Word: haig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ordinary times, Alexander Haig might have become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or a top Cabinet officer or perhaps a corporation president. He has in abundance the qualities that are needed: intelligence, limitless energy, patience, tact and unswerving devotion to duty and country. Yet in the year of Watergate, these very attributes have landed him in one of the world's toughest and least rewarding jobs: chief of staff of an embattled, imperiled White House, where almost every day brings another revelation, another shift in a defensive strategy that seems only to lose. For a 49-year...
...knows better than Al Haig what he has gambled and how high are the stakes. Whatever his burden, he bears it with the same military stoicism he has always shown. When duty summons, he obeys, even if it is a crippled President who calls. "I intellectually concluded that I had no alternative but to come over here," he says of his decision to quit his post as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, subsequently, to resign from the Army. "It was a difficult decision in my stomach, but not in my head." He left the order...
...compromised H.R. Haldeman. "During this time of repeated shelling of the White House, Al has never lost his composure," says Leonard Garment, assistant to the President. "He has dealt with the problems of the wounded with both compassion and detachment." In contrast to the closed-door policy of Haldeman, Haig has made the White House more accessible and a more pleasant place in which to work; there is at least a modicum of grace under ferocious pressure. "It's fun to deal with Al," notes a White House aide who is otherwise not enjoying himself much...
Organization Man. Unfamiliar with his new political terrain, Haig has nonetheless provided Nixon with sound advice. It was he, primarily, who talked the President into handing over at least some of the tapes demanded by Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. But he has also made his slips. He seemed to be in contact with the occult when he announced that a "sinister force" had been responsible for the elimination of 18% minutes of conversation from one of the tapes. He seriously underestimated the outraged public reaction when the President fired Archibald Cox from his job as special prosecutor last October...
Like other military men who have served as White House aides, Haig was chosen because he was something more than a general. Though he served in combat in Korea and Viet Nam and was decorated for heroism, he spent most of his career as a military organization man, a position in which he was unexcelled. He finished a lackluster 214th in a class of 310 at West Point, but he advanced rapidly through the Army and Navy war colleges and received a master's degree in international relations at Georgetown University. During the Kennedy Administration, he was named deputy...