Shortly after James Addison Baker III was named the 61st US secretary of state, an up-and-coming Israeli diplomat by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu asked a friend of Baker’s what made him tick. Simple, came the reply: just watch him hunting wild turkey in south Texas.
“He gets up at 3.30am-4am. Smears camo paint over his face. Waits patiently in the bush. The heat’s rising, all sorts of animals are crawling up his leg and biting,” the friend recalled, “Baker doesn’t move, not even an eyebrow, and then: Boom! He blows its ass off.”
As the Israelis discovered, patience, along with an acute sense of power, are the qualities which made Baker between 1980 and 1993 one of the most powerful men in Washington, alongside Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. He is the only American to have served as White House chief of staff, treasury secretary and secretary of state. At 86, says a long-serving Texan aide, “he’s still strong as a horse and kicks like a mule.”