After a formal dinner at the British Embassy, the tuxedo-clad Alexander Haig arrived at his northwest Washington home and retired to his office shortly before midnight on September 10, 1974. He soon had two visitors, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, the reporters who had helped fuel the political crisis that forced Nixon to resign the previous month. Their book, All the President’s Men, had been published a few months earlier to popular acclaim, and they wanted their encore to chronicle the unraveling of the Nixon administration. They looked for guidance to Haig, who had steered the White House through the Watergate scandal and emerged with much of his reputation still intact.
Haig sat lighting his Marlboro Lights with a “zippo-type lighter with large flame,” and chain smoking, Woodward wrote in his notes that have never been printed before. Haig’s son, Alex, brought the two reporters in to see Haig, who had helped engineer the pardon of Nixon by his successor, new President Gerald Ford, the former Republican House leader Haig had helped pick. It was the first time he had met either man, Haig would claim.
That was a lie.
When Woodward and Bernstein’s book, The Final Days, was published in 1976, Haig claimed he did not cooperate with them.
That, too, was a lie.
For more than an hour, well past midnight on September 11, Haig spilled forth details of his experience in the Nixon White House, the guilt of the president he had served since 1969, and the need to get Nixon to leave office. He knew “from the beginning . . . the inevitability of Nixon’s leaving office prematurely—‘from the day I came over.’”1 Haig actually knew much earlier. As Nixon’s deputy national security advisor, he had helped the president spy on members of his own administration through illegal surveillance measures, including wiretaps by the FBI, and had helped Pentagon leaders spy on Nixon, an act that the president would call “a federal offense of the highest order.”2
Haig, the devoted military man and patriot, had forced the president he had sworn to serve from office. Now, joined by one of the men who had helped him through devastatingly well-timed reports in the press, he was shaping his cover-up. Haig’s story, like so much of what he would say or write in the remaining thirty-five years of his life, was a series of interconnected falsehoods designed to hide what he had done and shift the blame to others.
Haig had known Woodward since at least 1969, when the reporter was a navy lieutenant tasked with delivering secret messages from the Pentagon to Haig at the National Security Council offices in the White House basement. Woodward had briefed Haig on military developments and issues critical to the Pentagon, according to three of the people who either sent Woodward there or knew about it: Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Woodward’s boss; Defense Secretary Melvin Laird; and Jerry Friedheim, Laird’s spokesman. Both Haig and Woodward would deny the relationship at the time, but, as with Haig’s claims about The Final Days, that was a lie.3
Not only did Haig know Woodward well enough to meet with him and Bernstein at his home, he knew Woodward well enough to guide him in putting together their new book, which, Haig told them, “can’t deal with only [the] last days, [but] must go back to the last 15 months” specifically Haig’s time as chief of staff. That time, Haig said, brought “one shock after another until nothing surprised us.”
In what he described as a “self-serving” account, Haig saw his role as preserving the functions of key government institutions as he handled Nixon and coaxed him from office. Haig told of a president consistently at odds with reality, no more so than in the last ten days of his administration, when he and his staff were confronted with the so-called smoking gun tape from June 23, 1972, in which Nixon and his former chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, discussed using the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in. “‘You only had to read [the transcript] once’ to know it was all over,” Haig said. But Nixon tried to explain it away, Haig said, by claiming that the details of the tape had been testified to before the Senate and that he had followed up ten days later by telling acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray that he should “conduct a full investigation” of the break-in. Haig said he “really had to push Nixon to get it to sink in. ‘I had to say goddamnit’” to the president. That’s when, Haig continued, Nixon said he knew he had to resign.
Haig worried about Nixon’s mental health during the final two weeks, including the possibility that the president would try to kill himself. “‘Yeah, Nixon talked about death, especially in the last week,’” Haig said. “‘You fellows in your business have a way of handling problems like this,’” Haig quoted Nixon as saying. “‘Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don’t have a pistol.’” Haig had Nixon’s doctors remove all of the president’s pills in case Nixon decided to check out that way. “I told the doctor, ‘no pills,’” Haig said, adding that this was the worst moment and that Nixon’s mental state was up and down.4 Haig’s revelation about Nixon and pills proved to be one of the most remarkable revelations in The Final Days, and Haig was the sole, although unidentified, source. The quote from the interview with Woodward and Bernstein on September 10, 1974, about the pistol appears verbatim in The Final Days.5
The man who arrived at the White House in January 1969 as an unheralded colonel and rose to a four-star general in just four years presented his patron as an impatient man who often veered out of control. Haig wanted to distance himself from Nixon. He told the reporters about Nixon’s “disciplined” mind, which was “very compartmentalized,” although Haig indicated that that was “not the best thing in the world.” Nixon, Haig said, often isolated himself in anguish and was very impatient. “Nixon would say ‘I want this I want that now,’” Haig said. Virtually every day, Nixon asked Haig to do “immoral or improper things,” which Haig said he would either ignore or give lip service to. He would come back to Nixon later in the day and say, “‘You didn’t mean that.’” Some of that, Haig added, happens in any organization. Did Nixon ever ask Haig to do anything that would have put him in the Watergate conspiracy? Woodward asked. Haig was vague, because, he said, Nixon “probably doesn’t think he was guilty of anything.” Instead, Haig said, Nixon had a “death wish” that he brought on by tempting fate and his enemies. Haig agreed with the “characterization of almost vindication in the posse finally coming to get him.”
Haig came close to saying that Nixon was “crazy outright,” but then he pulled back, adding that the most important thing was to “restore confidence in leadership.” Some details should not “come out right away” and maybe not for years. Was Haig actually the president for ten months, the reporters asked him? Haig “smiled, put his finger over [his] mouth and said, ‘I won’t talk about that.’” But Haig made his point without saying anything and guided the reporters to what he hoped would be their conclusion: “‘The American people do eventually have a right to know.’”
Throughout the eighty minutes Woodward and Bernstein spent with Haig, ending shortly before 1:00 a.m., Haig did his best to show Nixon’s instability while justifying his own actions, such as increasing the nation’s nuclear alert during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. “The Mid East alert was very real,” Haig told the reporters. They even underplayed the threat from the Soviet Union, Haig said, because the Russians were prepared to move seven divisions of troops into the area, a claim not supported by the facts. He and Henry Kissinger did not usurp control from Nixon, who Haig insisted was informed of each step. Kissinger, Haig claimed, wanted to call a National Security Council meeting at the State Department until Haig stepped in. “I said, ‘Henry, it’ll be in the situation room of the White House,’” Haig told the two reporters. “Then Henry called the president. We both got guidance from the president.” That was an exaggeration, if not an outright lie. Nixon was incapacitated or asleep most of the evening. The threat of a nuclear exchange in October 1973, Haig claimed, surpassed even that of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Haig did not know at the time that the details of the meeting that led to the nuclear alert would become public and contradict virtually everything he told Woodward and Bernstein. No, Haig and Kissinger did not keep Nixon up to speed about the meeting. When Kissinger asked Haig shortly before the principals convened if they should call Nixon, Haig said no. Haig would write in his memoirs that Nixon waited anxiously in the Oval Office for the meeting’s outcome. In reality, the president was asleep in his residence at the White House.6
The Haig who met with Woodward and Bernstein that night in September 1974 was no reluctant source. Haig spent much of the meeting setting up what would be the premise of The Final Days. He repeatedly told Woodward and Bernstein that Nixon resembled Captain Queeg from the World War II classic The Caine Mutiny. The political system, Haig insisted, was flawed, and Nixon was a representative of it, not an aberration. He complained that a military man such as himself would not be permitted by the system to run for president. His motivation in becoming chief of staff, Haig claimed, “was to save the office.” He was following precedents going back to the Civil War of “military men coming in to help straighten things out in crises.”
Bernstein, who knew little about Haig’s life before he was chief of staff, theorized that something “truly awful might be buried underneath [Watergate] that nobody ever wants to come out.” Haig agreed, adding disingenuously that “‘I kept looking for it,’” especially in the international and money areas, but that he could never find it. “‘If it’s there, I don’t know about it,’” Haig claimed. Haig and Woodward knew how bogus that claim was. They had collaborated on some of the events the tuxedo-clad general was now recounting. Woodward had protected Haig when a military spy ring at the White House was first disclosed in January 1974. Woodward had served under Rear Adm. Robert Welander, the Pentagon’s liaison with the National Security Council who had been implicated in the spy ring. The real secrets Nixon, Haig, and others were hiding were the unprecedented steps Nixon had taken to consolidate power in the White House, an effort in which Haig was an early and enthusiastic enabler. Haig, however, was not selling that story. He now needed to preserve his reputation, and in Woodward, whom he had used before, he had an ambitious and willing collaborator.
Haig, Woodward’s notes show, “kept getting back to the idea in one way or another of how extraordinary the 15 months were and how really out of hand Nixon was, how he had to be watched.” There was an implied agreement between Haig, Kissinger, and the White House lawyers to “talk to each other and make sure Nixon didn’t do anything crazy.” Haig told the two eager reporters that he had “extensive notes” to document his story and “can reconstruct everything.”7
For the two journalists preparing to write a book about the end of the Nixon presidency, Haig provided a clear direction for how to uncover what had happened and portrayed a White House that threatened to careen out of control if someone, specifically Haig, had not saved the day. Readers of The Final Days did not miss Haig’s hand; the book presented the general as the one person who maintained stability as Nixon wandered drunkenly around the White House or hid out in Key Biscayne or San Clemente. Haig, however, took great pains to deny helping Woodward and Bernstein. Shortly after the book’s publication, he cabled Nixon and said, “I . . . want to reassure you that I have not contributed in any way to the book.” Haig wrote another friend that “I have steadfastly declined to contribute to any post mortems which in my view would never be objectively viewed in the current environment.” Finally, Haig wrote Victor Lasky, a conservative writer critical of The Final Days, to “assure you personally that I did not contribute to the contents of the book despite repeated efforts by the author to get me to do so. Mr. Woodward even traveled to Europe where in the presence of a note-taking witness, I declined any comment in any way on the last days of the Nixon presidency.”8 Following the 1991 publication of Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, which detailed Woodward’s extensive relationship with Haig, the general devoted a section of his 1992 memoirs to denying the relationship with Woodward. “In fact, I met Woodward and Bernstein for the first time in the late summer of 1974, a month or so after Nixon resigned as President,” Haig wrote in Inner Circles. Haig encountered them outside his home when he arrived there after a dinner; Woodward’s notes show that Haig’s son greeted them. “They were looking for confirmation of a report that I had issued orders to the White House medical staff in the closing days of the resignation crisis to keep a close watch on the disheartened president in case he should try to harm himself by taking an overdose of prescription pills. I told them I could not provide information for their newspaper, but we chatted in a desultory way for an hour or so. It was a civil encounter.” Haig continued by writing that he had talked to Woodward in the days leading up to the publication of his memoirs and that the reporter “assured me that this conversation was helpful to him and his partner in their effort to understand the Watergate affair. From what I remembered of what was said, I was surprised that this should be so.”9
As he did while he was in the White House and afterward, Haig was covering his tracks. Woodward’s notes show that he confirmed the account of Haig limiting Nixon’s access to prescription pills, and during the interview Haig did not say that he would not comment for the newspaper. Haig’s revelation about the pills was one of the main pieces of news in The Final Days. The notes also indicate why Woodward and Bernstein would have found Haig’s comments helpful; the general had advised them on the structure of their book, said he had documents that would back up his claims, and promised the reporters access to those documents. And when the book was published, it was Haig, who had steadily pushed the president toward his exile in California, whose reputation was the most intact.
Shortly after the interview, Haig received his chance to leave politics to return to the army. On September 4 Gen. Creighton Abrams, a legendary World War II tank commander and the most successful U.S. commander in Vietnam, succumbed to cancer. He was the army chief of staff, the service’s highest-ranking officer, and if Haig had remained in the army, he would have been the logical choice to succeed Abrams. But Ford realized that the events of the last sixteen months—Haig’s tenure as chief of staff for both Nixon and Ford and his prominence at the bitter end of the Nixon presidency—made it virtually impossible for Haig to survive a Senate confirmation battle. Haig knew it, too. The army did not need the politics of a confirmation battle in the wake of Nixon’s administration, and neither did the new Ford administration. There was a neat alternative, however, that did not require Senate confirmation. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had discussed it during one of their breakfast meetings earlier in the year: supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Based in Brussels, Belgium, the job meant commanding all the troops that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force in Europe. While it was not the top spot in the army, it carried tremendous visibility and history—Dwight Eisenhower, before he was elected president, had been the first NATO commander. Ford named Haig to the job on September 15 and replaced him with another young, ambitious player, Donald Rumsfeld, former House member, head of Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity, and recently departed U.S. ambassador to NATO.10
But just before Haig was scheduled to leave in October, Buzhardt called Haig with a warning, Haig wrote in his memoirs. Ford had agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in October about the events leading up to the Nixon pardon amid concerns that he and Nixon had cut a deal. Buzhardt told Haig that Ford’s staff had prepared testimony for him that “could very well result in your indictment.”
Haig rushed to the White House and confronted White House counsel Philip Buchen and John Marsh, another top Ford aide. He demanded to see Ford immediately. They told him Ford was busy. Haig repeated his demand and threatened to reveal how Ford’s associates had worked to push Nixon out, including Senator Robert Griffin’s August 3 letter, which mentioned that Nixon had lost support; the appointment of Albert Jenner as the minority counsel to the House Judiciary Committee; and “a good many other things we all know occurred as part of a secret effort by Ford people to hurry Nixon out of the presidency behind Jerry Ford’s back.”11 Such a claim by Haig is laughable. His legal advisor, Morris Leibman, had been responsible for the selection of Jenner as the minority counsel, while it was Haig, not Ford’s allies, who had pushed Nixon out the door.
Buchen and Marsh let Haig in to see Ford, and Haig told Ford that all he wanted from the president was for him to tell the truth about the pardon. Ford said he would, and Haig later pronounced Ford’s testimony to be truthful.12 Haig went to Brussels unscathed.
Haig’s denials about cooperating with Woodward and Bernstein make even less sense when they are compared to another record of Haig’s contacts with Woodward during the time he and Bernstein were writing The Final Days. On December 18, 1975, the duo had a front-page story in the Washington Post challenging Ford’s denials that he had cut a deal with Nixon to resign in exchange for a pardon. Haig, then in Brussels, was quoted throughout the report, which referenced an interview on December 17 and another three months earlier. “Until yesterday, Haig had never specifically said publicly whether he and President Ford discussed the question of a pardon for Nixon,” the story said.13 Haig, who had helped Woodward and Bernstein shape The Final Days, was still shaping their account of the end of the Nixon administration.
Haig’s tenure at NATO came as the military endured its nadir following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. He maintained a high visibility, and the position enabled him to stay in touch with the world leaders with whom he had developed relationships while serving Nixon. His term ended in 1979, and there were no other jobs open to him. Ford had lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter, and while Carter had kept Haig at NATO, he would not give Haig, a legacy of the deeply troubled Nixon administration, another top post in the military. He retired from the army in 1979 and became the chief executive officer of United Technologies, a giant defense contractor.
Carter’s defeat by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 presented Haig with a new opportunity. Reagan, the former governor of California, had no foreign policy experience and no real candidates to fill the open job of secretary of state. Richard Allen, the former Nixon foreign policy aide, had counseled Reagan, too, but he was slotted to be Reagan’s national security advisor. Henry Kissinger wanted another chance at the job he had held for Nixon and Ford, but he was too tainted by his association with détente for the tastes of the conservative Reagan. Haig, with his years at the NSC, inside the West Wing, and at NATO, presented an appealing choice, and Reagan nominated him in December.
Haig faced Senate confirmation hearings, the same challenge that had kept him from becoming army chief of staff six years earlier. Although the Republicans had captured the Senate in the 1980 elections, he still had to navigate a Senate Foreign Relations Committee filled with potential antagonists. Almost immediately, committee members said they wanted access to Nixon’s White House tapes, which Haig had tried to spirit away from the White House just hours after Nixon resigned and fled to California.
To guide him through the confirmation fight, Haig turned to his former boss at the Pentagon during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: Joseph Califano, who had advised Haig unofficially while Haig was Nixon’s chief of staff, helping Haig engineer a claim of executive privilege when called before the Senate Watergate committee, and then greasing a path for Nixon’s pardon. Califano was one of Washington’s most connected lawyers. He had represented the Democratic Party in its lawsuit against Nixon’s campaign following the Watergate break-in and the Washington Post. After Carter’s election, Califano served as the secretary of health, education, and welfare before leaving in 1979. He prepared Haig thoroughly for his hearings and fought the committee’s attempts to get the tapes.14
Also helping Haig was a more unlikely defender on the surface: Woodward. One half of the duo riding high for helping to expose Nixon was also, unbeknownst to most Americans, a longtime friend of Haig. Woodward wrote a column in the Post arguing that the committee did not need to hear the tapes or read more transcripts. The committee, he wrote, should “forget about obtaining any of the Nixon tapes.” Anything Haig said, Woodward continued, was meant to placate Nixon, and if Haig had to be held to account, “let it happen without the tapes.”15 The committee backed down.
Woodward’s intervention was stunning. He gave no indication in his column that he had known Haig since his days as a young navy lieutenant delivering messages to Haig at the NSC for his boss, Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Woodward also mentioned nothing about his cover-up for another former commander, Welander. Seven years earlier, Woodward’s articles for the Post about the spy ring also failed to include that he had worked for both Moorer and Welander. His op-ed for Haig followed the same pattern. Woodward had used his journalistic celebrity to protect a source and a patron while keeping his readers in the dark.
Haig’s nomination, despite the popularity of the incoming Reagan, would have exploded if the committee had had access to the tapes and performed even the mildest due diligence. Senators could have heard Nixon’s correct suspicion that Haig had aided the military spy ring stealing secrets from inside the White House or heard the tape of Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and Haig discussing the White House’s attempts to have the CIA block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. They would have known that Haig had obstructed justice by sitting on that secret for fifteen months. A legitimate Foreign Relations Committee investigation would have exhumed these and other details embarrassing to not only Haig but also Kissinger. Haig had evaded discovery again, and the full Senate confirmed Haig, 93–6, the day after Reagan was sworn in.16
Four years spent watching Kissinger and William Rogers, Nixon’s first secretary of state, fight for control of foreign policy had made Haig wary of internal turf battles. He knew that a national security advisor with constant access to the president could sideline any cabinet member, even one at the State Department, so he crafted a plan that would put him at the top of the national security pyramid and presented it to Reagan, whose three top aides—James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver—recoiled. They would not allow Reagan to be boxed in by an outsider, Haig, who was so firmly identified with Nixon and seen as a power grabber. They rejected the plan.17
Reagan had also picked some longtime Haig rivals for key cabinet slots. The CIA would be led by William Casey, Nixon’s head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whom Haig had blackballed as a candidate to lead the agency in May 1973. Allen, who had worked with Haig in Nixon’s NSC, was Reagan’s national security advisor. Haig’s deputy at State was William Clark, a longtime Reagan aide from California and a former judge. He would be Reagan’s man inside the State Department, watching Haig as only a Reagan loyalist could do.
Haig ran an open shop at State, Clark said, and he was a good boss. But the open-door policy ended when certain visitors came to Foggy Bottom. “While he would be talking to Bob Woodward or the press or someone over breakfast, I always led the staff meetings across the hall,” Clark said. “I encouraged him over and over again to come in and at least make an appearance, so they could see that he was alive and well and in command. . . . Al always wanted me to know that his door was open to me at any time and any meeting, and he wanted me to be part of any meeting except Woodward and a few other people, press people, with whom he had developed relationships over the years.”18
Despite what Haig’s associates at State and elsewhere noted as a close relationship with Woodward, neither Haig nor Woodward could get their stories straight about when they first met. They both denied they knew what others such as Melvin Laird and Moorer confirmed—that Woodward and Haig knew each other while Woodward served in the navy. Haig said he did not meet Woodward until he and Bernstein showed up at Haig’s home in September 1974, while Woodward put the date sometime in early 1973. Given Woodward’s long service on Haig’s behalf as a journalist—covering up the spy ring, hiding Woodward’s relationship with the military’s top officers, masking Haig’s identity as a source in All the President’s Men, and writing a helpful column to push Haig over the hump in the Foreign Relations Committee—their protestations ring hollow. The close relationship between Haig and Woodward that Clark noted at State was no accident and no recent occurrence.
Haig eventually wore out his welcome in Reagan’s cabinet. After Haig made one too many threats to resign, Reagan accepted Haig’s resignation, before it had been offered, on June 14, 1982. It was the last time Haig would serve in government.
During the last twenty-eight years of his life, Haig would make a failed attempt at the Republican nomination for president in 1988, dropping out before the New Hampshire primary. In the 1990s Haig ran his own consulting company in Washington, where he represented some of the world’s rogue regimes. In 1992 he published his memoirs, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World. Haig tried to offer a glimpse into his career and the people who influenced him—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Joseph Califano, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and Richard Nixon. As has been shown multiple times here, the book is stunning in its attempts to reshape history and mislead readers. Haig lied about when he knew about the White House tapes, how he first tried to help Spiro Agnew and then pushed him to resign, how he covered up what he knew about the FBI wiretaps, and finally his involvement in the military spy ring. Historians who use Inner Circles as a guide to what happened during the Nixon administration will be led into a maze of Haig’s making that leads far from the truth.
Alexander M. Haig Jr. traced a career arc that stretched from the end of World War II to Korea, Vietnam, the White House, and the State Department. He saw Nixon’s restructuring from the inside and witnessed what Attorney General John Mitchell called the “White House horrors.” When Nixon was forced to find a replacement for H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at his side in the White House, Haig was the only logical choice. From that moment on, Nixon’s chances for survival, which was an open question on May 3, 1973, became impossible. No one did more to force Nixon from office than Haig. Haig’s coup, however, was not made for policy reasons but for self-preservation. Until the day he died on February 20, 2010, Haig succeeded not only in removing Nixon from office but in covering his own tracks.