James Baker

Born April 28, 1930

Houston, Texas

U.S. secretary of state during the Persian Gulf War

"I remain unpersuaded that anything we might have done, short of actually moving armed forces to the region, would have deterred Iraq's invasion of Kuwait."

James Baker quoted in The Politics of Diplomacy.

As U.S. secretary of state during the Persian Gulf crisis, James Baker played an important role in building the international military coalition made up of more than thirty-five countries that eventually forced Iraq out of Kuwait. In addition, he was a key advisor to President George H. W. Bush (see entry) on diplomatic and military strategy throughout the months leading up to the war.

Builds thriving career in law

James Addison Baker III was born April 28, 1930, in Houston, Texas. He was the son of James A. Baker, a banker and attorney, and Bonner (Means) Baker. Raised in an environment of wealth and privilege, Baker attended some of the country's finest private schools. In 1948 he enrolled at Princeton University in New Jersey, and four years later he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in hand. From there he entered the U.S. Marine Corps, where he fulfilled two years of active duty as a lieutenant. After leaving the marines, Baker studied law at the University of Texas in Austin. He graduated with honors in 1957 and quickly secured employment with one of Houston's most prestigious law firms.

Baker worked in corporate law for the next eighteen years, building considerable personal wealth. He and his wife Mary (McHenry) Baker, who were married in 1953, also started a family during this period. They eventually had four sons before she died of cancer in 1970. Baker was remarried three years later to Susan Garrett Winston, who had two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage. In 1977 they had a daughter together.

Baker's thriving career as an attorney kept him very busy, but he still found time to become actively involved in state politics for the Republican Party. He developed a particularly close relationship with George H. W. Bush, who served Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives during the mid-1960s. When Bush decided to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1970, he asked Baker to help run his campaign. Baker agreed, but his efforts came to naught as Bush was defeated.

Moves into world of politics

Despite the disappointment of Bush's defeat in the 1970 elections, Baker found that he enjoyed the excitement of political campaigns. He also was keenly interested in playing a role in shaping the future course of American public policy. As a result, he became an important advisor in the successful 1972 reelection campaign of Republican President Richard Nixon.

In 1975 Baker left his law career behind to accept a job as undersecretary of commerce in the administration of President Gerald R. Ford. The following year, he worked on Ford's election campaign, only to see Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter claim victory. Baker returned to Texas, and in 1978 he ran for the office of state attorney general. Baker's bid for the job, the only time that he ever ran for public office himself, fell short, as he was soundly defeated.

In 1979 Baker's old friend George Bush asked him to manage his upcoming campaign for the Republican Party's 1980 presidential nomination. Bush and Baker mounted a campaign that attracted considerable support from Republican voters, but former California Governor Ronald Reagan eventually clinched the nomination. Once Reagan secured the nomination, he asked Bush to be the Republican Party candidate for vice president. When Bush agreed, Baker became an important advisor to the Reagan-Bush ticket.

In January 1981 Baker became Reagan's first chief of staff. Over the next four years, Baker supervised the daily operations of the White House and became one of Reagan's most trusted advisors. Baker also solidified his national reputation as a smart and well-organized political mind during this period. In January 1985 Reagan began a second term as president. At this time, Baker became the U.S. secretary of the treasury, a position he held until August 1988.

In August 1988 Baker resigned from the Reagan cabinet in order to take the helm of Vice President Bush's presidential campaign. In November 1988 Bush defeated Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis to become the forty-first president of the United States. He subsequently nominated Baker to be secretary of state in his administration. The nomination of Baker was quickly approved by the U.S. Senate, and in January 1989 Baker assumed the duties of secretary of state. For the next four years, Baker was the United States' leading diplomat and chief advisor to the president on foreign affairs.

One of the biggest challenges that confronted Baker during his tenure as Bush's secretary of state was the Persian Gulf War. In August 1990 the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq, a powerful country led by a brutal dictator named Saddam Hussein (see entry), staged a surprise invasion of neighboring Kuwait. Hussein argued that Iraq had a historical claim to Kuwait's territory. He also wanted to control Kuwait's oil reserves and to gain access to Kuwait's port on the Persian Gulf. The United States and many other countries expressed outrage about Iraq's attack and demanded that Hussein give up his claim on Kuwait. When he refused, the United States organized a military coalition against Iraq that eventually grew to include five hundred thousand U.S. troops and two hundred thousand soldiers from other nations.

Secretary of State Baker played a major role in lining up the support of other nations. In addition, his diplomatic efforts helped pave the way for a tough United Nations resolution approving the use of military force to free Kuwait from Iraq's army. This resolution, passed in November 1990, established a deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait or face attack by the U.S.-led forces. When Iraq failed to withdraw its troops from Kuwait by the deadline, the coalition forces began a campaign of air strikes against Iraqi troops and military positions. These air strikes, known as Operation Desert Storm, battered Iraqi military targets for thirty-eight days. The United States then led a massive ground offensive against Iraqi positions in Kuwait and southern Iraq on February 24, 1991. Within one hundred hours, Hussein's forces were chased out of Kuwait and sent fleeing deep into Iraq.

Careful diplomacy during Persian Gulf crisis

Looking back on the Gulf War, Baker has admitted that the Bush administration may not have paid enough attention to Hussein's threats to attack Kuwait. "With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to argue that we should have recognized earlier that we weren't going to moderate Saddam's behavior, and shifted our policy approach sooner and to a greater degree than we did," he wrote in The Politics of Diplomacy. He continued:

At the least, we should have given Iraqi policy a more prominent place on our radar screen at an earlier date. And while I wish we'd focused more attention on Iraq earlier, given what happened, I remain unpersuaded that anything we might have done, short of actually moving armed forces to the region, would have deterred Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, Baker believes that the Bush administration handled the crisis with great skill. For example, he claims that the U.S.-supported January 15 deadline for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait convinced many nations that the United States was willing to let Hussein avoid a military clash.

[The deadline] helped us bring other nations into the coalition because it was a ... reasonable period of time and it helped us particularly with domestic political opinion in the United States. Which was at the beginning of all this very, very much opposed to the idea of going to war in the Persian Gulf.

Baker also points out that he gave Iraq one last warning of the danger it was in when he met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz (see entry) on January 9, 1991, six days before the UN deadline. "During the course of the meeting, I made an effort to point out to him that as President Bush's letter to Saddam Hussein pointed out, we were deadly serious about this, that there was no give in opposition," he told the PBS program "Frontline." He went on to say:

This was now a matter of the credibility of the United Nations, it was a matter of a resolution supported by the overwhelming majority of the international community. [If Iraq did not withdraw from Kuwait] overwhelmingly superior force would be used against them.... [Aziz] didn't buy it. He said something like—you haven't fought in the desert before. Your Arab allies will turn and run, they will not fight their brothers. You will be surprised at the strength and the determination and the force and the courage of the Iraqi military. Things like that. And it was not a particularly productive debate. I think as it turned out our assessments of what our overwhelmingly superior military forces could do were correct.

Baker remains proud of the part the United States played in forcing Iraq out of Kuwait. As he stated in his "Frontline" interview:

It was the right thing to do and it was the right thing to do morally, politically, and in the national interest. It was what the United States should do as leader of the free world. The diplomatic and political and military decisions that had been made leading up to it had been handled in the right way.... I think that when people look back at this they will see it as a textbook example of the way in which the world community can react to unprovoked aggression in a case where, particularly the United States is willing to offer the leadership required to do so.

Baker spent the last six months of Bush's term in office as the president's chief of staff. In January 1993 Bill Clinton took the presidential oath of office and Baker returned home to Texas. He spent the remainder of the decade dividing his time between his legal practice and political activism on behalf of the Republican Party. In 2000 Baker was asked by Republican nominee George W. Bush (see entry), son of Baker's lifelong friend George H. W. Bush, to help monitor the disputed results of the U.S. presidential election. Six weeks after the election was held, Bush was finally declared the winner. Two years later, Baker publicly declared his support for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and remove Hussein from power.

Baker has received numerous prestigious honors for his years of public service over the years. In 1991 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest award for civilians (people not in the military). Other awards that Baker has received over the years include Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award, American Institute for Public Service's Jefferson Award, Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government Award, George F. Kennan Award, and the Department of State's Distinguished Service Award.

Where to Learn More

Baker, James. The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992. New York: Putnam, 1995.

"James Addison Baker, III." In Encyclopedia of World Biography, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2003.

"Interview with James Baker." Frontline: The Gulf War, available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/baker/1.html (accessed on March 24, 2004).