THE former American secretary of state, James Baker, who has returned to international prominence as co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, was preparing to give a speech honouring his great-grandfather, a Texan grandee, at a cemetery two years ago when he was approached by a stranger.

“How do you do, sir, my name is James Baker,” the tall gentleman said. “I’m your cousin.”

To the astonishment of America’s premier diplomat, James Otis Baker was black. He was there with his 84-year-old younger brother, Wendell. Their famous cousin had never heard of his black relations.

“We black Bakers knew we were related, but it was accepted with us that we’d never meet them and we figured nobody would ever tell them,” said Wendell Baker in his first interview about the family.

What followed was textbook Baker diplomacy. He graciously introduced his new relatives to the crowd attending the ceremony in Huntsville, Texas, and did not bat an eyelid when a woman whispered to him afterwards: “That Wendell Baker is an agitator.”

In his new memoir, Work Hard, Study and Keep Out of Politics, Baker, 76, writes that he and Wendell went on “to start our relationship on the basis of what we had in common, not what we might disagree about”.

It is just the sort of advice that Baker has been dispensing, with Tony Blair’s assent, about how to open a dialogue with Iran and Syria on the future of Iraq and the Middle East.

Wendell Baker had dedicated his life to the civil rights movement in Texas, while James Baker’s grandfather had helped to found Rice University, an institute for the “white inhabitants of Houston and Texas” — it did not admit blacks until the 1960s.

In an exemplary lesson on how to bridge long-standing divides, the two families have put their differences behind them. Wendell Baker, it transpired, shared the same family passion for consensus-building as his cousin.

“I guess I was an agitator,” he recalled, “but I don’t call myself partisan at all.”

A few years ago Wendell published his own memoir, If Not Me, Who? What One Man Accomplished in His Battle for Equality.

Wendell admires the work James Baker is undertaking with the Iraq Study Group, which politicians of every stripe are hoping will furnish President Bush with a exit strategy from Iraq.

“Many of his ideas and philosophy are good for us all,” Wendell said. “We need the whole world working with us. We shouldn’t be trying to force our form of democracy on the Iraqis.”

Wendell’s great-grandmother Dinah was a mulatto slave who was purchased at the age of 12 in North Carolina and brought to Huntsville. She gave birth to five children by the master of the house by the age of 20.

One of the children was Wendell’s grandmother, who went on to have a relationship with Andrew Baker, the first cousin of James Baker’s grandfather.

He never married and died a wealthy man, but his inheritance passed to his white relations.

“They knew my daddy was his son,” Wendell recalled, “but they became almost hostile to us. My dad’s attitude was, ‘I won’t ever let it bother me’. He knew about his father’s funeral, but didn’t go.”

James Addison Baker III, meanwhile, was growing up in a life of privilege in Houston, 70 miles south of Huntsville. One of Wendell’s aunts worked for his grandfather, but he was never told of the family connection. He went on to serve as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and treasury secretary in the 1980s before being appointed secretary of state by his great friend, the first President George Bush.

From time to time Wendell Baker would see his cousin on television, but his own career was also distinguished. After serving in the army in Japan, he went to college and taught physics and chemistry at a secondary school before joining an oil company as a chemical engineer — “the first black professional there”.

Politics also dominated Wendell’s life. “I got the schools here integrated, the universities integrated and the Texas prison workers integrated,” he said proudly. “I’ve experienced a few successes and done a lot to change my community.”

On one occasion, Wendell helped muster black support for the election of Senator John Tower, a Texan Republican, whom he regarded as less racist than his Democrat opponent. Like his cousin James, he considers pragmatism a virtue. “Sometimes you have got to think outside the box, but we are both consensus-builders.”

James and Wendell Baker are now friends. Three car-loads of white Bakers went to the black Bakers’ family reunion nearly two years ago and they will soon be attending another one in Los Angeles, where James Otis Baker now lives.

“You haven’t seen the last of us,” the former secretary of state promised.

“We’re proud of each other. We feel comfortable together and we just talk. We don’t bother about the politics. We’re family now,” Wendell said. Now if they could just get Iran and America to feel the same way . . .

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