, which is a good one to talk about where the biographer of jimmy carter because this for those who don't remember and no reason you should it turns out that a briefing book that carter campaign had prepared for a debate against reagan had been filtered by what turns out of person who had worked for ted kennedy given to the reagan camp. and they use it before the debate to prepare now. i read the debate book. you probably did too. i don't know how much it really helped them. it was pretty basic stuff. but whatever. it was a pretty big scandal at the time because this seems like really dirty tricks only eight years after after watergate break in. and bakers suddenly got brought into it because jim bill casey who was the campaign chairman and later. the cia director said well, i gave it to baker or baker. give it to me. i forgot baker said he's lying. he's lying and it mattered so much jim today. nobody remembers us at all, but when we were interviewing him, his wife said that was the most pain second wife susan baker who's still with him today married to him for 40 50 years. wonderful person said the two most painful things she ever saw him deal with were the death of a grandchild and this briefing book caper. even though again nobody today remembers that are cares or thinks much of it one way or the other about him because it matters so much to him that he not be of that way. yeah, i think that's a great example because it tells you so much about you know, who he was in politics. you know that this was again it was it was a little bit of an act of rebellion for him even to be in washington, but you know you raised the 1988 campaign. i think it is important to think about baker as a partisan actor as well and not just you know, he's you know his place in washington today is the sort of the fixer who made washington work at a time when we all say wow. washington doesn't work anymore, but he was a very sharp elbowed partisan and both he and george hw bush did have a view of politics in a way. maybe this was the patrician in both of them that you were, you know meant to fight very hard, but it was somewhat unseemly business and you know bush himself sort of radiated that he didn't really see all that comfortable. he seemed more comfortable with a thousand points of light that he did, you know waging and yet he he authorized both, you know bush also was is responsible for this right bush and baker authorize absolutely scorched earth campaign, michael docus they turned him. into you know, he's like the sort of technocratic governor of massachusetts. they turned him into a, you know, flag burning aclu card carrying, you know, practically like an un-american figure. he was also, you know, not a man enough to defend his wife and i mean, it's really an extraordinary barrage and it worked and you know would baker would say it's interesting baker as margaret tutwaller who was a very close advisor to him throughout his washington care. she said baker doesn't do regrets and we found that to be the case in our many interviews with him, right? he we couldn't get him to say he regretted anything. basically. he's like, my record is my record. i'm comfortable with it kind of a person this was the only thing willie horton was the only thing that he ever said to us. well, you know, probably that might have gone too far and then by the way, took it back in the next interview not you know, he didn't say like this great or anything, but he want to his strategy in approaching his own biography his own history was here's my record warts and all you know, he would say to you. well, i didn't authorize you know the ad that gets mostly attention. that was an independent expenditure. but of course he didn't even object to it for weeks and you know, the record shows it actually was al gore who first raised willy horton in the primaries and then it was the bush campaign that did in fact say we're going to i believe lee atwater was quoted in time magazine thing. we're going to you know, make it indelibly associated with michael dukakis as you pointed out. jim baker was a was a promoter and and advisor of lee atwater never disavowed him and but the thing that's interesting that does tell you about how much our politics has changed. so you have this absolutely, you know. scathing attack in 1988 on dukakis and you know again, this was really the only way that they decided they could win the campaign and baker was very pragmatic campaigns were shorter than he comes in to run the campaign only at the very end only at the convention and you know, that's the rollout to rescue absolutely. so that's what i was gonna say. they understood that the only real way for bush to win. he was down 17 points at the convention was to tear down the opponents. this was a pragmatic decision in his point of view. but what happened after the election to me is quite instructive about what a a different moment it is. he's appointed secretary of state. he's the very first, you know appointment that bush makes and what's he doing within weeks. he's sitting down with democrats. he's sitting down with jim right the democratic speaker the house on their planning how they're going to basically and the american support for the contra wars and to take this incredibly divisive issue that it you know, really been one of the most polarizing foreign policy issues of the entire reagan presidency. take it off the table. that's a deal that he had to do actually jimmy carter, you know helped in this regard as well as jim wright and take it off the table and that's literally within weeks of you know him absolutely eviscerating the democratic nominee. so, you know, he was politically ruthless, but he could use common sense to get a deal done and and sort of he wasn't an extremist and on policy. and in you know the georgetown set, i mean he could be friends with the washington posts. make greenfield who ran the editorial page and he enjoyed dinners frequently with catherine graham the publisher of the post even though the paper was, you know, pretty critical of it is administration. so explain talk about that social washington scene and how he operated in it again. i think you're right. there was a pragmatic or practical right? because he's not gonna he doesn't hold grudges unless there's a reason to and he recognizes that especially with the press. you're going to take a hit today, but you can come back tomorrow and get a better story or that the hit may not have been as bad if you work with them so he didn't hold against catherine graham or meg greenfield when they you know, published things that they didn't like he wasn't really a social guy. i mean he did spend a lot of his time at the office. he did enough social stuff. that he thought was necessary as a very canny operator in washington and he would go to these parties when he felt he had to and he made bets with reporters about who was going to win the election and so forth and the difference is you know back then. the campaign could be rough and tumble. it could be a knife fight. it could be all the things susan described, but then it would be over, you know, and the purpose of the campaign was to at least for bush and baker was to get to power so then they could do something. didn't care. they didn't want the campaign wasn't the be all an end all it wasn't the thing that they that brought them satisfaction. it was the thing you needed to do the messy thing. maybe the grubby thing maybe the maybe the, you know dirty thing to get to the point where you could do something of interest and today it seemed like as the opposite today. we have governance in order to set up the next election. we use our time and power to set up issues that we can use to bash the other guy in two years during the next congressional election or the next presidential election, and that just was not the way he wanted to operate he wanted to he did want to get stuff done. it did me working with democrats because they had democrats in power in the house for all 12 years at reagan and bush 41 were in office and in six of the 12 years in the senate. he wasn't getting done if he didn't work with democrats. so why would he sit there and make them the enemy? and and you know, he had friends on the other side. he could talk to democrats and so he also could be pretty tough when he was secretary of state. he actually barred bb netanyahu from entering the state the state state department when he was ambassador something they'd like to do ever since that. well, that's right. that's one of my actually one of the best stories. that's that's not in the book, but that you know is is netanyahu's clearly failed effort to understand jim baker and this story was told to us by tom brokaw who later who covered baker and politics and then became friends with him. he also has a ranch out west and he told us a story that when a young deputy foreign minister netanyahu came to washington. he he asked brokaw to go out to breakfast and explain, you know, the secretary of state to him and broke on took him out of breakfast and he said well the thing you got to understand about jim baker is that he likes to hunt. and he likes to hunt turkeys and what you do to do that is you go out you wake up at four o'clock in the morning. and you smear your face with? makeup and it's freezing cold and you sit there for hours and hours and hours and hours waiting and then when it's the right moment, he blows this heads off. then you understand jim baker now. he used a different body part. well, jim baker sound very scary. the thing is is that netanyahu infuriated. baker and really there's no other secretary of state i can think of, you know, certainly in the last few decades and i'm familiar with netanyahu gave an interview right in which he said, you know, basically he accusing united states of reneging on its word on something and baker went nuts. he you know called in the ambassador did all these things and he said as long as i'm the secretary of state he is persona known grata. he's not i not allowed to meet with me. he's not allowed to meet with anyone in my department. he's banned from foggy bottom and aids, you know dennis ross who was the longtime negotiator for beef it would say like we were begging him like, you know, you don't understand like he's the, you know, deputy foreign minister of israel. can we please and you know, only baker and now the politics of israel were different at that time and both baker and bush, you know, actually were not at all hesitant to publicly criticize the israelis for building settlements and for taking actually this is all really about the settlements and the us pressure. absolutely the relationship to republican party israel back then was so different like bush is the last republican president who took israel on on things that would be unthinkable today for republican presidents and that was done with jim baker and baker then was accused of being an anti-semite as a result. i mean he took a lot of hate for it and he did say some things that were quoted about what he said that made it sound anti-semitic and so he did take a lot of heat for that. i think we explore that issue in the book a little bit more. i think it may have been distorted somewhat but in any case he is even to this day not seen as a friend of israel, which he would deny. he says he is a friend of israel, but unless you're 100% in support you get well jimmy carter claims that he's a friend of israel too, but exactly not good. it's a tough sell. so let's move on to a little bit. more contemporary history. i understand that that jim baker tried to advise donald trump during the 2016 campaign to sort of move to the center. what happened? yeah, that was not one of his better deals. well, that was no deal. there was no deal. yeah, no deal there at all. so he to drink 2016. exactly funny story the baker is at nancy reagan's funeral. nancy asked him to do her ulg. he did in the background. he's talking with newt gingrich. brian mulroney was at former prime minister of canada and george schultz. i think it is and they're talking about this new guy who's trump getting that new but this guy was storming the republican. primaries donald trump and baker says something that i he's not come to regret but i think a lot of people would say is not the best analysis ever made, which is he says, well, i kind of think of him as a little like reagan in the sense that reagan was entertainer you've seen as an outsider seen as a warmonger and gosh he came to town and he wasn't really all the things people were afraid of and maybe you know, maybe trump is the same ways or outside or he's an entertainer, but and i think we could all agree that that's there's no comparison between reagan and trump if you like trump fine, but it's they're not the same person by any stretch. but anyway that got communicated back by mulroney to trump who lived near him and hit palm beach. they have houses together not too far away. and he's young college. jim baker guy. he'll give you some advice. so trump at that point had paul manafort working for him matter for to work for baker at the 76 convention. one that leaves you another in baker goes and meet trump but baker's smarter than a lot of characters because he recognizes that a lot of people go into meet with trump as soon as they leave the trump people spin out that they got an endorsement and baker did not want to endorse this guy didn't like him. okay, he would eventually vote for him. we didn't like him. he didn't want to endorse him. so he brought in a two-page memo saying here are the things i think you need to do now that you seem to have this nomination sewn up. to win the general election and they include things like reached out to the middle, you know, stop saying these crazy things that look racist and sexist and so forth. stop talking about an arms race, you know, all these things that you would normally normal politics would have been obvious, but trump rejects all of it, of course, and that's you know, that was a really the last time baker tried to advise him. i think even though i think they may have had, you know some communication. he did recommend rex tillerson for secretary of state that didn't work out so well either and in the end by the end the bottom line is he votes for trump and 2016 and then he votes form again in 2020 and so a lot of our readers ask us about that and they say well, i understand that. here's this guy who's not an id log. he's conservative. he's not an ideologue and he's not and he wasn't even a republican until his 40s. he was a democrat in texas now. they're conservative in texas. so why is it these so stuck on party that he would actually vote for donald trump. he told us in our interviews. we i mean the funny thing about this is we started the book of students of before trump came into office, but a lot of our interviews took place with trump on the scene and the interviews we get past germany or the middle east and then they would always inevitably be about trump and we watched him over five years struggling with this because he's given his life to the republican party as an adult basically and here's this guy tearing it apart. he was trashing nafta, which is something that bush and baker helped start. he was trashing internationalism was something that baker really cared a lot about he's trashing nato. he's trashing, you know, the concepts that baker and bush had stood for as republican party. he told you that he thinks his guys nuts. that was his word. not ours, not crazy. he was that word, but he voted for him. and we think that in the end that's important because it tells us something about how is it the modern republican party embraced a guy that they don't like that. they didn't the establishment at least enough and yet they stood with him. and you know he was ultimately voting for a man who also was trashing the bush family. absolutely. so that's that's a mystery. well, i think that that actually right is is something where i think they're really probably some some hard feelings among some members of the bush family. i mean if there was ever a public figure who had an out not to vote for donald trump it would have been jim baker who is indelibly associated with the bushes and in fact if you go to houston, there's a park in which there's a statue and one corner of the park of baker and facing. across the way is george hw bush, you know in sort of perpetual dialogue with each other and you know, so he had this sort of easy easy way out and we really struggled i think again and again, we will come back to in fact. i saw jim baker in washington a few days before the 2016 election and i interviewed him at the willard hotel. he always likes to stay there and you know we were talking about past events in his life. talked at the beginning and he said well, i think i'm going to vote. trump and you know, he said i know you know, everybody doesn't want me to and i kind of let it go and then i just couldn't let it go and at the end i came back to it and i said and this was very unusual why you know in our back and forth, but just i said but how can jim baker vote for donald trump and he he looked agonized really? i have to say it was very interesting he said well. haven't done it yet and we kept circling back to this issue, you know then for the subsequent four years and i think ultimately i said to peter, you know, if the subject of your book is trying to is telling you something over and over and over again and giving you the same answer you have to listen to him and the thing is especially when baker then decided after telling us he was interested in joe biden and that he would consider supporting to abiden. the reversion to the partisan sort of media right the the partisan norm the comfort zone. i think it told us not only about where the republican party is and ultimately actually if you look at the election result, it's very much about you know as much about partisan identification as it is about donald trump and for for jim baker and a key voting block in this country, right it absolutely wasn't about who donald trump is but it's about who they are and it's about their identity and his view of power which i think is of you that you have to exercise it from the inside that in his mind, you know if you're on the outside, then you're just a voice howling at the wind and that the only way to exert influence. is to be on the inside now. a lot of people even a lot of people i would say probably in his family, you know aren't sure that that was the right decision, but it's one he will not he doesn't do regrets as mar as doesn't do regrets regrets and it's all about power but at one point you quote him telling obama in the year 2018. both the responsible center in american politics has disappeared. i was just thunderstruck by that. this is a terrible admission and you know it explains sort of where we are today. and yeah, no this. anyway, it's a terrific book. everyone should read it to be able to understand how power works in washington and our current politics. and i want to thank also by the way the leon levy center for biography where which i direct in at city university in new york and our benefactor shelby white who has made this particular program possible with her. generosity, but at this point it's quarter to the hour and i think we should begin to turn to the q&a. i hope i'm sure we have plenty of questions and we'll try to get to the mall. is this on? yeah. i read the book. it was absolutely fantastic. i learned a lot about things that i totally forgotten. so it was terrific. i wanted to ask you about that you were talking about the his this james baker's decision to back trump. i was dumb dumbstruck i was amazed that he came to a conclusion after reading the book at the end un with that essentially but why? folks like baker and even the bush family have been pretty silent. since january 6th, and they were silent except for his one comment when trump said i needed james baker and he came up, but he didn't condemn. the big lie, so why why is that? well, actually i did just do an interview with him. he does condemn the big lie and actually in very unsparing terms, you know, look he is a 91 year old guy who is living, you know in texas i think part of the explanation is he doesn't feel that, you know, his vote is one thing but he doesn't feel responsible, right, you know, whatever they do to screw things up in washington at this point. i think he understands that's not going to be on his legacy protect, but he i just to be clear he was absolutely unequivocal in terms of condemning the big lie in terms of condemning not only january 6, but also the falsehood about the election that led to january 6, and it's very interesting in fact to watch someone wrestling with absolutely keeping to his mind the same sad of principles and convictions that drove him in public life or even in private life and yet also, you know being unwilling to about his own votes, you know twice for someone who would who would portray who would you know convey? this level of falsehood on the american people. it's really it was hard for us as writers, you know also to rate it. but again, i think you know our point and when we wrestled with it, it really was okay if you're he's a subject of our book. it's his story. it's not our story and maybe he's provided us not a pat and predictable ending, you know to the story in which he can be a sort of convenient resistance hero, right, you know, like in a way maybe this is a truer account of our politics in some way. hi haven't read the book yet. i was going to make sure i do that but something something that sort of bugged at me. 40 years he takes 40 years before he gets into politics then suddenly. he joins the political game. what is it? that was so fundamental about him that he makes this decision a part of me thinks. it's that it's not enough to explain it by friendship or rebellion. there's something fundamental about the man. what is that? that's a great question and thank you very much. appreciate it. it's um, you're right and he had to look the family history at that point. was antipolitics right? they had a saying in the family work hard study and stay out of politics. that was the slogan of the baker family and through generations. they all more or less did that. so baker followed that that particular course and he wasn't particularly political in his interest, you know, it was fascinating and doing the look through his archives and looking through all these old letters from summer camping is there's no reference to the events of the world around him. he lives of the great depression and will war two and the kennedy assassination and mccarthy and vietnam and the civil rights movement and there is no reference to this in the letters to his to and from his family. there's no and we asked him about it. he couldn't remember a particular moments like yeah, i don't remember very much about what happened. then he was very a political. he was getting bored. he was a corporate lawyer in texas working for oil firms and real, you know, i don't have the railroads is much anymore, but real estate firms and other big big dollar clients. and you know the truth is by the time 1970 comes around. he felt like he didn't it wasn't excited about anything. and he was watching his friend bush run for office bush at that point it run for senate once and lost run for the house twice and one. and i think he was beginning to get interested even before his wife passes away. he's toying with the idea maybe getting involved maybe running for the house seat that george bush is going to give up to run again for the senate. and it's at that point that he writes his letter to george bush because he explains why he's not gonna run for the house because mary stewart is dying, but after she dies, you know, he is lost the nanny. we told you we interviewed told us she would find him to staring out the window. for you know, just blankly and he told us he said there's ever gonna be a moment. i was gonna be an alcoholic. that was the moment. he was really devastated by his wife's death leading him four young boys. so george bush says to him come work on my campaign it will help you with your grief. and he found he loved it. he found he was good at it like any of us in life if you find that one thing that you really have a passion for suddenly. you just grab onto it. he didn't know. immensely was it was a rebirth. it was a rebirth now again, it started before his wife passing, but the wife passing really i think you know was a way of starting a new starting something fresh for him. hi there. um confession time. i haven't read the book either, but i want to so when i do read the book, um hearing you talk about jim baker's career and his trajectory and hearing about how that reaching across the aisle and keeping a campaign dirty until you actually get to power and can do what you actually want to do. hearing all that in 2021 where the political climate feels so vitriolic and toxic no brainer there. my question is the point of reading jim baker's career and this book is it a way to use it as a foil between what we're seeing now in 2021 or is there anything? as belly can be applicable from his career that i can see now or is it just oh look. here's how these halcyon days when congress used to work where things used to work and and then there's now dot dot look it's you know, what individual agency matters. i think that is part of the takeaway of this story. and so, you know the structure of our politics matters and you know, we can talk about it and you know, chris can tell you a lot better than i can you know in the 1980s when jim baker was at his height, you know half of the the states had senate delegations that were split. you know, there were democratic senators say and they voted republican, you know for rain or vice versa, you know, this was a country where there were competitive elections within states within parties. there was a diversity of opinions part of baker. he was a political but he also came from the south and from texas at the moment of transition, right? so he in his lifetime understood that party identity wasn't fixed because he was surrounded by a whole bunch of people who switched their party identity, right? he himself, you know was sort of an indifferent southern democrat who became a republican when george bush came to houston the republicans were sort of the progressives right to a certain extent and, you know people from the midwest his first wife the family was republicans, and that was a transition that baker made in his own lifetime. so politics wasn't a fixed identity and it wasn't, you know, perhaps as tribal on the national stage because it was in the middle of changing first of all second of all, you know, it's also a story about the world order changing right and peter and i did come to this in part because we're interested in. the end of the cold war which turned out to be this very exceptional period we didn't know it at the time. somebody said to me when we were working on this book, right? 1989, november 9th 1989. i'm sure many of you here in this room. remember, but not everybody does that was the day of the fall of the berlin wall and it changed the world. we made a lot of assumptions about that day and what it meant for the united states that turned out to be wrong by the way and you know, including the idea that we had moved past superpower rivalry and you know seems kind of like our partisan politics think about you know, what our assumptions were about russia and china at that moment in time versus where we are today and talking about a new era of great power rivalry. so why read the book i would say. it tells you it offers you the chance to consider. what part of our politics you know is because of bigger factors and where can individuals make a difference. i do think to peter's answer here on this issue of why baker? why did he stay in politics? why was he so good at it versus other people. his natural wiring was as a deal maker and i think that required progressively bigger stages, you know, we saw the ability to make deals. he was good at politics, but that's not what he loved. he was not a man who was looking at redistricting 10 years from now the building blocks of politics. he wasn't somebody who was considering who can i get to run, you know in the fifth district, you know two election cycles out from now, he was good at politics. what he wanted to do what he loved was making deals and in retirement, you know when you're sort of the essence of a person we loved when he would tell us these stories like for example, the leader of the episcopal church in texas came to him a few years ago and said we have a huge problem all of the southern episcopal churches are wanting to break away from the national episcopal church because of same-sex marriage and ordination of women as well or gay sorry gay and lesbian ministers and the leader the texas church didn't want to break away and guess what jim baker brokered the deal and actually texas was the only state that did not break away from the national church, and he did exactly what he did with the soviets by the way in arms control. he essentially gave them longer time to get used to the new reality and that was the deal that he burger so i think that that was the essence of the guy. was really seeing his especially the harder the problem the better because he had this great ability to read people and not just briefing papers on, you know nuclear throwaways and the like good evening. i also have to confess. i haven't read your book yet, but it's on it's on my bucket list. this is good able to converse you is i was curious that i remember reagan once quoting that he's smart enough to know went to delegate things to other people. i'm curious given the fact that jim baker was from george. hw's camp and he was a political only less than 10 years before that. that he would select somebody who as you indicated wasn't they scholarly student? um, he did really know much about geopolitics and economics and yet he took on these high posts high ranking powerful posts as the chief of staff for both bush and reagan administration. he was secretary treasury, and he was secretary of state. and you think that reagan would have selected somebody from his camp giving the fact that he was very political for decades before that that he would have selected somebody from his own loyal camp to take on those types of posts as opposed to taking somebody from george. hw's camp like that. i was just curious as to how he managed to endear himself. yeah to rise over other people that may have been more qualified from a more law from the you know from reagan from reagan's camp now. i think it's an excellent observation and i think it tells you a lot about both reagan and baker right? i mean again whether you like reagan or don't like big, but don't already like baker or not. reagan was not so wedded. to ideology that he wasn't willing to reach outside of his team. you're exactly right about that baker and run not one but two campaigns against ronald reagan, the 1976 gerald ford convention fight the beat back reagan for thought last campaign that reagan lost and the george hw bush primary campaign that lost a reagan in 198. so baker had been on the other side of the republican divide twice reagan picks him anyway partly because people like michael dever and stu spencer did not want edniece davichievous doubt. they thought at meese was a good guy. they liked him a lot, but he would be a disaster as a chief of staff because he was a man for whom was known if a piece of paper went into his briefcase it never came back out again, you know idea what things are. they did not want me to be a disaster chief of staff and baker they felt like had been very impressive in these two campaigns and they convinced reagan and reagan said, yeah, i'll take it. think about that. when is last time you can remember a present taking somebody who'd run two campaigns against him as his number one eight. so it says it shows you the reagan was more pragmatic that people often remember and what baker quoted to us. if not once he quoted a thousand times reagan always said to him is look, mean regular super ideological obviously, but i would rather get 80% of what i want. then go over the cliff line my flag and get nothing. and so while baker took a lot of heat from the let reagan be reagan crowd the conservatives who thought he was kind of a mushy, you know sellout the truth is baker was was operating as reagan wanted to and it led to the other big jobs because he had shown he could do it. well, thank you very much. thank you. so that was you know, truly a fascinating conversation about james baker and you know, thank you for that inside look into washington and the man who won, washington. who ran washington? so with that i would like to invite you to have any closing remarks and then also for the audience so that you know for those who have not read the book as yet the book is available for purchase just outside and the authors will be signing as well. absolutely. thank you. thank you for the great questions. thank you kai you have been so kind with your praise of the book and believe me. he is a master class in biography. so for us, it's a great honor to be with you. thank you great conversation. thank you guys. thank you very much. appreciate it. welcome to anything about kurt vonnegut and other. other interesting things. my name is vincent on aradia. i own a word bookstore in brooklyn and jersey city, new jersey. thank you so much for being here. it's it's beyond important for for everyone to support local businesses, especiay