Word: haig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with its own deployments. Haig's principal arms-control deputy, Richard Burt, then director of State's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, believed it would be almost impossible to get a deal before the new American missiles were in place. Therefore the U.S. needed a proposal that would look equitable to the West Europeans and that would shore up their resolve to go ahead with deployment of the new weapons in the face of a stalemate in Geneva. "The purpose of this whole exercise," the harddriving, sometimes abrasive Burt told his staff, "is maximum political advantage...
...drew applause from both sides of the Atlantic and from all across the political spectrum. It seemed to many the perfect opening gambit. But within weeks, the West Europeans in general and the ruling West German Social Democrats in particular began expressing anxiety over whether other moves would follow. Haig assured the allied representatives who paraded through his office that "the proposal is being forwarded in good faith. We want a Soviet reaction to it. We are prepared to listen." Haig was inviting a Soviet counterproposal and clearly implying that the U.S. would eventually compromise...
Perle, however, felt that showing any sign of flexibility would actually invite Soviet rejection and intransigence. "Haig's going around giving his own speech," he told Weinberger, "and it's different to the point of insubordination from the President...
...Geneva to open the negotiations at the end of November, he had only the sketchiest instructions. The bureaucracy back in Washington was still bickering over the details of the U.S. position. While waiting for those issues to be resolved, Nitze prepared a series of general opening statements, but Haig's aide Burt insisted that even these be cleared in ad vance by Washington. Nitze balked...
...Britain's dour Field Marshal Douglas Haig in World War I who confessed he never went to the front lest the squalid horror of trench warfare diminish his will to send armies to their death, an act he thought not only necessary but inviolable...