By James Hohmann
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Retired Army Gen. Alexander Haig, who held influential positions in the
United States military and in politics and who as White House chief of
staff shepherded Richard M. Nixon toward peacefully resigning the
presidency, died today of complications from an infection. He was 85.
Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sent the four-star general to
Europe as supreme commander of NATO. Ronald Reagan made him secretary of
state, resulting in a brief and stormy tenure in which he famously tried
to assert command after the attempted assassination of the president.
And Gen. Haig himself, a tall man with blue eyes who kept his chin-up
military bearing long after he left the service, ran for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1988.
In a statement, President Obama said Gen. Haig "exemplified our finest
warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public
service."
Gen. Haig’s influence peaked in his late 40s during Nixon’s last 16
months in office, when brewing developments in the Watergate scandal
damaged and increasingly distracted the president. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger famously told Gen. Haig to keep the country together
while he held the world together during one of the greatest
constitutional crises in the nation’s history. Special prosecutor Leon
Jaworski, and many others, called Gen. Haig the "37 1/2 president."
Gen. Haig, untainted by the botched break-in to the Democratic National
Committee headquarters, took over as chief of staff in May 1973 from
H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, who would spend 18 months in prison for his role in
the Watergate scandal. When the public learned about the secret Oval
Office taping system, which would eventually implicate Nixon in the
coverup, Gen. Haig acknowledged later that he urged the president to
destroy the tapes.
When Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Jaworski’s predecessor,
pursued his investigation too aggressively for Nixon’s comfort, the
president dispatched Gen. Haig in October 1973 to instruct acting
Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. "Your commander in
chief has given you an order," Gen. Haig told him. Ruckelshaus refused,
quitting instead in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
Gen. Haig, while vigorously defending the president, realized the
direness of the mounting evidence and arranged a series of meetings
between Nixon, his lawyers and leading members of Congress to make his
boss understand that their position had become untenable in the summer
of 1974.
"I would have gladly stayed with him through the entire impeachment
process," Gen. Haig wrote in his 1992 memoir, "Inner Circles."
Gen. Haig said he thought Nixon needed to make the final decision, but
he "smoothed the way" by presenting resignation as the only serious
option, according to the account of this period in journalists Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1976 book "The Final Days." After the
president broached the possibility of suicide, the authors noted, Gen.
Haig ordered doctors to take away Nixon’s tranquilizers and deny his
requests for pills.
Then, on Aug. 1, 1974, Gen. Haig told Vice President Ford that he should
prepare to assume the presidency. Critics charged later that he brokered
a deal that got Nixon a pardon in exchange for stepping down. Gen. Haig
maintained that he never implicitly or explicitly made such an offer.
Gen. Haig stood on the White House lawn eight days later when Nixon
finally left town on Aug. 9. The chief of staff had his arms folded, but
he discreetly gave a thumbs-up to his disgraced boss.
*Powerful mentors*
Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born on Dec. 2, 1924, in the Philadelphia
suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Pa. He was 10 when his father, a lawyer, died of
cancer and left only $5,000 in life insurance money. Gen. Haig was the
second of three children, but he assumed an important role in family
matters as the oldest male.
From a young age, he aspired to a career in the military. He graduated
in 1947 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and
graduated 214th in a class of 310. Nevertheless he advanced far more
rapidly than his academic record might have suggested.
After college, he went to Japan to help with the post-World War II
occupation of that country. While playing football, he caught the eye of
an attractive girl named Patricia Fox, the daughter of a general on Gen.
Douglas MacArthur’s staff. He married Fox and earned a spot on
MacArthur’s staff, though not working directly for his father-in-law.
Gen. Haig is survived by his wife and three children, Alexander, Brian
and Barbara; and eight grandchildren.
As his military career progressed, Gen. Haig picked up a master’s degree
in international relations from Georgetown in 1962 and he continued to
attract a powerful series of mentors. Then-Army Secretary Cyrus Vance
chose Gen. Haig as his military assistant. Joseph Califano, a special
assistant to the Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, then tapped Gen.
Haig as his deputy.
Staying on the fast track, Gen. Haig took over a brigade in Vietnam as
tensions escalated from 1966 to 1967. Shrapnel from an exploding grenade
left a scar on his eyebrow and earned him the Purple Heart. Enemy fire
downed his helicopter during the battle of Ap Gu, and he survived a
successful crash landing. He returned to West Point as deputy
commandment from 1967 to 1969.
*Rapid rise under Nixon*
Kramer and Califano recommended then-Col. Haig to Kissinger, the
incoming national security adviser after Nixon won the presidency in
1968. As military assistant, Gen. Haig prepared daily reports for the
new president and acted as a liaison between the Defense and State
departments. Long hours and his finely honed skill at bureaucratic
infighting made him influential friends. In October 1969, after only
nine months at the White House, he won a promotion to brigadier general.
From 1969 to 1971, Gen. Haig transmitted 17 requests from the White
House to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for wiretaps of reporters
and government officials. Among those whose phones he had bugged were
the military assistant to the defense secretary and a close personal
adviser to the secretary of the state.
In January 1972, Gen. Haig led the advance team to China for a
top-secret four-day trip that laid the way for Nixon’s historic visit to
the communist country the next month. Gen. Haig’s star kept rising in
Nixon’s eyes, and his relationship with Kissinger became increasingly
fraught with tension. Later that year, Gen. Haig went along with
Kissinger as the president’s personal emissary to Paris for peace
negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Gen. Haig persuaded South
Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu to agree to the January 1973 cease-fire.
Gen. Haig discreetly told the president and Haldeman about Kissinger’s
designs for peace when he thought military options hadn’t been
exhausted, even showing the pair transcripts of Kissinger’s private
telephone conversations, according to historian Robert Dallek.
"Kissinger’s distrust of Haig was well deserved," Dallek wrote in "Nixon
and Kissinger," his 2007 book. "As ambitious as anyone in the
administration, Haig’s hard work and effective manipulation of Nixon,
Haldeman, and Kissinger himself had brought him rapid advancement."
Months later, Nixon promoted Gen. Haig to a four-star general and made
him the Army’s vice chief of staff. Doing that required the president to
bypass 240 generals with more seniority. The promotion sent Gen. Haig
back to the Pentagon, but Haldeman’s resignation meant the assignment
wouldn’t last long. To take the chief of staff job, Gen. Haig
reluctantly retired from the military.
Gen. Haig stayed on as White House chief of staff for the first six
weeks of Ford’s accidental presidency. At his request, the new president
recalled him to active duty as commander in chief of U.S. forces in
Europe. He became supreme allied commander in Europe in December 1974
and worked to strengthen the Atlantic alliance. After Jimmy Carter won
the presidency in 1976, he kept on Gen. Haig.
In 1979, Gen. Haig retired from the Army and left NATO. The week before
he hung up his uniform, a remote-controlled bomb detonated under a
bridge in Belgium as his car drove over it. The blast threw Gen. Haig’s
Mercedes 600 sedan into the air, but he miraculously escaped uninjured
from the assassination attempt. Members of the Red Army Faction, a
radical leftist group, were later convicted in connection with the attack.
*Tumult as secretary of state*
Gen. Haig was president of United Technologies, one of the county’s
biggest companies, before being named Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state
in 1981. He became the most prominent official from the Nixon
administration to return partly as a result of aggressive lobbying from
Nixon himself. Polls showed that important blocs of voters remained
nervous that the new president would be a saber-rattling militarist, and
Gen. Haig had supported seeking a stable balance of power through detente.
The ties to Nixon dogged Gen. Haig. Democratic critics forced him to
answer tough questions during five strenuous days of confirmation
hearings, and liberal columnists opined against his selection.
Gen. Haig got into a testy exchange with then Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes
(D-Md.), who pressed him for a "value judgment" about Nixon.
"Nobody has a monopoly on virtue, not even you, senator," Gen. Haig
retorted.
He acknowledged to senators that "improper, illegal and immoral" actions
had been taken during the Watergate coverup, but he refused to criticize
Nixon.
"I cannot bring myself to render judgment on Richard Nixon or for that
matter Henry Kissinger," he said. "It is not for me, it is not in me, to
render moral judgment on them. I leave that to history, to others and to
God."
The full Senate voted 93 to 6 to confirm him as the 59th secretary of
state on the day after Reagan’s inauguration.
Gen. Haig’s 18-month tenure as secretary proved tumultuous, marked by
continuing efforts to claim power over foreign policymaking that Reagan
and his aides didn’t want to give him. A characteristic first news
conference created a maelstrom of bad publicity. Gen. Haig declared
himself the "vicar" of foreign policy.
"With the dazzling speed that only words possess, it entered the
vocabulary of the press and played its part in creating first the
impression, and finally the uncomfortable reality, of a struggle for
primacy between the president’s close aides and myself," Gen. Haig said
later.
That narrative frustrated Gen. Haig, but everything he did seemed to
strengthen it. He tangled with Vice President George H.W. Bush over
which of the two should lead a committee charged with crisis management.
Then, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. nearly assassinated Reagan.
Gen. Haig quickly arrived in the Situation Room. Bush was flying back
from Texas when Haig went to address reporters in the briefing room.
"As of now, I am in control here in the White House," Gen. Haig told the
nervous country watching anxiously on television, "pending return of the
vice president and in close touch with him."
The sound bite symbolized to many a disconcerting hunger for power.
Gen. Haig was the ultimate Cold Warrior, seeing virtually every regional
conflict as enmeshed with the larger struggle against the Soviet Union.
At the State department, he elevated the importance of Central America
– pushing to support anti-communists in El Salvador to send a message
that the Soviets shouldn’t think about interfering in the Western
Hemisphere.
Reagan himself grew tired of Gen. Haig, who objected to sending a letter
the president personally wrote for the Soviet leader on the grounds that
State Department staffers should draft it.
On June 24, 1982, Gen. Haig visited Reagan in the Oval Office and handed
the president a list of complaints about the "cacophony of voices"
speaking about the administration’s foreign policy. Reagan called him
back in the next day and astonished him with a note accepting his
resignation.
"The president was accepting a letter of resignation that I had not
submitted," Gen. Haig wrote in his 1984 book "Caveat: Realism, Reagan,
and Foreign Policy."
"Caveat" was a score-settling account aimed at his critics in the White
House, which made headlines during Reagan’s 1984 campaign for
reelection. Gen. Haig, who had been so loyal to Nixon, decried the
Reagan foreign policy apparatus as "a ghost ship."
"You heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and
sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck," he wrote. "But which of the
crew had the helm?"
*Bid for presidency*
In 1988, as Reagan’s second term came to an end, Gen. Haig decided to
run for president. He struggled to raise money and build support,
deciding to pull out of the Iowa caucuses so he could focus his efforts
on the New Hampshire primary. Never having won an elected office,
observers quickly realized he wasn’t cut out for retail campaigning. He
scoffed when people didn’t seem to know who he was. Those who did again
questioned his ties to Nixon.
With polls warning of impending humiliation in New Hampshire, Gen. Haig
dropped out of the race on the Friday before the critical first primary.
He spent much of his campaign attacking Bush and quit the race with a
final flash of what some viewed as vindictiveness toward the vice
president by endorsing Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.).
In interviews, Gen. Haig brushed off all those who criticized his manner
and at times his methods.
"If you’re a guy who just comes in and occupies a position and keeps his
head down, of course, life can be rather pleasant," he once told The
Post in an interview. "They come and go in all their adulations. But if
you have a firm set of ideas, and you want to make a difference, you’ve
got to be controversial."
Haig is survived by his wife of 60 years, Patricia; his children
Alexander, Brian and Barbara; eight grandchildren; and his brother, the
Rev. Francis R. Haig.
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