Alexander Haig's Dark Side

Alexander Haig, right, with Henry Kissinger in 2006. (Photo: Reuters)

February 21, 2010
By Tom Shachtman
The Huffington Post (blog)

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Dispatched to Phnom Penh, Haig exceeded Nixon's instructions and told Lon Nol that the U.S. would continue to fight in Cambodia even after Congress had expressly forbidden further American incursions there and Nixon had agreed to that restriction. Visiting Vietnam to bring back honest reports of the war's progress, Haig returned with rosy ones that belied what soldiers in the field said to him. Jumped over hundreds of generals so that Nixon could appoint him Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army, Haig was in that job only a few months before being brought back to the White House in May 1973 as chief of staff. Thus began what Colodny and I call "The Haig Administration."

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Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is now posthumously being recast as the quintessential soldier-patriot. The truth is, he had a dark side: wiretapping for Richard Nixon, facilitating the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified documents from the White House, sabotaging peace negotiations over Vietnam and détente with the USSR, and unduly hastening Nixon's exit from office. Haig is most lauded as the man who, according to conventional wisdom, held the presidency together during the depths of Watergate. But that evaluation obscures Haig's true role in the Nixon White House.

He began to come to prominence in 1968 when Fritz Kraemer, who had helped Haig rise within the Pentagon, recommended him to another protégé, Henry Kissinger, as Kissinger's military advisor on the Nixon National Security Council. Haig shared Kraemer's militarist, simplistic, anti-Communist, anti-diplomacy view of the world and of America's place in it.

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