[ Music ]
>> History and Biography is
sponsored by Wells Fargo.
[ Music ]
>> Hi, there.
I'm Judy Woodruff,
and I am thrilled
to be joining these three
amazing authors today.
You see them on the screen.
They are George Packer,
whose latest book Our Man:
Richard Holbrooke and the
End of the American Century,
and Susan Glasser and Peter
Baker, whose book just
out this fall, The Man Who Ran
Washington: The Life and Times
of James A. Baker III,
two brilliant books
about two complicated
and fascinating men.
They were born a decade apart;
Baker in Houston in 1930,
Holbrooke in Manhattan in 1941,
Baker a Republican trained
as a lawyer, Holbrooke
a Democrat,
foreign service officer,
student of foreign policy.
Their lives took very
different trajectories,
but they both ended
up in Washington
where they became
major power players.
Peter, picking up on that,
I mean, this was a man
with great ambition, and it
was there even before he came
to Washington.
>> Yeah, it was.
Look, he is part of a family
of Houston aristocracy.
His family basically
built modern Houston,
and he was expected
to do great things.
He had a very dominating
father who imparted
on him the legacy
of this family.
Bakers were meant
to do big things.
And one thing they were not
meant to do was politics.
He was told don't do politics.
And that's one of the time
he finally breaks away
from his father's, you know,
domination over his life,
and his world basically
changes at age 40
when he suffers this
great family tragedy,
his first wife dies of cancer.
And it's his friend from
the Houston country club,
country club tennis courts,
who helps pick him up,
a man named George H. W. Bush,
sends the two of them off
on a whole different odyssey
that really I think, you know,
put them in the center
of world events.
>> And, and George, I'm going
to be going back and forth,
because, again, the stories,
the books are so rich,
that we could go in so many
directions, but I want to try
to weave these stories together.
George Packer, Richard
Holbrooke,
I use the word complicated.
That doesn't begin
to do justice to him.
But why did you want
to write about him?
And talk about his
ambition, what drove him,
and frankly the fact of
what the first quarter
of the book is about Vietnam.
>> So, he died in December 2010.
He was actually stricken in
Hillary Clinton's office,
the Secretary of State's office,
which was a fitting finale
and a high drama
characteristic of him.
A few weeks later, his widow
offered me his personal papers.
And I knew Holbrooke a bit.
Not very well.
And I thought, I have a chance
to explore a flamboyant,
mesmerizing, maddening character
whose career covered a half
century from Kennedy to Obama,
from Vietnam to Afghanistan,
through an intimate
look at his diaries
and letters and other papers.
So, I said yes without really
quite knowing why I said yes.
Holbrooke, as soon as I
began to read those letters,
and some of them were, as you
say, Judy, he began his career
in South Vietnam, actually
in the Mekong Delta
where the war was at
its hottest in 1963.
And as soon as I began
reading his letters
from the Mekong Delta
to his first wife,
I knew I had made the right
choice, because he was
such a good writer, he 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 demonic engine
that was there from the
very start, and that got him
into very high places
and led to some triumphs,
and also in the end I think cost
him a great deal; friendships,
relationships, and maybe
his own heart's desire,
which was to rise to
the top of his field.
He never got there, partly
because people found him
to be too difficult and abrasive
a person, and his ambition,
he could never keep it in check.
>> Demonic engine.
What a, what a term.
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 H. W. Bush,
and yet Ronald Reagan chose him
to be his White House
chief of staff.
And he was seen as probably
the most successful person
at that job, of this,
of this modern time.
How did he do it?
>> Yeah, that's a
great question,
because he didn't
really have a background
that would necessarily suggest
he was going to be successful.
He had been a lawyer up until
age [inaudible] and ran,
ended up running George L.
Ford's campaign in 1976,
kind of coming in from nowhere
in the wreckage after Watergate.
There were no Republicans left
of his generation at that point,
because, you know, the previous
group had been, you know,
convicted, sent off to
jail in the Nixon scheme.
Also, it opened up a world
for people like Jim Baker,
Dick Cheney, Brent Scowcroft,
and a whole new generation
of people who kind
of came to the floor.
In his case, I think, you know,
it's an example of, you know,
a president that is Ronald
Reagan seeing what makes sense
for him.
He was an outsider coming
into Washington, but he wanted
to get things done, and so he
didn't pick Abnese [phonetic],
who was his confidante,
Abnese [phonetic],
the organizational skills
to wonder why [inaudible]
didn't understand Washington.
Jim Baker [inaudible].
And the remarkable thing,
as you said, I can't think
of another president who
would pick the guy who ran,
not just one, but two campaigns
against him in '76 and 1980,
as his chief of staff,
but it ended up being,
I think as you said, it ended
up 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?
He went on, of course,
to be treasury secretary,
pulled off this big bipartisan
tax plan, which, as we know,
you know, we haven't seen
anything really the likes
of it since, back
during the Reagan years.
But what was it about
him that, you know,
pulled it all together?
>> Well, Judy, you
know, Jim Baker, right,
this is the question
everybody asked him.
He will give you the
sort of folksy twang,
and he'll tell you,
well, you know,
my family has an added
prior preparation,
prevents poor performance,
but, you know,
we all know pretty well that
Washington is a city full
of ambitious lawyers who do
their homework and stay up late,
and, you know, certainly
it's 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 at night,
in the Reagan White House, until
he returned every phone call
from everyone, every
member of Congress,
often after he knew they had
already gone home, by the way.
This is the pre e
mail, pre internet era.
But, you know, that's
not the secret.
Obviously there are plenty of
people who know their brief
and are extremely well prepared.
Certainly that's
one aspect of it.
But I think Peter and I found
in working on the book that,
you know, in the
end, for Jim Baker,
success was really
the only option.
He's obsessed with winning.
And I think the
hypercompetitiveness is part
of what he had in common
with George H. W. Bush,
I think that's how they
bonded on the tennis courts.
And by the way, there
are varying stories
about how they came to be
teamed up as a doubles team.
But I think one simple answer is
in a picture I was just looking
at the other day of
Jim Baker pointing
to the wall before George H.
W. Bush showed up in Houston,
guess who had been
the singles champion
at the Houston country club
for the past few years,
it was James A. Baker III.
And George H. W. Bush wanted
to be teamed up with a winner.
There's no question about that.
Jim Baker's father exerted
this, and his family in general,
exerted this overweening
power over his early years.
Right? And it shaped
him as a person.
His dad literally beat this kind
of competitiveness into him.
They joked and called him the
warden, but Jim Baker would go
and play tennis matches,
his father was also an
obsessive tennis player,
and when he was done as a
young boy playing his match,
his father would make him stay
on the court and
keep practicing.
And I think that tells
you an awful lot.
You know, Baker and Holbrooke,
both men of overweening
ambition,
both had a certain
insecurity and obsession
with how they were
perceived by others.
But the difference was that
Jim Baker, I think, was,
had this enormous self
discipline, whereas Holbrooke
and [inaudible], you know,
was his sprawling character
who emerges in George's
wonderful and powerful book.
And, you know, Baker just put
that discipline that was beaten
into him, and ironically
politics was his rebellion.
He never could have done
it while his dad was still
around and alive.
And it was only after his
dad passed from the scene
that he rebelled from
the family tradition
and headed north to Washington.
>> George, pick up on that.
I mean, I mean, there's so
much to say, as we keep saying,
about Richard Holbrooke.
I mean, his area
was foreign policy.
It was understanding the world.
People talk about
what a brilliant,
was he another version
of a Henry Kissinger,
how did you see him in his take
on the world as a diplomat?
And how did he combine that
with getting things done
in Washington?
>> So, a few things.
First of all, there's some
overlapping themes here
between Peter and
Susan's book and mine.
One is ambition.
And one is tennis.
Holbrooke played
a ton of tennis.
And I have this feeling
that he rose up through the,
the hierarchy in Saigon,
and then in Washington, by,
by whipping people on the tennis
court, or by being at least
so competitive that
they had to respect him.
First, there was Tony
Lake, Anthony Lake,
who was his close
friend and peer
in the foreign service
in Saigon.
And they remained friends
for about 10 years.
And then their friendship
mysteriously disintegrated
with great consequences for them
and for U.S. foreign
policy I think later
when they were working together
on Bosnia under Bill Clinton.
Then he started playing
tennis against Wes Morlin
and Maxwell Taylor in
Saigon, and eventually got
to Bobby Kennedy in Washington.
And this is how Holbrooke
maneuvered in order
to be invited to the best
dinner tables in Georgetown,
the best of them all
being Averell Harriman's.
He revered this post war
generation of American statesmen
from Averell Harriman
to George Kennan,
Clark Clifford, George Marshall.
He, 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.
He was not born to
the WASP aristocracy.
He was Jewish.
Although he never
talked about it.
And kind of had an outsider's
[inaudible] and even uncouthness
that kept getting in his way
as well as being a way for him
to push other people
aside and get ahead.
And the times changed.
The foreign policy establishment
was falling apart during
Holbrooke's career, in
the wake of Vietnam.
There was no longer
that group of wise men
who simply could be called upon
by presidents to give advice.
So, Holbrooke was forever trying
to get to the top of a mountain.
He loved mountain
climbing stories.
And always just falling
short of the summit.
I have this line about he got
to the highest base camp
imaginable, but he never,
every assault on
the summit failed.
And I think it's partly
because history changed.
He was not Henry Kissinger,
to answer that question, Judy.
He didn't have a
geostrategic mind.
He was more of an operative.
He was a guy who went
in and got things done,
especially in foreign countries.
In Bosnia, for example.
And times change, and
Holbrooke was not cut
out to smoothly ride
his way to the top.
He wasn't self disciplined,
like Baker, as Susan said.
He was undisciplined.
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, where
he desperately wanted
to work closely with him,
to be trusted by him.
Obama never trusted, never
liked him, and in the end,
Holbrooke died, to some degree
of a broken heart, with a sense
of failure at the
end of his life.
>> If I could just add this
quickly on the parallel
between these two men who
are vastly different in a lot
of ways, and yet ambition
being one of the similarities.
But also I think what
made them successful,
I think they both
were relentless,
and they both were instinctive.
>> I've been looking for, I
mean, so many, so many things
to explore, I've been looking
for places where maybe their,
where their lives intersected.
They obviously knew
of each other,
maybe knew each other better.
You can comment on that.
But I was looking at the
period of the Balkans.
I mean, Baker obviously was
there in the administration
at the end of the Cold War.
The Balkans, interesting, I
remember he said something
about we don't have a dog
in that, in that fight.
And then later, that
became the place
of Richard Holbrooke's
greatest triumph.
You know, it's a place, but
it may be a way, George,
to look at, I mean, what
was it about the Balkans
that lent itself to Richard's,
Richard Holbrooke's
strengths, weaknesses?
>> I think that line, we don't
have a dog in that fight,
was crucial, because
it said something
about James Baker's
world view and his view
of American foreign policy
and where we had interest
and where we didn't.
He looked at the Balkans
and just saw a hopeless
ancient Slavic struggle
that we could never understand
and had no business
getting involved in.
He made a very cursory effort to
try to negotiate with Milosevic
and other Balkan leaders at
the beginning of the war.
He botched it.
The war happened anyway.
Bill Clinton inherited it at
a terrible stage in Bosnia.
It's not Baker's finest
hour, and it shows something
about the limits of
his cold eyed realism,
because I think the difference
is Holbrooke had a passionate
sense that America had to
be involved in the Bosnias
of the world, that if we let
that country bleed, we would,
it would eventually
become our problem,
it would possibly rupture
the Trans Atlantic alliance.
It was not of no consequence.
We actually did have
a dog in that fight.
And once Holbrooke
committed himself to that,
and he did it in, you know,
in a way that showed he really
did care about other countries
and people in places whose
names we can't pronounce
who are suffering in
Civil War and as refugees
and in floods and famines.
This was something
that characterized him
throughout his career.
He had a passion Nate
humanitarian streak.
And that was activated by
the suffering in the Balkans,
as was his, you know, very sort
of post war Perryman [phonetic],
Atchison [phonetic],
Kennan [phonetic] sense
that America had to leave.
And so he was not going to stop
until he had a deal, a date.
And then that relentlessness
that Peter mentioned is exactly
what Bosnia brought out in him.
The same qualities did
not work in other places.
But in Bosnia,
all of Holbrooke's
strengths came together,
and he achieved what is
his claim to history,
which is the Dayton
Peace Accords.
>> And, and Susan, listening,
listening to you, I mean,
I'm thinking about how Baker
looked back on the Balkans
at the end of the
[inaudible], and another period,
of course the Iraq, the
first Iraq war, 1990,
the first Gulf War, where
in writing the book,
he wanted to take out
references to, there was a line
in there about, you know, maybe
we should have stayed longer.
We could have done something
about Saddam Hussein.
He didn't want that in there,
clearly suggesting he felt
maybe mistakes were made.
>> Well, look, I think Jim Baker
was a pragmatist and a realist
and he came by that
through his own experience.
He was not a tilter
at windmills.
He was not all about
imposing a freedom agenda
or democracy agenda
on the world.
You know, Baker was
essentially very calculating
about where he saw
a deal was possible,
then he was going to jump on it.
Where he didn't see one, he was
going to be pretty disciplined.
For example, at the beginning
of the Bush presidency
when he became secretary of
state, he wasn't interested
at all in the Middle East.
His aids couldn't get him
to pay attention to it
because there was no deal there.
And he understood he had
to focus on his priorities.
It's part of why some
of the career diplomats
were suspicious of him.
Right? He was going to have
his own very political list
of what he thought
he could accomplish.
And he wasn't going
to focus on the rest.
So, he was looking for the deal.
And I think that that is the key
to understanding his foreign
policy world view more
than even a kind of either
mushy centrism or an idea
that he was a rigid
kind of isolationist.
He wasn't.
He was very much willing
to assert American
power in the world.
But nobody was quite
sure what the [inaudible]
to that new power would
be as the Soviet Union.
You know, the world was
falling apart in 1989 to 1991.
>> And George, talk a little bit
about Holbrooke's view of all
that and how he maneuvered,
and you, I mean,
you talked about the Balkans,
but how did he maneuver in the,
in the aftermath, in
this post Cold War era?
>> I think Holbrooke 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.
Holbrooke, in a weird way,
never showed much interest
in the greatest foreign
policy issue of his life,
which was the Cold War.
He, I think he found the Soviet
Union maybe just too abstract,
too static, not enough
was happening,
nuclear arms talks was something
that Holbrooke would never
have gotten interested in.
His intensity and attention
were always directed toward
particular countries
where there was conflict,
and where there was suffering.
Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan.
Once the Cold War ended, I think
Holbrooke saw the opportunity
for Democrats to reenter
the foreign policy arena.
He had been scarred by
Vietnam, as was every Democrat
of his generation, both by
having been involved in the war
and by being tarred as doves
for thinking that we needed
to get out, which was the
position he ended up in.
So, he was always looking
over his right shoulder,
worried about an
attack from the hawks.
Once the Cold War ended, in 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, in East Timor, in
Congo, not with military power,
but certainly as a kind
of all purpose negotiator,
the horn of Africa.
There were all these small
wars going on in the 90s
as countries were
disintegrating,
and Holbrooke seemed to find
them all sort of irresistible.
So, in a way, Baker is more,
I think of a Kissinger figure
who had a sort of large view of
what was possible, what was not,
and of foreign policy
as geopolitics,
whereas Holbrooke was more of,
yeah, of an, of an operative
who would go in and try to
solve a particular problem.
I think in the post Cold War
era, he was both at his best
and also maybe at his most
excessive and got himself into,
into some troubles that he had
a hard time getting out of.
>> Peter, I'd like you
to pick up on that.
I mean, I looked, there was one
line I wrote 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 I'm quoting, he
was, after all, a fixer.
No matter how much
he tried to break
out of that straight jacket.
But a fixer who shaped
world events.
I mean, you know, George is
saying James Baker, you know,
was, in some respects,
more like Henry Kissinger,
but there was a difference.
>> Well, there's a difference.
That's right.
I think Baker is like
Kissinger in the sense
that they took on
the big things.
Right? Baker was unsentimental.
He didn't, he wasn't moved
by pictures of suffering.
He would never have thought
East Timor was worth his time.
He was very, very
calculating in that sense.
But he was not like Kissinger
in the sense he didn't have
a great world strategy,
a world geopolitical
view of things.
He did not, he would not
have gotten into a discussion
with you about the
Treaty of Westphalia.
He was, in the end, a
fixer, a lawyer who knew how
to negotiate, a political, you
know, operative who knew how
to get legislation through,
a campaign leader who could,
you know, negotiate the
base with the other team.
And the great downfall
of his life,
the thing that crushed
him the most,
was when he had been
secretary of state for three
and a half years,
he had negotiated the
Madrid peace talks,
and brought the coalition
together for the Gulf War, and,
and managed the unification of
Germany, and then his friend,
George Bush, calls him
back to the White House.
He's about to lose reelection.
He needs Baker to come back
and once again resume
that role of a fixer.
And this was just a
crushing blow for Baker.
He couldn't, he couldn't
stand the idea
that suddenly he was
worrying about bunting
and balloons again instead of
the great issues of the day.
In fact, through the fall,
as he was, once again,
at the White House, managing a
losing campaign, his own staff,
you know, felt like he
wasn't really in it.
They confronted him, said,
why aren't you doing anything?
They called his wife and said,
you've got to get on his case.
Even Barbara Bush was convinced
that Baker wasn't really
all in for her husband.
In fact, thought that he
was trying to avoid blame
for the coming loss being
heaped on his shoulders,
and it caused this rift between
Baker and the Bush family
that took years to
kind of really resolve.
And so, yeah, you're right,
the fixer was the thing
he wanted to transcend.
And in the end, is the thing
that he couldn't escape.
>> No, I was, I was
covering Washington then.
I remember felt like we waited
around for months for Baker
to get into the campaign.
The problems, the
problems they were having.
George, we've talked about
the ambition of these two men
and Holbrooke's case, you
know, larger than life pluses,
larger than life flaws.
What was it about him that
in the end you think kept him
from realizing, I mean, he
really wanted to be secretary
of state, you mentioned,
you know, what happened
between him and President Obama.
What was it about him?
>> Well, in 1996, he had just
achieved his greatest triumph,
which was the Dayton
Peace Talks,
and Bill Clinton was
reelected and had to decide
who would replace
Warren Christopher
as his secretary of state.
And it came down to
Richard Holbrooke
and Madeleine Albright.
And Clinton was actually
leaning toward Holbrooke
because he said he's
brilliant, he has a great mind,
he knows more, he's relentless.
Hillary Clinton wanted
her husband
to pick the first female
secretary of state,
which weighed decisively.
But in the end, Clinton
said to Al Gore,
I don't think Holbrooke
has the self awareness
to keep [inaudible]
from becoming toxic.
That was Clinton's
very shrewd analysis
of Holbrooke's character.
Holbrooke understood the person
across the table brilliantly,
whether it was Slobodan
Milosevic or Bill Clinton.
He did not know himself
very well.
He didn't, he couldn't
see himself.
He couldn't laugh at himself.
He couldn't see himself
as others were seeing him.
There was a kind of lifelong
blindness to his own flaws
and his own character that
I think was a fatal flaw.
And it meant he could negotiate.
But when there was an obstacle
that laid within himself,
he didn't know how
to get around it,
and that was what undid his
relationship with Barack Obama.
Holbrooke was driving Obama
crazy with his lecturing
and flattering and
talking about Vietnam
and like this ancient
mariner coming
to grab the young
president by the lapels
and say you must listen to
me, I've been there, I know.
And Obama couldn't stand it.
So, and Holbrooke did not
know why none of this was,
none of his charms and
his talents were working
with this sterling
young president
who he desperately
wanted to impress.
And that was the reason why
I think he never got that job
of his heart's desire,
secretary of state.
And the reason was himself.
I actually wanted to ask Susan
and Peter one question,
if I can.
How do you think so, Holbrooke's
boss, Warren Christopher,
became the counterpart
to James Baker
in Bush v. Gore, and was beaten.
And I've always felt that
showed James Baker was a kind
of blue eyed killer.
No one could beat
him when it came
down to that kind of contest.
How do you think Richard
Holbrooke would have done going
up against James Baker
on the floor to recount?
Obviously he's not a
political operative.
He's not a campaign manager.
He's not a lawyer.
But he is a brilliant
negotiator.
How do you think Holbrooke
would have done against Baker?
>> You know, George,
that's an awesome question.
I have to say, one of the
interesting things going back
to that 2000 recount, it was
many Democrats who said to me
that we knew that Al Gore
was toast as soon as we heard
that Jim Baker had
been involved.
So, I think that, you know,
people were well aware,
even at the time, even before
the recount, of the differences
between those two men.
But here's the thing.
One of Christopher's great
mistakes actually was sitting
down, and we tell the story
in the book of the two
of them sitting down for
this first meeting, you know,
this dramatic moment that
election is undecided,
what's going to happen
in Florida,
Christopher's blocked off
a whole amount of time
to sit there, and thinks
they're going to roll up their,
you know, pinstripe
suit, shirt sleeves,
and get down to business
of negotiating.
Jim Baker wasn't
there to negotiate.
He was there to win.
And I don't think,
you know, that,
that fundamentally I think
is where his experience
as a corporate lawyer
for decades came into it.
So, I think there would
have been an asymmetry there
between Holbrooke and Baker that
did come from his understanding
of what a high stakes
legal venture this was.
He understood he wanted to
get out of the Florida courts.
And he had a very,
again, calculated
and disciplined sense
of what it took.
And he wasn't going to jawbone.
He had no interest, in fact,
in sitting there and figuring
out what was in the mind of
Al Gore or Warren Christopher.
So, that might have made it
hard for Holbrooke to negotiate
in this particular situation.
And you also have to come
back to do you have the wasta
and the respect to
command your own team?
And I think that was one of
Baker's hidden assets, always,
in dealing with Bush,
certainly those two,
Peter and I have been
having a debate about this,
were they the closest secretary
of state and president ever?
Or were they the closest and
friendliest secretary of state
and president since
Madison and Jefferson?
He thinks ever.
I'm not for sure
because I'm not an expert
on Madison and Jefferson.
But my point being
>> This is what goes on
at your dinner table, huh?
>> I know that Jim Baker
would have appreciated Richard
Holbrooke as a worthy
adversary and a debate partner.
That's for sure.
He recognizes excellence.
And by the way, at a very sexist
time, you know, women, men,
he likes to play tennis
against a good player.
You know? And he would
have known Holbrooke
for a good player.
>> Yeah, but it's a great
thought experiment to think
about what, what would it,
what would it have been,
Baker versus, versus Holbrooke.
Peter, pick up on, on George's,
I mean, let me ask you,
he talked about, in the end,
Richard Holbrooke really
didn't know himself.
Does Jim Baker know himself?
>> That's a great question.
You know, he is not
a reflective person.
He is not an introspective guy.
In going through his [inaudible]
I love doing this book,
we love doing this book
because he was open with us.
We have a, we have a live
subject, and George didn't.
Right? So, we got the chance
to ask him all these questions.
And the truth is, he's not
somebody who is going to open
up his psychological profile
to you and really, you know,
expose himself in that way.
He is super disciplined,
even to this day.
But he did give us
access to his papers.
And his papers aren't, again,
like Holbrooke's letters I think
from Vietnam, they weren't
expressive in that way.
But there were little
clues here or there.
And one of them I thought that
was just very human was this,
you know, tragedy
we mentioned earlier
where his first wife
dies of cancer.
And he gave us a letter that
has never been published before.
>> I saw that was.
That was stunning.
>> Yes, he writes with
friend George Bush.
His friend George Bush is going
to move from the House to run
for Senate, and he's
trying to get Baker
to run for his House seat.
Baker writes him a letter,
explaining why he's not
going to make the campaign.
He says to his friend,
George, that the reason why is
because his wife is dying,
and even she doesn't know it.
The doctors haven't told him.
This is back, of course,
in the era where maybe
that was considered to be okay,
where the husband was
told and the wife wasn't.
And he said to his friend
>> Even at the time
it wasn't [inaudible].
>> Even at the time [inaudible].
But he says to his
friend, I can't do it
because my wife is dying.
I haven't told anybody.
I haven't told her.
I haven't told my kids.
I haven't told my mother.
The one person he
tells is George Bush.
That is a friendship
that is, in fact,
powerful and transformative.
And that's human.
Right? So, that, to have him
give us that letter, I think,
showed us inside a little
bit, in a way we hadn't.
And he also, by the way,
gave us another letter.
His wife, his dying wife Mary
Stewart, writes him a letter,
because, in fact, she does know
she's dying, and she hides it
in the house to be given
to him after he dies.
And when he hands us this
letter 50 years later,
he's crying even to this day.
And so it's a very human story.
It's a very powerful story.
He's not introspective.
He's not psychologically open
the way Holbrooke kind of was.
I think George's character study
of Holbrooke is so powerful,
so rich, so three dimensional.
Baker is not that
kind of a person.
But he is a human person.
I thought that was
one of the things
that really made this
book a lot of [inaudible].
>> My, my book, to be able
to do my book depended
on Holbrooke not being alive.
You have all the advantages
of being able to talk
to James Baker [inaudible]
of not having Richard Holbrooke
looking over my shoulder.
And, in fact, he wouldn't have
given me his papers at all.
And all the people who talked
to me didn't have to worry
about what he would
say once he found
out what they had said to me.
So, for me, this had to
be the story of a man
who had come and gone.
And that was how I, that
was how I was able to write
as honestly as I wanted to.
>> Well, and that's a real,
that's an important distinction.
I mean, both Holbrooke and
Baker, to bring it back
to this question, were extremely
astute in different ways
at managing their images,
both their critics would say
that that was one of their great
skills was actually talking
to reporters and people
like us, and, you know,
that they had an extreme
sensitivity toward their
own image.
Judy, you pointed out one
of the great sources for us
in writing this book
actually was looking
at what Baker [inaudible]
deleted from his memoirs
of his state department years
and his time in public life,
because it's often the
stage managing of your image
and the parts that they don't
want to tell you that are
as revealing as anything else,
you know, but I would say that,
you know, Jim Baker,
he's not a diarist.
He's not, you know, keeping
his personal historian
around to document things.
And we did have the
benefit of talking
to his subject late in life.
He's just turned 90 this year.
He's written two
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 self awareness
by the time you're 90.
And, you know, if you
can talk about how you,
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 to
sign up for the fraternity
with undergraduates because
that was a fraternity his father
thought a member of their
family should be in.
You know, he was willing to get
surprisingly personal in a way
that I think helped
us understand
that it's not just a resume that
you're talking to, and that,
you know, you have to look
at those personal qualities
to understand what made
him able to tackle a series
of Washington's hardest
jobs in a way
that actually nobody else has
done in such an expressed period
of time in the modern era.
>> I want to finally ask
you all about, you know,
today's Washington, and how, I
mean, I'm interested, George,
to know how you think Holbrooke
would be able to function
in a Washington of
today, party out of power.
But what would it be like?
The city has changed.
And Peter, you know, Jim
Baker, what does he think
of what's going on now?
And we know this, this interview
will be released in September.
So, time will pass from the,
you know, another month or so.
But George, what about that?
>> I think he would
have been at sea.
He was shaped, as I've
said, by the post war.
His DNA were the architects
of the post war world.
They were the influences that
he never stopped comparing
himself to.
And today, first of all, Trump's
Washington would be just a mind
bogglingly 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 can't think of a single
move Trump has made that,
that Holbrooke would
have agreed with.
And, and vice versa.
So, he would have been writing
columns for the Washington Post.
He would have been denouncing
the isolationism, America first.
He would have been talking
about the importance
of the Trans Atlantic alliance
and NATO and our allies in Asia.
And during the pandemic, I think
he would have been a brilliant
organizer of other countries
to find a cooperative response.
That was the kind of
thing he excelled at.
He put AIDS, HIV AIDS
as an issue before the
UN Security Council,
so he understood that a
disease could be a threat
to our national security.
But I think in a way he
would have been superannuated
and out to sea.
He would not have
known how to function.
Social media would have brought
out all his worst qualities,
I think, and none of his best.
He wouldn't, you know, the
schmoozing and seducing
of reporters, mental seducing,
I should say, of reporters,
that he excelled at, isn't
something that is so easily done
and matters so much anymore.
So, I think it would have
been an alien world for him.
And he would have felt as
if the golden age was gone.
>> And Peter, James
Baker is a Republican.
He's watching closely
what's going on.
>> Yeah, I think he finds
the Trump world maddening.
I think it is the antithesis
of everything that he believed
about governance and politics.
Trump is the anti Baker.
Trump is tearing down basically
both the architecture of world,
you know, affairs, and
the Republican party
that Baker spent a
lifetime building up.
I found in doing the
research one night,
I was actually covering
the impeachment trial
of President Trump,
and I was going
through some Baker files one
night after, after deadline,
and I found this memo o that
I hadn't noticed before,
and it was a memo that Baker
had written into the file,
because Baker kept
the integrity,
at least the appearance of
ethical behavior meant so much
to him that he kept a
file of all the instances
where people asked him
to do things he thought
were crossing a line.
So, he would keep
a record showing
that he would not do that.
And one of the memos he
had in there was a memo
about four Republican
Congressmen coming
to George Bush at the end
of the 1992 campaign
saying, hey, you're losing.
You need to ask Britain,
and you need to ask Russia
for help understanding
about Bill Clinton's overseas
activities when he was young.
And Baker and Bush said
no, that crossed the line.
We do not ask foreign powers for
help in our domestic elections.
The name of that memo was,
without looking at it,
I was so struck by it, right,
because it's such a contrast
to what we were covering
during the day.
>> You know, look, I
think Peter's point,
Judy, is really well taken.
You know, Jim Baker was
the unTrump in many ways,
and yet he could
not disavow him.
I sat down with him a few
days before the 2016 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 doesn't
believe anything that I believe
when it comes to foreign policy.
He's saying crazy things.
In fact, he told me that he
thought Donald Trump was nuts.
And yet he couldn't
bring himself
to reject the party's nominee.
Jim Baker came out of his
time in Washington convinced
that the only way to wield
power is from the inside.
And he's just not a map
who thinks there's any
efficacy whatsoever in being
in the outside, howling,
and complaining, you know,
that no one will
take you seriously.
And, you know, this
is the struggle
of the Republican
party under Trump.
And it's really been I think
a window into the party's soul
to watch Jim Baker wrestle
with Donald Trump, who,
on a personal level, is
the exact opposite of him.
And yet Baker's never
brought himself
to publicly denounce Trump,
and to disavow the turn
in the Republican party that
he spent his whole life working
in a different direction.
>> Fascinating.
Just, it's all fascinating,
endlessly fascinating,
these two men who clearly
helped shape Washington
with such enduring,
enduring legacies.
The books could not be
more important right now.
And I want to, again, thank
these amazing authors;
George Packer, author of
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke
and the End of the American
Century; and Susan Glasser
and Peter Baker, The Man Who Ran
Washington: The Life and Times
of James A. Baker III.
Thank you all three for just
an extraordinary conversation.
>> Thanks to you, Judy.
>> Thanks, Judy.
>> Thanks so much, Judy.
[ Music ]