Here's Where It Gets Interesting - From White House to War Zone with NYT Correspondent Peter Baker

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by Chief White House Correspondent of the New York Times, Peter Baker. From the White House to Afghanistan to Moscow, Peter has travelled the world to cover the world’s most pressing issues. Sharon and Peter dive into what it’s like to report on U.S. Presidents, and Peter shares his experiences as the first newspaper reporter to enter Afghanistan immediately following the 9/11 attacks. Peter and Sharon also discuss Peter’s latest book, The Man Who Ran Washington, and uncover the life and legacy of James A. Baker, a man who ran five presidential campaigns. You do not want to miss this fascinating episode! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. So excited to welcome you to this episode. I am chatting today with the New York Times White House correspondent, Peter Baker. I think you are going to find this conversation absolutely intriguing. He was the first U.S. newspaper reporter on the ground in Afghanistan after September 11th. He was the Moscow bureau chief for four years in which he covered the rise of Vladimir Putin. He has been covering five presidents so far for major newspapers. Oh my goodness, this man is a treasure trove of knowledge and also just delightful. So let's dive into this episode with Peter Baker. I'm Sharon McMahon. And welcome to the Sharon write some books.

I love to talk to people who know things I don't know. And so this makes it very exciting for me to talk to you because there's so many questions that I have them like, tell me all the things. I want to know everything about Vladimir Putin. I want to know everything about Afghanistan. I want everything about covering the White House. I want to know all the things. So let's just start. How did you actually get into doing this job? How does one become the White House correspondent at the New York Times? Tell me. Well, it's a good question. I've been very lucky.

I always wanted to be a journalist, even going back to being a kid as early as third grade. My third grade teacher just passed away. And I give her credit or blame for basically my whole life. She made me editor of the class paper at Pine Ridge Elementary School, and something really stuck. And ever since, I wanted to be a journalist. So I'm truly sorry that she has passed away because she has meant so much to me in my life. I grew up wanting to be a reporter. I worked at The Washington Times for a little while.

I worked at The Washington Post for 20 years. I moved to the New York Times about 13 years ago, something like that. And I've spent time in state houses and county school boards and overseas in Moscow. And as you mentioned, Afghanistan. But the thing I spent the most time doing is covering the White House. And it was a complete accident that I got the job and been very lucky to keep it. What about being the White House correspondent fascinates you the most? You know, what I love about it is it's basically like a front row seat of history. Yes. On any given day, something extraordinary can and often usually does happen. And it's not just one subject either. What I love is that it's something different most days. You know. One day you're doing foreign policy, the next you're doing Medicare policy. You could

be doing something about race relations in this country or about the legal system or about taxes or healthcare, any number of things. And so it's not tedious or boring because you learn something. I've been started at the White House in 1996 and been doing it almost continuously since then, except for four years overseas. And I still learn something every day I show up there. That has to be incredibly interesting and gratifying to learn something new every day. I know that would be like very interesting

and exciting to me. Like, what can I learn today? And I love what you just said about front row seat at history. Someday, this is what our kids are going to be reading about in their third grade classrooms. And you will have written the story that maybe not at a third grade level, maybe at a high school level, some teachers, some government teachers. First or second grade level, I'd say.

I'm working my way up to third grade. Give me time. I would love to hear some of your observations about how covering the president has changed since you were a younger reporter to now. It's a huge change. And one of the biggest changes is just how more distant we are from the presidents we cover. It doesn't matter Republican, Democrat. With each passing president, we are further removed from them in many ways. You know, back in 1996, when I started on the beat, Clinton was the president. And I felt like we spent enough close time in his proximity that we

got to know him a little bit. We could interact with him some. Today, you can't interact as a reporter with a president without it being basically on the record. It's impossible to have any kind of casual moment because of Twitter, because of social media, because of 24-7 cable, anything and everything a president does. There's no sort of casual sort of relaxed moment. You know, I mean, President H.W. Bush would come to the briefing room and just say,

hey guys, how's it going? And he didn't cause a big headline or whatever. He didn't say anything important, but it was a way of getting to know each other as human beings. The more we go into this hyper technology, hyper accelerated news cycle, the less we know each other as human beings. Now, Trump, to some extent, was an exception. He did like to interact with us a lot, a lot more than other presidents do. He wasn't

friendly or casual. A lot of times he was yelling at us, but he did interact with reporters a lot, a lot more than President Biden does, for instance. That is such an interesting point that now we've reached a point where literally every word out of the president's mouth is documented and potentially judged. Yeah, absolutely. And there's no such thing as a casual comment, a little aside, a tiny joke, a personal jab, all these things end up being reported. And that's understandable. And I'm sort of for that as a journalistic purist. But I think we also have lost something. And the other thing that's a big change since 1996 when I started is just the technology and the relentlessness of the news cycle. When I started as a reporter

covering the White House beat, I wrote a story, maybe two stories a day, but it was at the end of the day, around six o'clock, whenever the deadline was, and that was it. And then the earlier part of the day, I would spend reporting and calling people and meeting people and having interviews. Today, you could be writing constantly because of the internet, because you have to get things out right away, get it on Twitter, get it on social media, get it into the website. There's no time to sit back and think and digest and process a story before you publish it. So we try very hard to find ways to make sure we're still doing that kind of reporting. We have one reporter who's in charge of the sort of daily churn, this minute by minute journalism that we have to practice today,

while the other ones have a chance to spend more time looking at deeper stories and so forth. So we don't lose that kind of journalism, but it's really accelerated to such a degree that it's dominates your day and your life in a way that it never used to. Yeah. That is so interesting too. I tell people sometimes, you know, like when I was growing up, there was 30 minutes of national news on, do you like Dan Rather? Do you like Peter Jennings? You know what I mean? Like pick one. The story had to be so newsworthy that it had to fit into that 22 minute broadcast. When you eliminate the commercials had to be so newsworthy that it was included. And now everything is potentially newsworthy and it is difficult for consumers to make sense of like, what am I supposed to pay attention to? What is actually a big deal? Am I supposed to care about this

looming government shutdown? Am I supposed to care about that? You know what I mean? Like it's difficult. You're exactly right. And the other thing that's different is because back then we had Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw to pick from, and we had a couple of big newspapers and the wire services and the news magazines. There was a limited number of places that were going to provide you the news and that there was in fact then sort of a filter, right? And that meant that everybody was starting off with more or less the same back set when we had our conversations. Today, this is a good thing generally that we've had this proliferation of media, the democratization of the media through the internet. General, I think that's a good thing, generally, that we've had this proliferation of media, the democratization of the media through the internet.

General, I think that's a good thing. We have so many more outlets these days, so many more ways of learning things and hearing things. But the consequence of that is we tend to drift to that part of the info ecosphere that reinforces things we already believe, that reinforces our prior convictions. And we don't necessarily all start with the same fact set. You can watch Fox News or MSNBC for a month. And if you only saw those two things, you come out thinking the world is a very different place because you'd be getting different types of

stories, different types of information, sometimes misinformation, or at least not complete information. And that's a difference, right? When you watch Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, we're all starting from the same vantage point. And then we had our debates about what we should make of all this. But today, we're living in different realities. That is absolutely so true. I can just totally see what you're saying there, that it's difficult to have meaningful discussions when we don't even agree on a set of facts.

Absolutely. And that can be very challenging as a reporter, very challenging as a citizen when you're dealing with multiple sets of facts. Do you find it difficult to be objective when you are reporting on a president? Or is it easy for you to step out of your personal feelings? Yeah, it's a great question. I've stopped using the word objective and a lot of journalists have because I think it probably is misleading in some ways. Right. We're all human

beings. There's no such thing as true objectivity, because we all bring our own personal experiences and prejudices to the table. Objectivity is not something that any human can genuinely reach. So I look at this a little like religion in the sense that we all might aspire to have a sin-free life, but we all are sinners, and therefore we're going to fail, but we're going to try to improve ourselves and do the best we possibly can and reach some ideal that's not reachable as best we can. That's what journalism in some ways is like, to reach an ideal of not many objective, but fair, disinterested, open-minded, balanced, factual, for sure, interested, open-minded, balanced, factual, for sure, accurate, most important, but also contextualized and analytical. And that's a really hard space to find, right? Where, you know,

especially in this day and age, because of what we just talked about, because you can get your information off the internet so quickly, because you can find out something from Twitter, where does a newspaper or a TV person come in that offers something beyond just the who, where, why, or a TV person come in that offer something beyond just the who, where, why, and how. And so I think of my job, we think of our jobs, is to provide analysis as well as facts these days. But hopefully it's fact-based analysis, not opinions. And there's a difference. And it's hard and muddy, the line between those two.

An opinion is, I think this is a good idea, a bad idea. An analysis is, I think this has a chance of passing Congress. I don't think this has a chance of passing Congress. Hopefully that analysis is based on your experience in understanding how things work, not your preference whether something should or shouldn't pass Congress. But you ask about how do you try to keep that journalistic mindset? You know, I don't vote. I haven't voted since 1996.

I try very hard not to make a decision, even in the privacy of the voting booth, even the privacy of my own mind about who is better, which side is right, which side is wrong. I'm not saying you can do that. It's obviously, you know, pretty hard. But to the extent that I can, I try to avoid coming to conclusions about who's right or wrong about something or which candidate might be a better person or a better president than the other one. And that way, I go to the briefing room and I look at the person I'm covering. I don't have anything invested in that person because I voted for or against that person, right? I don't have to prove that I was right or wrong, even a small, tiny way in my mind that my choice was correct or not

correct. Again, it doesn't mean I'm going to succeed. We all fail, but that's the ideal anyway that we're striving for. So interesting. I love that. I would love to succeed. We all fail, but that's the ideal anyway that we're striving for. So interesting. I love that. I would love to hear a little bit more too about your experience working in Afghanistan because you were one of the first or the first reporter who was reporting on the ground in Afghanistan after September 11th. I would love to hear more about that. Yeah. I think what it is, I was the first American super writer to get there after 9-11, something like that. Anyway, just days after the attacks, before the CIA got there, before the special forces

got there. And I went in on an old rickety Soviet helicopter that the Northern Alliance, which was the rebel group fighting the Taliban, was flying from Dushanbe, which is Tajikistan, down to the Panjshir Valley, which is north of Kabul and their base of operations. And I stayed there for months with them. It was primitive. It was no electricity, no running water. I didn't eat anything other than rice or bread for weeks because I was afraid of getting sick.

We brought a generator in order to power up our satellite phones and laptops and slept on a concrete floor and went out wandering every day trying to figure out what the news was about this very, very complicated place that I had never been. In some ways, it's like the American experience, right? A guy like me doesn't know anything about the place, shows up, tries to figure it out, tries to figure out what it all means. And it was a real, for a reporter, it was a real adventure. Dangerous at times, confusing always, because I don't think we can ever really fully penetrate a society like Afghanistan. But the people I met were remarkable. And it's sad to see what's happened now in the 20 years since then, that they're going to go back to this way of living that I first encountered 20 years ago under this brutal, repressive regime

that doesn't allow women to show their eyes and hands in public. They can't go out without a male escort. Girls can't go to school. People, you know, beaten and tortured and killed. So it's a very sad moment, I think, for anybody who spent time in Afghanistan to see what happened. I don't take a position on what was right or wrong or do there. I understand the different sides of the debate, but no matter which side of the debate you're on, whether it was right or wrong to leave, it's still a sad situation for the Afghans who were left there. It's true. We're still humans. We can't shut down the compassion for the people who are living under an oppressive regime that they have little hope of changing. Yeah, that's right. And I think it was sad as if they had 20 years of hope, you know,

like at least some of them did. Right. We said, you know, we can help you make it a better place. We failed. They failed. Everybody failed in that sense. But the people I met 20 years ago didn't have a hope of a better life necessarily because they hadn't experienced it. Now, the younger people, especially those who grew up in the years since 9-11 and since the time when we toppled the Taliban the first time, they grew up thinking things could since 9-11 and since the time when we toppled the Taliban the first time, they grew up thinking things could be better for them. And now, you know, they're watching it go back. Oh, my goodness. I would love to hear more, too, about covering Moscow, your years covering Vladimir Putin. I find Russia super fascinating. I would want to

hear all of the juicy details. Well, it is a fascinating place. It really is. My wife and I went there, Susan Glasser. She now is the New Yorker. But at the time we were working at the Washington Post together, they asked us to go to Moscow as co-bureau chiefs, which we did. It was a real adventure. I mean, Putin was just beginning his time as president. He just came in and everybody told us, oh, I'm so sorry you're going now because it looks like it's going to be a really boring time. You know, you missed all the really interesting times with Gorbachev and Yeltsin and exactly and the coup and the fighting in the streets and all this stuff. And you're going to be there. It's just this boring technocrat, Vladimir Putin.

Well, I mean, the four years that we were there in some way, I think, are probably the most important four years in the last half century because it really was the change. It really was the pivot from the opening that they had had, the possibility of a democracy that they had explored, to this different, more authoritarian system that they have now had for the last 20 years. And it was anything but dull. A lot of terrorism in Moscow at the time. We covered a theater, musical theater. It was taken over by Chechen terrorists. We covered a school in Beslan where there was a horrific terrorist attack. 330 some people died. People forget about that.

It was the most horrific thing I ever saw in my life. But it's also a remarkable place in so many other ways. Getting past the politics of it, the people are extraordinary in their achievements and their interests. I mean, you know, this is the one country in the world other than the United States that is both, you know, a nuclear superpower, has a space program, has the literature and history and musical capacity. The ballet and the chess masters and their all of their scientific achievements are extraordinary. I got to meet KGB agents and ballerinas. I got to meet, you know,

cosmonauts and, you know, literary giants. And what a terrific opportunity for any reporter to spend some time there. What do you think that Vladimir Putin makes of the U.S. right now? You know, like obviously we underwent a pretty significant ideological shift with the election of Joe Biden. The rhetoric surrounding foreign policy, surrounding Russia, et cetera, changed when we got a new president. As somebody who probably knows more about Putin than a lot of people, what do you think he thinks right now? On the one hand, what he wanted in 2016 when they interfered in the election were two things. One was to get Donald Trump elected. They did have a specific intent to help him get elected, mostly because Putin hated Hillary Clinton. But he wanted to get Trump elected. The second thing he wanted to do was, I think, disrupt our democracy. On the first,

I don't think it worked out the way he hoped it would. Because of the investigation into his ties with Russia, it meant that Trump couldn't be as pro-Russia as Putin would have liked him to have been, right? Congress came in and said, we're still imposing sanctions on Russia. Trump felt at times that he had to agree to expel diplomats and do things, even if he personally kept saying nice things about Putin. So I don't think that worked out the way Putin wanted. But the part about disrupting our democracy, they've been very successful at that.

We've helped a lot, by the way. We didn't need outsiders to help us that. We've done that pretty well ourselves. But what he wanted to see in America was a weakened system, a system that was questioning itself, where we're fighting with each other so much that we're not bothering him in his part of the world. And what he wants to be able to do is show his people, see, that whole democracy thing, it sucks there too. They don't have it right either. They're pretty awful. So don't sit there and give me any pressure about changing our society because you wouldn't

want to be like them. So in that sense, I think he's gotten a lot in the last five years out of what's happened. One of the things people wonder about is these Russian attempts to interfere with our democracy. First of all, people don't understand what that looks like. Is it like spies stealing government secrets? Can you tell people what actually does that look like in the United States? Well, it's on the edges. They did not, as far as we know, hack into polling machines and change votes. It wasn't anything as direct as that. What it was, was like using classic disinformation and propaganda to get us to fight with each other. So they would create on Facebook, for instance, fake Black Lives Matter

sites or whatever. And they would say things like, we shouldn't vote for Hillary because she's terrible too. And we should stay at home. They're not really actually Black Lives Matters activists, or I'm making it up. I don't remember if it was specifically Black Lives Matter or some other group like that. It was they're trying to convince people that they are actually Americans, when in fact, they're Russians who are playing to our own fears and our own divisiveness and our own animosities toward each other and stir it up, get us angry and mad at each other. They would pretend to be white supremacists or they would put out these anti-Muslim websites or what have you. They would do these things in order to stir

up American passions and anger and so forth to get us fighting each other and to depress the vote in 2016 specifically for the Democrats. But broadly speaking, they also just wanted us to be at each other's throats. Can you explain to the listeners? I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs.

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Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. How does Russia benefit from that? Why do they care? Well, among other things, for Putin, life is a zero-sum game. If somebody else is winning, that means he's losing. If somebody else is losing, that means he's winning. Cover President Obama and he would say, well, you know, we're talking about Russian-American relations. It's not a zero-sum game. Like, well, you might not consider it a zero-sum game, but Putin did and does. And I think so, you know, from his point of view, trying to keep the United States down, it makes Russia up, right? And it keeps us from,

in his view, interfering with him. Right now, we're focused so much on other things that we're not focused, for instance, on what he's doing in Ukraine, where he sees part of the country. We're not focusing as much on the Middle East, where he has tried to exercise more influence. We're not stopping his plans for a new big gas pipeline into Europe, which has become very controversial. So if we're busy with other things, it gives him more freedom, I think, to do what he wants to do as he sees it anyway on the international stage. And then secondly, I think it just discredits the opposing system, right? It discredits the West and therefore it makes him look, in his mind anyway, better and that Russia is great again.

It's a little bit like if three children and two of them agree to get into a fight to distract mom so that the third child can go over here and steal the cookies. Absolutely right. That's exactly right. We fight and I pretend to hit you, then we'll meet you in our rooms later when we're being punished and you will have the cookies. He's the cookie stealer. He's absolutely. Please include that in your next article. I like it. It's a good analysis. I would love to hear more about your book, which I found so interesting. First of all, introduce us to the man who runs Washington and what made you interested in him? Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. The book is called The Man Who Ran Washington,

The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. Let's start off by saying there's no relationship between James Baker and Peter Baker, totally different Bakers. But Jim Baker was Secretary of State at the end of the Cold War under George H.W. Bush. He was the Secretary of State who helped bring the Cold War to an end. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he helped make sure that this was a peaceful process. When the Berlin Wall fell, he helped bring Germany back together again. They reunified. During the first Gulf War, he put together the coalition that helped drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

That was the more successful version of the Iraq War that would come later. If that by itself weren't enough, and usually that would be enough for a biography, what we found so fascinating is he also was on the political side. He ran five presidential campaigns. I mean, think about that. Guys like Karl Rove or David Axelrod or Steve Bannon, they run one or two. And they're big, famous figures just for that alone. He ran five campaigns.

So he managed to do both the politics and the statecraft at the same time. And also, I just think he was a fascinating individual because his story is the story of Washington. He had his hands in almost every major thing that happened from the end of Watergate to the end of the Cold War. And so telling his story allowed us to tell a bigger story about Washington and his era and how things have changed from then, how it's different today than the Washington of Jim Baker's time. I love how you described when he first became friends with George H.W. Bush, whom he called Bushy. They became tennis partners in Texas. Their friendship blossomed and George H.W. Bush was wanting him to come help me on my campaign.

You know, you're a great friend. You're such a smart guy, et cetera, et cetera. And his response to him was, I have two problems. I don't know anything about politics. The other is I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat. And George H.W. Bush was like, well, we can fix that second part. Yes. Yes. And they did. And they did. But this was Texas, of course, at the time when Democrats were really pretty conservative in Texas before they really became Republicans. Jim Baker was part of that change. Right. When conservative Democrats moved over the Republican Party, he was one of them.

But he didn't know anything about politics. It really wasn't something he knew. His family was big time aristocracy in Houston. His father, grandfather, great grandfather, all of them named James Addison Baker. They had built modern Houston, but they also believe in staying out of politics. So when he jumps at George H.W. Bush's invitation, it's all new to him. And suddenly at age 40, really, he's having the most successful midlife career change that we can think of. Yes. What do you think made him feel like, maybe I could try this?

Maybe at age 40, I would be good at running political campaigns, or I would be good at being secretary of the treasury or being secretary of state. Well, I think for one thing, he's supernaturally confident. That's a lesson to all young people, is that you have to have confidence in yourself. Not arrogance, although there's some of that too, but confidence. And I think he just was very confident in his own abilities. Secondly, I think he's super competitive. Bush was too. The two of them, they played on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, fanatically competitive people. To this day, Baker will brag about the two doubles championships that he and Bush won back in the 50s or whatever it was. We interviewed

President Bush before he passed away. He brought up the tennis championships that they had won. President Bush before he passed away. He brought up the tennis championships that they had won. These two guys were super competitive. They wanted to win. I think for him, that was the first appeal of politics is to figure out how to win. And then as he went along, he kind of evolved. Over time, he wanted to stop being a fixer. He wanted to stop being a campaign guy and start being a guy who actually was a principal, right? A cabinet secretary, somebody who was, as you say, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of State, who made big things happen, who moved history. And so he kind of evolved from that original role to a different and higher plane as he saw it. Two things I want to ask you about history, which is the Carter and Ford debates, because I think people today would find what that debate was like

very interesting compared to the dumpster fire inside a train wreck that today's debates are. Tell everybody more about the Carter Ford debate. Oh my goodness. It was such a different experience. This is the first time a president had debated his opponent since the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960. This is not a tradition at this point. It was these debates, the Ford-Carter debates that made it a tradition ever since. But it was a very decorous, very genteel affair. In fact, at one point during one of the debates, the power goes off, the lights go off for 25 minutes. And the two candidates just stand there

at their podiums quietly saying nothing because they didn't know what to do. They didn't want to move. You know, there was no shouting. Nobody was saying lock them up or lock her up. I mean, it was a very different kind of affair. It had a big impact. At one point, President Ford made a gaffe where he talked about Poland not really being under Soviet domination. And people gave him a lot of grief for it because, of course, the Soviets did dominate Poland. But that was the kind of thing that we considered to be a gaffe back then. It wasn't these sort of free-for-alls we see today where everybody's shouting at the same time and screaming and yelling at the moderators and acting like the three children you just said stealing the cookies right it seemed like they were just announce your turn why don't

you give your answer yes i will pay attention while you give your answer well that's interesting and here's what i have to say about that you know like no name no name calling no zingers nothing tweetable nothing tweetable happened They stood there in the dark for 25 minutes. That's right. And all of the base, they had three base and Carter never raised the most controversial thing that Ford had done, which is to pardon Nixon. He never even brought it up. You know, can you imagine a day? Well, again, I think back then they were always afraid of going too far. You had to be, you know, respectable and, you know, have a certain image. And you didn't want to look like you were a partisan knife fighter. That was for what other people did, right? That's what your Jim Bakers did, not what your George H.W. Bushes

did. And of course, over time, that changed, right? And the candidates themselves engaged in the knife fight more directly themselves. And today, of course, you know, they all are walking around with machetes. But back then, it was seen as a little beneath you to be too harsh. You always had to treat the other person with a degree of respect because you needed to be seen as a leader with diplomacy. Exactly. We wanted at that time our president to be somebody that we could look up to, not somebody that we would root for on a wrestling federation. That's right. Lots of people I feel like probably don't know that Ronald Reagan was not hip to choosing Bushy George H.W. as his vice president. A lot of people probably don't realize that

Reagan was really strongly considering a different candidate. And Jim Baker had a lot to do with his choice. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, the honest thing. So George H.W. Bush and Reagan run for the nomination in 1980. Reagan beats Bush, but Bush does better than people expect. He's the last man standing. Reagan didn't like Bush. He was mad at some of the things that had been said on the campaign trail. He bore a little bit of a grudge. When he came to the convention in Kansas City, he has his eye on somebody else, as you put it rightly, Gerald Ford. Can you imagine that? I mean, making the last president be your vice president is a little weird, right? It's a little weird. But Gerald Ford thought about it. He considered it. And then he went on TV with Walter Cronkite and they talked about this idea.

And he said, yeah, I'm negotiating. And I think it would have to be something like a co-presidency. I actually, Ford didn't even use the term co-presidency. Cronkite used it, but Ford didn't correct him. And Reagan's watching the TV back at his hotel suite saying, uh-uh, no way. We're not going to have a co-presidency. I'm the guy who's winning. You know, you'd be the vice president. So that blew that up. And at that point, you're at the convention.

You got to pick somebody. And they're like, OK, well, who's left? And he said, well, there's Bush. And so he wasn't really enthusiastic about it. But Bush was the last man standing. So he calls up Bush. Baker, of course, had been an aide to Ford and an aide, of course, to Bush and was the guy who picks up the phone when Reagan calls and hands the phone to Bush. And sure enough, Bush is picked. And he might not have been picked had Baker not intervened earlier to force Bush to drop out of the race when it looked like he couldn't win. Bush wanted to keep on going. Baker understood as his campaign manager that the longer he went, the more he was likely to aggravate or alienate Reagan and doom his chances of possibly getting on the ticket. So he went against his friend, which is not an easy thing to do,

and said, George, it's time to get out. You've got to get out of this. And Bush was mad, but it was the right thing to do. You describe in the book how Bush had said something about Reagan's economic policies that really got under Reagan's skin. And Reagan didn't feel like Bush was anti-abortion enough for him. And that basically Bush needed to agree to get on board with the entirety of Reagan's platform. And once Reagan heard those words, then he was fine. I can go with this. I can work with this. Exactly. And Bush's view was, look, you know what, you're the guy who's won. I will serve as your vice president. You'd call the shots and I'll be loyal to you even if I have disagreements. I'll keep them private between us. I'll never

embarrass you in public. And he became kind of a model in some ways for being vice president for a lot of his successors, you know, somehow managed to be both loyal, but not, you know, ruining his own independent view by the time it came for him to run for president in 1988. you know, somehow managed to be both loyal, but not, you know, ruining his own, his own independent view by the time it came for him to run for president in 1988. Mm hmm. I love how you said, too, that Jim Baker, his doctrine was dealmaking. Yeah. Which is so different than the way a lot of political operatives work today, which is their doctrine is sledgehammering. political operatives work today, which is their doctrine is sledgehammering.

Yeah. It's a great way to put it. So I would love to hear more about the Jim Baker doctrine of deal-making. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. First of all, he was White House Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan. That by itself is extraordinary because he had run two campaigns against Reagan, and Reagan still thought, this is the guy I need to be running my White House because he understands how things work. That tells you how things were not nearly as personal back then as they are today. I can't imagine today anybody hiring, you know, be their chief of staff, that person who tried to beat him twice. But Baker was very good at understanding that you needed to get something done by working with the other side. Reagan had a Republican Senate for a few years, but he never had a Republican House.

He had a Democratic House all eight years. George H.W. Bush had a Democratic House all four years he was in. So for the 12 years that Baker is there, he has to deal with the Democrats if he wants to get anything done. And he believes that there's a way to have a negotiation which the other side gets something that they need

while you get most of what you need. And it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. It's the opposite of Vladimir Putin and the opposite of today's politics, where if you win, it must mean I lose. That's not the way Baker looked at it. He was a believer in the win-win. You're a believer that we can have a negotiation where I get most of what I want, but you walk away from the table feeling like you got enough of what you need. Why do you think we have moved away from that? You know, it's a variety of things. One thing I think is we are in a more polarized time, in a more ideological and partisan time. You know, it used to be that if you were a member of Congress, you wanted to find somebody from the other side of the aisle to co-sponsor

your legislation. And you would go down to the House gallery or the Senate gallery or the press and say, here, you know, here we are, we're together, it's a bipartisan bill. And you would be rewarded, or at least the perception was that politically you were rewarded for being bipartisan. Today, you would be punished. Today, if you're perceived to be bipartisan, then what you do is you risk getting a challenge from the extreme of your party, whether the left or the right. Because we've gerrymandered these districts in such a way that most incumbents are more vulnerable to a primary challenge within their party than they are to somebody from the other side. So there's very little interest, very little incentive to reach out to the middle, to reach out to the

other side, because you only get at risk being called a traitor, you know, being called somebody who is a sellout. Again, this is a left-right thing. This is true in both parties. Now, the Republicans have to be particularly adamant about not cooperating with Biden right now. But broadly speaking, the incentive structure has changed. Yes. And it's just different than it was when Baker was in office. Do you pin most of that on district gerrymandering?

That's part of it. It's a number of things. It's the gerrymandering of House districts so that, again, you're more vulnerable to your party than you are to the other side. It's also what we talked about earlier, the fragmentation of the media, so that there are these safe spaces of your conservative or liberal that you go to and that now tend to heighten the pressure on members of Congress to stick with the team. We're a more tribal moment in our history. So if you're a Republican, you're very cognizant of what is

being said in the conservative media about you. And same thing if you're a Democrat, you're much more concerned about what the liberal media is going to say about you. And so when it was the Dan Rather, Peter Jennings era, there wasn't that same kind of pressure from the wings to stand by your party and not work with the other side. That's such a good point. I would love to hear more too, because I'm sure you have experienced a shift in the public's perception of the media that it used to be the New York Times was who everyone aspires to be. You know what I mean? And now there is a high degree of skepticism on the part of many Americans about the quote unquote mainstream media.

I would love to hear more from your perspective about how the perception of the media just in general has changed. And if you think that's fair or not fair. It's a good question. And it's really an existential one for us. Again, part of it, I think, comes back to what we talked about, which is to say, because there is this proliferation of alternative information zones right now, that has increased the belief that the legacy media, the mainstream, whatever we want to call it, the Times, the Post, the Journal, and so forth, are somehow not trustworthy.

It's also, of course, a function of our politicians who have made a real point of telling the public not to believe us. The last president told the public that the press was the enemy of the people. And he used phrases like fake news. And if you use those phrases enough time, it doesn't matter whether they're true or not, it gets through to at least a certain number of people. You know, I would go to rallies for President Trump, and he would start this whole riff about how the press is fake and not telling the truth. People in the rally would turn around at us in the back of the room and start shouting and screaming and pointing their fingers. And they were really angry. So some of that's been stoked by politicians for political gain, for their own personal gain. President Trump was once asked by Leslie Stahl, why do you do that kind of thing? He says, you know why I do that? In order to

discredit you so that when you write something nasty about me, nobody will believe you. It was an intentional practice, an intentional approach by the last president and by other politicians as well to discredit anybody who might say something they don't like. That's part of it. The other part of those are our own fault. I mean, we have only ourselves to blame as well. We need to look internally. We need to look at ourselves and figure out what we're doing that has encouraged people not to believe us. I think we need to be more transparent about things. We need to explain ourselves better to our readers and our viewers so they understand what we do, what we consider journalism to be. Part of it is that we've had this blurring of the lines. We have the blurring of the lines between opinion and news, right?

We talked a little bit about that earlier. And the truth is, if you turn on the TV, is that person talking to you an opinion person or a news person? We can't tell as much anymore because we don't really advertise it the same way. The old days, we'd have the news in the front of the newspaper. The opinions were in the back on the editorial page, and you knew there was a distinction. Today, we've really blurred that line. I'm part of it, too. I sit on MSNBC, and I'm on a panel on a show. The show may be a great show like Brian Williams, but sitting next to me is a Republican sitting next to me on the other side, the Democrat. They're spouting opinions. My job is not to spout opinions, but to provide news. But it's not surprising that the audience might sit there and say, well, he's just another one of them. You know, he's just like them.

He's just as biased and, you know, taking sides as they are. So I think we've done a bad job, unfortunately, of clarifying our lines, explaining to the public what we do, what we consider journalism to be, helping them understand what we do. I would love to change gears just a little bit and hear about what it was like to write this book that we've been talking about with your wife. Because I can tell you if my husband and I tried to write a book together, Lord help us. Well, you have three children, right? Four. Four children. So that's a much bigger thing to do with a spouse than writing a book. Let me tell you, that's a much bigger deal. But the writing of the book has been great. This is our second book together. We started off working

together. So we've always been working companions as well as personal companions. This book was easier than our first one together because the first one we wrote while my wife was pregnant with our son. And you can imagine how that would go, right? And so we're rushing to finish it before the baby arrives. We go to dinner one night and we're walking home and she says, I think the baby drops. And I'm like, I don't know what that means because I'm a guy. She says, it means it's coming not too long from now. Like that's not possible. We have two chapters. So we go home, we sit up all night trying to polish these two chapters. My wife goes upstairs for a little while to get some rest. Maybe you're at five in the morning. I come up a couple hours later. I said, okay, I've sent those last two chapters publisher. She says, good. Cause I'm having contractions. Our baby was born that day.

Oh, my goodness. So that was a much bigger challenge than this. Good for her. Yeah, yeah. She could do everything. That's right. Have you heard that story about Judith Love Cohen? Do you know who she is?

She's no, no, no. So she is was a NASA engineer and it was her job to construct the abort guidance system for Apollo 13. Oh, wow. And she was hugely pregnant and she was like, I cannot have this baby until I finish the abort guidance system, which of course then Apollo 13 ended up needing, right? Like Houston, we have a problem. So she went into labor before she had finished up like all the things she needed to do. She went to the hospital. She was like, I'm having contractions. She finished up in between contractions, finished up all the work on the abort guidance system, had a career come and take it back to NASA and then gave birth to the actor Jack Black. Oh, you're kidding. Really? Isn't that fascinating? That's a great story. How did I not know that? I love Apollo and space program

stories. I never heard that. That's amazing. It is such a great story. It reminds me of your wife's story of like, I will finish the book. Exactly. The book will be finished before the baby makes his appearance. Oh, by the way, that's the thing. So she's having contractions. What does she do? Does she go straight to the hospital like a normal person would do? No, because we've been so busy with the book, we haven't done anything to like get the baby room ready or anything. So she drive to buy, buy baby. Oh my God. She starts like, she's pulling things off the shelf. It's like, you know, one of those concepts, you know, what can you do in 60 seconds? And the great thing is if, you know, buy,bye baby, if there's, you know, there's an

express line, if your contractions are under five minutes apart. So, you know, she got through there pretty quickly and then went to the hospital. Oh my goodness. Yeah. You got to get it, like throw the diapers in. What else do we need to hear? Lunsies? Yes. I love that. Good for her. Women are incredible. They are, yes. Oh my goodness. One last question, which is, what do you hope that when somebody picks up this book, which is such a fascinating peek into this era of U.S. history and politics, you absolutely will love the inside scoop of how things used to work in Washington. What do you hope the reader takes away from this book? Well, thank you for asking. I appreciate that. What do you hope the reader takes away from this book? Oh, well, thank you for asking. I appreciate that. And thank you for saying that. You know,

it's a personal story, obviously, about one man and his story. And there's some really interesting personal stories or tragedies. His first wife dies and leaves him with four boys. He has to figure out how to reshape his whole life. There's all these really human moments in there. But broadly, I think you don't have to know or care much about James Baker to find this interesting, because I think it's really a story about us, about our modern times, about Washington, about how we govern. And he just happens to be the person we're used to tell that story. Susan likes to say it's not a celebration of power, but a study of power, a study of how power works, or at least how it used to work. And if we understand how it used

to work, then we think about how it works today. And we understand, you know, what's changed, what hasn't, what makes sense about what the way things used to be, what doesn't make sense about the way things used to be, maybe how we can think about what we should do today. I love that. That is super interesting. Well, I really enjoyed the book. Tell everybody where they can find you if they want to find you in the world, not at your house, but I live on the corner of K. No, obviously they can read your articles in New York Times. They can find your books in bookstores. Do you have like a Twitter, an Instagram, any of that kind of stuff that you would like people to follow you at? I do have a Twitter account. It's at Peter Baker, that you would like people to follow you at? I do have a Twitter account.

It's at PeterBakerNYT. And that's most of my social media. I'm not very good at it, but I try to be good at it. And we put out a lot of stuff on Twitter. And at some point we'll have a website. Well, this was absolutely a pleasure. I truly enjoyed talking to you and I loved your book.

And please tell your wife, thank you for being a partner in writing this and your other books. I will tell her that. Thank you very much. And thank you for a a partner in writing this and your other books. I will tell her that. Thank you very much. And thank you for a delightful conversation. I really enjoyed every minute of it. It's terrific.

And I can tell why you have so many fans. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories

or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.