The world into which Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born on December 4, 1924, was filled with great possibilities. Optimism surged through the U.S. economy as factory production rose and the stock market soared. President Calvin Coolidge had shaken off the scandals left by his predecessor, Warren Harding, and won a landslide a month earlier. In Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, a well-tended suburb eight miles from Philadelphia along the Main Line from downtown, young Alec was the second child of a striving lawyer and his lace-curtain Irish wife, Regina. The Haigs were on the verge of making it. Alexander Sr. was an ambitious young lawyer with a bright future.
But Alexander Haig Sr. developed cancer and died at age thirty-eight, when Alec was ten. Then the expectations for the entire family—Alec, his older sister, Regina, and his younger brother, Frank—turned dark. The nation was mired in the Great Depression, and while Haig’s father had managed to surf over the rough patches of the national economy with his law practice, his widow had to depend on the kindness of family members and her job to keep things afloat. Instead of private school, Haig had to attend the local public high school, Lower Merion, a change in status that impeded Haig’s dream of attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, and becoming an army officer. “Al is definitely not West Point material,” the Lower Merion principal told his mother.1 So Haig traveled to South Bend, Indiana, to attend Notre Dame, where he waited until he could apply to West Point again.
Haig entered West Point in 1944 at the height of World War II. At the rate the war was going, he would not graduate in time to fight in either Europe or the Pacific. The academy lacked the academic rigor of the years before the war, as too many instructors had left for the battlefield, while the remainder focused more on producing combat-ready officers, not academic achievement. Even so, Haig failed to distinguish himself academically, finishing 214th out of a class of 310 cadets. But the contacts he made during his three years at West Point would remain part of his life for decades. Fred Buzhardt, the son of a South Carolina lawyer, was in the class ahead of Haig; they would work together in the Nixon White House. Brent Scowcroft, a future general and national security advisor, finished 86th.2
After graduating in 1947, Haig received the routine postings that many young second lieutenants received after West Point and during peacetime. He was stationed to forts in Kansas and Kentucky for courses in infantry and armor. The war was over, the army was shrinking, and Haig’s military career seemed to have little direction.
That changed when the army sent Haig to Japan to join the staff of the imperious Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the American viceroy who ruled over Japan from his offices in the Dai Ichi Insurance Company building. The young lieutenant learned quickly how to ingratiate himself to his superiors by anticipating their commands. He also caught the attention of Patricia Fox, the daughter of Maj. Gen. Alonzo Fox, a top MacArthur deputy. They were married on May 24, 1950, just a month before North Korean forces invaded South Korea to start the Korean War. After allied forces retreated under the North Korean assault, ultimately forming a small perimeter around the southern city of Busan, came MacArthur’s true genius stroke as a general: the amphibious assault on the port city of Inchon. Surprised, the North Koreans buckled and fled. Haig carried MacArthur’s sleeping bag ashore and remained in the commander’s headquarters as U.S. forces moved rapidly north, past Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, which had turned communist the previous year after Mao Zedong’s ouster of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.3 The coming Chinese attack, signs of which MacArthur and his team ignored, pushed the U.S. forces south in some of the bloodiest fighting ever seen. Haig saw almost no combat in Korea but witnessed MacArthur’s leadership failures, which led President Harry Truman to fire him in 1951.
After Korea, Haig endured a series of uninspiring peacetime postings stateside, including trips to the Naval War College and a stint on the West Point staff. The army sent him to Georgetown University in Washington DC, for his master’s degree. It was while he was in the Pentagon in 1962 that he caught the eye of Cyrus Vance, secretary of the army, who added Haig to his staff.4 In the Pentagon, the Republican Haig acquired his four unlikely Democratic benefactors: Vance; his assistant, New York–born lawyer Joseph Califano; Defense Secretary Robert McNamara; and Chicago lawyer Morris Leibman, a liberal anticommunist who advised the army on multiple issues.5 They embodied the Kennedy era’s vigor and optimism and the belief that they could reshape the world. Haig joined a small group in the Pentagon developing secret plans to overthrow the government of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who had whipped an ill-prepared band of Cuban exiles when they tried to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Under the direction of President John Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Haig’s group plotted assassination attempts, propaganda programs, and military assault plans.6 Details of the Kennedys’ secret obsession would remain secret until the mid-1970s, long after both Kennedys had been assassinated. Haig also oversaw the army’s share of the CIA’s Project Moses, the repatriation of the Cuban exile soldiers captured at the Bay of Pigs.7
During this time, Haig gained two more influential mentors. William Sullivan ran the FBI’s intelligence division. One of Director J. Edgar Hoover’s favorites, Sullivan controlled many of the bureau’s most controversial programs, such as the attempt to destabilize civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., the sweeping COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) domestic intelligence network, and the fight against domestic communism, on which he worked closely with Leibman.8 With Sullivan, Haig vetted the returning Cubans to determine who could be absorbed into the U.S. Army. A second guiding light for Haig was army strategist Fritz Kraemer, a monocle-wearing, riding crop–wielding exile from Hitler’s Germany. The magnetic Kraemer, who had during World War II discovered a young private named Henry Kissinger, espoused a hard-line theory called “provocative weakness”; he believed any signs of weakness by the United States would invite attacks or maneuvers by its rivals, particularly the Soviet Union and communist China. During the Kennedy administration, Kraemer’s vision, emanating from deep inside the Pentagon, was very much in vogue, and Haig fell under his spell. “Kraemer was seen as one of the ultimate wise men, an energetic thinker who had a wide knowledge of history and warfighting and how civilizations rise and fall,” Califano said. “He had a lot of fans among the army colonels and lieutenant colonels at the time,” including Haig, who remained a Kraemer acolyte for the rest of his life.9 Kraemer and Sullivan also shared a bond, one close enough so Kraemer felt comfortable warning Sullivan in 1963 that national security advisor McGeorge Bundy was a “Fabian socialist” whose tacit acceptance of Soviet domination of parts of the world weakened American will.10
After Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the obsession with Castro waned. New president Lyndon Johnson soon focused his attention on Vietnam, where an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 provided a false pretext for what became a U.S.-dominated war that eventually saw 565,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Vietnam. Haig received his first combat command in 1967 when he was sent to lead a battalion near the Cambodian border. There Haig led his troops in the battle of Ap Gu, an extensive firefight on March 31 and April 1, 1967, in which Haig’s troops ultimately defeated a larger North Vietnamese and Viet Cong force. After flying a helicopter into the thick of mortar and small arms fire at the point of contact, Haig helped push off the enemy, actions for which he received a Distinguished Service Cross, a commendation second only to the Medal of Honor.11 He returned in 1968 to a post as commander of the Third Regiment of the Corps of Cadets at his alma mater, West Point. There he remained at the end of 1968 and the closing of the Johnson administration and the transition to a new president, Republican former vice president Richard Nixon, who had lost a razor-thin election to Kennedy in 1960.
Perhaps Haig’s army career would have ended there. But as his national security advisor Nixon chose Kissinger, whom Kraemer had discovered during World War II. By late 1968 Kissinger had established an international reputation as a leading thinker on nuclear weapons policy as a member of the Harvard University faculty. He seemed destined for a prominent role in the administration of either Nixon or his defeated Democratic rival in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. As he assembled his national security staff with a host of national security bureaucrats and Johnson holdovers, Kissinger sought the advice of Kraemer and Joseph Califano for the name of a reliable officer to be his chief military aide. They both recommended Haig. “I told Henry that Al would work twenty hours a day,” Califano said. Kissinger hired him.12
Nixon gave his National Security Council a different look from that of Johnson, who often made policy through ad hoc meetings and lunches with advisors. Nixon’s system focused almost all authority in the national security advisor and the president. As established in the secret National Security Decision Memorandum 2, which Nixon signed shortly after being sworn in on January 20, 1969, the various agencies would receive policy questions from the White House. The agencies would supply their recommendations, and then the NSC staff and Kissinger would analyze them before presenting Nixon with a series of options from which he would make his decision.13
And Haig was in the middle of it, gathering information from the Pentagon and sifting through the flood of paper in Kissinger’s overflowing in-box. Haig’s twenty years as a military staff officer, starting with MacArthur in Japan, served him well. Even before Nixon took office, Haig was sending Kissinger memos about how to manage the paper flow into the White House. He stayed at work when others went home. He watched his peers carefully and slyly undercut them. “I have expressed to you on several occasions my concern that the NSC staff is not properly organized and that the functions of the components of the staff, i.e., the Operators, the Planners and the Programmers have not been sufficiently delineated and formalized to insure the kind of smooth staff work that is essential,” Haig wrote Kissinger a little more than two weeks after Nixon took office. “I have no personal ambitions with respect to this problem and am honored to serve in any capacity at this level, providing I have assured myself that you are getting the kind of support which you must have,” Haig helpfully added, displaying the brownnosing that was quickly earning him the enmity of his colleagues.14 Kissinger increased his reliance on Haig.
Soon, however, Haig’s Pentagon allies saw signs that Nixon was not the hard-liner they wanted. The Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed Nixon’s budding plan to return the island of Okinawa to Japan, from which it was wrested in a 1945 battle that claimed 12,500 American lives. Haig became their conduit to the president, saying in an April 2 memo to Kissinger that “I must emphasize that the price we would pay for [redacted] Okinawa, even after a settlement of the Vietnam War, would be extremely heavy.”15 Haig also used a “dead-key” system on Kissinger’s telephone to listen in on his conversations. Once he turned to Charles Colson, a Nixon aide and former marine, and whispered, “He’s selling us out on Vietnam!” He later told Colson, “I’ve got to get hold of Kraemer.”16
Other problems emerged. Nixon’s proposals and other secrets quickly appeared in the press, often just days or hours after they developed. A March 31 New York Times article included details from a March 29 memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposing the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, a mere hours after the memo was sent to the secretary of defense from Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Earle Wheeler.17 Leaks about Nixon’s response to a North Korean attack on a military spy plane, troop withdrawal plans for South Vietnam, alternative Vietnam policies, and a potential sale of fighter planes to Jordan also drew anger from Nixon, who was hearing regularly from Attorney General John Mitchell and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that he had to start placing wiretaps on the telephones of suspected leakers, starting with Kissinger’s nominal deputy, Morton Halperin.18
Kissinger resisted until May 9, when the Times published a story that contained details of the still “secret” U.S. bombing of targets in ostensibly neutral Cambodia.19 Nixon had approved the secret bombing campaign, called Menu, in March after military leaders said they needed the air strikes to wipe out the border sanctuaries and an alleged North Vietnamese command center along the border. Kissinger erupted when he read the story by reporter William Beecher at breakfast in Key Biscayne, Florida, where he had traveled with the president and his team.20 Kissinger called Hoover, who had been steadily prodding him to do something, and asked for Hoover’s help. By day’s end, after three more calls from Kissinger, Hoover had already ordered the first wiretap on Halperin’s home telephone. With Haig’s help, Kissinger identified two more wiretap targets on the NSC staff, Daniel Davidson and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, and a surprising fourth target, Col. Robert Pursley, the military aide to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. A former U.S. House member from Wisconsin, the wily Laird had mastered Washington intrigue. He had also opposed the need to secretly bomb targets in Cambodia, which made him suspect to Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig. Ten days later, they added two more targets, NSC officials Richard Moose and Richard Sneider, who led the staff effort on the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, the details of which were showing up in the press too frequently. Those leaks dealt with the military’s opposition to the reversion, meaning they came from the Pentagon or perhaps Haig, the military’s representative inside the NSC.
Hoover agreed to the wiretaps but only with the signed authorization from the attorney general, who agreed. While most experts considered the wiretaps legal under the current laws, they remained controversial, and Hoover realized public sentiment had turned against the FBI’s freewheeling tactics. Hoover delegated the wiretaps to Sullivan, his trusted lieutenant and Haig’s friend. “After a lifetime of service under Hoover, he had the weary air of a man who has been sifting other people’s secrets all his life and finding them not particularly interesting,” Haig wrote of Sullivan.21 By February 1971, when the program stopped, the FBI had tapped the phones of seventeen government officials and journalists.
Hoover ordered Sullivan to keep the wiretaps secret and hold the files outside the bureau’s legendary central filing system, which held blackmail-worthy information on hundreds of members of Congress and other prominent officials. Sullivan coordinated picking the targets with Kissinger and Haig, who met with Sullivan often. Kissinger told Sullivan, “It is clear that I don’t have anybody in my office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.”22 Hoover, however, had picked the wrong man with Sullivan, who believed the wiretaps gave him the leverage to supplant his boss. For years, Sullivan had used Hoover’s authority while quietly exceeding the director’s desires. Sullivan bridled at Hoover’s earlier edict to curtail surreptitious break-ins by agents without warrants.23 Sullivan used Hoover’s antipathy toward civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to justify bugging King’s hotel rooms and writing a threatening letter urging King to kill himself.24 Sullivan oversaw the burgeoning and highly secret COINTELPRO campaign, which targeted legitimate and illegitimate threats alike. Sullivan also used his good relations with the Central Intelligence Agency, which ran contrary to Hoover’s wishes, to promote the creation of a national intelligence service similar to the British MI5, another idea anathema to Hoover.25 Sullivan also cultivated journalists such as columnists Jack Anderson and Robert Novak with a series of secret tips.26 Hoover would soon regret putting such a sensitive operation in Sullivan’s hands.
The wiretaps, Haig claimed, generated proof that one leaker was Daniel Davidson, a protégé of longtime Democratic diplomat and politician Averell Harriman.27 Haig quietly told Davidson he had been discovered and had to leave, which he did. Beyond Davidson, however, the taps found nothing, leading Sullivan to tell Hoover they should stop. Hoover refused, saying he would maintain the taps as long as Nixon wanted them. Hoover also believed the taps gave him leverage, the reasons for which were detailed in a 1971 FBI memorandum: “It goes without saying that knowledge of this coverage represents a potential source of tremendous embarrassment to the Bureau and political disaster for the Nixon administration. Copies of the material itself could be used for political blackmail and the ruination of Nixon, Mitchell and others in the administration.”28
Haig steadily became Kissinger’s go-to deputy. By September Nixon was pinning on Haig’s brigadier general’s star at the White House. During the second half of 1969, Haig made another critical connection. A navy lieutenant, Robert U. Woodward, who worked in the Pentagon communications office for Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, started delivering secret messages from the Pentagon to Haig at the White House.
In 1971, after leaving the navy and spending a year on the staff of a small newspaper in suburban Maryland, Woodward became a reporter for the Washington Post using the byline Bob Woodward. One year later, Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, would became famous for their reporting on the Nixon administration. Haig and Woodward would eventually deny that they knew each other at this time, but recorded interviews with three top Pentagon officials—Moorer, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim—show that Woodward regularly met Haig at the White House.29 Moorer said Woodward was one of six lieutenants entrusted with keeping the White House informed of Pentagon developments, and Haig was their conduit.30 While Laird said the Woodward-Haig relationship “bothered” him at the time, he never told Nixon about the connection between Haig and Woodward, not even when Laird was a member of the White House staff in 1973 and 1974 and Woodward’s stories were putting Nixon on the defensive.31
Woodward was part of a larger operation aimed at ferreting out the secrets the White House kept from the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had a liaison office at the NSC, which concerned Laird, because it let the military brass communicate directly with the NSC staff and go around both Kissinger and Laird. He warned Kissinger early that he would regret keeping the office, but Kissinger had other priorities and left it open, not realizing Haig was already telling the military the secrets Nixon was trying to hide from them. Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, a future chief of naval operations who knew Haig from McNamara’s Pentagon, said Haig frequently told Gen. William Westmoreland, the army chief of staff, about the White House’s plans.32 Navy Rear Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, the head of the Chiefs’ liaison office, met often with Haig behind closed doors and was one of the few navy officers to attend Haig’s promotion ceremony to brigadier general, along with Haig’s hard-line mentor, Fritz Kraemer.
Nixon believed he needed secrecy to achieve his three main foreign policy goals: reduced tensions and an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and an end to the Vietnam War. If his plans were exposed, Nixon feared that Washington’s entrenched interests at the Pentagon and in Congress, the State Department, the intelligence community, and the press would kill them. The secret maneuvers started almost immediately. Just one month after taking office, Nixon authorized Kissinger to tell the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, that the United States had no intention of trying to win on the battlefield in Vietnam and recognized that South Vietnam’s long-term chances of survival were grim.33 Just as quickly, Nixon began to seek improved relations with the Chinese communists, who had fought and killed thousands of U.S. troops in Korea. Haig learned all these secrets as Kissinger’s deputy, and he eventually became one of Nixon’s favorite confidants.
Military leaders initially thought Nixon would release them from the restrictions that President Johnson had placed on them in Vietnam, but they soon realized how much Nixon did not tell them. On troop reductions in Vietnam, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, and then the quick reversal of plans for that invasion, Nixon routinely surprised the brass, so by the middle of 1970 Moorer had begun to seek more information from the Chiefs’ NSC liaison office and Robinson’s strong relationship with Haig. That effort was boosted by the second half of 1970, when Robinson gained a new assistant, navy yeoman Charles Radford, a young enlisted man who did clerical duties for NSC staffers and also traveled with Kissinger and Haig overseas.
Robinson told Radford to get as much information as possible from the White House, which Radford considered authorization to steal documents from the NSC offices. He took the “burn bags” of documents meant to be destroyed after reading, lifted and copied the documents, and then placed them back into the bags for disposal. On trips to Vietnam and elsewhere with Haig and Kissinger, Radford stole papers from their briefcases and sent them to the Pentagon. The information gap between the White House and Pentagon began to narrow.34
Laird oversaw a multilayered intelligence-gathering network beyond the White House spy ring. Whenever Kissinger flew on a military plane, such as to Paris for secret talks with the North Vietnamese, the military pilots told Laird where Kissinger was going. Whenever Kissinger used a CIA communications channel, the National Security Agency intercepted the calls and sent the details to the NSA chief, Gen. Noel Gayler, who passed the information to Laird.35 Finally, Zumwalt, the new chief of naval operations, had a protégé working directly in Kissinger’s office, Lt. David Halperin, who told Zumwalt about Kissinger’s activities.36 When Kissinger met secretly in Palm Springs, California, with Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, in May 1971 to discuss his upcoming secret trip to China, Halperin took the notes.37 He then told Zumwalt about the top-secret trip. While Nixon routinely bypassed Laird and hid secrets from him, Laird was returning the favor, and with Haig’s help. Laird never told Nixon about the Haig-Woodward relationship because doing so would have exposed Laird’s own spying on the White House.
By the middle of 1971 Haig’s rhythms at the White House were firmly established. He had a closer relationship with Nixon, who often tired of Kissinger’s emotional neediness and bypassed him to talk with Haig, who often fed some of Nixon’s more aggressive or paranoid instincts. Meanwhile, Haig and Kissinger talked behind Nixon’s back, often calling him “our drunken friend.”38 In June 1971 Haig inadvertently threw Nixon into a political crisis that would dog him for the remainder of his presidency. On June 12, the day after Nixon gave away his daughter Tricia at a glamorous wedding at the White House, a concerned Haig alerted Nixon to a story on the front page of that Sunday’s New York Times.39 The Times had obtained a copy of a massive history of the military’s involvement in the Vietnam War that was commissioned by Haig’s onetime boss, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Quickly dubbed the Pentagon Papers, the archive showed how successive administrations had lied and exaggerated about the Vietnam War despite their grave doubts. Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant, student, and former advisor of Kissinger, had stolen the study and given it to the Times, which spent weeks assembling the documents into a narrative. While Nixon had little to fear from the papers, which detailed previous administrations’ decisions and mistakes, Haig had greater risks. He worked at McNamara’s side as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened, and Haig also had even deeper secrets that risked exposure, such as the long effort to subvert and overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. He told Nixon about “the goddamn New York Times expose of the most highly classified documents of the war,” a story Nixon had not seen.
Was it leaked out of the Pentagon? Nixon asked. “Sir, it, uh, the whole study that was done for McNamara, and then carried on after McNamara left by [Clark] Clifford, and the peaceniks over there,” Haig answered, referring to the Pentagon analysts whose ranks once included Morton Halperin, a Haig rival at the NSC. “This is a devastating, uh, security break, of, of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.” Nixon’s first instinct was to find someone to fire, preferably at the Pentagon, to show that leaks were not tolerated. Haig speculated that the papers were stolen during the transition from the Johnson to the Nixon administrations and would damage Democrats, not Nixon: “They’re going to end up in a massive gut fight in the Democratic Party on this thing.”40
Nixon wanted the FBI to investigate and destroy Ellsberg, just as the FBI had helped a young Nixon in the late 1940s when he went after Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of once being a communist. But this time, Hoover, stuck in a power struggle with Sullivan, declined to cooperate. Nixon then authorized creating a White House team of investigators to do what Hoover would not and Sullivan could not do. Under the ostensible leadership of White House aide John Ehrlichman, the team consisted of longtime CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, former Treasury agent G. Gordon Liddy, and White House staffers Egil Krogh and David Young. Hunt tapped his former CIA colleagues for help, and Ehrlichman also sought aid from the agency’s deputy director, marine general Robert Cushman, who agreed to lend technology and assistance. By September the investigations unit, nicknamed the Plumbers because they were supposed to plug leaks, had recruited a group of Cuban exiles with Bay of Pigs connections to travel to Los Angeles and help Hunt and Liddy break into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who had treated Ellsberg. The break-in yielded no dirt on Ellsberg, but it ensnared the White House in a criminal conspiracy.41
In December the Plumbers appeared again, this time in a case that threatened to expose Haig, Laird, and their allies in the Pentagon. Haig and Laird’s need to perpetuate the spy ring cover-up extended through the rest of Nixon’s presidency and put Haig’s survival over that of the president.
On December 14, 1971, a report in the Washington Post by columnist Jack Anderson highlighted the dangers of Nixon’s decision to send a task force led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal near India, which was fighting a war with neighboring Pakistan, whose leader, Yahya Khan, had worked secretly to help Nixon’s outreach to China.42 Nixon professed neutrality in the India-Pakistan war, but behind the scenes he tilted U.S. policy to help Pakistan. Anderson exposed the tilt by citing details from secret White House meetings and highlighted the dangers of moving the Enterprise to where it could collide with Soviet forces backing India. In the liaison office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yeoman Charles Radford’s new boss, Rear Adm. Robert Welander, immediately suspected that Radford had leaked information to Anderson. After a second Anderson column on December 16, internal Pentagon investigators, led by Donald Stewart, a by-the-book former FBI agent, interrogated Radford, who, instead of confessing to leaking to Anderson, broke down and confessed to stealing White House documents for Welander, who then gave them to Moorer.
An outraged Nixon learned the details in a meeting with John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman on December 21. Calling the theft and leaks “a federal offense of the highest order,” he wanted to prosecute Radford, Welander, and Moorer. Mitchell, however, warned that prosecuting Moorer “would have the Joint Chiefs aligned on that side directly against you.” What has been done has been done, Mitchell said, and “the important thing is to just paper this thing over.” Nixon reluctantly agreed, deciding to ship Radford and Welander to remote posts outside Washington and have Mitchell warn Moorer that he must never do anything like that again. Moorer would then be, in Ehrlichman’s words, a “preshrunk admiral” easily manipulated by Nixon.
Troubling for Haig, however, were Nixon’s suspicions that Haig had played some part in the spying. “Haig had to know,” Nixon said.43 Ehrlichman said Haig did not know. Aware of Kissinger’s suspicion of Haig, Nixon ordered Haldeman and Ehrlichman that Kissinger must not do anything to Haig. While he did not want a criminal investigation or anything more from the White House, Nixon allowed Ehrlichman and Young, one of the White House Plumbers, to interview Welander. During their December 22 meeting in the White House, Welander declined to sign a confession offered by Ehrlichman but readily acknowledged that Haig routinely shared White House secrets with him.44 Ehrlichman and Young played the Welander confession to Haig and Kissinger the next day, and Kissinger erupted, saying that Nixon needed to do more to punish the spies or else he would eventually regret it. Haig said little then, but that night he called Young at home and threatened him.45 Young, who hated Haig, told Ehrlichman, who did nothing, thinking that Young had overreacted out of animosity toward Haig. That ended the White House’s investigation into the spy ring.
Ehrlichman admitted that he “missed the boat” on Haig’s spy ring connections: “I heard what Welander was saying, but I didn’t fully realize its implications in terms of Haig’s role as an agent of the Joint Chiefs.” Ehrlichman’s conclusion, which he did not share with Nixon, was that “Haig had an enormous conflict of interest” between his loyalty to Nixon, who “sponsored him and, and fostered his career on the one hand, and the Joint Chiefs on the other.” Haig, Ehrlichman said, was in “an impossible situation, which I guess he resolved in favor of the Joint Chiefs.”46
Ehrlichman had other difficulties. Nixon wanted him to investigate whether Anderson and Radford had a homosexual relationship. Nixon said he discovered homosexual connections in the Alger Hiss investigation in 1949 and suspected the same with Anderson. At the Pentagon Laird blocked the investigation because he had ordered one of his own, which was essentially aimed at covering for military leaders. Laird knew Haig was sending secrets from the White House to the president. “I was disappointed,” Laird said of Haig’s role in helping the spy ring. “Well, because I didn’t think it was fair to the president.”47 But Laird said nothing to Nixon about what he knew about Haig and instead assigned the task of compiling a Pentagon report to the department’s top lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, Haig’s old friend from West Point. On December 22 Laird told Ehrlichman that he needed to deal with Buzhardt exclusively. The next day, he told Ehrlichman that they could not touch the homosexuality issue because it would become public and expose their cover-up. Laird used the controversy surrounding the Radford case to get the White House to shut down the liaison office. “I knew that there was this channel and I knew exactly what the channel was,” Laird told Ehrlichman. “Now, I have no problems with investigating these people to death. I do feel, however, that this will be an embarrassment for the President, for the National Security Council, for this whole system that has been set up and has been used in the Nixon administration. And I don’t want it to break on the basis of this guy refusing to answer questions on homosexuality.”48
As part of the investigation ordered by Laird, Buzhardt called Stewart back home early from a vacation in Florida to interview Welander. Buzhardt never told Stewart about the first interview with Welander during which he admitted getting inside information from Haig. Instead, Welander portrayed Haig in the second interview as Radford’s victim, not a collaborator in the military spy ring. This carefully massaged interview ended up in the final report that was passed to Laird, while Young and Stewart’s more thorough report was filed away in the White House and buried.49
There the matter died, leaving a dissatisfied Stewart to believe he had witnessed an attempted coup against Nixon like the one in the movie Seven Days in May, a coup that had been covered up. While Haig had escaped discovery, he still worked for Nixon, who remained fixated on the spy ring and repeatedly complained how he could not trust the military, which he also believed owed him loyalty for not prosecuting Moorer and Welander for treason.
The year after the fall of the spy ring was one of triumph and budding tragedy for Nixon. His secrecy began to pay off as he traveled first to the China and then to the Soviet Union for summit conferences that opened diplomatic relations and cemented a significant arms control deal. Military leaders questioned the result of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), but Haig persuaded them, despite his personal doubts and earlier feelings that Nixon was selling out to the communists. In Vietnam, where Nixon had reduced the U.S. presence to 24,000 troops by May, the South faced a spring offensive from the North that saw Nixon strike back with a bombing campaign led by B-52 bombers, which rained down 155,500 tons of bombs on targets across North Vietnam.50 Nixon pressured an unusually compliant Moorer, chastened by the discovery of the spy ring, to maintain the pace of the bombing. The South Vietnamese government held, and Kissinger’s still-secret talks to end the war continued.
Then, early on the morning of June 17, 1972, a team of five burglars dressed in suits were caught by local police after they had broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office complex. The men included four Cuban exiles who had worked with E. Howard Hunt, the longtime CIA operative who worked with the White House Plumbers team. The fifth member of the break-in team was James McCord, another former CIA agent who was now the chief of security for Nixon’s reelection campaign. Hunt and fellow Plumber G. Gordon Liddy watched helplessly from a nearby hotel as police took away their partners, and they scrambled quickly to cover up the White House ties to the break-in.51 Nixon had no advance notice of the break-in, but by June 23 he and Bob Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and White House counsel John Dean were eagerly working to cover up the White House connections, including the existence of the Plumbers team. Their main cover-up effort involved trying to use the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in by claiming it would expose secret operations. Dean led these attempts through a series of meetings and calls with the agency’s deputy director, longtime army general Vernon Walters, who rebuffed him.52
Haig had no involvement with any of the Watergate mess. He remained focused on Vietnam and the myriad other policy issues that dominated the administration. One of his former associates, the young navy officer Bob Woodward, was gaining a name for himself as a journalist covering the evolving Watergate story for the Washington Post. With his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, Woodward had some of the first stories that tied the burglars to the White House and exposed the existence of a secret fund at the Nixon campaign that paid for political espionage and dirty tricks operations. Their reporting, along with that of reporters Seymour Hersh of the New York Times and Sandy Smith of Time magazine, would begin to preoccupy the White House.
Haig’s time at the White House was winding down. He longed to return to the army, and Nixon obliged him by promoting him over 250 other generals to four stars and naming him the army’s vice chief of staff. In that position Haig could resume what now seemed like an inevitable rise to the top of the military chain of command and the chance to take over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Moorer’s tenure ended.
Nixon, meanwhile, swept to an easy victory that November over Democratic nominee George McGovern, a South Dakota senator and advocate for an end to the Vietnam War. Nixon quickly reshuffled his cabinet and dispatched CIA director Richard Helms to Iran as ambassador. Nixon never forgave Helms for not helping cover up the Watergate break-in. Other nemeses, such as Laird, were also out. Nixon’s second term would enable him to rearrange the government as he saw fit, and few impediments remained to stop him. His reelection victory, followed by the completion of the Vietnam peace deal in January 1973, left Nixon at the top of the world, a president with a series of policy triumphs and a world he seemed to have shaped to his liking. This was the White House Haig left for the army that month.
Then it all started to fall apart.