“Baker is not perfect,” says Tutwiler. “But he can handle pressure. He’s a Steady Eddie. And he’s a realist. It’s almost clinical. He doesn’t lead with emotion. He can handle a whole lot of incoming and just not get rattled.” Baker’s version is that he simply delivered a dose of reality. “My message when I got back to the Situation Room was calming, because I relayed the doctors’ message. And the doctors’ message was that the surgery had been successful. They expected the president to gain a full recovery.”
