Obituary;Alexander Haig

Alexander Meigs Haig, soldier and public servant, died on February 20th, aged 85

Grant and Eisenhower aside, America is uneasy about handing civil power to soldiers; and from the very start of the Reagan administration, in 1981, there was nothing Al Haig could do to erase the impression that he wished to take over the country. At his confirmation hearings for the post of secretary of state he rode roughshod over his interrogators (“No one has a monopoly on virtue, not even you, senator”). He let slip that he wanted to be the “vicar” of foreign policy, a word with pope-size pretensions. The press pinned on him the word “arrogant”, and never removed it. His picture appeared on the cover of Time, chin high and arms akimbo, above the words “Taking Command”.

This portrayal was not without foundation. It was well known that in 1973-74, as Richard Nixon crumbled under the weight of Watergate, General Haig, then chief of staff in succession to the disgraced H.R. Haldeman, kept the administration functioning. He advised Nixon how to deal with his enemies, and when to resign; he suggested to Gerald Ford that he should pardon his predecessor. His power was such that when Nixon appeared to ask him for a way out of his turmoil, “a pistol in the drawer”, he immediately ordered the president's doctors to take away his pills.

Most of the time, however, though ambition burned through him like a fire, he had no interest in the office of the presidency. A disastrous foray in 1988, flaring out before New Hampshire, was as far as he went in that direction. He had no politicians' sleazy graces, and was proud of that. The brusque attitude and tone had been instilled at West Point, together with the gimlet stare and the preference for dealing with America's adversaries, whether Cubans, Palestinians or leftist Nicaraguans, with a bombing run or an invasion. His duties at the White House, on Henry Kissinger's National Security Council and for Nixon, had been carried out while still under military orders and earned him a dizzy ascent, from colonel to four-star general in four years. His scar tissue came from battles both actual and political.

As a soldier, he believed in certain rules of behaviour. First, the need to keep secrets and not go leaking to the newspapers, for soldiers died when secrets came into the enemy's possession. And second, to follow the chain of command. Foreign policy in particular required a single source, one clear voice speaking for America. The greatest danger in those cold-war years was to show the Soviet enemy a soft, disunited front. The Soviets would surge through then, expanding their troublemaking and missile-rattling round the globe, just as the Chinese and North Koreans had driven through the “foolishly divided” front at the Yalu river in 1950, leaving 12,000 Americans dead or wounded in the ice, when he was a young lieutenant.

The greatest frustration of high politics, for General Haig, was lack of that one voice. Nixon's White House, besieged by enemies, was mostly undermined by “Deep Throat” leaking to the Washington Post—and though the general had no truck with Watergate, the strong rumour that he himself was Deep Throat offended all his notions of right conduct. Despite his liking for phrases such as “terminological inexactitude”, he was not a dissembler. He was in the more straightforward business of transmitting orders to fire prosecutors, and tapping journalists' phones.

The ghost ship

He went to Reagan's White House, fresh from a five-year stint as NATO's supreme commander, with, he supposed, a guarantee from the ever genial president that he would be the spokesman on foreign policy (“I'll look to you, Al”). It lasted no longer than his first encounter with James Baker, Michael Deaver and Ed Meese, the president's staffers. Meese put the vital Haig directive for the organisation of foreign policy in his briefcase, where it stayed.

There followed Haig explosions right and left over appointments, or statements of policy, which he had not authorised: fearsome times when the general turned purple, pounded the table and roared his displeasure. Turf wars blazed with the NSC and the Pentagon. Eighteen months of this, though punctuated by hard work on arms control and a valiant bout of shuttle diplomacy, in 1982, to try to avert the Falklands war, were more than enough.

The moment for which he was best remembered came on March 30th 1981, when Reagan was shot. Sweating and intense, his hands shaking, General Haig declared to the press that “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the vice-president.” Hedged words; but he never lived them down.

Some thought he had become unmanageable, and he could give that appearance. But the nub of the matter, as he described it in a calmly lyrical passage of his book, “Caveat”, was this:

The [Reagan] White House was as mysterious 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. But which of the crew had the helm?…It was impossible to know…

If someone evidently had the helm, General Haig saluted. If not, rather than let drift and uncertainty give any comfort to America's enemies, he had acquired the habit of seizing the wheel himself.