Baker, James Addison III

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US Republican politician and lawyer. Under President Ronald Reagan, he was White House chief of staff 1981–85 and treasury secretary 1985–88. After managing George H W Bush's presidential campaign, Baker was appointed secretary of state in 1989 and played a prominent role in the 1990–91 Gulf crisis and the subsequent search for a Middle East peace settlement. In 1992 he left the state department to become White House chief of staff and to oversee Bush's unsuccessful re-election campaign. In 1997 he served as a UN special envoy to try and broker a peace settlement for the disputed territory of Western Sahara. In December 2003 he was named by President George W Bush to manage the foreign debts of Iraq, then under US occupation.

A lawyer from Houston, Texas, Baker entered politics in 1970 as one of the managers of his friend George Bush's unsuccessful campaign for the Senate. He served as undersecretary of commerce 1975–76 in the Gerald Ford administration and was deputy manager of the 1976 and 1980 Ford and Bush presidential campaigns. Baker joined the Reagan administration in 1981 and in 1988 masterminded the campaign that won Bush the presidency. The most powerful member of the Bush team, he was described as an effective ‘prime minister’. An adviser to George W Bush in the November 2000 presidential elections, he was influential in helping Bush secure the presidency by manoeuvring the disputed vote count in Florida to a Republican-leaning Supreme Court.

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