THE FORMIDABLE AL HAIG

By Henry Kissinger

When Nixon asked me to become Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, I thought it important to have a military assistant whose responsibilities ran to the White House rather than to the Pentagon. With a war in Viet Nam to end, I needed an officer who belonged to my staff but had the confidence of the military.

General Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought I would be most comfortable with an officer with advanced degrees from famous institutions. Having taught at Harvard, I rated somewhat lower the wisdom evidenced by such degrees. I sought a more rough-cut type, someone with combat experience, familiar with operational planning. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then a colonel at West Point, was recommended by conservatives and liberals. I offered him the post after one interview.

Haig soon became indispensable. As my deputy after the first year, he disciplined my anarchic tendencies and established coherence in a National Security Council staff of talented prima donnas. He acted as my partner, strong in crises, decisive in judgment, skillful in bureaucratic infighting, indefatigable in his labors.

To be sure, nobody survives in the rough-and-tumble of White House politics--especially of the Nixon White House--without a good measure of ruthlessness. Haig was implacable in squeezing to the sidelines potential competitors for my attention. At the same time, I am sure, he was not above presenting himself to my subordinates as the good guy tempering my demanding, somewhat unbalanced, nature. He worked assiduously at establishing his own personal relationship first with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, then with Nixon. I did not doubt that they considered him more of a loyalist than me. I began to wonder whether Haig always resisted Nixon's version that I was a temperamental genius in need of reining in by stabler personalities, and that he could be helpful in tranquilizing me, so to speak.

This is no more than saying that I recognized Haig as formidable. One of the most useful tools for a chief of staff is to present unpleasant orders as emanating from an implacable superior; it was a tactic I used in my relationship to Nixon. Nor had I strenuously objected when others had put me in the position of the good guy in the White House. In that sense Haig hoisted me with my own petard.

During the Viet Nam talks in 1972, Haig drew closer to Nixon--partly out of conviction (he probably would have preferred a military outcome), partly from the conflicting pulls of loyalty to me and duty to his Commander in Chief. This caused moments of exasperation. Yet in the end they were always superseded by my admiration for Haig's integrity, courage, intelligence and patriotism.

At the start of Nixon's second term, Haig was made Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, a four-star rank culminating a spectacular rise from colonel in four years. When he was called back in May 1973 as White House chief of staff, his strength and discipline helped the Government traverse Watergate without disintegrating. Haig kept faith with his President, and he kept faith with the nation's institutions. It was a unique and indispensable service.

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