Baker at Princeton

In 1949, as the United States and its west­ern allies estab­lished the North Atlantic Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion to “con­tain” Soviet expan­sion into Europe, James A. Baker III was a fresh­man at Prince­ton. He was, in his words, “focused more on mak­ing grades, play­ing ten­nis and rugby, and chas­ing girls — not nec­es­sar­ily in that order — than on U.S. for­eign pol­icy” (Baker p. 287).

In his mem­oir, Baker pro­vides a good-natured account of his early years here. “I became a mem­ber of both Princeton’s Right Wing Club — so named because we spent much of our time using our right arms to hoist spir­i­tu­ous bev­er­ages — and the 21 Club, another social orga­ni­za­tion with a sim­i­lar mis­sion” (Baker p. 9). But by the time he left Prince­ton, Baker had pro­duced seri­ous work; he found his inter­est in his­tory and clas­sics and had writ­ten his senior the­sis about par­lia­men­tary pol­i­tics in Britain in the two pre­ced­ing decades.

The Cold War would soon find him, how­ever. Baker grad­u­ated in 1952 and imme­di­ately entered the U.S. Marine Corps’ offi­cer train­ing pro­gram while the Korean War was still ongo­ing. The Cold War would con­tinue to shape Baker’s career, by which he was both a wit­ness to and agent of the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1991, Baker had served as Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff and Trea­sury Sec­re­tary and as Sec­re­tary of State for George H. W. Bush.

Return to Princeton

This video, doc­u­ment­ing a talk by Baker co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wil­son School and the Class of 1993, was deliv­ered on Decem­ber 12, 1991 in Alexan­der Hall. Baker was then serv­ing as Sec­re­tary of State.

Sec­re­tary Baker must have been extremely busy at the time that he gave this address.  The first Gulf War had begun and ended ear­lier that year, and Baker had coor­di­nated a meet­ing of Pales­tin­ian and Israeli lead­ers in Madrid six weeks previous.

After Pres­i­dent Harold Shapiro’s intro­duc­tion (2:10), Baker begins his speech (5:10) with a rhetor­i­cal vic­tory lap, cel­e­brat­ing the end of the Soviet Union and decry­ing the per­ni­cious dan­gers of Stal­in­ism. After all, one of the pri­mary goals dur­ing his work for the last two admin­is­tra­tions — the con­tain­ment of Soviet com­mu­nism to the point of non-existence — had been achieved. As he put it, “while nuclear war would have destroyed us phys­i­cally, Stal­in­ism would have destroyed us spir­i­tu­ally” (6:50).

Sec­re­tary Baker con­tin­ued his speech with a dis­cus­sion of the United States’ role in the fate of post-Soviet republics, not­ing an imme­di­ate need for human­i­tar­ian aid at the begin­ning of a long winter.

Imper­a­tive, Baker noted, was the con­trol of the for­mer Soviet Union’s vast arse­nal of con­ven­tional and nuclear weapons, now under the con­trol of a rapidly chang­ing state appa­ra­tus. In this con­text, Baker dis­cussed a $400 mil­lion appro­pri­a­tion from Con­gress to be used toward destroy­ing the Soviet nuclear arse­nal. “That’s nei­ther char­ity nor aid; that’s an invest­ment in a secure future for every Amer­i­can” (30:53). If not destroyed, he said, these weapons may find them­selves in the hands of fig­ures like Sad­dam Hus­sein or Muam­mar Gaddafi.

The other arena in which Amer­i­cans and their allies can offer help, Baker asserted, was as mod­els for democ­ra­ti­za­tion and cap­i­tal­ism, bring­ing “democ­racy to lands who have lit­tle knowl­edge of it” (18:45).

Watch­ing this video, now twenty years later, is a reminder of the anx­i­eties of the imme­di­ate post-Berlin Wall era, and of how, in some cases, these anx­i­eties have endured.

Inter­est­ing note:  George Ken­nan, the orig­i­na­tor of the term and phi­los­o­phy of “con­tain­ment,” was in the audi­ence for this address. Kennan’s papers are also housed at the Mudd Man­u­script Library.

– Mau­reen Calla­han, Pub­lic Pol­icy Project Archivist

This VHS tape is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 1486).