James Addison Baker III (born April 28, 1930) is an American statesman, attorney, diplomat, and former Marine Corps officer. 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, Texas, 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 serving briefly as under secretary of commerce, Baker ran President Gerald Ford's failed 1976 campaign following the ouster of campaign chairman Rogers Morton. Baker considered running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Houston and did run a failed 1978 campaign for Texas attorney general, but he otherwise remained in appointed positions for his career.
Baker ran Bush's unsuccessful campaign for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, but after Bush joined the Republican ticket under Ronald Reagan, Baker became an asset to the incoming president. Reagan appointed Baker as his White House chief of staff, and Baker remained in that position until 1985, when he became Secretary of the Treasury. As treasury secretary, he arranged the Plaza Accord and the Baker Plan. He resigned as treasury secretary, with some trepidation, 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 to help orchestrate Bush's re-election bid.
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. Baker has served on the World Justice Project and the Climate Leadership Council. He 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 and last surviving secretary of state to have served in the 20th century.
James Addison Baker III was born at 1216 Bissonnet Street in Houston. Baker's mother, Bonner Means Baker, was a Houston socialite. His father, James A. Baker Jr, was a partner of the Houston law firm Baker Botts, which was founded by Baker's great-grandfather in 1871.
Baker's father was a strict figure who used corporal punishment, and was known as "The Warden" to Baker and his friends. He offered Baker the aphorism which Baker knew as the Five Ps: "prior preparation prevents poor performance." Baker referred to this mantra as a gift he thought about "almost every day of [his] adult life." The Warden also forbade Baker from getting involved in politics, believing that it was unseemly. Baker named his memoir Work Hard, Study...and Stay Out of Politics after this worldview, expressed by both his father and grandfather.
While Baker was growing up, his father vehemently opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, believing Roosevelt a class traitor who unduly burned wealthy Americans. Despite the sentiment, Baker's father and grandfather were still Democrats in the one-party state of Texas.
Baker was born eighteen months before his only sibling, his sister Bonner Baker Moffitt. She struggled with schizophrenia and a tumultuous marriage with Houston Chronicle reporter Donald Moffitt. She died in 2015.
Education and pre-political career
Baker attended the private preparatory academy, the Kinkaid School in Houston, where his father was chairman of the board, until 1946. For his final two years of school, Baker attended the Hill School, a boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania attended by his father and late uncle.
After boarding school, Baker attended Princeton University. Though his grades were middling, his father was a Princeton alumnus and wrote to the school more than a year before Baker applied to lobby for his admission. While at Princeton, Baker, by his own admission, "went wild" and joined multiple drinking societies, including the 21 Club, the Ivy Club and the "Right Wing Club" (named because members would use their right arms when drinking). In 1952, Baker completed his history degree with a 188-page senior thesis, titled "Two Sides of the Conflict: Bevin vs. Bevan," under the supervision of Walter P. Hall.
Soon after the outset of the Korean War, while at Princeton, Baker joined a U.S. Marine officer training program to avoid being drafted before he finished college. Baker went on active duty with the Marines from his graduation in 1952 to 1954. After months of basic training, he was originally assigned to lead an infantry platoon, which may have taken him to the front in Korea. Baker instead requested to be assigned as a naval gunfire spotter. Baker received the assignment and served for six months in the Mediterranean Sea aboard the USS Monrovia as first lieutenant. Baker remained in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1958, rising to the rank of captain.
After his mandatory two years of active duty, Baker began attending the University of Texas School of Law, his father's alma mater. He considered attending law school in the northeast, but chose the University of Texas due to his family connection and greater compatibility with a Texas-based law career. At the urging of his father, he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and underwent severe hazing rituals:
I went through hell. I had these young kids who were five and six years younger than I was telling me, "Sit on that ice block in burlap," and they would drop raw eggs down my throat. I did all that for my dad. He wanted me to do it.
In November 1953, while enlisted, Baker married his first wife, and had his first child soon after. While he received a dispensation from the Army under the G.I. Bill, Baker also received a monthly allowance from his father to help him support his wife and child while in school.
After law school, Baker intended to join the family firm Baker Botts, which was among the largest in the state. The firm had implemented a no-nepotism rule, which would have prevented Baker from working there while his father still did. Baker and his father requested an exception, but the partners of the firm voted against admitting Baker. After his tenure as secretary of state ended in 1993, Baker returned to Baker Botts, which had revised its rule to allow for Baker and his descendants to join.
From 1957 to 1980, Baker practiced law at Andrews, Kurth, Campbell, & Bradley. His work at the firm largely involved helping clients draft by-laws, advising on mergers and acquisitions, and otherwise providing guidance as needed. The firm's business primarily lay in the prosperous oil and gas trade in Texas, with its most important client being the eccentric tycoon Howard Hughes, though Baker himself never worked with Hughes in any detail. Baker's clients included Petro-Tex Chemical Corporation, Con Edison, and the oil-rich heirs of Shanghai Pierce.
While at Andrews, Kurth, Baker worked six to seven days a week and considered himself a "workaholic." He wrote in his memoir that his only significant breaks from work were for tennis—he won back-to-back doubles tournaments at the Houston Country Club with future president George H.W. Bush—and occasional hunting trips. Though he had a consistent, relatively high salary as a lawyer at a blue-chip firm, Baker's father continued to support him financially, providing money for his first house, for parts of his children's education, for Baker to buy a station wagon, and as assistance in the construction of a new house.