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Peter Baker + Susan Glasser: At the Top of Their Game

Peter Baker + Susan Glasser:  At the Top of Their Game

 

 




Introduction to Peter Baker + Susan Glasser.   1:52 min.  Interview:  Raymond Elman. Camera:  Lee Skye.  Post-Production:  Javier Romero.  Music: Angela Paulson – Out at Sea – Zapsplat.  Recorded:  11/20/2021, Miami.

 

 

PETER BAKER is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, responsible for reporting on President Biden, the fifth president he has covered. He previously wrote about Presidents Donald J. Trump and Barack Obama for The Times and Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the Washington Post.

Mr. Baker joined the Times in 2008 after 20 years at the Post and has reported on elections, inaugurations, economic crises, foreign policy, natural disasters, legislative battles and Supreme Court nominations. He co-authored the Post’s original story breaking the Ken Starr investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and served as the paper’s lead writer on the impeachment of Mr. Clinton. He covered the ups and downs of the Bush and Obama presidencies, including the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And he chronicled the tumultuous Trump administration through the coronavirus pandemic, the storming of the Capitol and both impeachments.

In between stints at the White House, Mr. Baker and his wife, Susan Glasser, spent four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for the Post, chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin, the rollback of Russian democracy, the second Chechen war and various terrorist attacks. Mr. Baker also covered the early months of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the first American newspaper journalist to report from rebel-held northern Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, and he spent the next eight months covering the overthrow of the Taliban and the emergence of a new government. He later traveled the Middle East for six months, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and around the region before embedding with the United States Marines as they drove toward Baghdad. At the Times, he served briefly as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Mr. Baker is the author of six books, most recently the bestselling “The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker II” (Doubleday, 2020), written with Ms. Glasser and named one of the books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Financial Times, Fortune and Bloomberg. He also wrote “Obama: The Call of History” (New York Times/Callaway, 2017), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work; “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” (Doubleday, 2013), which was named one of the five Best Non-Fiction Books of 2013 by the New York Times; “The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton” (Scribner, 2000), a New York Times bestseller; “Impeachment: An American History” (Modern Library, 2018) with Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali and Jeffrey A. Engel; and, with Ms. Glasser, “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution” (Scribner, 2005), named one of the Best Books of 2005 by the Washington Post.

Mr. Baker has won all three major awards devoted to White House reporting: the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Coverage of the Presidency (twice), the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award (twice) and the Merriman Smith Memorial Award. Mr. Baker is also a political analyst for MSNBC and a regular panelist on PBS’s “Washington Week.”

A native of the Washington area, Mr. Baker attended Oberlin College and worked for the Washington Times for two years before joining the Post in 1988 as a Virginia reporter.

— New York Times

 

SUSAN B. GLASSER is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.

Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure.

Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She edited Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, early in her career.

Her books include “Kremlin Rising” and “The Man Who Ran Washington,” both of which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

— The New Yorker

Baker and Glasser  live in Washington with their son Theodore.

 

The videos below are organized by Success Factor, and run between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

 

 

COLLABORATION:   2:31 min.




When you collaborate to write books, what is your protocol, and how has it evolved over time?

 

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES:   0:37 sec.




ArtSpeak published a video interview with Karen Dukess, who at one point was an editor of the Moscow Times, while her husband Steve Liesman was eventually the Moscow bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:  3:22 min.




You write for two of the world’s most honored and famous liberal-leaning publications. Why did Republican icon Jim Baker agree to cooperate with you on his biography?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:  1:35 min.




Jim Baker has a public image as the epitome of a polished patrician, yet the infamous “Willie Horton” racist ad against presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, a very decent man, happened on Baker’s watch. How does he defend that?

 

OVERCOMES CHALLENGES TO SUCCEED:  3:02 min.




Donald Trump was a year behind me at Penn. When he announced his candidacy for president, many of my classmates were asking each other, “Do you remember ever seeing him on campus or in a class?” Nobody did. Do you have information on his two years at Penn?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:  2:14 min.




George H.W. Bush was Jim Baker’s buddy, and Baker knew George W. Bush from the time he was a kid. How did Baker relate to each of them as president?

 

CREATES A UNIQUE PERSONAL BRAND:   3:06 min.




You must compare notes about working for The New Yorker and the New York Times. What are the similarities and the differences?

 

OVERCOMES CHALLENGES TO SUCCEED:  1:17 min.




How did you prepare yourself to do television commentary on MSNBC?

 

UNDERSTANDS ARTISTS’ NEEDS:  0:18 sec.




I always assumed that one of the challenges of televised news commentary is to say something fresh and different from the previous commentator.

 

CREATIVE FLEXIBILITY:  1:50 min.




When you write your books, do you simultaneously imagine them as movies?

 

STRONG DRIVE FOR ACHIEVEMENT:  0:29 sec.




When do you anticipate publishing your book about Donald Trump?

 

RESPECTS OTHERS POINTS OF VIEW:  1:04 min.




Would you consider showing your book to Mary Trump before it’s published?