James Baker

James Addison Baker III was born in Houston in 1930, graduated from Princeton, served in the U.S. Marine Corps and earned his law degree from the University of Texas in 1957. He practiced law in Houston for nearly two decades before entering national politics in the 1970s. Baker served in Gerald Ford's administration and then became a central political and governing figure in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years, moving between campaign management and senior executive-branch posts.

Baker served as Ronald Reagan's White House chief of staff from 1981 to 1985 and as secretary of the Treasury from 1985 to 1988. Under President George H. W. Bush he became secretary of state from 1989 to 1992, a period that included the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe, German reunification, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the international coalition assembled after Iraq invaded Kuwait. He returned to the White House as chief of staff and senior counselor late in the Bush presidency. In later years Baker remained active in diplomacy and public policy, while Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy — founded in Houston in 1993 — became the major Texas institution carrying his name.

Baker's reputation rests on an uncommon combination of campaign strategy, executive management, economic policy and diplomacy. His service as secretary of state placed him at the center of U.S. foreign policy during the rapid restructuring of Europe and the Soviet sphere and during the Gulf War crisis.

Houston remained the geographic through-line of that career: it was his birthplace and legal base, the political environment that connected him to the Bush family, and later the home of Rice University's Baker Institute. That Texas institutional legacy makes him more than a national official who happened to be born in the state.