Glasser, Susan

Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a CNN global affairs analyst, a former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and the co-author – with her husband, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC – of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution. The couple’s latest collaboration is The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (Anchor), a study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late 20th-century America. For 25 years, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency or ran the White House without the advice of James Addison Baker III. A child of Texas aristocracy, Baker had never worked in Washington until a family tragedy struck when he was 39. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford’s campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races – and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season but an indispensable dealmaker after the election, Baker ran Ronald Reagan’s White House. The Economist called it a “masterclass in political biography.”