BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times ? The Washington Post ? Fortune ? Bloomberg

From two of America's most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world.

For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations.

A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush's best friend on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, Baker had never even worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford's campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan's White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker governed as the avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal-making over division, a lost art in today's fractured nation.

His story is a case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington and the world in the modern era--how it once worked and how it has transformed into an era of gridlock and polarization. This masterly biography by two brilliant observers of the American political scene is destined to become a classic.

• We started tracking this book on September 5, 2019.
• This book was $15.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 74 times in the past 2,053 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked one day ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $3.99 last reached on January 30, 2022.
• This book has been $3.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $15.99 last reached on September 5, 2019.
• This book has been $15.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• HistoryAmericasUnited States20th Century
• HistoryAmericas
• HistoryUnited States20th Century

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 1,028 Pages
• File Size: 391 KB