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By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 18, 2000; Page A13

On the morning after Election Day, James A. Baker III was in his car headed from Houston's Hobby Airport to his Rice University office for a meeting with a Mexican official, when the cell phone rang. He had been up late, watching returns in Austin with his old buddy, Republican vice presidential nominee Richard B. Cheney, and now he was hoping to hear that the Florida vote had been settled so he could go ahead with preparations for a hunting trip to Britain with former president George Bush.

Instead, it was Don Evans, the campaign chairman for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, asking if Baker could clear his schedule and fly to Florida to take charge of the vote recount that would settle whether Bush or Vice President Gore would be the next president.

Take charge he did, and for the past 10 days, the 70-year-old lawyer, a former treasury secretary and secretary of state, has been Bush's principal agent in the final stage of the battle for the White House. Officials in both Austin and Tallahassee said yesterday that beyond his role as the campaign spokesman on recount issues, Baker "has been calling the signals and shaping the strategy," as one source put it, to fend off Gore's effort to overturn Bush's unofficial Florida lead.

"He is the field commander," one senior Bush campaign official said, "and he's not being countermanded by higher authority."

The unexpected return to the spotlight represents a high-risk situation for Baker. If Bush prevails in the fight for the 25 electoral votes that will determine the next president, Baker stands to receive much of the credit from Republicans eager to recapture the White House. But if he fails, the second-guessers will have a field day.

For Baker, the phone call from Evans was a familiar kind of summons. In the summer of 1976, when he was a junior political appointee at the Commerce Department, President Gerald Ford had pulled him into the campaign to take charge of the delegate roundup and stave off the threat of Ronald Reagan capturing the Republican presidential nomination.

Four years later, after managing the elder George Bush's bid for the nomination and persuading Bush to drop out when the odds turned against him, it was Reagan who recruited Baker from the opposition camp to be his White House chief of staff.

As a member of the Reagan administration, Baker played an important behind-the-scenes role in the 1984 and 1988 campaigns of Reagan and the elder Bush, who rewarded him with prestigious Cabinet posts at Treasury and State. And in 1992, with Bush's reelection campaign in trouble, Baker reluctantly left the State Department and came back to the White House to oversee what turned out to be a losing effort against Bill Clinton.

The decision to recruit Baker for one more rescue mission had many authors. A senior aide to Gov. Bush said Cheney, the defense secretary who worked beside Baker during the Persian Gulf War crisis, put the idea before Bush early on Nov. 8. It was, this source said, enthusiastically endorsed by Evans and the triumvirate of Joe Albaugh, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, who had run the Bush campaign. And Margaret Tutwiler, Bush's longtime aide, now a Washington public relations executive, reportedly enlisted other Republican bigwigs, including the candidate's father, the former president, to reinforce the view that Baker was the right choice to go up against Gore's just-named recount field general, former secretary of state Warren Christopher.

Within hours of the call from Evans and a follow-up phone conversation with Bush and Cheney, Baker was on his way to Florida, soon to be joined by Tutwiler, former Treasury and State department aide Robert Zoellick and others from his old government team.

The next morning, Baker came before the press corps in Tallahassee and said blandly that Bush "would like to see this process carried out in a very transparent, open, deliberate way, as expeditiously as possible, of course, given the national interests." He fired some opening volleys at the Democrats, jumped back into his car and was gone. But as the days went on, the diplomatic politeness gave way to a tougher partisan tone.

The only people who seemed surprised by Baker's sudden reappearance were the reporters and political junkies who had murmured for months about his conspicuous absence from the governor's campaign. Except for a couple fundraisers where he appeared as the drawing card, Baker had played no public rule in the son's race.

The murmuring in political circles became louder when Baker was not on the scene last May 23 when the "wise men" of the Republican foreign policy and defense establishment stood up with Gov. Bush as he made a major statement on missile defense and international issues at the National Press Club in Washington. Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and retired general Colin L. Powell were all there. But no Baker.

There was speculation that Baker had been banished by the Bush family for foot-dragging in 1992-initially resisting requests to give up his Cabinet post to take over the campaign and then failing to give it the focus and energy people had come to expect from him.

One veteran of that campaign said yesterday that "there were some sore feelings in the White House when Jim and his people came back. They conveyed the message, 'Okay, we'll try to save your [bacon], since you couldn't do it for yourselves.'‚" And it turned out they were kind of rusty after being away from campaigns, so they didn't do what they claimed they would do."

But Rich Bond, the Republican national chairman in 1992 and a longtime Bush loyalist, said, "I never saw any strain between him [Baker] and the president, and I never heard any complaints from the current candidate or his mother."

At his age, moreover, Baker had no wish for a major role in another race, associates said. And he understood and agreed with the view that it would be politically damaging to the younger Bush to be surrounded by relics of his father's administration.

"Look what the press did when he picked Cheney" as vice president, one Austin official said. "Any public role for Baker would have meant endless stories about 'seeking the restoration of the Bush dynasty.'‚"

In fact, these sources say, Baker was doing some kibitzing on both policy and strategy, talking with the governor and later Cheney and with members of the campaign triumvirate. "He had done five campaigns," said one of those who talked with Baker from Austin, "and he said, 'I'm happy to discuss anything you want, but I know that to be effective, you have to be in it day after day. I hope you don't have any expectation that I can do that.' He said it very diplomatically, but he made it clear this campaign should be run by a fresh team."

The conversations during the campaign smoothed the way for coordinating between Austin and Tallahassee during the past 10 days of legal struggles and political maneuvering, Austin sources said. Baker has been making early morning phone calls to Bush, Cheney and Evans every day, followed by an after-breakfast conference call between Baker's team in Florida and the campaign high command in Austin. Updates are arranged as needed, and Baker has checked back with the principals-Bush, Cheney and Evans-late in the day almost every day.

From the beginning, sources said, Baker pressed the view that success would rest on two key points: the certification of the vote, and Bush's narrow lead, by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and the approval of that action-or at least its acceptance-by the Florida Supreme Court.

Whether the strategy will succeed is still unclear. Some Republicans outside the Bush campaign have been critical of the decision-made jointly between Austin and Tallahassee-to fight the Gore campaign's demand for manual recounts of disputed ballots in heavily Democratic counties, rather than asking authorities in Republican counties to do the same thing.

But those debates are moot. The Bush-Gore battle goes on, and Baker's hunting trip will have to wait.

Staff writers Peter Slevin and Ben White contributed to this report.