James A. Baker III
Former Secretary of State
"Making History: A View From Inside the White House"
Janurary 28, 2000

James Baker: Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Philip, for an overly generous introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for welcoming me here to the University of Virginia.

Philip, in his introduction, said, "You all know the name" James Baker, Jim Baker. When you’re privileged enough to hold high-level positions in this wonderful country of ours that I was privileged to hold, you get to be pretty well known by people here. And not just here, as a matter of fact. When you’re secretary of state you get a lot of face time on TV, so people even across the water know you. And there used to be a time when I could walk down almost any airport concourse in the country, and people would come up to me, and they would either congratulate me or cuss me out, depending upon the job they thought I was doing. When you’re out of power for seven years, as is the case with me now, it doesn’t happen quite as much. There's still a recognition factor. They recognize the face, but they don't have any idea really who it is. You can always tell when that recognition factor kicks in, because after, if they’re two people walking past you, after they get by, they start whispering and pointing and sort of asking each other who it is.

Occasionally, though, someone will recognize me. They’ll put it all together. And the other day, I was walking down an airport concourse somewhere and this guy comes up to me. He says, "I know you." He really was having difficulty. "I know you," he said. He stuck his finger right in my face. He said, "You’re, you’re... You’re Jim Baker." Huh hah! I swelled up with pride because that doesn’t happen much anymore. And I looked at this guy and I said, "Indeed sir. I am Jim Baker." He never batted an eyelash. He said, "I knew it!" he said. "And how's Tammy Faye?" So... So I don't care how effective you are, Philip, as a public servant, or for how long, you just have to remember that the day will come when people will ask you that question or a similar question.

I’m delighted to be here at the University of Virginia. This is a university, of course, that has supported public service to this country for the better part of two centuries. And I'm really grateful to have the chance to come here and to visit with you a little bit about some of my experiences in public service.

Thanks to Philip, Philip Zelikow, who extended the invitation to me and arranged this event. I'm here, and I'm grateful to be here and happy to be here. Because Philip properly didn’t mention this in his introduction of me, but Philip Zelikow, and most of you probably know this, served with great distinction on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. And this Miller Center of yours here is fast becoming the premier institution for the study of the American presidency under the leadership of Philip Zelikow, and you’re mighty fortunate to have Philip here at the University of Virginia.

Now, I want to talk to you a little bit today about the institution of the presidency. This is the twenty-fifth anniversary at the Center. You're building your programs around that institution. And then I'll be glad to answer any questions that you might have. Answer them or duck them, as the case may be.

I’m reminded though... So we’ve got to save enough time for Q&A, but I'm reminded in that regard, of the, of the fellow that never gave a speech that lasted for less than two hours. And one day he’s up there blowing on and on and the audience is getting a little restless. And somebody in the front row gets up and starts walking out of the hall. And the speaker gets up and says, "Hey, wait a minute. Where are you going? I haven’t finished." This fellow looks back at him and he said, "Well," he said, "I'm going to get a haircut." And the speaker said, "You’re going to get a haircut? Why in the world didn’t you do that before we started?" This fellow says, "Sir, before you started speaking I didn't need a haircut." So, I’m going to be shorter, I’m going to be shorter than that.

This year we're going to choose a new president. Most everybody here knows my bias and prejudice, and I'll acknowledge that right up front. But this is supposed to be a nonpartisan presentation, and whoever becomes president of the United States is going to have to figure out what that office means and how to make the White House work.

Since I got out seven years ago, I've talked a lot about my experience as a secretary of state. I’ve talked a lot about my experience as secretary of the treasury and about running presidential campaigns. But today, I want to visit with you about my experience as White House chief of staff. I was chief of staff, as Philip said in his introduction, for two presidents, so I’ve had the opportunity to watch the institution of the presidency from some pretty good vantage points.

The media, the press covers the presidents so much and to such an extent that we really sort of magnify them into something a little larger than life. For instance, you might hear someone say Clinton neglected this, or Bush wanted that, even though they’re actually talking about the actions of a government that employs more than one million people. A president, of course, is just one person who doesn't have any more hours in his day than any of you have in yours. There are a dozen executive departments, many foreign and state governments, more than 500 members of Congress, and thousands of reporters who want some part of that president’s time and who want that president’s attention.

The presidency, of course, is an institution and not just a person. But it is a very unique institution. It is one that is fixed by our Constitution. It's fixed by our laws. It’s fixed by the budget, and it’s fixed by, of course, physical space and places like the Old and New Executive Office Buildings and the White House itself.

But this is an enduring institution. It has endured throughout the period of our existence as a nation, and it is regularly reinvented. To an incoming administration it almost feels as though the institution is being reinvented from scratch. When Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981, we had a young administrator working for us on the transition team and in the transition office who later became the assistant to the president for administration of the White House, and he led a team into what really appeared to be a ghost town. At noon on January 20, 1981, we walked into empty rooms with empty desks, empty files, and empty in-boxes. And like many other administrations before us, we then set about the task of creating our own version of the White House with a new organization chart and a new chain of command. It had different procedures. It had different jobs. It had different ways of doing business. And, by the way, most White Houses do vary one from another in the way they go about doing business.

The only institutional memory back on that day was what we could learn by talking to people who had been there before. Either political people who’d been there before and were out of power, or the very few career employees of the executive office of the president who stay on from administration to administration.

A new president of course needs good help. And that's why, when it comes to making the White House work, no appointment is any more important I don’t think. And maybe I'm biased here, but I don't think any appointment is any more important than who the president picks as his White House chief of staff. President Reagan, right after the election in November of 1980, asked me to serve in that capacity. That choice was a great surprise to many people, most of all myself. I’d had no idea that he was going to ask me to be his chief of staff. After all, in 1976 I had assisted President Gerald Ford in taking the nomination away from Governor Reagan. And in 1980 I had worked against him in the primaries for my good friend of 35 or 40 years now, but not quite as long then, George Bush, and had managed the Bush campaign for president in 1980. Of course, Bush had ended up as Governor Reagan’s vice presidential nominee, and I did help Governor Reagan during the general election campaign, especially in preparing for the debates. But I was still very, very far from being considered to be a Reagan person or a Reagan man.

Most of the experts had predicted that Ed Meese would be President Reagan’s chief of staff, and that was a pretty good guess because he had been his chief of staff in California. So you ask, why me? And I'm not sure I can answer that, except to say that I think that President Reagan wanted someone who understood Washington and knew how Washington worked. And I had, as Philip mentioned, I think, I had run President Ford's campaign in 1976 against Jimmy Carter. And I had worked very closely with the Ford White House, so I knew how the White House worked, and I knew how Washington worked. I think a couple of his closest advisors, including his wife, Nancy, agreed with that, and I have to say I think it really shows the broad-gauged nature of President Reagan and the rest of them there that were his close-in people that they were sufficiently self-confident and broad-gauged enough to trust an outsider in a vital role. They, they put performance ahead of prior political loyalty.

The first thing I did was to work out a division of responsibilities with the Californians, Ed Meese and Michael Deaver. My responsibilities were not very glamorous actually. They did include some of the fundamental things that make a presidency work -- the flow of paper to and from the president, the president’s schedule, and dealings with the press and with the Congress. I went about hiring the most talented people that I could for my own immediate office. Also, first thing I did was go around and visit with most of the former White House chiefs of staff, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. I took a lot of notes of their advice. And during the time that I was chief of staff, I tried to follow what I learned.

And I want to summarize today a few of the points that were made to me and a few of the things that I learned while I was on the job. First things first. The White House chief of staff must never, never, never, never forget that he is a staffer, not a principal. The White House chief of staff is oftentimes the second most powerful person in the United States, because you can influence where a President goes, what he does, who he sees, what he reads, what issues he decides, what he says, and what issues he does not decide. But you are not a principal. Nobody elected you to anything. That word principal, when I use it in this context means the person at the top who has the formal responsibility for making the decisions. It may be an elected official like the president elected by the American people, or it may be a cabinet secretary appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. When I was secretary of state, I was a principal. When I was secretary of the treasury, I was a principal. When I was White House chief of staff, I was probably more powerful than in either of those two jobs, but I was a staffer. You may be the most, second most powerful person in Washington, but you're still staff. And that means that the chief of staff should not be seen or heard publicly very much.

Having said that, one main job, I think, of the chief of staff is to spend a lot of time with the press, so that the press gets the administration's view of the issues and what the administration is trying to accomplish. But you need to spend that time on background and not on the record. And, by the way, I define backgrounding as trying to drive the president's agenda, as opposed to leaking which is trying to drive a personal agenda or a policy position in a case where the president has not yet decided among various options.

Now let me say that it's very, very easy to get arrogant when you're in the White House. And a lot of people do, and the minute they do, they get in trouble. One thing, I think, it’s always good to remember as a rule of thumb is that the people who wouldn't return your telephone calls before you took that job there in the White House are not going to return them after you go home. And if you remember that, I think you can avoid the temptation to become arrogant. You have tremendous power because you're right there with the president all the time, meeting alone with him any time you want. He comes to you oftentimes and bounces ideas off of you. So, those things make it all the more important to remember that you're just staff. A few chiefs of staff have not remembered that, and in each case their tenures in office ended rather unhappily.

Now that brings me to another guide with respect to the job of chief of staff. And that is that he must, above all things, he or she must be an honest broker. He must be sure that the president gets all sides of an issue. The president, after all, is human, and a president is going to have favorites. One favorite cabinet secretary may be arguing with another about an issue. So you have to be sure the process works and that the president gets a complete and balanced picture of the problem. Now that sounds like a great principle, doesn't it? But in practice it is really hard to implement. First, it's hard because an effective process has to be designed from the ground up. Not just as a last-minute check at the very top. Some issues come to the White House very slowly. These issues have made their way down a long assembly line, and the White House sees a product that may already be the result of delicate compromises involving executive agencies and Congressional committees. Then there are other issues that come to the White House at great speed. Sometimes as the urgent preoccupation of an official in the government or perhaps driven by a story in the press. The chief of staff has to design a process that will, first of all, avoid surprises. That will, secondly, keep the president from being locked into a bargain in which he had no voice. And that will, thirdly, help the president keep the initiative in shaping the national agenda to suit his purposes and not the purposes of others.

In the spring of 1981 we had a new president who had received a pretty resounding mandate from the American people. He was very popular. He’d carried, I think, all but eight or ten states, if I’m not mistaken. And we had a real opportunity to reform the social security system, something that had been needed for a long time. But the issue first came to the White House with a package that had been put together by our very bright budget director, David Stockman. But it was a package pulled together at the last minute, and it had some hidden ingredients that David thought would work, but which had really not been adequately examined by other government experts. And above all, it had not been coordinated with Republican members of the Congress on Capitol Hill.

David explains this in his memoirs when he writes about his service as O.M.B. director and how he used his considerable bureaucratic skills to get his package to the president without much review, and he quickly got the presidential decision that he wanted. When we became aware of the deficiencies in the process by which the decision had been made, we undertook to make sure that the president, himself, did not announce the policy change. Then we helped the president keep his distance from what we thought would be the resounding explosion to follow. And indeed there was a resounding explosion. By handling it that way, I think we sheltered the president and we protected his ability to accomplish the rest of his first-year agenda. But the episode was unfortunate because that particular opportunity to deal with social security was lost. And, of course, all of you know that social security is the third rail of American politics. You can't talk about it hardly without getting burned, so if you’re going to deal with it, you need to go about it very, very carefully. And yet we do need to make it financially and fundamentally sound. So we learned some lessons from that experience. And a couple years later, once the issue had cooled down, we came back again to fix social security, which was in the process of going bankrupt, really, before the turn of the new millennium which we are now in. This was in 1983. This time we came up with a bipartisan commission that came up with a very good solution that guarantees the solvency of the system well into this new millennium. So establishing a good process and sticking to that process is very, very important.

It's also hard for another reason. And that is that people come to government feeling very, very strongly about issues. That’s quite proper. People should not come into government if they really feel lukewarm about what happens. But passions have got to be tempered by analysis. And that's why the process is so important. I remember very well an occasion in 1983 when our military forces were engaged in Lebanon and there was a leak to the press about the naval shelling there. The then-national security advisor to President Reagan, Bill Clark, who had been President Reagan’s chief of staff when he was governor of California, was quite properly livid about this leak. He was so livid about it that he met alone with the president and persuaded the president to issue an order requiring that the attorney general force everyone in one particular national security meeting to take a lie-detector test, to be strapped to the lie detector. I learned about this order shortly after the president had called the attorney general. Well, the order violated what we had agreed to as the established procedure for making decisions on matters like this. So I went in to see the president, and I asked him if he really was going to polygraph his vice president and his secretary of state, who, of course were statutory members of the National Security Council. Well, of course, the president had no such intent and hadn’t thought about that, and it hadn’t been pointed out to him. So the president called Bill Clark, the attorney general, and other officials to a meeting to discuss the problem. We had a meeting that was fairly tense, and the president quickly rescinded his order. This all just goes to show... It’s an example that I give you to make the point once again that you need to manage a well designed process and above all else, you need to be an honest broker, because you have a great advantage in there alone with the president.

Third, the White House chief of staff has to be the chief political advisor to the president. When I say you have got to be an honest broker, that doesn’t mean that at the end of the day you’re not entitled to give him your views, because you are and because he’ll want them. More often than not presidents ask their close-in staff members, people that they rely on on a daily basis, what they think about a particular issue. And frankly, they wouldn't have picked you if they didn't value your judgment. What’s more, I think the chief of staff plays a unique role in the process because the chief of staff sits at the intersection of politics and policy. It's his job to spell out the political meaning of a decision, while also understanding the policy implications of that decision. So I've often said and believe firmly that having electoral campaign experience, having political experience--not necessarily running for office but running campaigns or being in campaigns or being in politics--serves you well as White House chief of staff.

As the president’s chief political advisor, the chief of staff has to be sure that Congress is part of the process. As soon as I got on the job, I really did work hard at building strong relationships with Congressional leaders. My own private rule was that before I would go home at night, I would make sure that I returned every call I’d received that day from any member of Congress. We worked long hours. My normal day would end around 9:30 in the evening. It would start about 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning. That included Saturdays the first two years. But I would always make sure to return those Congressional calls, knowing full well that they’d probably already gone home too, but at least I got credit for returning their call. We also created a legislative strategy group in the White House as the place where executive branch goals and policies were reconciled with the circumstances or opportunities in Congress or with the press or with interest groups in order to get results.

Let me give you a fourth rule. The White House chief of staff must never, never forget what the president is trying to do. Most of the time that means learning how to say no. Ninety-eight percent of the job of the chief of staff is to say no. At least sometimes it sure felt that way to me. I see here in the audience Peter Rousell, who served in the press office during the Reagan administrations, and I never will forget telling Pete, on more than one occasion, that the chief of staff job was the worst job in government, because all you ever do is say no. It’s pretty much true. You say no to people who want to see the president. And you also have an obligation to resolve issues that really don't need to go to the president. You remember what I said about all those hundreds of people, thousands really, who are claimants on the president’s time. Somebody has got to say no to those people. And that generally falls to the White House chief of staff.

When President Reagan took office, he was able to focus only on a few key issues, especially economic recovery including a major reduction of taxes and a major reduction of spending. We had a first-one-hundred-day plan when we came into office. The president had approved the plan for action, and we took great pains to stick to that plan. That was my job and that was the job of my colleagues in the White House. So, for instance, we did not let the suggestion that we should somehow expand American involvement in the civil wars of Central America get in the way of that first one hundred days’ economic plan. Each cabinet secretary usually has issues of great importance to their particular constituency. But we made sure that those issues didn’t come up for decision during that very critical early period. The president achieved his most important goal for the country -- Congressional passage of a comprehensive package for economic reform. And this laid the basis for a successful presidency, because we judge our presidents, in this country, on their effectiveness in moving their policies through the legislative branch to become law.

Now there’s one final responsibility I want to mention. And that is that the chief of staff has to make sure that the trains run on time. And by that I mean he has to run the place. And when I say the place, I really mean the administration, because the administration has to work as one smoothly functioning and well-oiled unit to serve the president. That doesn't mean that the chief of staff runs everything. It doesn't mean that he or the White House staff for that matter is king, because they’re not. But the presidency as a whole has to function effectively, to concentrate attention on the president’s priorities. And then once a decision has been made, the chief of staff has to make sure that the implementation is effective and expeditious.

Ideas are important. Ideas are very important. A vision of where the country should go is extremely important, of course. But ideas and vision only matter if they can be deployed effectively, and in my experience effective deployment requires some very real planning.

The press has referred to me oftentimes in the, when they were writing about me in the, in the past as a pragmatist. And let me tell you something, I'm not offended by that. I have never felt that pragmatism is a dirty word provided that I stayed true to my principles. To me, pragmatism means accomplishing or succeeding. And I would even argue with you that the Gipper was a pragmatist and a really principled one, but a pragmatist. Many, many times I can remember working with him on some legislative package or proposal when we agreed we would compromise or take something less than one hundred percent. Many times President Reagan told me, "Jim, I would rather get sixty or seventy or eighty percent of what I want, rather than go over the cliff with my flag flying." So, yes, I admit to being a pragmatist, because I wanted the presidents I served to have the most successful presidencies that they could have.

Running the place means that the departments and agencies cannot be permitted to set their own agendas and bypass the process. But a strong cabinet and a strong staff in the White House are not mutually exclusive. They are not either/or propositions. When George Bush named me as his secretary of state, no one doubted that he and I would work closely together on foreign policy. But he also named Brent Scrowcroft as his national security advisor. Brent was the only man ever appointed to the job who had already held it before. He held it for President Ford. So Brent Scrowcroft clearly had some very strong foreign policy views of his own. But even with strong personalities, I would submit to you that in the Bush Administration we had the first administration in twenty years that did not make headlines about arguments between the secretary of state and the national security advisor, or the secretary of state and the secretary of defense or somebody else in the foreign policy community.

Now as we all select a new president for the United States, I think it’s appropriate for us to ask, what should we look for, in a president? And my friends, I would recommend one answer to you, above all else--trust and respect. Pick someone you can trust and respect. I worked for three presidents, each of them with great character and integrity, whom I respected and whom I trusted. And pick someone who you think is wise enough to surround himself with the very best staff and the very best cabinet. A president will make many decisions that you cannot predict and you may not have the information to understand. Imagine that in your own life you have to choose someone to make very important decisions for you about your family, or about your health, or about your finances. You would think very hard about who you could trust to make those choices thoughtfully and honestly. That is not a bad way to think about who you would choose for president.

Thank you all very, very much.