LITTLE DID THE GRAYING, bespectacled, well-groomed forty-
seven year-old Baker realize, as he embarked for England in 1918,
that this new assignment would mark a clear dividing point in his
professional life. In many respects the service he was employed
to perform for the State Department was essentially journalistic,
but now his reportorial abilities were placed at the service of the
Wilson administration. It was this connection with the administra-
tion and more specifically with President Woodrow Wilson that
came to shape so much of Baker's professional life after 1918.
From England Baker moved to the Continent in an effort to meet
the State Department's need for information, and at the end of the
War he was persuaded to stay on as the press representative of the
American delegation at the peace conference.

This new post gave him an insight into the deliberations and
brought him into close, regular contact with Wilson. These two
concerns, the peace conference and Wilson himself, would absorb
most of Baker's writing energy and thought in the 1920's and 1930's.
He published three volumes on the peace conference and an
eight-volume biography of Woodrow Wilson. Most of his other
writing was either derived from these major subjects or was auto-
biographical in character. Many of the events and experiences that
determined Baker's professional course were still in the future when
he sailed for England in 1918, but the chain of causation had been
set in motion.

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