Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9004010234
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Doyle McManus Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
If the Cold War was over, they asked, why hadn't the budget changed? Why wasn't there more money for the new democracies in Eastern Europe and poor countries in Latin America and Africa?
Baker's hazel eyes narrowed. His honeyed voice went cold.
"You want to go out and argue for higher taxes to pay for foreign aid?" he demanded, according to officials who were present. "Try that argument out in your district, congressman."
The response was pure Jim Baker: politically canny, with a well-honed sense of the bounds of domestic consensus - but, his critics would say, too hesitant to go beyond the near-term possible.
In little more than a year in the job, Baker has made himself the most powerful secretary of state since Henry Kissinger - and the closest the Bush administration has to a foreign policy architect.
Baker has won widespread credit for moving the administration from its initial standoffish view of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to its current, more active effort to cooperate with Moscow. He has cemented closer relations with West Germany and other European allies, and he has guided U.S. policy in Central America from war toward diplomacy.
His stock in Congress is high - sometimes breathtakingly so. One enthusiast, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., declared at a recent hearing: "Every statesman in the world over the last four decades, from Churchill to Reagan, has attempted - with millions of troops and trillions of dollars - to free up Eastern Europe, all to no avail, until the first year of the Baker administration at State."
"He's a dealmaker, a negotiator, a master broker," said Roger Stone, a Republican political consultant who worked with Baker on Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. "He's perfect for the job."
Even Baker's critics acknowledge his prowess as a deal maker. But what the Bush administration needs most, they argue, is not a broker but a strategist.
"Lots of things have come up aces, but that's more luck than anything else," said Paul Nitze, the Reagan administration's chief arms negotiator and a foreign policy mandarin since 1944. "I don't see any signs of subtlety or great planning."
"We have a foreign policy shaped like a doughnut: there's no center to it," complained Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations. "What is America's role in the world? What's our purpose? Baker hasn't defined it. None of them has."
At the turn of the year, Baker and his closest aides met in his elegant mahogany-paneled office to review their first year's performance. They pronounced themselves satisfied.
"The U.S.-Soviet relationship has progressed well in a number of areas," one of Baker's top advisers said, paraphrasing the internal review. "In arms control, we've made a major move forward" in talks to limit conventional armed forces in Europe. "In Western Europe, we've been ahead of the curve, especially on the German question."
In Eastern Europe, he said, "events have been extremely positive. We've tried to set out some principles in terms of democracy and free market economies. But it's a tough issue on which to satisfy the public's yearning for a conceptual framework."
He bristled - as does Baker - at the suggestion that they have failed to chart a strategy.
"Give me a break," the aide said. "We have set out a strategy, in a series of speeches the president has given and the secretary has given. It's there, but some people want to pretend it isn't - often for political reasons."
Undeniably, Bush and Baker have spelled out a series of basic principles to guide U.S. diplomacy: support for reform in the Soviet Union, support for democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, cooperation with allies to promote stability.
But they have advanced only modest specifics to back up those principles. There is no new Marshall Plan, reflecting the president's insistence that U.S. funds are short, and no detailed new structure for European security, reflecting his apparent reluctance to get too far in front of events.
Nevertheless, Baker and his aides take considerable pride in having brought the administration around to a new, more cooperative attitude toward the Kremlin.
Before Bush's inauguration, Baker was briefly touted as a "deputy president," a hands-on manager who would run the entire administration. That was never to be; even in foreign policy, where Baker is chief negotiator and chief tactician, Bush is clearly chief executive.
"Bush has established himself as a hands-on president, high in the polls, with a high profile," said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former Kissinger aide now at Washington's Brookings Institution. "Baker sometimes goes for days without being in the news; he isn't a high-profile secretary of state. He picks the issues in which he's interested - some say those he finds politically rewarding."
Baker's prodigious political instincts are a recurring theme among those who have watched him through the years - as both his greatest asset and, according to some, a serious potential weakness when it comes to diplomacy.
The secretary of state has successfully extended his back-room negotiating skills to the international arena and has carefully cultivated close working friendships with his two most important counterparts, the Soviet Union's Eduard Shevardnadze and West Germany's Hans Dietrich Genscher.
But he tends to address questions of substance from a purely political standpoint. Last year, when Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, criticized the administration for "timidity" in its approach to Eastern Europe, Baker issued an unusual reply.
"When the president of the United States is rocking along with a 70 percent approval rating on his handling of foreign policy, if I were the leader of the opposition party, I might have something similar to say," he declared.
Baker's colleagues from the Reagan White House recall that, in those bygone days, he had little apparent enthusiasm for the details of foreign policy.
"Our four-item agenda with the Soviet Union was not something Jim originated or took much of an interest in," recalled Robert McFarlane, Reagan's national security adviser in 1983-1985.
Since then, Baker has soaked up considerable on-the-job training in the arcana of foreign policy. But he still puts enormous stress on marshaling broad support for policies, both within the Cabinet and in the Congress.
One result, officials said, has been the most harmonious administration in recent memory, one free of the bitter internecine struggles that marked the Reagan years.
"I can assure you it's a hell of a lot better than I've ever seen it," said Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who has held high-level posts under five presidents.
But there is still plenty of friction, especially between the two institutions that traditionally vie for primacy in making foreign policy, the State Department and the National Security Council staff.
Some Baker aides privately deride Brent Scowcroft's staff at the NSC. "There are some good people over there," allowed one, "but they're the exception, not the rule."
NSC staffers, in turn, occasionally express resentment of Baker's power and his well-burnished public image. "You want to know how Jim Baker makes decisions?" one aide asked bitterly. "Here's how." He moistened a fingertip and held it up to the wind.
In particular, some White House aides charge that Baker makes himself scarce whenever Bush runs into political trouble on a foreign policy issue. When members of both parties in Congress protested Bush's decision to renew high-level talks with China, for example, reporters at the State Department were told that Baker had warned against the idea. In public, however, Baker loyally defended Bush's decision.
Baker and his staff deny that they were trying to play both sides of the issue. Still, some Bush aides are convinced that the State Department is not always on their side.
Another lightning rod for criticism is Baker's small, close-knit staff. More than any secretary of state since Kissinger, he has held the reins of policy tightly in the suite of offices the State Department calls "the seventh floor," and staffed it with a cadre of aides loyal only to him.
Closest to Baker are Margaret Tutwiler, 39, his canny and fiercely protective press secretary; Robert Zoellick, 36, his closest adviser on day-to-day operations; and Dennis Ross, 41, a cerebral former University of California, Berkeley, scholar who acts as grand strategist.
At the second rung of influence are Deputy Secretary Eagleburger, 59; Robert Kimmitt, 42, undersecretary of state for political affairs; and Janet Mullins, 40, Baker's chief liaison to Congress. With the exception of Eagleburger, none of the six has served as a foreign service officer.
State Department veterans complain that Baker's reliance on his relatively inexperienced inner circle has cut him off from some of the advice he might be getting from the career bureaucracy.
Despite the generally laudatory reviews, critics have pounced on some of Baker's actions. Not all of them are willing to speak openly.
"Baker has a long memory, and he works in mysterious ways," said one former aide who refused to be quoted by name. "You may never know when he deals you the dying hand. He probably read Machiavelli in his crib."
Even some of his own aides say Baker blundered last December when he said the United States would support Soviet military intervention in Romania to ensure the victory of the democratic revolution there.
"I think that was asinine," sputtered Nitze. "And supporting Gorbachev against the Lithuanians [as the administration has done off and on] has been a mistake as well."
More difficult days may lie ahead for Baker. Already, the policy of cooperation with Gorbachev is brushing against its limits as the Soviet leader tries to stop Lithuania's movement toward independence. German unification, which the administration has cheered on, is running into new complexities.
"Events have been going so much our way that it's been difficult to screw it up," said Mandelbaum. "But the test of a foreign policy team is how well they do when events turn sour. And you can see already that more testing times are ahead."
by CNB