Not Losing at All Cost: Smooth Jim Baker's Rocky Reign at State
Brock, David
David Brock NOT LOSING AT ALL COST: SMOOTH JIM BAKER'S ROCKY REIGN AT STATE President Bush's secretary of state has mastered the Foreign Service and lost touch with the world. W hen President...
...Power is concentrated, but attention is riveted only on theissue of the day...
...Jesse Helms sent Baker a congratulatory note, along with some sage advice...
...But someone ought to tell Baker that, when a deal is struck, both sides typically get something...
...Preface to the 1st Edition, foreword, bibliography, index...
...foreign policy returned to its normal state: inertia...
...Not surprisingly, he flopped...
...Within the hour, he'd agreed to allow the Democrats to place a set of unprecedented conditions on Salvador's military aid...
...The Baker crew groused about this brazenness for days...
...When Newsweek ran the headline "Cohen's Coup...
...For some years, this course was well calibrated to the dramatic changes Gorbachev had put in motion, but as the Berlin Wall fell it also became clear that the Sovietleader's program at home was failing...
...In these days of bureaucratic giganticism, foreign interventionism, mass semi-literacy and yuppie ethics, it comes as something of a shock to find that he saw the future and knew it wouldn't work...
...Ruth Sinai, thus far the only beat reporter to take on Baker, reported last year in an amusing AP dispatch that the bureaus are so removed from the action that officials dawdle at the translation typing pool hoping to glean some information about what the seventh floor is telling their countries...
...We're just sitting here reading the newspapers...
...when Bush, Baker, and Robert Mosbacher used to go hunting in Texas in the 1970s, the three joked about one of them being President someday...
...Mullins lied about her dealings with the Democrats, and when Dole found out about it he broke off relations with State...
...Baker was making positively Orwellian noises about Gorbachev's "reforms" and insisting that Gorbachev's survival was essential—but essential to whom...
...It's hard to say whether this is a gambit—part of the "co-presidency" idea may have been that Baker would apply his talents only to the premier issues, like US.-Soviet relations, to make sure he got equal billing with Bush—or merely a concession to reality...
...Baker continued his trammeling of the department at the assistant-secretary level by appointing lackluster officials who make good caretakers and don't get their names in the papers, and by keeping the policy cards so close to his vest that the bureaus have little idea of what the seventh floor is up to...
...I once heard Howard Wolpe, the former chairman of the House African subcommittee, complain that he had been trying to get in touch with Shultz for more than a year...
...rationalism seems more alive than ever before...
...the Syrians proceed with their annexation of Lebanon...
...In fact, the lack of progress suggests that this latest venture in high-level diplomacy may have been based on a fallacy...
...Or that, having been suckered by the likes of George Mitchell and King Fand, Baker is once more simply out of his depth...
...His name is Ray Seitz, an FSO recently named ambassador to Britain...
...The most embarrassing instance, of course, came last fall when he was asked to justify the troop deployment in the Gulf and mumbled something about "jobs...
...Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, used his five minutes' speaking time to badger Baker into appearing the following week at hearings of the subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, which Hamilton chairs...
...foreign policy...
...Under Shultz, reporters regularly phoned desk officers directly for briefings...
...That was the assumption that the Persian Gulf War had infused the region with an urgent new realization of the need to put aside old antagonisms and seek the stability of a comprehensive peace...
...He seems to conclude in advance that he can't win on an issue and then agrees to a one-sided deal to avoid looking like a loser, though that is assuredly what he is...
...Personal attention from the secretary goes an even longer way with the press corps, which is apparently happy to have Baker dictate their stories for them...
...Baker and Eagleburger ignored such pleas for months, on the grounds that traversing Panama militarily would be "illegal," could result in Noriega's death, or might mean the loss of American life...
...Of course, noone thinks that Baker jumped into this thicket willingly, and it's not exactly his fault that the intricacies of Middle Fast politics are over his head...
...ailing Baker a "pragmatist" is ac- C tually too high a compliment, as it implies a sense of purpose beyond merely playing the game, which he clearly lacks...
...When, consistent with the policy of non-intervention in Iraq, Washington looked the other way as the Shi'ite and Kurdish rebellions began, Baker made no provisions for the logical outcome: tens of thousands of Kurds in desperate flight from a massacre...
...Please allow approximately 4 weeks for delivery...
...Baker thought he would use his skills as a political tactician to cut the best deals he could with his two main adversaries, the Soviets and the congressional Democrats, while generating favorable headlines and public opinion ratings...
...It must be said that staying on the right side of Congress and American public opinion are not, in and of themselves, unwelcome qualities in a secretary of state...
...Baker's leverage with the press, The stories follow a strikingly similar and disturbing script that finds Bush pulling Baker's fat out of the fire by sending in troops...
...Kenneth Minogue, London School of Economics and Political Science Rationalism in Politics has established Michael Oakeshott as the greatest British philosopher of conservative disposition...
...And nobody is seriously talking of a co-presidency, much less a future Baker candidacy, anymore...
...aker took up residence on the sevk) enth floor of the State Department determined to avoid Shultz's fate as the mouthpiece for the department...
...Since Bush relies almost exclusively on State for such early warnings—Brent Scowcroft, the doddering NSC adviser, isn't a player—the Saddam problem fell through the cracks until it was too late to talk...
...But on Baker's jaunts to Moscow, Seitz wasn't on the plane (Kimmitt—just named ambassador to Germany—and Ross usually were...
...He has cut the entire Foreign Service out of the policy loop at Foggy Bottom and established direct political control over the foremost issues of foreign policy...
...But his remarkable essays, always hard to find, have long been out of print even in their hardcover editions...
...Both of these decisions demonstrated political smarts, but Baker stumbles when he has to shape public opinion, not follow it...
...Thus, there are no cheesy advertisements in Human Events featuring photos of Baker and asking: "Mr...
...Robert Torricelli, chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee in the House, and Janice O'Connell, a wicked aide to Dodd...
...ambassador who is considered the Foreign Service's shining star, ran afoul of Baker for trying to take some credit for cobbling together the international coalition against Iraq...
...Snowe, who tells colleagues she's a "drinking buddy" of the secretary's, favored tearing it down, but couldn't muster the votes...
...Baker toured the area, and while standing on a hill, with the giant Mount Elbrus hidden in fog in the distance, he was asked whether from this perch he could see his way to peace in the Middle East...
...What Ross doesn't acknowledge is that, while the closed circle worked once it was ensnared in a crisis, the closed circle also bears a great measure of responsibility for bringing on the crisis in the first place...
...With Baker and his aides sealed off from the bureaus, the seventh floor operates like a Chinese fire drill, reacting to, not anticipating, events...
...Their conception of the national interest is to make Baker look good...
...Oakeshott's account is only now coming into its own...
...The knock on Baker isn't that he opposed the war, as Bob Woodward reports in The Commanders, but that he helped make it necessary...
...The first is that his entire effort to engineer a diplomatic breakthrough between Arabs and Israelis may be based on a false premise: that the defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf war has opened a new window of opportunity to settle this age-old conflict...
...In the early going, Robert Zoellick, a Baker protege from the Treasury who was named counselor to the State Department, asked for briefings from the regional bureaus...
...We're just sitting here reading the newspapers...
...The genius of these witty and profound essays is in revealing the misconceptions of rationalism which underlie such doctrines...
...If he's double-crossed them on the I big items, Baker has been particularly careful to collect some political chits by mollifying the Republicans with small favors...
...Because Bush himself has a tin ear in speaking to the public about such grand themes, the President needed help in setting forth a coherent and convincing line of argument...
...Only when Noriega's open taunting of Bush made the gravity of the threat undeniably plain did the US...
...Lawrence Eagleburger, the only Foreign Service officer in the bunch (he retired from the service in 1982), is technically the department's No...
...The State Department's rotation policy—under which tours of duty in a given region are typically limited to two years—virtually ensures that our diplomats don't become expert in much besides procedural game-playing and toadying to foreign powers...
...In a brief flash of candor Mr...
...The talk was of resolving technical problems in the next arms control treaty, setting a date for asummer summit, and extending new aid and trade favors to the central government...
...A member of the 1980 Reagan transition team tells me he did...
...Bush's finest moments have come on the heels of Baker's failures...
...A great strategist—Henry Kissinger, say—can find ways to deploy the bureaucracy without becoming its captive, but the Baker Boys are too often caught with their pants down in the vast regions of the globe that aren't on their radar screens—Latin America, Africa, all of Asia...
...This sort of flattery goes down well in a culture where everyone knows he wields immense power and nobody gets any recognition for it...
...That's true...
...When he approached the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hoping to testify publicly on his efforts, Baker found out and gave him a severe dressing down...
...Baker's few critical notices have come from independent columnists like Fred Barnes, William Safire, and Michael Kinsley...
...It is unusual to bring them in and give them nothing to do...
...advisers in Guatemala were making final plans to go to Managua to bless the results...
...This alone tells us nothing about whether particular administration policies should be cheered or booed, but it does tell us who is in charge when things go awry, as they have in several cases now...
...In practice, an old saying is more telling: "When you raise your hand to take the Foreign Service oath, they cut your nuts off...
...Down the hall, Janet Mullins, a Bush campaign operative and former Senate aide, was reading the riot act to the new regional assistant secretaries...
...This edition also arranges the essays thematically so that the reader will be better able to grasp the relation between the arguments of these essays and Oakeshott's other major works...
...In The Commanders, Woodward reports that the emphasis on PR irritated Adm...
...even Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post said so...
...They had a crisis a year...
...Getting rid of the Reagan appointees was easy...
...No one else matters much...
...In most federal agencies—say, the Commerce Department—career employees do not advance into the highest policy-making jobs...
...would ground rebel planes to thwart the uprising, then called Vice President Dan Quayle, who okayed the action in Bush's absence...
...Mullins, head of the legislative affairs bureau, announced that "heads will roll" if the bureau chiefs maintained independent channels to the Hill and struck up their own deals, as had been the widespread practice under Shultz...
...dollars...
...Baker has surpassed even the senator's expectations...
...But once again they were in no position to fight, since State had already agreed to the deal with Rep...
...The Republicans, meanwhile, had been writing a three-page bill that featured tough eligibility requirements tied to free-market reforms...
...Communism may well be dead...
...In early 1990, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Latin bureau tried for months to bring an incipient crisis in Haiti to the attention of the Baker circle...
...Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell then stepped in to run the military operation, and the success in the desert was theirs (and Bush's...
...According to close associates, Baker has long thought of himself as Bush's better...
...He appointed Aronson, a liberal Democrat, as assistant secretary for the region, with a mandate to keep Nicaragua out of the headlines...
...Foreword, selected bibliography, acknowledgments, index...
...the seventh floor got pissy...
...He found it was hidden behind thick fog...
...The undersecretary-for-management slot is open...
...The seventh floor quickly told Richard Solomon, the assistant secretary for East Asia who is considered by resistance supporters to be "a force for evil," to quit dragging his feet and get the money released...
...And in both cases, Baker and his aides subsequently fail to secure the peace...
...Then came last year's negotiations with Congress on an aid bill for El Salvador...
...After Janet Mullins felt out the Senate leadership—literally in one case, since she was dating George Mitchell at the time—Baker and Mullins arrived on Capitol Hill for a meeting with Mitchell and Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat...
...I'm going to be around this town for a long time," the 37-year-old Zoellick warned...
...Thus has fallen to Baker the comparatively easy task of securing and shaping the post-Cold War peace...
...Despite the efforts of certain Reaganites, this system won and U.S...
...Strangely enough, for someone who is revered as one of Washington's best and brightest, Baker owes his fall largely to his own miscues and shortcomings...
...The two top jobs under Shultz were held by Foreign Service officers—Michael Armacost for policy and Ronald Spiers for management—who consistently foiled the Reagan agenda by pursuing diplomatic appeasement and promoting the careers of soft-headed FSOs...
...The point is that, for better or worse, the department ran Shultz, who in turn lobbied Reagan hard...
...The real worry with Baker is that his political antennae, like his managerial ones, are totally reactive...
...W hen President Bush appointed his close friend James A. Baker III secretary of state, Sen...
...Burt calls the story "bull...
...Like it or not, this ability is requisite for any successful foreign policy...
...Shultz, for example, was such a stubborn old Buddha that he blew some excellent deals, especially with Congress...
...Baker gestured toward the fog and replied, "I can see it as clearly as Mount Elbrus there" It was a frank admission that after three trips to the Middle East—spread over seven weeks and more than 50,000 miles—his efforts to launch a peace conference between Israel and its Arab adversaries have made little headway...
...Of course, the makers of political rep-utations inside the Beltway haven't yet recognized that the secretary has no clothes...
...In these areas there is less political control than ever from a detached and indifferent top...
...The fact of the matter is that Baker was simply lucky as hell to be named secretary of state at a moment when the policies of the previous administration began to pay off...
...Olympia Snowe of Maine, essentially left the decision to Congress by soft-pedaling State's loony "Top Hat" proposal—which involves building unbugged floors onto the top of the bugged structure...
...The Bush team—Cheney, Powell, and especially Baker—seems to have this knack in spades...
...One can only wonder if Bush will be able yet again to maneuver the U.S...
...Senate conservatives had brought the matter to his attention...
...Ever the smooth pol, Baker is positively nice to everybody on the Hill and throws more than the occasional bone...
...With a touch of bitterness, Baker would tell friends years later that the man the trio thought would get the job hadn't gotten it...
...Baker's goal was more personal: confident that Bush would supply the depth of knowledge about foreign affairs that he lacked, Baker hoped to add foreign policy experience to his resume, and then ride into the Oval Office on the crest of a wave of global stability and harmony...
...When the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico came to a test, Baker and Zoellick (who's taken Mexican relations away from Aronson) were ciphers...
...He shows up prior to testifying to say hello to the committee aides, whom he knows by name...
...The increasing bureaucratization of foreign policy —State had ten bureaus in 1970 and has more than thirty today—means that policy itself is wedded more and more tightly to the status quo...
...subseTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 17 quently, relations between the two have chilled...
...It makes no sense, in fact, to talk about an independent "Baker policy" on anything: the call is always made by Bush, who functions as a super-secretary of state...
...Reagan eventually reversed the former policy in 1986 and the latter in 1988, each time after a campaign by David Brock an assistant managing editor of Insight magazine, is writing a book on Congress and U.S...
...Having assented in the decision not to cross the Euphrates and topple Saddam, Baker should have given some thought to the consequences of this inaction...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 19 tions on new aid to uNrrA last October...
...But at State they do, securing appointments that are only nominally "political...
...After Mr...
...The U.S...
...Finally, he escaped blame in the "Debategate" filching of briefing books from the Carter campaign that year, even though he's widely believed at least to have known about it...
...William Crowe, Powell's predecessor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the sort of conservative who couldn't sell a glass of water in the desert: "Crowe saw decisions made in the NSC in terms of their impact on Congress, the media and public opinion...
...With Baker preoccupied with Soviet affairs in the first half of 1990, the Near East bureau received no instruction from the top that its old policy of tilting toward Iraq was dangerously out of date...
...One CIA official says, "It's not worth talking to my opposite number across the river...
...off the calamitous course charted by his secretary of state...
...Hardcover $20.00 0-86597-092-0 Paperback $ 7.50 0-86597-093-9 LibertyPress, 1991 Please send me: grugenz Title Edition Price Amount Hardcover $24.00 Rationalism in Politics Paperback $ 7.50 Hardcover Paperback $20.00 $ 7.50 The State of the Union Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total Prepayment required on all orders not for resale...
...Baker's position at the outset was that "everything is on the table...
...Baker turned over the power to a tiny clique of loyalists from his prior stints at the White House, the Treasury, and the hustings...
...When Bush got the job, intending to make his mark more on foreign than on domestic policy, he naturally put his most trusted political operator at State, where he could make good use of Baker's managerial and deal-making skills...
...Similarly, Margaret TUtwiler, the department spokesman, centralized all press contacts in her public affairs office...
...Whatever else this is —a political campaign, perhaps?—it isn't statesmanship...
...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...The Democratic bill—a 300-page affair that translates all of the Democrats' domestic socialist agenda into East European terms—was written by Mitchell & Co...
...Liberia and Somalia followed the same pattern later in 1990, although, by the time Col...
...And, despite the media hype about Bush's cronyism, the number of ambassadors who are Foreign Service officers has increased since the Reagan years, extending even to coveted posts such as London, which normally go to political supporters...
...First published in 1962, it is now published in a new and expanded edition, including six additional essays (one previously unpublished), a full index, and a foreword and bibliography by Timothy Fuller...
...The Iran-contra follies, treated as an aberration by the media, were actually typical of the furtive way business was done in the Reagan years...
...By 1991—after the crackdown in the Baltics, the scrapping of free-market reforms, the rise of Yeltsin, and the fall of Shevardnadze—conventional wisdom held that Gorbachev was finished...
...Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 21...
...W hether or not these scandals were bona fide, schmoozing with Congress and the press kept Baker's name out of them...
...Prosper Avril in March, the department had no plan to direct the transition, and the inner circle was left wondering why...
...Mullins then told Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader, that a "bipartisan" deal had been struck, and that Republicans would just have to go along with it...
...NEW FROM LIBERTY FUND RATIONALISM IN POLITICS AND OTHER ESSAYS By Michael Oakeshott Foreword by Timothy Fuller "Socialism and communism are now plausibly thought to be dead...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 ilar and disturbing script that finds Bush pulling Baker's fat out of the fire by sending in troops...
...Meanwhile, Baker was spending his time keeping the Arab coalition against Saddam together, in part on the foolish promise that he would attempt to revive the elusive "Middle East peace process"once the fighting ended...
...and Robert Kimmitt, the undersecretary for policy...
...Thank God for that...
...If peace and democracy are the wave of the future in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, if the Cold War is over and the Soviet bear stopped in its tracks, this is the legacy of Ronald Reagan...
...According to calendar notes that surfaced during the Iran-contra investigations, Shultz went to the White House ninety-nine times for one-on-one meetings with Reagan to argue the department's case on various matters...
...Robert M. Crunden, University of Texas 340 + xxx pages...
...Helms even presented plans for the removal of Noriega, including a lightning-quick strike designed to nab him and fly him to the U.S...
...On election eve, in fact, U.S...
...But, unlike Shultz's high command, they groused in private...
...On the other side of the ledger, two strong-willed assistant secretaries with political appointments—Elliott Abrams in Latin America and Chester Crocker in Africa—slipped past Anna-cost and enjoyed Shultz's backing for their ambitious agendas in the decade's two hottest spots...
...This became apparent when, to get on with the U.S./Soviet show, Baker tried to defuse contentious issues with Congress, especially the Central America ones that so bedeviled the Reagan Administration...
...to stand trial...
...But Baker can't be happy about the unintended consequences of his earlier inaction: Bush, Cheney, and Powell are basking in the glow of the Desert Storm victory parades, while the secretary has been cast as waterboy in a "process" with the slimmest of chances for resolution...
...Well into the appeasement of his third dictator—Noriega, Saddam, and now Gorbachev—Baker can no longer claim he was asleep at the switch...
...In fact, there were far better examples of "government by cabal" inside George Shultz's State Department than Iran-contra...
...inattention and immobility became glaringly apparent in the botched coup attempt of October 1989...
...He then agreed with congressional Democrats to a slow-motion sellout of the contras, and prepared to accept a fraudulent Sandinista election victory...
...It will be recalled that Bush had made getting tough with Manuel Noriega a theme of his 1988 campaign, in part to distance himself from the embarrassingly cozy relationship Noriega enjoyed with some elements of the Reagan Administration, particularly Bill Casey...
...The outer ring includes Mullins and two colorless policy pros who entered government under Jimmy Carter, served under Reagan, and then developed close ties to Baker: Dennis Ross, the head of the policy planning staff...
...In April, four noisy Republican representatives—Helen Bentley, Bill McCollum, Don Ritter, and Bob Dornan—complained in a letter that the administration had not released $7 million in non-lethal aid to the anti-Communist Cambodian resistance that had been appropriated at the beginning of the fiscal year last October...
...If the Near East career people had been involved in the lead-up to January's use of force, so his argument goes, the war would never have been prosecuted, pace April "We-have-noopinion-on-your-border-dispute" Glaspie...
...T he irony of Baker's operating style 1 is that, while the Foreign Service is shut out when it comes time to solve a momentous problem, small problems mushroom to momentous proportions precisely because they are left to fester for months in the auto-pilot bureaus—run mostly by sycophantic FSOs who will do anything to "preserve the relationship" with the country they follow...
...His idea of putting non-career people in top slots, however, turned out to be not quite the same as old Jesse's...
...Could it be that Baker is simply unwilling to face the real challenges posed by Gorbachev's collapse because that would expose his own misjudgment of Gorbachev's prospects...
...ambassador decided that the U.S...
...Thomas Pickering, the U.N...
...sanctions against South Africa this spring would be controversial, so he overruled the Africanists in the bureau and took the issue to the seventh floor, where he's working it out with House Democrats...
...It meant, on the one hand, ensuring that Foreign Service types like Armacost would not steer the ship, and, on the other, purging the department of anyone with firm ideas on policy, like Abrams or Crocker...
...It is unusual to bring them in and give them nothing to do...
...In one such meeting, Zoellick explained that, if either the FSOs or the remaining Reaganites "lied" to him in an attempt to advance their own biases, he'd crush them...
...Such was the fog that threatened to engulf Baker in 1989...
...Baker wanted to be a virtual co-President for foreign policy, and even hawked this idea to the New York Times, which featured Bush and Baker on its Sunday magazine cover last year, under the headline: "The Fabulous Bush and Baker Boys...
...Baker's three trips around the Middle East in seven weeks, it is apparent that, while the road to peace may remain obscure, several other things should be crystal clear...
...Quick, who's been assistant secretary for European affairs the past couple of years...
...The subcommittee's number-two Democrat missed Baker's answers to the queries of his forty committee colleagues...
...Baker knew that any move to lift U.S...
...2, but he's been relegated to housekeeping chores and keeping the Foreign Service fat, dumb, and happy...
...and Baker's preoccupation remains blaming Israel for his fruitless negotiations with Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia over their participation in a quixotic Middle East "conference...
...Any discussion of foreign policy-making in the current administration must start with President Bush's unwillingness to be swayed—or duped, as the case may be—by cabinet secretaries or NSC advisers with their own bureaucratic or ideological agendas...
...In at least two important cases—the secret agreement to abide unilaterally by the unratified SALT II treaty, and the secret deal to cut off military aid to the Afghan rebels on Day One of a Soviet withdrawal—State committed the administration to a policy line that directly contradicted Reagan's bedrock beliefs...
...in consultation with Baker's office...
...policy literally overnight, turning the capital over to Tigrean Marxist rebels and calling for a referendum on Eritrean independence...
...Because Bush knows precisely how he wants toconduct affairs of state, it is useless to try to drive an analytical wedge between him and his secretary of state...
...Passing over the Foreign Service, one of the most beguiling and corrupting institutions in Washington, was a taller order...
...As John Goshko of the Washington Post reported somewhat mournfully last November: "Almost four months after President Bush began his drive to force Iraq out of Kuwait, neither Bush nor his top aides have tried significantly to tap the knowledge and advice of those experts—both in and out of government—who have spent their lives trying to understand the Arab world...
...What he overlooked was that peace between Israel and the Arabs and the resolution of the Palestinian problem would not by a long shot be the most pressing diplomatic concern in the postwar period...
...So Cohen reversed thirty years of U.S...
...llitwiler is first among equals (I assume that Zoellick does not receive a fresh rose on his pillow each night while on the road with the secretary, delivered by Baker's security detail...
...Hamilton claimed that his allotted questioning time before the full committee simply wasn't enough to become fully informed about administration policy...
...Now, it won't do to hold Baker responsible for the fact that the "new world order," in another irony, looks more and more like the don't-rock-theboat mentality of the Foreign Service establishment...
...Hardcover $24.00 0-86597-094-7 Paperback $ 7.50 0-86597-095-5 LibertyPress, 1991 Also Available THE STATE OF THE UNION: ESSAYS IN SOCIAL CRITICISM By Albert Jay Nock Edited and with a Foreword by Charles H. Hamilton "Albert Jay Nock has long had a reputation, in certain circles, of being one of America's shrewdest social critics...
...But there is another mitigating factor that has helped Baker cover up his incompetent reign at State —though Baker likely doesn't realize it...
...Yet Baker has been following by rote the course set in the second Reagan administration: dealing with Gorbachev as a reformer who could be pressed to halt Soviet expansion abroad and establish a benign authoritarian rule at home...
...His Jefferson, and his Memoirs, are already on many shelves...
...Dan Burton, an obscure Indiana Republican, for his vote against an amendment to place condi"It's not unusual for a secretary to bring his own people," says one official...
...We have a crisis a day here...
...When it comes time for a big congressional vote, it's clear that Baker's style has won him little political capital...
...Any congressional page knows that you don't get votes on the Hill without working for them...
...Senators Helms and John Kerry tried for months to draw Baker's attention to Noriega's increasingly reckless and dictatorial behavior, to no avail...
...Once Bush was in office, however, nobody in the administration, least of all the State Department, picked up the ball...
...His name was curiously absent from the recent accusations that Bush tangoed with Iranians in a conspiracy to delay the release of the hostages before the 1980 presidential campaign, even though Baker was Bush's top campaign aide at the time...
...This sorry spectacle developed because Shultz and his second-in-command, John Whitehead, had no foreign policy experience or ideology and gave lower-level officials wide latitude to operate, and thus quickly became creatures of the people who worked for them...
...Very few papers ever make it from the bureaus to the desks of the bigwigs upstairs...
...Department H103 7440 N. Shadeland Ave...
...The top-down, value-free approach he took on the campaign trail and in the White House is not suited to running the nation's foreign policy: this was evident at the outset, when Baker devised a tightly controlled political operation along the lines of the White House's, and moved to suppress competing power centers within the department...
...When the issue of what to do with the bug-ridden U.S...
...Please send me a copy of your current catalogue...
...This is not to suggest that Baker has an inordinate reverence for Congress...
...In December 1989, State was caught unawares by the coup attempt against Cory Aquino in the Philippines, even though the coup had virtually been announced in advance...
...It has enabled him to emerge unscathed from attacks in the press on Bush's 1988 campaign (which Baker ran), from exposes of the savingsand-loan crisis (which developed on his watch at Treasury), and from accounts of private fund-raising for the Nicaraguan contras (which started while he was White House chief of staff and was discussed in NSC meetings that he attended...
...As of this writing, a well-armed Saddam remains in power...
...Embassy in Moscow came up, Baker, in deference to GOP Rep...
...Throughout much of 1989, it was business as usual with Noriega, as his patrons in the foreign policy bureaucracies filled the vacuum following the departure of Noriega critic Elliott Abrams...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 achieved through his own legendary leaking to the reporters covering him, is an open secret...
...Gruff, tough-talking businessmen who peppered their private mutterings with racist epithets, the two used their considerable turf-battling skills with the other foreign policy agencies, and indeed with the White House, to advance plans hatched in the bowels of State, mostly (but not exclusively) by Foreign Service bureaucrats...
...Goshko: While waiting Wednesday for Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh to arrive for a meeting in Lislovodsk, a spa in the Caucasus Mountains, Secretary of State James A. Baker III climbed a hill to view the towering local attraction, Mount Elbrus...
...Bush and Quayle did the heavy hitting in the ninth inning, with personal lobbying of members...
...It's not unusual for a secretary to bring his own people," says one official...
...The ostensible reason is that the Foreign Service pro-duces an elite corps of diplomatic specialists whose expertise is essential to the conduct of American foreign policy...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...At least, not yet...
...When nationwide protests forced the resignation of Lt...
...the program of reconstruction and regional security for the Gulf states is meager...
...Or perhaps two: not losing...
...It was said, 'We want new people.' Baker had a lot of animosity because he thought the Reagan crowd was going around calling him a pragmatist, which he hates...
...President, Does This Man Speak for You...
...Of course, it's not quite working out that way...
...Before their talks, Mr...
...Name Address City State/Zip Mail to: LIBERTY FUND, INC...
...Shultz thought he was better than "the politicians" (especially the conservatives...
...For all his inattention and indecision, Reagan made a few bold moves—the military buildup, SDI, the Reagan Doctrine (none of them supported by Baker, by the way)—that hastened the demise of world Communism...
...Last December, Baker was hauled before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to give testimony on the Persian Gulf crisis...
...After the war, it took several nights of prime-time television coverage of the Kurdish plight and an outcry in Congress before Baker reacted and advised Bush to reverse course and intervene (Quayle's position all along...
...The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote that the two key jobs in the State Department—the undersecretaries for political affairs and for management—should go to political appointees, not Foreign Service officers, as they have traditionally and did under Baker's predecessor George Shultz...
...In effect, Baker replaced the competing agendas of the ideologues and the Foreign Service establishment with an agenda of self-aggrandizement...
...Now there's a shocking revelation...
...Last year, he was told that any sellout of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels in Angola would wreak havoc for Republicans in Florida, so he hung tough, even to the point of personally asking Rep...
...This May, Republican staffers were dismayed to find a complete cutoff of military aid to Guatemala in the Democratic mark-up of the foreign aid bill...
...The Gulf action was a success in no small measure because Bush was his own desk officer...
...He also didn't have much of a taste for playing to a domestic political audience and the press (interestingly, neither did any of the foreign policy figures of the Reagan em—Weinberger, Casey, McFarlane, or Poindexter...
...At the State Department, however, it was still 1988...
...Good public relations and successful deals become the ends, not the means, of policy...
...Compare, for example, Baker's spin control on his flagging Middle East diplomacy in the lead-ins of Thomas Friedman for the New York Times (who is so close to Baker he's considered a shadow secretary of state) and John Goshko for the Washington Post on Sunday, April 28: Friedman: Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d briefly interrupted his Middle East diplomacy last week to meet with the Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh in the Caucasus Mountains...
...The same will no doubt be the case when Congress tries to take Most Favored Nation status away from China...
...By way of comparison, it is instruc- tive to recall just how discombobulated the foreign policy process was on the Gipper's watch...
...Baker tried anyway, not so much because he opposed the use of force but because he hoped to pull an agreement out of the hat and get credit for averting war...
...One could argue, as Baker probably has, that these pesky Third World backwaters count for nothing, especially in a post-Cold War setting...
...ennis Ross has been roaming the Li halls of the State Department lately making the point that the Persian Gulf episode shows that "the closed circle works...
...He's turned the account back over to the assistant secretary for Latin America, Bernard Aronson, better known around the department as "the Inspector Clouseau of foreign policy...
...Mengistu had his wife and his Rolls Royce shipped off to Zimbabwe this May, the Africa bureau's Herman Cohen had learned the lesson that he'd better not cool his heels waiting on Baker...
...You had a lot of people who were deputy assistant secretaries under Reagan who thought they had a shot at moving up, since some of them had briefed Bush over the years and during his campaign, but it didn't happen," says one official...
...act—and then in a way that caused more destruction and loss of life than likely would have resulted from an earlier action or a negotiated departure...
...When it looks as if you don't have them, it's time to compromise...
...This can be summed up in one word: winning...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...This is all to the good, since the man who holds the cabinet portfolio isn't up to the job...
...But once Hamilton finished speaking, he packed up and left for the day...
...He is said to return all his calls (though he never returned mine, alas...
...This year, State asked Congress to authorize up to a 22 percent pay hike for senior FSOs...
...He thinks they're mostly a bunch of jokers, and his belief is sustained by experience...
...The most that could have been expected from the bureau's Arabists, of course, was a clue about Saddam's bellicose intentions...
...Baker answered, "About as clearly as I can see Mount Elbrus...
...Like his reputed political instincts, his vaunted deal-making has no grounding in principle...
...Adding insult to injury, in the wake of Noriega's surrender Baker has been content to let the place go to pot again...
...assistant secretaries are supposed to stay out of the limelight...
...T he inner ring of the Baker circle in- 1 cludes only ihtwiler and Zoellick, who recently took on the additional title of undersecretary of state for economic affairs...
...A reporter asked jokingly at that point whether the hilltop vantage enabled Baker "to see the path to Middle East peacemore clearly...
...Baker and Mullins pulled the same trick last fall on the so-called Seed legislation, aid to the newly emerging democracies in Eastern Europe...
...In fact, here is a line of inquiry for the prodigious "October Surprise" congressional investigators: Did Baker arrange a payoff to then-New York Times reporter Richard Burt, in which Burt—in exchange for holding back information about both the hostage meetings with Iranians and the stolen briefmg books—was given a high-level post in the Reagan State Department...
...He got it not from Baker but from Quayle, who gave an eloquent defense of the policy...
...According to one disgruntled FSO, "You could probably staff Titasury with four people...
...558 + xxvi pages...
...But no matter how hard they've tried, the seventh floor can't call all the signals...
...he's just the sort of malleable Republican they love...
...But it was two pesky backwaters—Panama and Iraq—that caused the only full-blown foreign policy crises of the Bush Administration...
...the paper flow is mainly downward...
...the refugee situation is still smoldering...
...In fairness, then, let's judge Baker and his staff against what they actually set out to achieve in foreign affairs...
...The stories follow a strikingly simBaker protégé Robert Zoellick explained that, if either the FSOs or the remaining Reaganites "lied" to him in an attempt to advance their own biases, he'd crush them...
...now, they are told they must go through public affairs...
...he is his own April Glaspie...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
