An ambitious work of both biography and political history written by one of the great journalistic power couples of the day. Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and political analyst for MSNBC. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker composing a weekly column on life in Washington, and she’s global affairs analyst at CNN. In The Man Who Ran Washington, they tell the story of James A. Baker III, the once obscure corporate lawyer who became the indispensable man to four American presidents, a masterful power broker who ended up influencing the course of the United States for years. Now,at a time when politics in Washington is widely viewed as hopelessly broken and the art of deal-making is shunned if not forgotten, it’s nonetheless instructive and certainly fascinating to look back at how Baker operated and draw lessons, as the authors do, about the practice of compromise over confrontation and pragmatism over purity