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James Baker: Out Front and Behind the Scenes
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15826 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1989 |
2,691 Words |
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Ralph Z. Hallow
Ralph Z. Hallow is a political reporter and senior national
correspondent for the Washington Times. |
Jim Baker, Washington's quiet, supreme manipulator, began the first day of the Bush era sitting on the sidelines.
The morning of November 9, 1988, was sunny and warm in Houston, matching the mood of a tired but happy George Bush, who was about to hold his first press conference as president-elect. He had planned to show how much of an energetic, "hands on" president he would be by using the occasion to announce his first two cabinet appointments.
Few people in his own official entourage knew that, and certainly not the assembled reporters, most of whom had been criss-crossing the country with the vice president for more than two years in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. They were simply too weary from incessant travel and from covering the election returns the night before to have worked up much intellectual curiosity about what Bush would say.
What surprised the press was not that James A. Baker III, his close friend for 30 years, would be the secretary of state in the Bush administration, since most reporters already had written speculative stories to that effect, nor that the vice president chose to make the announcement as his first public act as president-elect.
What did surprise the few Bush insiders who had an inkling of what was supposed to transpire was something else: that Bush did not at the same time announce that another dear friend, Nicholas Brady, would be asked to remain as secretary of the treasury.
"At the
... (1997 of 15852 Characters)
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