Nixon's Secret (74 page)

Immaculately groomed and spectacular tailored, whether in his uniform or in a suit, the chain-smoking Haig had served as a “clean-up man” for both Democratic and Republican presidents. When President John F. Kennedy wanted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the man who drafted the plan was Al Haig. When Lyndon Johnson and Army Secretary Joseph Califano needed something done, the man charged with responsibility was Al Haig. When Nixon and Kissinger wanted to have someone wiretapped, they called Al Haig. When Kissinger needed someone to negotiate the fine details of the cease-fire in South Vietnam, he sent Al Haig. When Richard Nixon wanted to remake geopolitics by reaching out to the Chinese and then playing them off against the Soviets in order to slow the arms race and disengage from costly American entanglements abroad, the man he and advisor Henry Kissinger turned to was Al Haig.

Haig was a soldier’s soldier but was also a master political operator, administrator, and power politician. He served on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in Japan as a young officer. During the Korean War, Haig was responsible for maintaining MacArthur’s intelligence and maps and briefing the general daily on both. Haig was later awarded two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star as an aide to General Edward Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff.

Haig’s military résumé is impressive. His days in the Pentagon began in 1962, when he served a two-year post as a staff officer in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. Haig served as deputy special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara until the conclusion of 1965. While working for McNamara, Haig reported to Joseph Califano, who at that time was McNamara’s chief special assistant. The Haig-Califano relationship would survive after Haig’s service in a Republican White House and staunch Democrat Califano would remain a close advisor to Haig throughout his career, including his stormy tenure as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state.

It is important to note that Haig was not only a desk warrior; he sought out and excelled in the theater of combat. Haig led a battalion of the First Infantry Division in Vietnam and saw plenty of action. During the Battle of Ap Gu in March 1967, Haig’s battalion was pinned down by the Viet Cong. Haig flew to the scene in a helicopter, which was shot down and quickly enmeshed—Haig in the heart of the battle. For the next three days, Haig and his troops fought off waves of Viet Cong as a force three times the size of his own bore down upon his men. Haig troops, inspired by his powerful example, managed not only to hold the vicious horde off, but also to kill 592 enemy soldiers. For his command and valor, Haig was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the country’s second-highest honor for heroism, by General William Westmoreland. It was no surprise that Haig revered swashbuckling General Douglas MacArthur.

Promoted to colonel for his heroics, Haig became a brigade commander of the First Infantry Division in Vietnam. Haig’s knack for strategy on and off the battlefield made his eventual transition to geopolitics seamless. “Politics and soldiering are very, very close,” Haig would say. “[They’re both] fields where a man lays everything on the line to win or lose. They’re tested by the vote or they’re tested in battle. When one doesn’t win, the results are fatal; and in the case of the military, quite fatal. So I have a great respect for politicians.”
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In 1969, he was appointed military assistant to Dr. Henry Kissinger, who served as presidential assistant for National Security Affairs. Haig attained the appointment at the recommendation of military geopolitical strategist Fritz Kraemer, who was
the
primary mentor for both Haig and Kissinger. Kraemer would say, “Above all he is a man of strong character besides being intelligent and gifted with an innate understanding of political and psychological issues.”

Often donning a monocle, carrying with him a riding crop, and wearing riding jodphurs and immaculately polished knee boots, Kraemer may have looked flaky, but he was a brilliant tactician who, with Haig and Kissinger, also counted amongst his disciples General Creighton Abrams, Lieutenant General Vernon Walters, who served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and Ambassador to the United Nations, Major General Edward Lansdale, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
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In his twenty-seven-year career in the Pentagon as a senior civilian counselor to defense secretaries and top military commanders, Kraemer would mentor generations of military minds and work under ten US presidents.
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Eulogizing the powerful strategist in 2003, Kissinger would say that Kraemer “was the greatest single influence of my formative years, and his inspiration remained with me even during the last thirty years when he would not speak to me.”
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Kraemer’s military philosophy was built around the concept of “provocative weakness,” which can be best summed up by Donald Rumsfeld in his farewell speech after his resignation in 2006. “It should be clear that not only is weakness provocative, but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well,” Rumsfeld said. “A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power.”
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Kraemer himself continued to broadcast his message until his death. “We will absolutely have to have so visibly, so obviously, the wherewithal to cope with aggressors, that every, even the most determined troublemakers can calculate for themselves that we indeed have all the things to cope with aggression,” Kraemer said in 1990 at a conservative leadership conference that explored the role of nuclear weapons in the post–Cold War world.
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The fact that Al Haig survived as the assistant to Henry Kissinger is testimony to both his temperament and resilience. The notoriously temperamental and mercurial Nixon foreign policy advisor was known for the abuse and destruction of his own staff. Haig himself, though, was also known to belittle and intimidate like a “schoolyard bully” over Kissinger, according to a source close to both men.
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Former NSC colleagues suggest that Haig endured Kissinger’s verbal abuse in group meetings but was capable of intimidating him physically one on one. Several NSC members said that Kissinger feared Haig might attack him physically if they got into a heated argument.

Both Haig and Kissinger came to represent two camps in the Nixon administration. Kissinger began to work with Nixon and sought an accord with America’s adversaries. Kissinger believed that this was his path to power and largely abandoned Kraemer’s bedrock principle of “provocative weakness.” At the apex of the Vietnam War, Nixon began an attempt to hand the war over to the forces of South Vietnam whilst withdrawing American forces. Even if the Vietnamese reached a peace accord, it was now Kissinger’s philosophy that the United States would allow the country to take their own “purely Vietnamese” course and thereafter develop “in keeping with the historical traditions and experience of the Vietnamese people.”
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Haig was aghast at kowtowing to the enemy and believed any such actions were anathema to the fight against Communism and a betrayel of America’s responsibility. Haig saw Nixon and Kissinger move toward détente as treasonous. Kraemer, according to Haig was a “spellbinder” who combined “logic, factual knowledge and conceptual depth with a spirited and inspirational personal demeanor,”
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Although, he sometimes humored Nixon’s ideas in order to play the role of loyal soldier, Haig had other plans.

Haig would simultaneously work over Nixon and Kissinger. “Haig moved in on Henry and he moved in from the very beginning,” wrote Seymour Hersh in
The Atlantic Montly.
“First of all, he was Henry’s butler and his chauffeur. Henry never knew the kind of perks that could be arranged—private planes for trips to New York for dinner, limousines—and he loved it. Haig also was very shrewd politically where Henry was naive. He was advising Henry at first on how to handle Haldeman and Ehrlichman. When Henry had to wear a white tie and tails for his first White House dinner, it was Haig who went to Henry’s house and helped him dress for the first time.”
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At the same time, Haig was double-dealing on Kissinger. One way was through Nixon’s insatiable love of gossip. Another was through his hard-line approach to politics, which bolstered Nixon’s confidence. A third way was by spying on Kissinger. As we covered previously, Haig was a key figure in a military spy ring in which a Yeoman courier had rifled desks, burn bags, and even the briefcase of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to copy documents and forward them to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Haig also had a penchant for listening in on Kissinger’s private phone calls. In his NSC office, Kissinger had installed a private phone line in which a third party could privately listen in. Haig used this privledge liberally. On one such occasion, Haig, tapped in, whispered to Chuck Colson, who was standing nearby, “He’s selling us out on Vietnam!” and later told Colson “I[‘ve] got to get ahold of Kraemer.”
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Kraemer would come to the White House weeks later in an attempt to reinvigorate Kissinger’s warrior spirit.

Haig was a born schemer, a self-serving egomaniac. “Al Haig was a neurotic narcissist with an unquenchable craving for power,” wrote political journalist Christopher Hitchens.
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With the power of hindsight, one thing is perfectly clear: Haig was ultimately out for himself, and in his quest to slow détente he went so far as to review the notes of private meetings between Kissinger, Nixon, and Chinese leaders. Nixon and Kissinger “are selling us out to the Communists!” Haig told Haldeman aide Dwight Chapin.
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In the early years of the Nixon White House, Haig was somewhat loyal to both Nixon and Kissinger. Haig knew, in the words of Seymour Hersh, “that future promotions lay with Kissinger as much as with the President.”
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Haig also shared dark secrets with both men.

A continuing vulnerablilty for
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Kissinger and Haig was their in involvement in the 1969–’71 wiretaps place on NSC staffers, White House aides, and prominent journalists. Haig and Kissinger had a mutual interest in keeping the entire sordid affair from becoming public, and worked in concert to bar public exposure of the wiretaps. When word of the wiretaps ultimately leaked to Woodward, his source Deep Throat tried to deflect blame away from the FBI and the administration, claiming the taps were placed by the same rouge elements of the CIA and the FBI who broke into the Watergame (Hunt, McCord, and Liddy). Once again General Haig left his prints on a lie, this one designed to bury the role of he and Kissinger in the taps. Interestingly, when the wiretaps finally became public and posed an issue in Kissinger’s confirmation to be secretary of state, Haig and Kissinger would both deflect total blame for the wiretaps onto Nixon and Kissinger. They would deny “initiating” the taps, even though it was he who agitated for them and made up the list of the those to be surreptitiously eavesdropped upon.

By the fall of 1972, Haig had begun to circumvent Kissinger to meet directly with the president. “Henry would be an absolute wreck, he’d be close to a nervous breakdown because the president was meeting with Haig,” recalled an NSC aide.
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Despite believing that Haig had been involved in the naval spy ring, Nixon was impressed by Haig’s confidence and swagger. Getting close to the president had its perks. Incredibly, with Nixon’s help, Haig went from colonel to four-star general in a matter of four years, skipping the rank of general entirely. Nixon awarded Haig two more stars, expediously jumping over 240 ranking officers to become eligible for his next post: vice chief of staff of the US Army, to which
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the US Senate confirmed him in October 1972. Haig’s new post put him directly in line for his next promotion.

Following the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman on April 30, 1973, Haig made his move. Departed Nixon aides Haldeman and White House Counsel Charles “Chuck” Colson, both pushed Haig for the vacant Chief of Staff slot in their own self-interest; both hoped for executive clemency from Nixon before he left office. Haig double-crossed Haldeman on this score too, presenting Nixon with the option of pardoning Haldeman and his colleagues for their Watergate crimes at the same time pardoning those who had illegally avoided service in the Vietnam war, a surefire nonstarter for Nixon. The president said no.

Nixon was considering the appointment of John Connally as his chief of staff, with whom the president was enamored, but Nixon staffers hardly knew. In lieu of Connally, Nixon decided on Haig, who served as White House chief of staff, while still retaining his army commission, during the height of the Watergate affair from May 1973 until Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

Nixon loved Haig’s military bearing and use of military language, which Haig used to buck up Nixon’s toughness. “We’re at the point that we can see the barbed wire at the end of the street. What we have to do is mobilize everything to cut through it,” Haig would bark at Nixon during the Watergate debacle.
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Haig was the ultimate courtier with a false bonhomie. “He was not a nice guy trying to play a nice guy, it was totally phony,” said Jeff Bell, who met with Haig as one of the Manhattan Twelve, conservatives, including William Buckley, who suspended their support of the Nixon administration after Nixon’s tilt to the left on both foreign policy and domestic issues.
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Many in the “New Majority” were shocked to learn that Nixon never intended to repeal the New Deal of the Great Society and that the growth of government and spending would continue to grow. Many on the right hung with Nixon for sentimental reasons, he was, after all, the man who nailed Alger Hiss, but his support on the right began to wane. Haig had been assigned by the president to meet with the disgruntled conservatives.