Alexander Meigs Haig Jr, a retired four-star U.S. Army general, former White House Chief of Staff under Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State under the Ronald Reagan administration, 1981-1982, died yesterday at the age of 85.
At age of 11 and 12, I remembered little of him other than this big news event about the Reagan assassination in 1981 and the media’s attack on Haig for a misunderstood attempt to hold down the fort (the White House) until the Vice President Bush’s return from Texas. The media thought he was seizing power (he wasn’t, even though he later admitted that he used a poor choice of words, speaking from hindsight).
He was combative to some of Reagan’s close aides (such as Weinberger, Baker, etc.), who were too moderate or too hawkish, in Haig’s view, on foreign policy and defense issues, and especially with the Soviet Union. All Cold War stuff. Before he was the Secretary of State, he was the SACEUR from 1974-1979, prompted by his boss, President Ford, to return to active duty (and President Carter retained Haig in 1976 in that capacity). It was in that role he obtained a real geopolitical education of the world, of Europe and the Soviet Union that would serve him well as Sec. of State, given the uneasy political and economic circumstances at that time. Haig was a hawk but he was the realpolitk hawk among Reagan’s “hawks”; Haig learned a lot from Nixon’s presidency in dealing with Red China and understood that stability was key to the balances of the world, again, given the circumstances of the 1970s.
He was forced to resign in the summer of 1982 after he felt there was a covert campaign by Reagan aides to oust him. Haig knew that it was Vice President George H. W. Bush and James Baker who spearheaded the ouster by getting Reagan around to them instead of Haig’s. He was succeeded by George P. Schultz (I was no fan of his tenure as a Secretary of State). When Haig left the White House, Reagan and America lost a much wiser warrior-diplomat.
In 1984, in his article in Time magazine, remarking about what has transpired in the Reagan White House while Haig was the Sec. of State, he blamed the problem on the lack of discipline between the President and his aides:
There is nothing lacking in President Reagan’s vision. Where Ronald Reagan’s instincts have been thwarted, where his policies have not succeeded, the problem has lain elsewhere. The problem, almost unspeakably complicated in its consequences, is very simple in its essential nature. It lies in an absence of discipline on the part of some of his advisers; there is no adequate structure to enforce discipline upon the system.
In the absence of such a structure, the Chief Executive must exercise a lonely and nearly superhuman monitorship of the whole system—an undertaking that is beyond the limits of individual knowledge and energy. Vision without discipline is a daydream.
And he was right: the President’s visions of the future cannot be attainable without having a disciplinary system in place, so to keep his chief aides and lesser aides best-behaved and not playing games, dirty, mean-spirited, or furtive, with each other, or toward the President. History is rife with calculating political advisers or aides taking advantages of powerful rulers to advance some political or personal goals, but such acts often ending up in nasty or deadly consequences. I don’t think that every President since Reagan has ever implemented such a disciplinary system that Haig suggested. The United States of America is a nation of laws, not of ambitious people with unconstitutional agendas (and no, Haig wasn’t trying to usurp the Presidency in 1981, that’s 100% bullshit).
Haig ran for U.S. President in 1988 but did not obtain enough votes to beat George H. W. Bush. He settled into his retirement years but he was always willing to speak his mind and offered his foreign policy expertise over the years.
He was a Korean War and Vietnam veteran, and he was deservedly recognized for what he did as a Colonel in the Vietnam War in 1967:
When two of his companies were engaged by a large hostile force, Colonel Haig landed amid a hail of fire, personally took charge of the units, called for artillery and air fire support and succeeded in soundly defeating the insurgent force…the next day a barrage of 400 rounds was fired by the Viet Cong, but it was ineffective because of the warning and preparations by Colonel Haig. As the barrage subsided, a force three times larger than his began a series of human wave assaults on the camp. Heedless of the danger himself, Colonel Haig repeatedly braved intense hostile fire to survey the battlefield. His personal courage and determination, and his skillful employment of every defense and support tactic possible, inspired his men to fight with previously unimagined power. Although his force was outnumbered three to one, Colonel Haig succeeded in inflicting 592 casualties on the Viet Cong… (HQ US Army, Vietnam, General Orders No. 2318 (May 22, 1967)
Debbie Schlussel called General Haig “a great friend of Israel”. Read it all please. General Haig always put America first before the world and unapologetically stood by it.
America lost a great patriot. Rest in peace and thank you for your services to the country, General Haig.
