Al Haig no longer in charge here... or anywhere.

[Caliga]

FOXNews breaking headline: "Former Secretary of State and Presidential Adviser Alexander Haig Dies at 85".

[Syt]

[jimmy olsen]

RIP

[katmai]

Seedy is gonna be distraught!

[Ed Anger]

Shit.

[HisMajestyBOB]

He's in charge in heaven now.

[CountDeMoney]

Oh fuck

[CountDeMoney]

I didn't even get to say goodbye.

Alexander Haig, four-star general and former secretary of state for Reagan, dies at age 85

ANNE GEARAN
AP National Security Writer

9:26 AM EST, February 20, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a four-star general who served as a top adviser to three presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own, died Saturday of complications from an infection, his family said. He was 85.

Haig's long and decorated military career launched the Washington career for which he is better known, including top posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. He never lived down his televised response to the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.

Hours after the shooting, then Secretary of State Haig went before the cameras intending, he said later, to reassure Americans that the White House was functioning.

"As of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending the return of the vice president," Haig said.

Some saw the comment as an inappropriate power grab in the absence of Vice President Bush, who was flying back to Washington from Texas.

Haig died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was surrounded by his family, according to two of his children, Alexander and Barbara. A hospital spokesman, Gary Stephenson, said Haig died at about 1:30 a.m.

In his book, "Caveat," Haig later wrote that he had been "guilty of a poor choice of words and optimistic if I had imagined I would be forgiven the imprecision out of respect for the tragedy of the occasion."

Haig ran unsuccessfully for president in 1988.

"I think of him as a patriot's patriot," said George P. Shultz, who succeeded Haig as the country's top diplomat in 1982.

"No matter how you sliced him it came out red, white and blue. He was always willing to serve."

Born Dec. 2, 1924, in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Alexander Meigs Haig spent his boyhood days dreaming about a career in the military. With the help of an uncle who had congressional contacts, he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1943.

After seeing combat in Korea and Vietnam, Haig — an Army colonel at the time — was tapped by Henry Kissinger to be his military adviser on the National Security Council under Nixon. Haig "soon became indispensable," Kissinger later said of his protege.

Nixon promoted Haig in 1972 from a two-star general to a four-star rank, passing over 240 high-ranking officers with greater seniority.

The next year, as the Watergate scandal deepened, Nixon turned to Haig and appointed him to succeed H.R. Haldeman as White House chief of staff. He helped the president prepare his impeachment defense — and as Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate, Haig handled many of the day-to-day decisions normally made by the chief executive.

On Nixon's behalf, Haig also helped arrange the wiretaps of government officials and reporters, as the president tried to plug the sources of news leaks.

About a year after assuming his new post as Nixon's right-hand man, Haig was said to have played a key role in persuading the president to resign. He also suggested to Gerald Ford that he pardon his predecessor for any crimes committed while in office — a pardon that is widely believed to have cost Ford the presidency in 1976.

Years after serving as one of Nixon's closest aides, Haig would be dogged by speculation that he was "Deep Throat" — the shadowy source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story. Haig denied it, repeatedly, and the FBI's Mark Felt was eventually revealed as the secret source.

Following Nixon's resignation, Haig stayed with the new Ford administration for about six weeks, but then returned to the military as commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe and supreme allied commander of NATO forces — a post he held for more than four years. He quit during the Carter administration over the handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

Haig briefly explored a run for presidency in 1979, but decided he didn't have enough support and instead took a job as president of United Technologies — his first job in the private sector since high school.

When Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States, Haig returned to public service as Reagan's secretary of state, and declared himself the "vicar of American foreign policy."

His 17-month tenure was marked by turf wars with other top administration officials — including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and national security adviser William Clark.

Two months into the new administration, Haig was portrayed as pounding a table in frustration when the chairmanship of a crisis management team went to Bush. Despite the clashes, Haig received high praise from professional diplomats for trying to achieve a stable relationship with the Soviet Union.

In his book, Haig said he had concluded during a 1982 trip to Europe with the president that the "effort to write my character out of the script was under way with a vengeance." He resigned days later.

Describing himself as a "dark horse," Haig sought the Republican presidential nomination for the 1988 elections. On the campaign trail, he told supporters about his desire to "keep the Reagan revolution alive," but he also railed against the administration's bulging federal deficit — calling it an embarrassment to the GOP.

Haig dropped out of the race just days before the New Hampshire primary.

During his career in public service, Haig became known for some of his more colorful or long-winded language. When asked by a judge to explain an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the Nixon tapes, Haig responded: "Perhaps some sinister force had come in."

And later, when he criticized Reagan's "fiscal flabbiness," Haig asserted that the "ideological religiosity" of the administration's economic policies were to blame for doubling the national debt to $2 trillion in 1987.

Haig is survived by his wife of 60 years, Patricia; his children Alexander, Brian and Barbara; eight grandchildren; and his brother, the Rev. Francis R. Haig.

[stjaba]

RIP

[Sheilbh]

RIP.

[Razgovory]

   Did he at least outlive those Red Army fucks who tried to kill him in the 1970's?

[Scipio]

The best thing he ever said was when he told Nixon about Cuba: "You just give me the word and I'll turn that fucking island into a parking lot."

[Agelastus]

R.I.P. Mr. Haig. 

[Barrister]

Hitchens, keeping it classy, Martinus style...

Death of a Banana Republican
Al Haig was a neurotic narcissist with an unquenchable craving for power.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Feb. 22, 2010, at 2:29 PM ET
"Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do," I once wrote. "And I think he is a homicidal buffoon." I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.

When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan's tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since—that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way. According to Douglas Brinkley's splendid edition of the president's diaries, Reagan wrote as early as March 24, 1981:

Later in day a call from Al Haig, all upset about an announcement that George B. is to be chairman of the Crisis Council. Historically the chairman is Nat.Sec.Advisor [Richard V. Allen]. Al thinks his turf is being invaded. We chose George because Al is wary of Dick. He talked of resigning. Frankly, I think he's seeing things that aren't there.


A bit more than a year later, on June 25, 1982, after Haig had been largely responsible for the historic calamity that had allowed Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to occupy Beirut, Reagan decided to do what he'd clearly already decided to do if Haig talked about resignation again—grab the chance!

Today was the day—I told Al H I had decided to accept his resignation. He didn't seem surprised but he said his differences were on policy and then said we didn't agree on China or Russia etc. ... This has been a heavy load. Up to Camp David where we were in time to see Al read his letter of resignation on TV. I'm told it was his 4th re-write. Apparently his 1st was pretty strong—then he thought better of it. I must say it was OK. He gave only one reason and did say there was a disagreement on foreign policy. Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec of State did.

The result was a terse one-page letter from Reagan to Haig, letting him go.

Just a few days after his president had begun to suspect that Haig was "seeing things that aren't there," on March 30, 1981, to be exact, this neurotic narcissist seized the microphone and made a clumsy attempt to seize power. With Reagan lying critically injured in the hospital, Haig announced in the Situation Room that "the helm is right here, and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here." As his rival Richard Allen commented, having caught the megalomaniacal drivel on tape, this was "out" by several degrees and intermediate officers mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. "But Haig's demeanor signaled that he might be ready for a quarrel, and there was no point in provoking one."

I saw that "demeanor" up close more than once and was coldly appalled by the pig-nostriled and also piggy-eyed form that it took. But nothing could equal that day's performance, which evinced all the sweaty, pasty-faced, trembling symptoms of a weak king or of a slobbering dauphin who could not wait to try on the crown. For a few hours at least, the United States of America appeared to be—and actually was—a pathetic banana republic.

Indeed, the bulk of Haig's awful political career was an example of banana-republic principles and the related phenomenon of an overambitious man in uniform who mastered the essential art of licking the derrières of those above him while simultaneously (see above) bullying and menacing those below. This was the method he perfected between 1969 and '74, serving Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and helping to superimpose an impression of "order" on a White House that was full of dysfunction, crookery, and coverup. Without any further battlefield experience, except for propaganda trips to Vietnam to support a war that his bosses had artificially prolonged, he moved up the ladder from colonel to four-star general—not bad even for a man who had gotten started by marrying his commanding general's daughter.

Haig had few illusions about the sort of people for whom he was working, and liked to gratify both sides of a riven White House. According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Final Days, to Kissinger and others he liked to joke after hours that "Nixon and Bebe Rebozo had a homosexual relationship, imitating what he called the President's limp-wrist manner." When it came time to fold the whole dirty game, he was the first to go to Vice President Gerald Ford and suggest the low stratagem of a pardon that would put the lawbreaker in chief (and by extension some of his underlings) above the law itself.


Haig also developed a natural sympathy for some of the more vicious banana-republic dictatorships with which he had worked overseas. He helped Kissinger to wreck Chile during his first tour in the White House, and under Reagan was one of those who took a sympathetic view of the Argentine military fascists in the Falklands War. I shall also never forget the day in February 1981 (mentioned by none of Haig's obituarists) when extremist mutineers in the Spanish army took over the parliament in Madrid and our secretary of state, asked for a comment, described this assault on Europe's newest democracy as purely an internal matter for Spain.

Having made a complete clown of himself with attempts to run for the presidency in 1980 (when his efforts stopped at considering a run) and 1988, Haig went into quasi-retirement and advised on arms sales to the sorts of regimes who like to have a former general and politician as an "adviser." He then decided that politics was not for him after all, since "the life of a politician is sleaze." We all think this from time to time, but Haig really came by the idea dishonestly. His manically authoritarian personality frightened even many on the right, from John Poindexter to Richard Allen, and his career was one of contempt for democracy at home and abroad. From his squalid life one can learn to detect the diseased symptoms of Caesarism and the urgency of combating it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2245618/

[derspiess]

RIP.  A true cold warrior.