Emotional and breathless, Alexander Haig faced an anxious press corps and nation in the White House briefing room at 4:14 p.m. on March 30, 1981, to announce who led the nation as President Ronald Reagan lay anesthetized in an operating room at George Washington University Hospital. Haig had scrambled from the State Department to the White House to manage the crisis caused by the assassination attempt on the new president. Reagan, it seemed, would survive, but a nervous, jittery nation that had seen a president killed and another forced out of office in the previous twenty years needed to know someone was capable of making decisions in the White House.
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so,” Haig said. “He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”1
Haig’s words were clear and simple. He and some of Reagan’s closest aides had gathered in the White House Situation Room to determine who had shot the president and why. Authorities soon learned that twenty-five-year-old John W. Hinckley, an unemployed and delusional drifter from Colorado, had shot Reagan with a .22-caliber pistol when the president left the Washington Hilton. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, had been shot in the head, and a Secret Service agent and Washington cop had also been wounded. But, as so often happens in such attacks, thoughts turned to a larger conspiracy and who controlled the government.
That brief moment in the White House, as he strived unsuccessfully to display calm, marked Haig forever as impulsive and unstable as he grabbed for power and attempted to fill Reagan’s vacuum. It was not the first time Haig had assumed authority that was not his to take. Haig believed he was in control that day in 1981 because he knew what it meant to be in charge at the White House. During the fifteen months from May 1973 to August 1974, when he served as President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, Haig was the de facto president of the United States.
During those final months of the Nixon administration, as the president desperately tried to withstand the onslaught of negative press reports, congressional investigations, and federal prosecutions spurred by the Watergate scandal, Haig controlled the president’s agenda and determined who met with the president and whether to even tell Nixon about many of the decisions made in his name. Haig stacked the deck against Nixon’s legal defense, hiring both Nixon’s main Watergate defender and the special prosecutor. He also forced the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, under investigation for bribery and corruption, and engineered the selection of his replacement. With Henry Kissinger, who was first Haig’s boss at the National Security Council and then secretary of state, Haig coordinated foreign policy. Together, he and Kissinger put the country on nuclear alert while Nixon slept. And as Nixon careened toward resignation, Haig shaped that departure and the pardon Nixon eventually received from his successor, Gerald Ford. Haig knew crisis management because he had managed the White House through an unprecedented political and succession crisis. He was, in the words of Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, the nation’s “thirty-seventh-and-a-half president.”2
Haig only did what came naturally to him after Reagan’s shooting.
But Haig’s rushed attempt to assure calm triggered troubling memories for many who remembered his work for Nixon. Shortly after Nixon’s departure, author and reporter Jules Witcover watched Haig in the VIP section of the Capitol after Ford addressed Congress and observed that Haig was “in a sense applauding his own deft achievement of presidential transition never contemplated in quite that way by the Founding Fathers.” Witcover witnessed “a bloodless presidential coup engineered by an army general, a man who had gravitated to the very right hand of one president and who, when that president fell, saw to a swift removal of the body.”3
If only he knew the whole story.
Haig eased Nixon out of office not to save the military or the presidency but to save himself.
Nixon needed to go for many reasons. By his final year in office his mental condition alone justified his removal. He drank too much and was often absent during major crises. But Haig, in concert with White House lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt, made it impossible for Nixon to stay, and then both men did everything to protect themselves. Haig needed Nixon to resign and be pardoned by Ford. A House impeachment and Senate trial would have exposed how Haig had leaked White House secrets, obstructed justice, and abused power. As Nixon’s deputy national security advisor, Haig led the White House campaign to have the FBI wiretap government officials and journalists to identify the leakers of White House secrets. Those wiretaps were part of the surveillance techniques included in the impeachment articles, and both Haig and Kissinger had lied to cover their tracks. Haig had also cooperated with military leaders who were stealing secret documents from the White House and then leaking the details to derail his plans, an act the president had described as “a federal offense of the highest order.”4 That cooperation would have cost Haig his job and possibly landed him in prison. If Charles Colson and H. R. Haldeman, both longtime Nixon loyalists and top aides, had known about Haig’s betrayal, they never would have recommended that Haig succeed Haldeman as the White House chief of staff.
After Haig saved himself by jettisoning Nixon, he engineered his cover-up. Less than forty-eight hours after Ford pardoned Nixon and eliminated the threat of a nasty criminal trial, Haig repaired to the den of his home in northwest Washington DC and met with the two reporters who had caused much of Nixon’s problems: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.5 Together they would write the inside story of Nixon’s final days, aided and abetted by Haig’s early and enthusiastic guidance. Haig had betrayed the president he had sworn to protect, and then he engineered his cover-up. For an ambitious and cunning man like this, seizing control of the moment at the White House after a president had been shot was just another routine piece of business.