Why Write a Kiss-and-Tell When You've Been Leaking for Years?

...the consequences were not very positive...

...Such poignantly naive encounters with the grandchildren of the Revolution provide Baker and the reader with insights into how little the East knew about us and how little we knew about it in the murk of the Cold War, and remind us what a lot we have learned in the six short years since the toppling of the Berlin Wall...

...It would be hard to imagine anyone more different from the patrician, buttoned-up, clubbable Baker than this impulsive, intellectually disheveled, conscience-stricken apparatchik...

...This is a provocation,' one of them sputtered...

...You're trying to rub their noses in it.'" When speaking of presidents, however, Baker clearly does not subscribe to Plutarch's dictum that, where the great are concerned, "sometimes...

...Throughout the narrative President Bush is an offstage figure...

...Yet Baker liked Shevardnadze tremendously from the start, and despite many betrayals of trust arising from Gorbachev's compulsive double-dealing, he seems to have trusted him almost absolutely...

...The isolation of power creates a weakness for intimacy, even false intimacy, and Baker speaks time and again of the "pull-aside"-that spontaneous moment when a head of government or a foreign minister steps out of character, seizes his interlocutor by the arm, and says what is really on his mind or in his heart...

...When the Berlin Wall falls, Baker goes over to the White House to watch live coverage of the event on CNN with the president...

...Gerald Ford appears almost exclusively in the dot-matrix of recycled news clippings, and Ronald Reagan is handled in a smattering of asides, mostly concerning the object lessons provided by his unfortunate personnel choices at the National Security Council and State...

...To the figures who look out upon the real world from within this work of pointillism, the most routine gesture often seems remarkable, as if Stuart's George Washington had managed after two centuries of deep concentration to scratch his nose...

...There is nothing boastful or even conscious in this...

...the therapeutic, for former chamberlains who have been frogmarched through the media in their psychic underwear...

...by getting [George] Shultz's entire entourage into Moscow by train from Helsinki when the Soviet capital was fogbound...

...Baker tells us that they talked as they watched "the Iron Curtain ripped asunder...

...Baker's years as Reagan's Talleyrand, the skeptic more trusted by the ruler than the true believers, presumably will be covered in a future, more liberated memoir...

...Despite, or because of, this world view, Baker's book often reads like a variation on It's a Wonderful Life, in which Baker, playing the Jimmy Stewart role, is allowed by his guardian angel to see the world not as it would have been if he had never been born (a far worse place), but as it is because he was born (a far better one...

...Only rarely, as in a nicely muted description of Moscow in the rain, does the ghost permit himself to be heard, or let Baker lapse into policyspeak, as in "Kimmitt's heads-up call had enabled me to leverage Shevardnadze's Georgian passion to the maximum advantage...

...Of course, that's what they all say...

...Early in Baker's career, over a vodka martini, John Tower remarked to him, "You know something, Baker...

...He has nothing to gain, and much to lose, by lifting the curtain on inner self or inner circle...

...Trumped in the press by Mikhail Gorbachev on first meeting and many times afterward, Baker "was not sure how much business we could do if he was more interested in playing past us to the Western publics...

...Shevardnadze smothers her husband's statesmanlike point about the 1,500-kilometer border the U.S.S.R...

...air strikes that the administration feared the effect on world opinion of "grisly news photographs of the carnage...

...he drops in now and then, usually to say something meaningful to the press or something kind to Baker, whom he always calls Jimmy, and then drifts back into the wings...

...Strangely enough, it is Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's first foreign minister, who provides most of the human moments in this narrative...

...After all, we have Baker, a consummate handler of the media, to thank for much of what we already know about the inner workings of the Reagan and Bush administrations...

...Any presidential consort who survives to the end of a reign (much less two, as in Baker's case) has already written his real autobiography under the bylines of favored reporters and settled all important scores through judicious leaks...

...At a home-cooked dinner for four in the Shevardnadzes' Moscow flat, Mrs...

...And indeed it is difficult not to be charmed in a way when Shevardnadze, emerging from the dank cellars of Bolshevik "history" into the light of reality, shares insights with Baker...

...He saw in the invasion of Panama a means of "breaking the mind-set of the American people about the use of force in the post-Vietnam era" and "an emotional predicate that allowed us to build the public support so essential to the success of Desert Storm thirteen months later...

...But he does not tell us what they said, or how the president reacted, or if, like Baker (later, of course, when he was alone), he "[found] it hard to hold back tears of joy...

...Baker seems always to have been gratified by such gestures, but the reader is likely to be left with the feeling that you really had to have been there when, for example, F. W de Klerk tells him "in a voice brimming with conviction . . . 'I am going to be the last white president of South Africa.'" Baker's tenure as secretary of state was surely one of the most eventful in history, encompassing as it did the fall of the Soviet Union, the economic and diplomatic resurgence of China, the reunion of Germany, the Gulf War, the recurrence of the long-suppressed Balkan nightmare, the first steps toward the creation of a Palestinian homeland, and much else...

...a Georgian attitude," she proudly declares...

...In one of the crankiest historical outcomes since the defeat of Churchill in 1945, all these triumphs for America culminated in the rejection by the American electorate of the president who presided over them-the same president to whom Baker had devoted most of his adult life in a long process of advising, preserving, positioning, and finally electing...

...On the evidence of The Politics of Diplomacy, Jimmy Baker hasn't changed all that much in the intervening years, and that may explain much that lies between the lines of this book, which fascinates in spite of itself...

...This is a squalid business we're in...

...Although Baker was certainly aware of the effect of his work on the lives of nations and people, his preoccupation more often than not seems to have been with how policy played in the media...

...Perfect...

...aid by Yemen for voting wrong in the Security Council, but $15 billion each from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait toward the cost of the war...

...We are told how, after marathon discussions of a joint policy on arms negotiations, the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany, and the United States were rescued from deadlock by Joe Clark, a State Department man who "came up with the idea of putting the adverb 'partially' before the verb 'reduce.'" Baker himself later suggested underlining the adverb (which had by then been refined into an adjective) in the final draft "to emphasize there would be no zero" in regard to the number of short-range nuclear forces deployed by NATO...

...Meanwhile, the most interesting thing about Baker-his long friendship with George Bush, and the manner in which the two of them managed their survi-val and eventual political triumph in a party and administration in which they were widely regarded as apostates-remains a mystery...

...At the same time, she's tough, mean, and devious...

...After an intensive diplomatic effort nearly unique in American history, in that it was designed to make war possible rather than to preserve or restore peace, Baker's chief thought was that the Bush administration "had quite literally convinced the world of the necessity for war . . . but had so far been unable to get Congress and U.S...

...I have my own attitude about Iran...

...Here Baker lapses into healthy acerbity, describing Reagan's foreign policy apparatus as "a witches' brew of intrigue, elbows, egos, and separate agendas" conducted by "principals whose small-bore behavior" torpedoed a plan (hatched by Baker and Mike Deaver) to solve the problem by making Baker national security adviser...

...There was a time," he confides at one point, "when Moscow had encouraged the application of the Soviet model in Eastern Europe...

...Charles McCarry, the author of the recent Shelley's Heart and seven other novels, collaborated with Donald T. Regan and Alexander M. Haig, Jr., on their memoirs...

...He does not mention that this might have had something to do with the fact that American troops would bear the brunt of the war, rather than soldiers from any of the 12 countries whom Baker had visited in a marathon of consultation, arm-twisting, and what he calls vote-buying: $2-3 billion in guaranteed World Bank loans for Turkey, $7.1 billion in forgiven debts for Egypt, the loss of $70 million per year in U.S...

...In this regard Baker owes much to his collaborator Thomas M. DeFrank, long Newsweek's senior White House correspondent, who has performed prodigies of organization and endowed his author with a consistent and engaging voice while conscientiously suppressing his own...

...shared with Iran with heartfelt horror stories of the 17th-century Persian conquest of Georgia, when the shah's agents forced the queen of Georgia to renounce Christianity and then burned her at the stake...

...About Lawrence Eagleburger, Baker's choice for deputy secretary of state: "Smart as a shithouse rat...

...Baker's rendition of Nixon's thumbnail personality profiles goes far toward explaining why those who really knew him relished his phone calls...

...public opinion firmly behind [the president...

...Out of countless seemingly meaningless details, it paints a Seurat-like portrait of the banality of power, making us aware how truly deadening is the reality of life at the top, and what painful effort is required from the cast of hundreds who cogitate, fetch, and remember things for the mighty to achieve the simplest result...

...But Baker really meant it, and the result is the sort of work that the protagonist of George Orwell's 1984 had in mind when he perceived that the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know...

...Elsewhere Baker describes the tortuous thought process by which he and his advisers decided that he would shake hands with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz "but . . . without smiling, my look of distaste evident," and names a Foreign Service officer who "became a legend...

...Another man to whom Baker warmly responded was Richard Nixon...

...Desert Storm itself ended with Saddam Hussein still in power, partly (perhaps largely) because so many fleeing Iraqis were being killed in U.S...

...I was determined," the author declares in the preface to this account of his years as George Bush's secretary of state, "not to write the sort of kiss-and-tell account that seems so distressingly in vogue these days...

...Or in his encounter with "two members of [Senator Christopher J.] Dodd's staff who were so angry that the veins in their neck were bulging . . . [because] a draft agreement contained two references to the need for democratic reform in Nicaragua...

...Appropriately, that turns out to be the great strength of this particular book...

...an expression or a jest informs us better of their characters and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles...

...Baker, new to Washington and still in possession of his illusions, replied, "Speak for yourself, Senator...

...The Politics of Diplomacy gives us something far more valuable than mere autobiography...

...In The Politics of Diplomacy (G.P Putnam's Sons, 687 pages, $22.50), James A. Baker III strives for opacity but achieves something quite different...

...like Hollywood's George Bailey, Baker simply plays the hand that fate has dealt him and ends up being the indispensable man...

...and the opaque, for those who found happiness in Washington and would like to come back someday...

...There are other flashes of cin?ma v?rit?, as when Baker distributes an eight-page top-secret memorandum on Central American policy to the 10 most trusted Republican leaders of the House and then collects them at the end of each meeting...

...Of State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, Nixon says, "She has that nice, soft southern accent...