Back to story
Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the personal remembrance frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Personal remembrance frame
A friend and longtime collaborator has died suddenly, and what matters now is honoring the man — his warmth, his sharp mind, the dinners and conversations — alongside a quick accounting of an extraordinary life in law and national security.
Career-legacy frame
Baker's death marks the loss of one of the most consequential national-security lawyers of his generation — NSA general counsel, DHS policy chief, Stevens clerk, Steptoe partner — whose institutional footprint deserves recognition on its own terms.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
Mourning a friend, plainly
A longtime co-blogger and friend would say —
Stewart was 78, and we had dinner two months ago, and now he is gone — that is the fact I am still trying to absorb. What I want on the page right now is not a CV but the man: the modest way he carried a remarkable career, the incisive comments that made me a sharper reader, the easy generosity of looking each other up when I was in D.C. We disagreed often — he was more conservative than I am — and I always learned from him anyway, which is the thing I will miss most. May the Earth rest lightly on him.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.