Baker, James Addison, III

Baker, James Addison, III (1930- ), US Secretary of State (1989-1992), political leader, and public official. He was born in Houston, Texas, and educated at Princeton University. After serving in the Marine Corps from 1952 to 1954, Baker studied law at the University of Texas. Admitted to the bar in 1957, he worked for a corporate law firm in Houston, where he became a partner and practised until 1975.

Baker helped manage the 1970 Senate campaign of his longtime friend George Bush. In 1975 Baker was appointed the under-secretary of commerce by President Gerald Ford, and the following year he joined Ford's re-election campaign. Baker made an unsuccessful bid to become Attorney-General of Texas in 1978, and in 1979 he managed Bush's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. When Bush became the party's 1980 nominee for vice-president, Baker joined, as a senior adviser, the campaign of presidential nominee Ronald Reagan. Baker's exceptional skills as a tactician and political manager were considered instrumental in the Republican victory.

Serving as White House chief of staff from 1981 to 1985, Baker was also a member of the National Security Council and a senior foreign policy adviser. Baker was highly influential in policy formulation and legislative strategy, and was widely considered to have masterminded Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign. Baker served as secretary of the treasury from 1985 until 1988, when he became chairman of Bush's presidential election campaign.

Appointed secretary of state under Bush, Baker pursued the administration's long-term foreign policy goals in the Middle East, particularly during the Gulf War and its aftermath, and continued the rapprochement with the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991 he organized the first comprehensive Middle East peace conference. He left his position as secretary of state in 1992 to run Bush's unsuccessful re-election campaign. Baker later became a business consultant. Between 1997 and 2004 he was the UN special envoy charged with finding a solution to the conflict over Western Sahara. In June 2001 he failed to persuade the Polisario Front to agree to autonomy terms for the region. During the legal controversy over the results of the US presidential election in November 2000 he was spokesman for George W. Bush.

In December 2003 President Bush appointed Baker to oversee the restructuring of the debts incurred by Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. Iraq had been under US-led occupation since the spring of that year (see War on Iraq). In March 2006, Baker was invited by Congress to be joint chairman (along with the former Democratic Party congressman Lee H. Hamilton) of the Iraq Study Group. The committee was asked to investigate a range of policy options, and to report its conclusions to the Bush administration. The report, delivered in December, acknowledged the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, and advised that it could only be stabilized with the cooperation of Syria and Iran, states with which the Bush administration had notably bad relations. It also suggested that responsibility for security should be handed over to Iraqi forces, and coalition troops withdrawn according to a timetable.