American lawyer and statesman (born 1930)
James Addison Baker III (born April 28, 1930) is an American attorney, diplomat and statesman. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 10th White House chief of staff and 67th United States secretary of the treasury under President Ronald Reagan and the 61st U.S. secretary of state before returning as the 16th White House chief of staff under President George H. W. Bush.
Born in Houston, Baker attended the Hill School and Princeton University before serving in the United States Marine Corps. After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, he pursued a legal career. He became a close friend of George H. W. Bush and worked for Bush's unsuccessful 1970 campaign for the United States Senate. After the campaign, he served in various positions for President Richard Nixon. In 1975, he was appointed Under Secretary of Commerce for Gerald Ford. He served until May 1976, ran Ford's 1976 presidential campaign, and unsuccessfully sought election as the Attorney General of Texas.
Baker ran Bush's unsuccessful campaign for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, but made a favorable impression on the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan. Reagan appointed Baker as his White House chief of staff, and Baker remained in that position until 1985, when he became the secretary of the Treasury. As treasury secretary, he arranged the Plaza Accord and the Baker Plan. He resigned as treasury secretary to manage Bush's successful 1988 campaign for president. After the election, Bush appointed Baker to the position of secretary of state. As secretary of state, he helped oversee U.S. foreign policy during the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as during the Gulf War. After the Gulf War, Baker served another stint as White House chief of staff from 1992 to 1993.
Baker remained active in business and public affairs after Bush's defeat in the 1992 presidential election. He served as a United Nations envoy to Western Sahara and as a consultant to Enron. During the Florida recount following the 2000 presidential election, he managed George W. Bush's legal team in the state. He served as the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, which Congress formed in 2006 to study Iraq and the ongoing Iraq War. He serves on the World Justice Project and the Climate Leadership Council. Baker is the namesake of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Since the death of Henry Kissinger in 2023, he is currently the oldest living former United States secretary of state, as well as the earliest serving.
Early life, education, and pre-political career.
James Addison Baker III was born in Houston at 1216 Bissonnet St., the son of James A. Baker Jr. (1892–1973) and Ethel Bonner (née Means) Baker (August 6, 1894 – April 26, 1991). His father was a partner of Houston law firm Baker Botts. Baker has a sister, Bonner Baker Moffitt. His grandfather was attorney and banker Captain James A. Baker, and his great-grandfather was jurist and politician Judge James A. Baker.
Baker attended the Kinkaid School in Houston, before graduating from the Hill School, a boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He graduated "cum laude" with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1952 after completing a 188-page senior thesis, titled "Two Sides of the Conflict: Bevin vs. Bevan", under the supervision of Walter P. Hall. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta. Baker was a member of the United States Marine Corps from 1952 to 1954, attaining the rank of first lieutenant as a naval gunfire officer serving in the Mediterranean Sea aboard the . He remained in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1958, and rose to the rank of captain. He earned a Bachelor of Laws (1957) from the University of Texas School of Law and began to practice law in Texas.
From 1957 to 1975, he practiced law at Andrews &amp; Kurth after the anti-nepotism policy of his family firm, Baker Botts, prevented him from being offered a job there.
Early political career.
Baker's first wife, the former Mary Stuart McHenry, was active in the Republican Party, working on the congressional campaigns of George H. W. Bush. Originally, Baker had been a Democrat but too busy trying to succeed in a competitive law firm to worry about politics, and considered himself apolitical. His wife's influence led him to politics and the Republican Party. George H.W. Bush and Baker were regular tennis partners at the Houston Country Club in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and when Bush decided to vacate his congressional seat and run for the U.S. Senate in 1970, he supported Baker's decision to run in his place. However, Baker changed his mind about running for Congress when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer; she died in February 1970.
Bush then encouraged Baker to become active in politics to help deal with the grief of his wife's death, something that Bush himself had done when his daughter, Pauline Robinson Bush (1949–1953), died of leukemia. Baker became chairman of Bush's Senate campaign in Harris County, Texas. Though Bush lost to Lloyd Bentsen in the election, Baker continued in politics, becoming the finance chairman of the Texas Republican Party in 1971. The following year, he was selected as Gulf Coast Regional Chairman for the Richard Nixon presidential campaign. In 1973 and 1974, in the wake of the Nixon administration's implosion over Watergate, Baker returned to full-time law practice at Andrews &amp; Kurth.
Baker's time away from politics was brief, however. In August 1975, he was appointed Under Secretary of Commerce by President Gerald Ford, succeeding John K. Tabor. He served until May 1976, and was succeeded by Edward O. Vetter. Baker resigned to serve as campaign manager of Ford's unsuccessful 1976 election campaign. In 1978, with George H. W. Bush as his campaign manager, Baker ran unsuccessfully for Attorney General of Texas, losing to future Texas governor Mark White.
Reagan administration.
White House Chief of Staff (1981–1985).
In 1981, Baker was named White House Chief of Staff by President Ronald Reagan, in spite of the fact that Baker managed the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford in 1976 and of George Bush in 1980 opposing Reagan. He served in that capacity until 1985. Baker is considered to have had a high degree of influence over the first Reagan administration, particularly in domestic policy.
In 1982, conservative activists Howard Phillips (founder of the Conservative Caucus) and Clymer Wright of Houston joined in an unsuccessful effort to convince Reagan to dismiss Baker as chief of staff. They claimed that Baker, a former Democrat and a Bush political intimate, was undermining conservative initiatives in the administration. Reagan rejected the Phillips-Wright request. Around 1983 Baker became heavily dispirited and tired due to the weight of his job; he attempted to become National Security Advisor, a change to which Reagan initially agreed, but some of Reagan's other advisers dissuaded him from naming Baker to the position. According to his wife, Baker was "so anxious to get out of [his job]" that he gave some consideration to the prospect of becoming Commissioner of Baseball, but he ultimately did not pursue that.
Baker managed Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign in which Reagan polled a record 525 electoral votes total (of a possible 538), and received 58.8% of the popular vote to Walter Mondale's 40.6%.
Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1985, Reagan named Baker as United States Secretary of the Treasury, in a job-swap with then-Secretary Donald Regan, a former Merrill Lynch officer who became chief of staff. Reagan rebuked Phillips and Wright for having waged a "campaign of sabotage" against Baker.
In 1985, Baker received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.
During the Reagan administration, Baker also served on the Economic Policy Council, where he played an instrumental role in achieving the passage of the administration's tax and budget reform package in 1981. He also played a role in the development of the American Silver Eagle and American Gold Eagle coins, which both were released in 1986.
Baker also served on Reagan's National Security Council, and remained Treasury Secretary until 1988, during which time he also served as campaign chairman for George H. W. Bush's successful presidential bid.
Bush administration.
Secretary of State.
President George H. W. Bush appointed Baker Secretary of State in 1989. Baker served in this role through 1992. From 1992 to 1993, he served as Bush's White House chief of staff, the same position that he had held from 1981 to 1985 during the first Reagan administration.
In May 1990, Soviet Union's reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited the U.S. for talks with President Bush; there, he agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO. He later revealed that he had agreed to do so because James Baker promised that NATO troops would not be posted to eastern Germany and that the military alliance would not expand into Eastern Europe. On February 9, 1990, Baker, as the US Secretary of State, assured Gorbachev: "If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east".
 But Bush ignored his assurances and later pushed for NATO's eastwards expansion. In the Bush administration, Baker was a proponent of the notion that the USSR should be kept territorially intact, arguing that it would be destabilizing to have the USSR's nuclear arsenal in multiple new states. Bush and US defence secretary Dick Cheney were proponents for Soviet dissolution. 
Soviet states forced action by holding referendums on independence. 
In 1991, .
When Ukraine became independent, Baker sought to ensure that Ukraine would give up its nuclear weapons. On 5 December 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed.
On January 9, 1991, during the Geneva Peace Conference with Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Baker declared that "If there is any user of (chemical or biological weapons), our objectives won't just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime..." Baker later acknowledged that the intent of this statement was to threaten a retaliatory nuclear strike on Iraq, and the Iraqis received his message.
Baker helped to construct the 34-nation alliance (Coalition of the willing) that fought alongside the United States in the Gulf War.
Baker also spent considerable time negotiating one-on-one with the parties in order to organize the Madrid Conference of October 30 – November 1, 1991, in an attempt to revive the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Arab countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Baker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.
Policies on the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Before the US presidential election on November 8, 1988, he and a team of some Middle Eastern policies experts created a report detailing the Palestine-Israel interactions. His team included Dennis Ross and many others who were soon appointed to the new Bush administration.
Baker blocked the recognition of Palestine by threatening to cut funding to agencies in the United Nations. As far back as 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) issued a "declaration of statehood" and changed the name of its observer delegation to the United Nations from the PLO to Palestine.
Baker warned publicly, "I will recommend to the President that the United States make no further contributions, voluntary or assessed, to any international organization which makes any changes in the PLO's status as an observer organization."
In May 1989, he gave a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He called for Israel to "lay aside once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel", cease the construction of Israeli settlements in West Bank and Gaza, forswear annexation of more territory, and to treat Palestinians "as neighbors who deserve political rights". Israeli officials and public were highly offended due to the tone of his speech, though his address called for little more than his predecessors.
Baker soon decided that Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer would be his principal aides in Middle Eastern policies. All three have been reported as leaning toward the policies of the Israeli Labor Party.
Baker was notable for making little and slow efforts towards improving the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations. When Bush was elected, he only received 29% of Jewish voters' support, and his reelection