James Baker

Biography

James Addison Baker III was born in Houston in 1930 into a family of lawyers; his great-grandfather founded the firm Baker Botts. He attended the Hill School and Princeton University, where he took a history degree in 1952, served as a Marine Corps officer from 1952 to 1954 and then studied at the University of Texas School of Law. An anti-nepotism rule kept him out of the family firm, so from 1957 to 1980 he practised corporate law at Andrews Kurth in Houston.

Registered as a Democrat, he was drawn into Republican politics by his friend George H. W. Bush and helped run Bush's 1970 Senate campaign. He was under secretary of commerce under Gerald Ford, won the delegate fight for Ford at the 1976 convention and then chaired his campaign, lost the 1978 race for Texas attorney general, and managed Bush's 1980 primary campaign.

Ronald Reagan made him White House chief of staff in 1981. In 1985 he became treasury secretary, arranging the Plaza Accord and the Baker Plan, and in 1988 he left to run Bush's successful presidential campaign. As secretary of state from 1989 to 1992 he handled the end of the Cold War, German reunification, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the coalition for the Gulf War, and helped organise the 1991 Madrid peace conference. He returned as chief of staff in August 1992 to lead Bush's re-election bid.

After 1993 he rejoined Baker Botts and briefly consulted for Enron. From 1997 to 2004 he was the UN secretary-general's personal envoy for Western Sahara. He directed George W. Bush's legal team in the 2000 Florida recount and co-chaired the Iraq Study Group in 2006.