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Virtual Event – Peter Baker & Susan Glasser
October 15, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Join us for an evening with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, two of America’s most revered political journalists, exploring their definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: The Man Who Ran Washington.
To register in advance for this free event on Zoom, visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OOJz8FLTQwG3JPDZLaGKWQ.
After registering you will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to join the event on Thursday October 15 at 7:00 CDT.
THE MAN WHO RAN WASHINGTON is available at Magic City Books starting September 29. You can order a copy here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-man-who-ran-washington/244
About The Man Who Ran Washington
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.
PETER BAKER is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and author of Days of Fire and The Breach. SUSAN GLASSER is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its weekly “Letter from Trump’s Washington” as well as a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, after which they wrote Kremlin Rising. Today they live in Washington, D.C., with their son.
