Campaign of Cunning: The Inside Story of Alexander Haig's Rise to Power

It Began almost quietly. Early in December 1968, at his transition headquarters in New York's Hotel Pierre, on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park, President-elect Richard Nixon introduced to the press his choice as National Security Advisor, an unfamiliar Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger. Typically, it began, too, with a little deceit on a matter that would prove monumental. Having vouchsafed beforehand to a gratified Kissinger that they would "run foreign policy from the White House," Nixon proceeded to announce to the reporters that his new assistant would confine himself to planning and leave diplomacy to a "strong Secretary of State" about to be named. Out of "eagerness to deflect any possible criticism," Nixon's public pretense was "substantially at variance" with their private intention, as Kissinger later delicately described it in his memoirs. It was also an omen of much more such variance to come.

From the Pierre, Nixon and Kissinger fastened their absolute control over the governance of the country's international relations. They fashioned and implanted a new circuitry of decision making in which all the impulses of foreign policy fused in the White House, shorting out the bureaucracy and the Cabinet secretaries. Yet in the hotel that December, a time Kissinger remembered as a "moment of charmed innocence," those fateful consequences were scarcely apparent. It was an unlikely dyarchy, the German-born academic strategist with a fondness for great power concerts and the California politician of native suspicion, bigotry and home-grown anticommunism. Least of all was there any foreshadow that their historic collaboration would produce one more figure--a third man, who, raised in the strange inner ferment of their regime, would eventually succeed to Kissinger's place and pretend to Nixon's. Like the seizure of power at the Pierre, the extraordinary rise of Alexander Haig from 1969 to 1973 happened largely out of sight.

While his future employers were making their respective ways through electoral politics and establishment jockeying to the rendezvous on Fifth Avenue, Haig was returning home from Vietnam in June 1967 to vaguely uncertain prospects. Years later, the New York Post called him "probably the only ranking officer to emerge from Vietnam stronger than when he went in," but that was distorted hindsight. The war had laid bare the post-Korea decay of the Army, and by 1967, the ultimate toll or taint in careers was by no means clear. The system that in peacetime routinely ground out rhapsodic officer-efficiency reports had applied the same practiced reflexes to the surreal paperwork of Saigon, fattening the Viet Cong body counts that proved victory, falsifying the intelligence reports that would have pointed to awkward numbers of enemy troops--and, with them, to the unwanted signs of another unwinnable war. A subsequent war-college study concluded nimbly that there had been "a clear loss of military ethic" among the officer corps in Vietnam. Other scholars found, more clinically and more bluntly, that the Army there bordered on "an undisciplined, ineffective, almost anomic mass." its commanders manifesting "severe pathologies."

All of that provoked an exodus of disillusioned soldiers, many at Haig's grade. Yet Haig had no part in the soul searching, remaining sternly aligned with a system that had, after all, been very good to him. For long before his opportunity with Kissinger and Nixon, Haig had been advanced by a remarkable run of patronage. Making West Point only on a second try and graduating in the bottom half of his class, he had begun his Army career with neither intellectual distinction nor family advantages. But he had married the general's daughter during his first postacademy assignment in Japan, and from there he was handed a series of aide-de-camp positions that took him into the imperial command of General Douglas MacArthur during the first year of the Korean War, and later into the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, Cyrus Vance and Joseph Califano during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Thus well schooled in the arts of the courtier, he would eventually come to the Nixon White House, raised, ironically, by powerful Democratic patrons, as well as by the Army's nepotism and careerist ethic.

The West Point to which the then--Colonel Haig returned in 1967 was in its staff ranks a bastion of orthodoxy. Yet the siege mentality of the Vietnamtortured Army may have been visible in the account of his 1967-1968 tenure at the academy written by one of Haig's regimental cadets. Lucian K. Truscott IV was the offspring of an old Army family who later grew disillusioned with the Service and left to become a reporter and novelist. His memoir in New York's Village Voice in May 1973 was predictably acid. However, set against Haig's past, as well as what followed with Nixon and Kissinger, it also seems in many ways a trenchant portrait of the man and his culture on the eve of his White House rise.

At first impression in the autumn of 1967, Truscott's Haig was "a popular if enigmatic figure," grinning and snapping salutes at the cadets in his regiment, whom he called by nicknames in a style "polished and magnetic," and apparently "a perfect mixture of ego and humility." No other staff officer, thought Truscott, seemed more a "soldier's soldier." Yet there was also the mark of the martinet. His first action on taking command of the regiment was to require it to march even more rigidly than regulations required, with elbows locked and fingers cocked at the second knuckle, thumb and index finger "pointed like an arrow" toward the ground. Ever-present at fall drills, slapping yellow gloves against his leg to make constant corrections in the technique, Haig once remarked, "If they can get that hand straight, that elbow stiff, then all the rest falls into place. Every directive becomes second nature." He added. "It's my way of putting my signature on a unit."

But the regimental commander's motives soon went beyond signatures and perfection. Haig had "an almost maniacal desire," Truscott wrote, to keep "within the regiment" and unknown to superiors "anything which he felt would reflect badly upon his command." When seven cadets were implicated in a marijuana investigation in the autumn of 1967, in a unit in which drug use was widespread, according to Truscott, the seven were furtively punished by loss of summer leave and instructed to lie to their parents about the reason; the incident was covered up, because "neither Haig nor his superiors at the academy wanted it known at the Pentagon that his regiment harbored a bunch of junkies and perverts." Similarly, Truscott described a regimental cheating scandal in May 1968: The inquiry was cut short and the entire company was told "to keep the whole thing quiet."

Truscott's climactic clash with Haig began the same spring, when he and another cadet complained to the colonel about mandatory attendance at chapel. Greeting the cadets heartily. Haig heard their complaint with a frown and then told them cheerfully that he would do them "a big favor" and send them back to their barracks before they "only hurt" themselves by bucking a regulation "bigger than us." Truscott and his fellow cadet retreated meekly. But a few months later, four cadets protested, this time in writing, about arbitrary deductions of chapel "donations" from the small cadet pay. Soon they began to be called in by staff officers below Haig, who threatened courts-martial or asked them to resign.

Haig had been named deputy commandant of cadets in June 1968, and in October he summoned Truscott to his office. At first, the colonel struck an "informal, almost jovial" pose, in shirt sleeves, tie askew, asking "Mr. T." about alleged infractions and "laughing off" the charges as Truscott denied them. Haig then held up the chapel-donation complaints. "Know what this is. Mr. T?" Haig said he would route the paperwork back to them, and Truscott and his buddies should "tear them up." Otherwise, "if these go up, Mr. T., you'll leave the commandant with no choice but to eliminate you, all of you, from the academy. Do you understand that? You're boxing him in, Mr. T., leaving him no choice." When Truscott argued that expulsion was not an issue, that even West Point chaplains wanted no such compulsory donations. Haig "began to get agitated," tightening his tie and donning his beribboned coat. He had tried to "play ball," tried to "warn" and "protect" the cadets. But no more. "This is the end," Truscott remembers him saying. "You'd better watch your step from here on out, young man, because you're treading on some dangerous ground."

With Haig coming around the desk, Truscott recounts his own defiant rejoinder: "If this is the way you want to play it. . . ." And then: "Haig exploded, driving himself across the blue carpet until he was inches from my face. His fists were clenched and one of them was raised next to my head. 'You little bastard,' he seethed between gritted teeth. 'I will personally see you out of here one way or another. Now get out of here. Get out of my sight. The next time I see you, it will be at the front gate of West Point, going out.'"

During the following two months, before Haig was suddenly transferred to the White House, Truscott was hounded at every turn, had his room ransacked for subversive papers and was repeatedly threatened with expulsion. When Truscott asked a staff major about the harassment, he was told that he must surely know why it was happening--that feeling at headquarters was "running so high," anyone who questioned the persecution would "ruin his career." Later, when Truscott's father--himself a colonel, a West Pointer and a Vietnam veteran--went to see Haig about the case, Haig denied having threatened the cadet and told the father his son was "way beyond being a hippie."

The younger Truscott concluded in his memoir that Haig had been "obsessed" with power, that he was an "ultimate action/reaction . . . addict" who saw power as the "simple establishment of authority by any means necessary." He had shown "a peculiar anxiety" about the challenge to authority and in "the perfect malleability of his personality [was] willing to go to any length to achieve his ends." All in all, thought Truscott, Haig was a man in whom "there was never a core"--for whom the "only true authority, inner or outer, was the Action." For his part, the elder Truscott later retired from the Service and in 1974 wrote a magazine article titled "The Hazard of Haig" about the latter's appointment to command NATO. Colonel Truscott pointedly quoted Lloyd George: "There is no greater fatuity than a political judgment dressed in a military uniform.'"

Afterward, the hiring of Alexander Haig as Henry Kissinger's military assistant at the National Security Council took on a kind of mystique in bureaucratic lore. West Point superintendent William Knowlton was fond of telling visitors years later how, in December 1968, "a phone call came from New York City" and the otherwise obscure colonel was magically "summoned to the inner sanctum." It was his favorite success story, Knowlton would say, proving that in today's Army, you just never knew where lightning might strike. Public credit--or blame--for the lightning commonly went to Joe Califano, at the time Lyndon Johnson's chief counsel for domestic affairs. As Haig's fame grew, Califano never tired of telling reporters how ardently and in what bipartisan spirit he had recommended his old aide when Kissinger came asking for counsel that winter. If Califano's recommendation was important, though, it was not original. Seldom given to soliciting Democratic house lawyers for general diplomatic advice, Kissinger, like a dutiful personnel officer, had called Califano simply because he already had Haig's name and the Pentagon connection. He had gotten them from General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster, the Pierre's military advisor for the transition, who had known Haig when he was the courier for Vance, then for McNamara.

Yet Goodpaster's was only one vote for Haig: another was the decisive one. While at his Pentagon staff desks, Haig had come in contact with one of the intramural legends of the building, Fritz Kraemer. Monocled, with a large head and a German education and accent, the 60-year-old Kraemer displayed gothic affectations and political preferences that made him, much more than Kissinger, a Strangelove an figure. He had risen from a precocious Army private in World War Two intelligence to a Pentagon colonelcy and a backroom advisory role as an Army-department "strategist"; far more important for Haig, Kraemer was also known as the man who had discovered Henry Kissinger. During the war, Kraemer and picked out the young Kissinger, a fellow refugee and an Army private, for administrative duties in the German Occupation. He had then encouraged Kissinger to go to Harvard and had nurtured his later consultancies and contacts, including the vital connection with Nelson Rockefeller. Kraemer's son had studied under Kissinger at Harvard and was to join the NSC staff, working for a time under Haig. No figure from Kissinger's life was more influential in bringing him within range of the Nixon White House, and none would remain closer or more discreet. Haig had impressed Kraemer as a diligent, suitably loyal and orthodox young adjutant. At any other moment, with any other men, it would have made no more difference than thousands of such encounters in the bureaucracies. But now the conjunction suddenly pulled Haig into history.

"When I met Dr. Kissinger, he asked some very brief questions," Haig told an interviewer in 1972. "He explained that he was interested in a military man who was a field soldier and a commander and not such a military intellectual." The point is crucial in understanding what followed, especially the chemistry of the men. In the jungle of ambition and calculation surrounding Kissinger, the fact that Haig had not been hired or groomed as the NSC deputy made possible in many ways his eventual claim to that powerful role. Not least, he was to be an unthreatening field soldier and no military intellectual to rival the adequately gifted Kissinger, who would later write eight chapters and almost 250 pages of his detailed White House memoirs before recalling an event involving his military aide. Kissinger's preference for a simple, obscure soldier was perhaps most ironic of all. For the same martial, nonintellectual qualities and background that Kissinger saw in Haig as limits, as natural weaknesses in any potential rivalry for power, Richard Nixon would see as attractive strengths.

But all that lay ahead. In mid-December, after a swift enlistment, Haig was sent to Washington, where he routinely filed to Kissinger in New York daily intelligence briefings from the bureaucracy for the President-elect and his staff. Unlike Morton Halperin, Lawrence Eagleburger and other aides, Haig missed the organizational coup hatching at the Pierre. Instead, he worked from his transition outpost in the old Executive Office Building next to the White House; it was there that the lameduck NSC staff first saw him before Christmas 1968--a lined, ruddy and leathery 44-year-old colonel in tweedy hat, trench coat and a new dark business suit with slightly high-water trousers. From his stately, vaulted office at West Point, he would soon move into the NSC quarters in the White House West Basement, a scene that a style-conscious staff lawyer named John Dean would describe a year later as surprisingly "dreary and over-crowded, jammed with cluttered desks and staffed by a few young military men wearing out-of-date civilian clothes." But its decor never reflected the significance of the office. What mattered there amid the clutter was the gathering, largely invisible power to command and exploit men in much more impressive quarters, including those upstairs at the White House.

Kissinger's take-over was swift and sweeping. Within the first weeks of the new Administration in 1969, while Haig sat in an adjacent office routinely sorting through daily intelligence digests from the Pentagon and the CIA, the new National Security Advisor came to dominate every issue and forum of foreign policy. Kissinger's intellect, his grasp of the issues, his bureaucratic instinct and his political gifts would have made him a force at the higher levels of any government, but here his pre-eminence seemed inevitable. By all measures, his competition was sadly meager. At the State Department sat Secretary William Pierce Rogers, a congenial New York attorney and a Nixon associate from the Eisenhower years who understood little of either the policies or the politics at play. A more politically astute ex-Congressman from Wisconsin, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was only slightly better armed for the bureaucratic struggle. But his Capitol Hill prowess for press leaks and personal publicity only aroused Kissinger's superiority at the same arts, and Nixon's resentment. Behind both men were the usual, largely stagnant and self-protective bureaucrats, whom Kissinger shrewdly flattered, co-opted or ignored to outflank his rivals.

Meanwhile, though determined to dictate foreign policy through his NSC strategist, the new President was prevented by something in the murky depths of his personality from facing his own Cabinet officers with that unpleasant news. Giving such a direct order, Kissinger wrote tartly, was "the one thing Nixon was psychologically incapable of doing"; the pernicious result was a Chief Executive who was diffident and equivocal when personally confronted by his ministers and who raged and schemed against them in private for thwarting his will. Having then deepened everyone's sense of insecurity and rancor, not least his own, he increasingly withdrew to leave the furtive, uneven bureaucratic battle to Kissinger.

Even with Nixon's evasions, the result (continued on page 199) Campaign of Cunning (continued from page 92) might have been simply another period of chafing personal dominance over American foreign policy, Kissinger's ascendancy comparable to those of John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson, strong Secretaries of State. But what set this Government and these men apart--what provided much of the strange yeast for Haig's rise--was the personal venom, the pervasive suspicion and the sheer excess that soon descended upon the White House. The court found its style early in 1969--in savage slurs and gossip. Thus, it was not enough for Kissinger to best Rogers in policy issue after policy issue; there was also the story, pandered to staff and press, that the Secretary of State was keeping a homosexual lover in Georgetown. It was a rumor that apparently amused more than angered Rogers' staff, who saw their handsome and conventional boss as rather a ladies' man. As for the Secretary of Defense, Kissinger called him a veritable "traitor" whose Pentagon office was the "Laird for President" headquarters.

But equal or worse epithets were reserved for the new President himself. In his memoirs, Kissinger would publicly and compassionately remember a "spent, even fragile" Nixon at the Inauguration, a politician tragically drained and embittered by his long quest for the office. But now, in the opening months of 1969, Nixon's chief foreign-policy advisor talked sneeringly with his own staff about "our meatball President" or "my drunken friend" in frequent contempt of Nixon's late-night, losing bouts with gin. Closing the sordid circle, there were ever recurrent and utterly baseless insinuations about Nixon's past relationship with Rogers in which something illicit, illegal or both was holding hostage the President of the United States.

Smut was one of Kissinger's weapons against his own consuming anxieties--and against the bizarre setting in which he now found himself. The problem of Richard Nixon was one burden of states-manship for which the Harvard professor was woefully unprepared. This President was a deeply flawed leader, his pettiness and his impulsiveness as dangerous as his intelligence or his boldness might be creative. His caprice even came to be codified in White House staff practices, whereby Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman had prudently ordained "the staff officer's duty to ignore any clearly inappropriate demand, even if the President...insisted on it."

The early cost of having this tragic figure in the Presidency was not some single act or negligence; far worse, it added to the erosion of integrity and restraint among the none-too-honorable men he had gathered around him. Nixon's weakness was an invitation to manipulation and to abuse of authority that his men did not resist. In the West Basement's foreign-policy office, the result was to exploit the power that Nixon formally appropriated or that his method of rule made possible and, at the same time, to shield that power from him when necessary. That created Kissinger's secretive world of personal diplomacy, leaks and back-channel communications; narrow, compressed decisions wrung from a bitter and distrusting President; and a general hypocrisy toward the barbarians at every gate.

Inevitably, the rancid practices turned back on the White House. Thus, Kissinger's most formidable rivals on the Nixon staff, Haldeman and domestic-affairs counselor John Ehrlichman--men whom the Oval Office tapes show talking with the President virtually as equals, with few of the deferential "sirs" or "Mr. Presidents" of other interlocutors--became known in the West Basement as the Gestapo. Reciprocating with the house fixation on homosexuality, Ehrlichman thought his friend Henry "queer." From early in 1969, Kissinger faithfully recorded all his telephone conversations with Nixon, senior aides and everyone else, the Dictabelts transcribed every day (eventually under Haig's watchful eye) and were salted away in personal files to be removed from the White House to Rockefeller's Pocantico Hills estate. For Kissinger, it was a bit of insurance against history as well as against his fellow policy makers. "This is not an honorable business conducted by honorable men in an honorable way," he told an unsurprised staff later that first year.

Haig watched all that develop from a vantage point just outside Kissinger's office, and it was during this period--for approximately a year and a half--that I worked around Haig on the NSC staff, sometimes at close range and usually on cordial personal terms, whatever our policy differences. His duties during this time "varied dramatically," he said during his 1981 Secretary of State confirmation hearing. He began by funneling intelligence reports to Kissinger and, through him, to Nixon. Then, as the stream of staff papers, cables and bureaucratic studies rose with Kissinger's control, Haig joined Eagleburger in reading and transmitting a share of those as well. It was, then, an orthodox staff position, one in which Haig was to see that the disorderly Kissinger disposed of the papers and decisions expected of him and that the outflow from Kissinger's desk to the President, to the NSC staff, to the bureaucracies beyond ran without major snags. To that end, he worked 14-to-16-hour days, always on a schedule that stretched just before and beyond Kissinger's. Like all such high-level Government clerking, it was an uneven rhythm of quiet and rush, late nights as often the result of the lumbering inefficiency of the bureaucrats whose papers he processed or of the fashionable night hours thought de rigueur among key officials as of the actual significance or volume of a day's work.

Still, at what he did, Haig was indefatigable and, even more important, was reputed to be. "Not smart, but he's the quintessential staff man," the New York Post quoted an NSC staff colleague. The military bearing and the sense of command never seemed to be ruffled by the perturbing disarray of papers--nor even by Kissinger's regular frenzies and abuse of underlings. "He pounds assistants into the ground," said White House speechwriter William Safire.

"Only someone schooled in taking shit could put up with it," echoed Coleman Hicks, an appointments secretary who quit.

Outwardly loyal to Kissinger, Haig could nevertheless be ingratiating with the staff officers who trooped through to push their papers or to see Haig's boss. Posing as their irreverent, sympathetic advocate in the West Basement, he was just another of Henry's victims, one of the boys. When Kissinger sent a staff officer to conduct delicate secret negotiations with foreign factions in defiance of the State Department--a doubtful mission for which Kissinger could claim credit or disavow the aide, depending on the outcome--Haig, with a sympathetic smile, passed the man a note after Kissinger had left a meeting. "He gets the diamonds," read the large scrawl. "You get the rocks."

But often the empathy was discreetly self-serving. When aide Anthony Lake resigned over the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, Haig--who could not have been more opposed to Lake's philosophical position--was told by Kissinger to take Lake to lunch to try to rescind the resignation. He should not leave, Haig told Lake as they sat down in the White House mess. Then Haig launched into a familiar, unbroken litany of how difficult and demeaning it was to work for Kissinger. "He was very subtly working on all the feelings I had about leaving, all the embers of my resentment," Lake told a reporter long afterward, having resigned as planned. "He knew what he wanted from me, and he meant to get it."

As the foreign-policy power of the Presidential advisor rapidly became evident, there was considerable early jockeying for the unspecified position as Kissinger's deputy--though Kissinger himself showed scant readiness to share even a slice of his title and role, jealously blocking staff contacts of any sort with Nixon. In any case, Haig--processor of documents, with no noticeable policy intellect--was then an outside choice at best. A more likely candidate was Halperin, the architect and staff coordinator of the new NSC system and, before his later conversion by wire tap to civil liberatarian and public opponent of the regime, one of the more grasping, calculating bureaucrats circling the West Basement. While Halperin's ambition flashed nakedly, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the old, much overestimated and equally predatory Kissinger friend in Soviet affairs, sat in his office down the hall in the E.O.B., sullenly joking about his potential rivals and waiting for the summons to be deputy himself. Eagleburger, Haig's peer if not slight superior in staff rank, might have been a third, perhaps even stronger, prospect. A practiced adjutant of little substance (and, therefore, little threat to Kissinger), Eagleburger was fueled by a nervous compulsiveness that not only kept the office running but drove him more than once to change shirt and suit in the middle of any day on which he was to meet with the President. He was shrewd, ambitious and politically conservative, but he was also a chronic asthmatic with no stamina or patience. Haig would surpass those men not by ingenuity, depth or particular design (though they all, typically, saw the latter when it happened) but mainly by outlasting them.

His first break in that respect came in midsummer 1969, when Eagleburger collapsed in the office and consequently was forced to leave the job for a calmer post as a NATO diplomat in Brussels. Bellowing for staff attention and service even as Eagleburger lay on an office sofa waiting for an ambulance, Kissinger soon replaced him with Lake, a 30-year-old junior foreign-service officer--at one stroke leaving Haig the senior and stronger figure on Kissinger's immediate staff. There, where routine and compliance far outshone all other abilities, Haig flourished. Within months, Halperin was gone under a shadow of the wire tap and questions of security; the same political doubts hung over Sonnenfeldt as well, even though the stayed. Lake left over Cambodia, along with another possible rival, staff secretary William Watts, who had worked for Rockefeller. Of the men who followed them in Kissinger's personal orbit, none was strong enough or senior enough to rival Haig, and none would be so politically or personally compatible with the Nixon regime. With that attrition, Haig was in the position of the junior officer who finds himself commanding in battle. In this case, his further rise became all the more dependent on his relationship with Kissinger.

The ties between the two men were always more complex than any organizational chart could convey. Haig's contribution to the office operation was crucial. "He never would have got anything read if it wasn't for Haig," Laird once said, referring to Kissinger's disorder. As the National Security Advisor became theorist, bureaucratic politician, then renowned negotiator of the regime, Haig became his much-needed logistics and administrative officer, managing his growing empire with attention to the mundane but all-too-necessary details Kissinger spurned. With every new diplomatic conquest and its demands on Kissinger, with every cession of office management, every proxy in his absence, every bit of added knowledge about Kissinger's plans, vulnerabilities and needs, Haig's power grew.

It is impossible to envision Haig's prominence apart from Kissinger--and, later, Nixon--without the singular coincidence of men and moment. The very secrecy and aggrandizement of the Kissinger approach drew power into his own office, making Haig--or anyone in that place at that time--indispensable. But another temperament would not have put such a premium on Haig's clerical skills. A more secure man would not have found such comfort or, indeed, necessity in Haig's relative lack of intellect. Then, too, a diplomat of lesser gifts than Kissinger's could not have compensated so easily for a deputy of Haig's limits--could not have afforded them. But with all the genuine and phantom enemies about, Kissinger needed reassurance, and that Haig provided. Safire records a scene with Kissinger in high dudgeon at a State Department insinuation that he could not leave Washington for fear of losing influence with Nixon. As Safire saw it, "Kissinger's voice broke a couple of times as he paced and talked, he was so worked up, [while] Haig, standing in the corner, kept nodding in agreement or sympathy."

In the first few years, they rarely argued, Haig insinuating his views in the traditional fashion of the staff assistant--a cover note on certain memos, a puncturing question of another officer at a staff meeting, a remark about this man's pet cause or ambition or that one's dubious loyalty or insensitivity to Kissinger's plight. Dealing with an extraordinarily moody, busy, distracted and ever-suspicious superior, Haig could shape policy or its consideration without ever truly resorting to open advocacy or opposition. It was privileged access and it had its special price, levied in terms of what was, in Kissinger's mind, at once Haig's strength and weakness: that he was a soldier. "I'm going to call the Pentagon to ask them to release you for a day's work on my staff," Kissinger would taunt him. Or, in a variation: "There's no point in your coming, Al; the Army doesn't have anything at stake in this meeting." With Haig in the room, Kissinger reportedly held forth for visitors on how military men were "dumb, stupid animals to be used." By similar accounts, he frequently berated Haig in front of the rest of the West Basement staff. In one instance, when fighter bombers did not attack Vietnam because of poor weather, Kissinger ranted about the need for "generals who could win battles . . . not good briefers, like Haig."

There would be no shortage of such humiliating outbursts seen and recorded by several witnesses. As Haig was leaving for a trip to Cambodia, with a small crowd of aides and even reporters present, Kissinger pulled him back and began to polish the single star on his shoulder. "Al, if you're a good boy," he said in a stage whisper. "I'll get you another one." A witness to that and similar gestures described Haig at such moments as smiling thinly, looking off and "working his jaw and neck back and forth in a sharp, tight motion . . . almost as if the man were trying to straighten his tie with no hands."

His role as a buffer, sparing the rest of the staff such abuse, explained, in part, why Haig would gradually be accepted as first among equals by NSC officers--and why, too, the job as deputy, whatever its political rewards, lost much of its allure for others. It was with the staff that Haig had his whispered revenge, such as it was in the early years. Thus, Henry could not see them just now; he was having "one of his fits." Or it would do no good to propose the cable tonight: He was "weak," "crazy"; he was about to leave for a date and "his mind is in his pants."

If Haig first distinguished himself with Kissinger by sheer perseverance and seniority by survival, he took one office initiative in 1969-1970 that was crucial to his progress. In a time-honored feudal technique of bureaucracy as well as of diplomacy and war, he formed a quiet precautionary alliance with his tormentor's nemesis--in this case, Kissinger's White House adversary Haldeman. The single contact point between the two staffs (Kissinger did not trust his NSC officers' dealing independently with his White House rivals any more than with the President or the rest of the Government), Haig cultivated the Nixon inner circle with casual, then increasingly sympathetic, conversation about Kissinger's spreading notoriety, which both Nixon and his senior menviewed with resentment. To Bill Gulley, head of the White House military office and a close observer of staff politics, Haig had "found a way to make use of Bob Haldeman. He began to tell him little intimate tidbits of gossip about Kissinger--he's screwing this or that broad in New York . . ." Gulley wrote in his memoirs. "Kissinger was hot copy and everybody wanted to be let in on the inside story, a story nobody but Haig could give out." It was "valuable currency," thought Gulley, and Haig "bought Haldeman's support with it." Still another former colleague called Haig "Kissinger's man in Haldeman's office and Haldeman's man in Kissinger's office."

But some of those accounts have an aroma of gossip as well, and the connection was never so simple as titillation or so immediately ambitious as some aides feared. A more thoughtful former Nixon-campaign aide called Haldeman and his faction, for all their imperious manner, "basically unsure of themselves, second-raters playing over their heads and fiercely resentful of anyone who dared approach them at eye level." Haig now made that approach as a dutiful middle-level staff man giving them an entry into the one bureaucratic sanctum of the White House they did not control and, indirectly, into a vault of Nixon's mind and the province of his major political triumphs--foreign policy--from which they had been barred.

Like most office politics, it tended to be a devious double gambit. When Kissinger sent Haig to Haldeman early in 1970 with one of what would be periodic resignation threats provoked by tangible or suspected affronts, Haldeman knew from Haig that it was not serious but a petulant gesture. And when Haig returned with the reply that Henry should resign if he wished, Kissinger went into a funk that aides recalled lasting for days. But then Haig was also a source for an ever-interested Kissinger about the ceaseless machinations around Haldeman and Ehrilichman, bringing from his discreet forays upstairs at the White House news of the rise and the decline of a Presidential counselor such as Pat Moynihan or later, more ominously, of the creation of Ehrlichman's plumbers and the fulminating obsession with internal security and domestic espionage that would bring down the Government.

The most important benefit of the Haldeman tie was to cast Haig in a favorable light with his ultimate patron, Nixon. Kissinger allowed no one any direct exposure to the President in those early months, but when Haldeman turned the attention of the Oval Office to Kissinger's staff--to questions about leaks and the disloyalty of the NSC bureaucrats--Haig was a notable exception, the soldier who saw Kissinger's flaws as clearly as Haldeman.

There was a prophetic scene late in 1969 when Nixon, Kissinger and speech-writer Safire were working in the President's hideaway E.O.B. office and Haig was summoned to bring a piece of missing information. He brought a paper with the answer and was dismissed with a nod from Kissinger. But as Haig turned to go, Nixon suddenly said to him, "No, stay while we're doing this," adding to Safire in an aside, "thought and action." The cryptic reference was to a favorite Nixon theme drawn from a passage by Woodrow Wilson about the distinction between "men of thought and men of action." Nixon had given a 1966 campaign speech with the line, "The man of thought who will not act is ineffective; the man of action who will not think is dangerous." The maxim ran deep in the precarious self-image of Nixon, who struggled to prove himself the suitable blend of the two characteristics. Safire, who recorded this incident and others like it, observed that "the President--unknown to Kissinger--saw that combination in Al Haig" and sought to encourage it. It was unlikely that Nixon had formed more than a cursory perception of Haig at this point, and that mostly from Haldeman. Yet it was probably enough that Haig, as decorated veleran and loyal aide, seemed the part and, in any case, supplied in his background of action the ingredient Nixon most doubted in himself. Later, when Nixon struck out with ferocity in Cambodia and Vietnam to prove his own decisiveness, Haig would always be there to lend the advice of action, not thought--to fortify and indulge the impulse to be effective, not to temper the dangerous.

Following that encounter, their direct dealings became more common and Nixon's regard more open, in part as a conscious antidote to the coveted fame and Washington acceptance of his National Security Advisor. "Haig's always down there," the President once motioned toward the West Basement in a bitter remark to aides in the spring of 1970, "while Henry's off having dinner in Georgetown." On occasional nocturnal wanderings around the White House, Nixon would stop by the lighted office and chat with Haig, a few times asking for memos from him directly, including one on the then-proposed all-volunteer Army. In most cases, Haig was careful to tell Kissinger of the request as if it had been made to the office in general; on those occasions, the responses went back upstairs signed with the customary "H.K." Haig ventured a few times, though, to send his own papers quietly in and out of the Oval Office through Haldeman, creating his private Chron-R.N. file, kept from Kissinger. It was just one more intramural secret in the West Basement.

As Kissinger increasingly became the regime's secret and far-ranging diplomatic agent after the autumn of 1970, Haig's personal briefings and direct written reports to Nixon became all the more frequent. He acted as Kissinger's lone relay, often in matters of such exclusivity that only those three men in the entire American Government knew the details. Several staff witnesses to the process thought it gave Haig ready opportunity to exploit the uneasy relationship between Nixon and Kissinger--to insert his own views, much as he did as intermediary between Kissinger and NSC staff officers. He was dealing with a President so sensitive to the question of who actually conceived and directed his grand gestures of foreign policy that he ordered the Oval Office bugged in part to prove his authorship and doomed himself in the act. "So Haig gave Kissinger's messages a tilt . . . a little editing here and a little rephrasing there, making a suggestion that this or that point might fall in line better with the President's view of what should be done, rather than Kissinger's," reported Gulley from a cynicism educated by 11 years in the White House military office. "The result would be messages sent back in code with little changes from Nixon, changes which, in fact, had been suggested by Haig purely in order to play up to Nixon's vanity. Al Haig was manipulating both players."

Yet onlookers appear to have exaggerated both Haig's subtlety and the simplicity of the scheme. Tampering with Kissinger's cables on China or Salt or Vietnam would have been too easy to detect afterward for Kissinger and his traveling aides, men who would scarcely have spared Haig the consequences. Moreover, Nixon was too involved by the time this triangle began, too well versed in both the issues and Kissinger's approach merely to pass over such manipulation. If Kissinger's recommendations or performance were at odds with the President's view, Haig need only have reported that faithfully and thoroughly and sat back to await the predictable reaction--inserting his own comments to Nixon orally and off the record. He did not have to manufacture or to conspire but simply to take quiet advantage of the chance to ingratiate himself with a proud, touchy President while maintaining "delicately," as one account worded it, his primary relationship with Kissinger.

As always, while those personal factors shaped issues of international moment, they also had their seamy, profoundly cynical side. At the same time he was dropping in on Haldeman, sitting in as the man of action in Nixon's speech-writing or chatting respectfully with the Presidential night stroller, Haig privately referred to Haldeman and company as "those shits" and to Nixon as "our drunk" and joked savagely--a variation on the Kissinger refrain--about Nixon's "limp-wrist" relationship with businessman and White House intimate Bebe Rebozo. In 1969-1970, Haig would call over NSC colleagues to regale them with what had come to be known as Butter fieldgrams. As one of his duties as Haldeman's deputy, before the recording devices were installed in February 1971, Alexander Butterfield was charged to sit quietly in the Oval Office or in Nixon's E.O.B. office and record nearly verbatim random Presidential utterings and instructions--many addressed to Kissinger--while Nixon read intelligence briefs or, more often, the newspapers. The product was a daily pile of two-to-three-line memos describing the President's thoughts, not to mention the now-comic, now-pathetic virulence of rivalries in the Administration. Haig sat smiling at the alternating shock and mirth of the staff men reading the memos. A typical batch reviled Laird; "Henry, Laird is up to his old tricks," a notation read after Nixon saw a critical article on defense policy. "Shut the bastard up." Or, "I see this goddamn cocksucking story about troop levels: this is Laird again. The son of a bitch is up to his old games. What's he trying to do?" As for the State Department, "Stop this!" on a report of Rogers' negotiating in the Middle East; or on reading about Undersecretary Elliot Richardson's Congressional testimony, "They're trying to undercut us again." None of the instructions would be acted upon, as Haig and the staff men knew. They were just more proof of the disarray and the veering sanity of the Government--more morsels of gossip, in a sense, that Haig would share.

Of course, "they" were crazy, Haig would tell incredulous or depressed colleagues reading such tidbits, but "no crazier than most." That was what one learned to expect working for great men. He might then tell the story of having to carry MacArthur's sleeping bag ashore at Inchon when he served under that famous general during the Korean war. At other times, to other men, he said, "I've got to get out of here" and talked wistfully about resuming his Army career.

But there were few moments of what seemed deeper unease. One fellow assistant remembered him "silent and pretty upset" when it was evident that Nixon had been drinking during the decisive hours of one of the Administration's first crises, when the North Koreans shot down an EC-121 reconnaissance plane in the spring of 1969. And once, after reading a staff memo, Haig leaned forward and said almost sadly to the author, "Goddamn, if I could write that well, I wouldn't be doing this." But there would be no real pause, no sure sense of limit--of where service and acceptance crossed over into compromise and complicity.

He stayed and was promoted, at the very least resigned to pettiness and megalomania and malevolence as occupational routine. "He moved me up based on human chemistry," Haig once described his early rise with Kissinger, "not bureaucratic wiliness or all that." In 1970, when Watts sent Kissinger an unusual memo urging an end to the venom and the harsher habits of rivalry with the State Department, Haig openly ridiculed Watts to Kissinger and other officers.

"He was always perfectly comfortable doing what must be done," a co-worker told a reporter. Later, when there were vicious jokes and leaks about President Carter from NATO headquarters, when there was a year of savage rivalry and personal battle with National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen in the Reagan Administration, those who had seen him in the West Basement wondered if Al Haig knew any other way to govern.

The malignant style of the Administration tended to obscure the fact that the same people were engaged in the deadly serious business of foreign policy. For those who were inside, for those who later studied the era and the personalities, there was a fascination with the ugly confederacy of power and then with all the hypocrisy and connivance as omens of Watergate. Haig came to be judged in his fitness for even higher office against that perverse standard: Had he been part of the worst excesses or only a staff retainer? Had he committed one of the outrages or somehow stood unknowing and apart? Finding no felonious evidence, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would heartily endorse him as Secretary of State. But behind the character scandals, the policies in the world beyond were real enough, and Haig's role in their making and conduct was a major influence in his rise.

As his bureaucratic position grew more secure through 1969, he gradually expanded the customary role of military liaison to active lobbying for Pentagon budgets and, in particular, for the Army, whose Chiefs of Staff he kept discreetly informed of White House trends. In the spring of 1971, when Kissinger moved toward recommending more money for the Navy, it "roused the Army tiger in Al Haig," as Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, then Navy Chief of Staff, later put it. Haig was "not about to let that happen and mounted a sustained attack on the credibility" of the Naval figures, which led to a budget stalemate. Later in the same fiscal cycle, Admiral Zumwalt had been asked by the President, apparently without Haig's knowledge, to present Naval priorities to Budget Director George Shultz. As the admiral was walking through the White House to Shultz's office, he passed Haig with no more than a casual greeting. While he was briefing Shultz, Zumwalt then reports, Haig anxiously called Shultz's secretary to ask why he was there. When he discovered the reason, he hit the ceiling. Before Zumwalt returned to the Pentagon, Haig had called Laird to complain that the Navy was taking "unfair advantage" of the Army.

At the same time, Haig's position at Kissinger's elbow made his insertion of a parochial Army or Pentagon bias all the more galling to others. Early in 1969, in one of his first cover notes, he clipped to a Sonnenfeldt memo on the issue of U. S. bases in Franco's Spain the standard Pentagon argument for keeping them at almost all costs. But Sonnenfeldt learned of the note, and the memo was swiftly leaked to the press with minor but unwanted embarrassment. "That'll teach the son of a bitch," Sonnenfeldt told colleagues, but the leak only damaged his own standing, and Haig went on writing tactical notes slid between Kissinger and his staff. He felt qualified to judge bases in particular. On the subject of renewing a British base in Malta, he and Zumwalt agreed that, in Zumwalt's words, "we ought to pay a little more blackmail." The deal later involved three times the rent of a former agreement, with the U. S. paying nearly £4,000,000 a year.

On other issues deemed of less strategic importance (issues the Pentagon commonly ignored), Haig could be cheerfully offhand, even derisive. In the first year, when NSC meetings were still held, at least pro forma, he often took notes for Kissinger--and did so solemnly at an early session on the Nigerian civil war and U. S. relief policy toward starving Biafra, where Nixon decided on a "high profile" humanitarian effort. But when the topic of African relief came up at NSC staff meetings. Haig would smilingly beat the table like a jungle drum, much to the amusement of Kissinger, who, astonishingly, shared the racial stereotypes and the casual prejudices of his military assistant and his President.

It was Vietnam that Haig staked out as his main policy concern. His military-staff role and his past experience drew him there as a matter of course at the beginning and, once established, his involvement thickened not only as a result of his bureaucratic intimacy with Kissinger but because he was so in agreement with the deepening secrecy and the periodic ferocity of the White House war policy.

He began by fighting his own guerrilla action against National Security Study Memorandum One, a lengthy series of questions drafted by Halperin and others (among them a consultant named Daniel Ellsberg) and intended to elicit a fresh appraisal of the war from every involved bureaucracy. When the answers about the political and the military state of affairs produced an unusually candid and bleak picture--estimates of the time required for the pacification of South Vietnam ranging from 8.3 years to 13.4 years--Haig argued that the study had been produced by a "Democratic bureaucracy." It was not ignored for being wrong or irrelevant, though; its awkward truths simply clashed with the emerging Nixon-Kissinger view of national interests and "manliness" in the conflict. In the same vein, Haig joined Kissinger in urging Nixon to bomb North Korea after the April 1969 downing of a Navy intelligence plane over the Sea of Japan. As he later told a journalist, he believed that as a result of their proposed "get-tough" retaliation, "the Indochina war could be a whole new ball game." When Nixon elected to send a small flotilla to show the flag, the President began to be labeled in the West Basement as weak, along with other assorted descriptions.

By the summer of 1969, Haig had stepped up his memos, notes and comments on the issue. Watching the growing frustration of the Administration in the face of a negotiating deadlock in Paris and renewed Viet Cong offensives on the ground--an impasse produced in large measure by Washington's failure to formulate a new policy and by Hanoi's exploitation of that indecision--Haig pushed Kissinger to consider the old military nostrum, an unlimited attack on North Vietnam. Whether to raise the issue in order to dispose of it or genuinely to evaluate the option, in the fall, Kissinger assembled a small, highly secret group of NSC staff planners, including Haig, to consider what Kissinger called a "savage, punishing" blow. "I can't believe," he told the group, "that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn't have a breaking point."

It was the same logic Haig and other Pentagon officers had professed for years. When military plans were sent to the NSC as part of the study (without Laird's knowledge, of course), they were no more than retyped versions of war plans drafted years before. Christened variously the September or the November Group by its participants, the task force produced a scenario based upon the mining of the port of Haiphong and inland waterways; a Naval blockade; carpet bombing of population centers; the destruction of the Red River dike system, causing widespread loss of life and farmland in North Vietnam; and the closing of the main railroad pass into China by a nuclear explosion--all accompanied by a political/diplomatic campaign to neutralize domestic opposition, hold the Chinese and Russians at bay and pressure Hanoi to a peace settlement. When the plan was submitted to Nixon and, finally, to Laird and Rogers, it was defeated. As always, the military assurances of success were uncertain and wavering, and Laird and Rogers carried the argument for the moment with predictions of domestic uproar. But the very exercise gave the escalation a legitimacy it had never had under Johnson and paved the way, psychologically and bureaucratically, for the unleashing of many of the same actions in 1972.

For Haig, by now a brigadier general, the episode further enhanced his aura of action. Moreover, in a subtle, unconscious manner, by his very presence at court, Haig was once more a symbol. The two other men whose inner fears drove the Vietnam policy during the next four years were already visibly haunted by the imagined right-wing reaction to another "lost" war. The President, after all, had erected his own political career on the "loss" of China and the anguish of the Korean stalemate, and Kissinger remembered vividly the extremism that had overtaken his native Germany in the wake of World War One. It was an intangible emotional factor, but there is much evidence that with a Nixon and a Kissinger somehow fearful of the consequences of peace, Haig, the soldier of stern opinion and steely nationalism, determined that the war would go on.

Ironically, by the close of 1969, Haig's involvement in the September Group was almost incidental to the role he had already begun to play in the most furtive and, in many ways, most fateful part of the war policy--Cambodia. He had attended the first White House meetings in early February 1969, when the U. S. military command in Saigon urged on the new Administration its perennial request to bomb the Cambodian border areas through which the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had marched and camped for years. The proposed bombing had never been approved in Washington, mainly because the military yield was uncertain, and Cambodia tolerated the sanctuary in return for Hanoi's ignoring the handful of local Communists, the Khmer Rouge.

Now, however, the old recommendations to attack "fell on fertile ground," as Kissinger wrote later. Nixon had contemplated a "very definite change of policy toward Cambodia" at the Pierre, and Goodpaster had obligingly supplied him the vague Pentagon intelligence about supplies pouring through the country and the need for "pre-emptive operations." In late February 1969, when Viet Cong attacks planned months earlier suddenly raised American casualties, Kissinger found Nixon "seething" with "all his instincts to respond violently" to what he saw as a challenge to his new authority. On February 24, while Nixon was on a European trip, Haig, Haldeman, Kissinger and a Pentagon planning officer charted the attacks in the Presidential cabin of Air Force One at the Brussels airport. The bombing would be strictly secret, they decided, and acknowledged only in the unlikely event that Cambodia protested it. After some weeks of bureaucratic vacillation by Rogers and Laird (pushing Nixon still further toward Kissinger and Haig), the raids began on March 18.

On March 19, Haig brought Kissinger the first ultrasecret damage assessment, which Halperin, there on other business, remembered Kissinger reading with a smile because the planes reported secondary explosions, seeming to confirm the logic of the strikes.

With the first sorties, Haig became the sole White House liaison with the Joint Chiefs on the Cambodian bombing. As such, he probably knew not only about the accompanying spread of the fighting but also about the shadowy Defense Intelligence Agency contacts with Lon Nol and the officers who overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk a year later. Spawned by the bombing and by the inward wheel of the sanctuaries, the coup shattered the country's traditional neutral bargain, provoked the Khmer Communists and, in turn, set Nixon off again in manly retaliation--a series of actions and reactions that was to be Cambodia's brutal fate from then on. As the White House coiled to invade in the spring of 1970, secrecy drew even tighter, with Haig pulling the cloak. At the end of March--as he and Kissinger and a few alarmed staff officers watched a flow of combative stream-of-consciousness memos on Cambodia spill down from the Oval Office--Haig repeatedly called Laird's office, ordering that "the State Department was to know nothing" about options being considered for Cambodia and that Defense was to "keep everything . . . on a very closely held basis." Laird later acknowledged that on Haig's orders, even the general's erstwhile fellow soldiers--Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs' long- and short-term planning officers--were cut out of the decision until the end.

On the weekend of April 24-26, with Nixon lurching toward decision, Kissinger shifting with his mood and Haig firmly in favor of an American ground attack into Cambodia, the train of events was expressive of the men and their rule. On Friday morning, there was a rambling White House meeting with Nixon, ordered the previous midnight when the President telephoned Kissinger--who, in turn, called Watts to pull together needed documents, telling him, "Our peerless leader has flipped out." Friday evening, Kissinger met with three dissenting staff members (including myself), who argued their opposition to the invasion. Afterward, Haig told Kissinger to dismiss the dissent as the views of the "Eastern Establishment" and to disregard another staff member's critique of the plans, because he was not a military officer. Having meanwhile flown to Camp David with Rebozo, Nixon called Kissinger frequently through Saturday, on one occasion with Watts listening in at Kissinger's request as the President drunkenly taunted his advisor on the invasion. "If this doesn't work, it'll be your ass, Henry," Nixon said thickly, adding in an aside at the other end of the line, "Ain't that right, Bebe?" Saturday evening, Nixon returned with Rebozo, was joined by Kissinger on the Presidential yacht Sequoia, watched the movie Patton for the fourth or fifth time and ordered the invasion.

Nixon announced the attack April 30, and the aftermath, amid the public furor, reflected the tone of the Government as well. Nixon said he had bolstered a wavering Kissinger, while Kissinger leaked that the President had been "on the edge of a nervous breakdown." Haig pronounced his resigning staff colleagues "weak and worn-out"; said that Kissinger had vacillated ("Henry tried to talk [Nixon] out of it, but it had gone too far"); confided to a reporter that the "paranoia" was so bad that troops had been brought to the White House basement to hold off potential demonstrators; and outwardly supported the President ("He knew he was swimming against the tide," he later told one author).

"We are all the President's men," Kissinger told his assembled NSC staff the day the Cambodian invasion was revealed. The remark was to prove profoundly ironic, for no policy or series of events had a more divisive effect on the inner politics of the Administration or on Southeast Asia itself. For Kissinger, the episode brought the final eclipse of Rogers. Kissinger had been striving to demonstrate his outward loyalty, and "it was the invasion of Cambodia," wrote one historian of the policy, "that enabled him to do so." In the Oval Office, an already besieged President saw the demonstrations against his act as new evidence of his many enemies and of the need to counter with extraordinary measures. For Haig, the invasion was a triumph to equal Kissinger's. The "martinis that launched Cambodia," as journalists privately joked later about Nixon's drinking, now launched the general even more rapidly upward. When the smoke had cleared, Watts and Lake--his last potential rivals--had gone and the few remaining possibilities, to one degree or another, had not fared well in the litmus test of loyalty.

In the West Basement that summer, Haig presided over the expansion of the U. S. mission in Phnom Penh. It was a policy that would have its bloody sequel, but before that was played out, there was yet another consequence of Cambodia for the tortuous politics inside the White House. It was a May 1969 New York Times story on the secret Cambodian bombing, presumed to come from a leak, that started the notorious wire taps of the Kissinger staff, other officials and a number of journalists. And a year later, just after the invasion, Haig telephoned the FBI to say that the latest leak had been "nailed down to a couple of people" and to ask for four more wire taps. The request was almost routine; it was hardly the first time he had called on the subject.

When the taps were revealed in 1973, the furor descended primarily over the more famous Kissinger, who weathered it by invoking everything from national security to his resignation and by pleading that he was only a novice and a bystander next to lawyers Nixon and John Mitchell and policeman J. Edgar Hoover. Haig contended that he had only run Kissinger's errands. Both denied the story baldly when it was first breaking and came close to blaming each other before their accounts hardened into formal testimony in 1974. If Kissinger displayed unmistakable discomfort at the subject, however, Haig's reaction was usually cool, sometimes remorseless. They "don't give me gas pains," he remarked about the taps to Safire--whose sense of personal and political betrayal over being tapped Haig ridiculed as "battin' gnats."

Although the Senate Foreign Relations Committee excused him along with Kissinger, and the court in Halperin's civil-damage suit eventually dropped him as a defendant, Haig and the taps were judged more harshly by his former colleagues. The wire-tap hearings had been a "joke" and a "whitewash," wrote Safire, and the general belonged "right with Nixon" in his responsibility. To Richardson, the whole episode was "the ugly glimpse of an incipient police state." And in 1974-1975, there were those in the Watergate Special Prosecutor's office who argued privately that the grand jury should be told in more bureaucratic detail Haig's integral parting overseeing the taps and that the general should be held accountable in some more tangible way for his part in the abuse of power.

Yet--as with so many disasters he attended--the wire-tap episode that damaged almost everyone else it touched was a veritable boon to Haig's influence and career. It was very much, after all, his Cambodian policy that was being protected by it all, and in the deepending distrust of the self-tapping White House, secrecy and policy making narrowed still tighter around Haig. His role in the hunt for leakers gave him new power and leverage with Kissinger; his readiness to suspect his NSC colleagues further certified him with Haldeman. Ironically, among the ten NSC, State and Defense officials tapped, there was no connecting link in press contacts or in information known. Perhaps the one mark the men shared was that they were potential rivals or policy adversaries of Haig's. When the taps and the Cambodian invasion were gone; Sonnenfeldt and another key advisor, Winston Lord, remained--but only under the wire-tap cloud and never so trusted or so influential as Haig. Senior aides in State and in the Pentagon, men whose bosses might rival Kissinger and who themselves were Haig's counterparts in the shrinking circle of decision makers, were tainted as well, simply for having been once suspected. And the innuendo and the snooping were doubly bitter when the supposed leakers were matched with the leaks. The offending newspaper stories, early and late, had but one element in common: The only Government officials who had known all those secrets beforehand were Kissinger and Haig.

Of the Nixon Administration policies in which his role was later questioned, none would be more charged for Haig than the covert U.S. intervention in Chile. Coming in the wake of the wire taps and the Cambodian invasion, the Chilean episode in the autumn of 1970 possessed all the elements to excite its eventual 1975 Senatorial investigation and revelation: corporate bribery and scheming, White House intrigues, military conspirators, CIA agents passing money and guns at some predawn rendezvous and, in the end, torture, tyranny and assassination.

One of the few Latin nations with a firm tradition of nonmilitary democratic rule, Chile also had a history of regular CIA intervention. The Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations all spent covert money to back pro-U. S. candidates, including $3,000,000 in propaganda and various secret subsidies in 1964 to ensure the defeat of Salvador Allende, the avowedly Marxist presidential candidate of a loose Socialist/Communist/moderate coalition. In the 1970 election, however, Allende's Christian Democratic and rightist opposition was splintered and leaderless, and his victory seemed likely. Precisely what danger an Allende regime represented to Washington was one of the tragic puzzles left when it was all over.

In any case, Allende's prospective triumph at the polls rang alarm bells throughout the Administration's covert precincts early in 1970. The highly secret 40 Committee--a sub-Cabinet body chaired by Kissinger, staffed by Haig and responsible for overseeing clandestine operations--voted on March 25 to spend $135,000 on a "spoiling" operation against Allende in the September Chilean election. That sum was supplemented by International Telephone and Telegraph's $350,000 payment to stave off nationalization of its lucrative holdings in Chile. Meeting again on June 27, the committee voted to increase the anti-Allende campaign fund to $300,000 and discussed bribing the Chilean congress in its final presidential certifying vote in October should Allende win the popular election. When Allende won in a free election on September fourth, the committee allocated $250,000 to bribe members of the Chilean congress. It also launched still more covert actions prior to the October 24 congressional vote to prevent Allende's assumption of power "through either political or military means."

With that intervention already in train, Nixon met on September 15 with PepsiCo's Donald Kendall, an old supporter and corporate-law client; Kendall had been approached for help by one Agustin Edwards, a Chilean Pepsi distributor, publisher and long-time ally of the CIA. Already harshly anti-Allende, Nixon emerged from the Kendall meeting and summoned CIA director Richard Helms, Mitchell and Kissinger to order a new, wholly separate covert onslaught in Chile. In a policy that was to be kept secret from the 40 Committee, the Secretaries of State and Defense and the U. S. Ambassador in Chile, Nixon told Helms to go all out to mount a military coup to "save" that country. Not concerned risks involved . . . best men we have . . . make economy scream, read some of Helms's handwritten notes on his instructions. "If I ever carried a marshal's baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office," the CIA director later confessed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "it was that day."

Thus began Track II, as it became known, the White House's last-minute intervention paralleling the somewhat less extreme Track I already laid out by the 40 Committee. Over the next five weeks, the two Tracks snaked through Washington and Santiago while Allende went on to be confirmed by the Chilean congress anyway. But before it ended, Track II had endorsed the plot of a few Chilean Fascist officers and led to the murder of Chile's army commander, General René Schneider, a bulwark of the country's constitutional process who had spurned all coup conspiracies.

When all this was exposed in 1975--when Allende lay dead as the result of a 1973 coup and Chile was in the grip of a savage military dictatorship--Haig denied any knowledge of the conspiracy. He had not even heard of Track II, for that matter. "Well, again," he told a Senator during his confirmation hearing, "I did not know there was a Track II specifically established." In his prepared statement on Chile to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he assured its members that "I was not deeply involved in either overt or covert policies toward that country. . . . I had no responsibility to review or approve any CIA covert activities in Chile."

Yet by every other account in a remarkably documented record, including even Kissinger's exculpatory memoirs, Haig's role in the policy was unique. Unlike Rogers, Laird or most other responsible officials, Haig was one of fewer than a half dozen men in the world who went to the meetings, heard the briefings, took the telephone reports, read the cables and wrote the memos to Nixon--all on Track II.

As Kissinger's sole liaison with the CIA's Thomas Karamessines, Helms's deputy in charge of Track II, Haig would be there at every crucial juncture between Nixon's September 15 order and the October 22 murder of Schneider. Whatever a Congressional investigation later uncovered, those involved at the time had no doubt about the extent of Haig's role. Summoned back that fall from a post in Rio to the inner recesses of the CIA, where he would run the tiny Track II task force as a guarded secret even within the agency's already dense secrecy, agent David Atlee Phillips remembered his dismay at being briefed on the narrow authorship of the policy. "That was disturbing," he wrote in his memoirs, The Night Watch, "a covert action scheme to be launched directly by a President and his intimates--in this case Kissinger and Haig--without being on the agenda of the 40 Committee and, at least, being crafted by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense."

In 1975 testimony about whether he was aware of a CIA-supported plot to kidnap Schneider--the act that led to the commander's assassination--Haig told Congress, "I don't believe I was at all." Yet the conspiracy to remove Schneider was an integral part of the coup plans urged so heatedly from the West Basement that autumn. Contacting 21 key military and police officials in Chile, the agency found and reported promptly that the "major obstacle" facing the would-be conspirators was "the strong opposition to a coup by . . . Schneider." With the CIA then "borrowing" the Army attaché in Santiago to act as a go-between, because he knew the plotters better (a bureaucratic switch that involved a Defense Department cable secret from Laird but known to Haig), there ensued what Helm's biographer, Thomas Powers, generously called "a succession of jerry-built schemes to kidnap General Schneider" to pave the way for some coup d'état. "Schneider is the main barrier to all plans for the military to take over," the CIA station reported from Chile on October eighth. Under "constant pressure from the White House," CIA headquarters replied: "This would make it more important than ever to remove him. . . . Anything we or station can do to effect removal of Schneider?"

The kidnaping supposedly got "no support, no endorsement, no assistance and no approval," Kissinger has written. Yet CIA cables disclosed in the investigation showed that one Chilean general had been promised $20,000, plus $250,000 in life insurance, by CIA agents on October 13, while another was pledged $50,000, all payments duly authorized in Washington. In the first two weeks of October, the Senate investigative report concluded, one of the generals planning Schneider's abduction "came to be regarded as the best hope for carrying out the CIA's Track II mandate."

Meanwhile, the same record documented the CIA's "close consultation" on those matters with the White House. Karamessines' calendar showed him meeting with Haig five times and with Kissinger six to ten times during the five weeks. From September 26 to October fifth, when Kissinger and Nixon were abroad. Haig was the lone White House overseer of Track II. The CIA, said one analyst of the documents, "informed Kissinger and his aide Haig of the bleak picture on a regular basis."

Karamessines lunched with Haig on October eighth, and on October tenth, he telephoned the general in a routine report and told him that the prospects for Track II were "negative." On October 13, having seen his half-informed Ambassador to Chile about Track I, Nixon received Karamessines in Byzantine succession to discuss Track II. On the 14th, the 40 Committee heard, among other things, a scathing report from the Ambassador on the kidnap- and murder-prone generals lurking about Santiago. None except Haig and Kissinger had any idea that the United States was behind them.

Then Karamessines met Haig and Kissinger on October 15 for a crucial report. By all versions, the coup prospects were dim, and they agreed ("It was decided by those present," said the CIA memorandum, again showing Haig a policy maker) to pull back from what they called "precipitate action" regarding one of the plans. "We had better not do anything rather than something that was not going to succeed," Haig remembered the conclusion.

With the October 15 meeting, Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, he now believed the plots and the coup-planning ended. But while the CIA cable to Chile after the meeting made it plain that one specific plot seemed fruitless, the telegram went on to tell the field that "it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. . . . We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource." Thus, Track II never really ended, Karamessines testified. "What we were told to do was to continue our efforts."

In the later embarrassment over Schneider's murder, Kissinger and Haig would suggest that the CIA version of the October 15 meeting was simply a bureaucratic effort, in Kissinger's words, to "preserve the maximum degree of authority." Yet Haig no doubt saw the telegram following the October 15 meeting, as he routinely saw most of the agency's sensitive traffic on other matters of special White House concern. If the telegram had so utterly misrepresented policy, he and Kissinger had done nothing at the time to correct it.

Events then moved swiftly toward Schneider's murder. On the 17th, a CIA operative cautioned one general not to move too fast, but the coup-plotting continued. Kissinger argued later that he and Haig had not known of one group of plotters, "for the very good reason that they never did anything." Yet Haig's testimony referred in passing to "two" groups, and on October 19 and, again, on October 20, the same plotters attempted abductions of Schneider. Later, Chilean courts quickly erased Kissinger's alibi in the distinction between plotters by finding both generals and their cohorts guilty in the coup and the kidnap-murder. On the 20th, CIA records showed headquarters badgering the field for news of "whatever events may have occurred 19 October." because CIA officials "must respond during morning 20 October to queries from high levels." By definition, high levels meant only Kissinger and, probably, Haig, next to Nixon himself. According to CIA testimony, they not only knew of the plots but were eager for the news the next morning. Karamessines met with Haig on October 19, he testified, on an occasion when he would have given a complete report of the ongoing kidnap plans. ("This is all very new to me," Haig said when questioned about the meeting. He had "no recollection" of plots, money or kidnaping.) At two A.M. on October 22. CIA-supplied machine guns were delivered to plotters in a remote section of Santiago. Six hours later, conspirators stopped Schneider's car, and when the general resisted, he was shot on the spot. He was killed with a handgun, but as Powers wrote, "If the CIA did not actually shoot General Schneider, it is probably fair to say that he would not have been shot without the CIA."

After Schneider's death, the Chilean army rallied to its new command and remained for a time apolitical. Track II, as Phillips described it, had "no more rails," and Washington's opposition settled into longer-run isolation of the Allende regime. The policy now rechristened destabilization, over the next three years there would, indeed, be an effort to "make the economy scream," as aid, trade and monetary relations, once a major portion of U. S. help in the Western Hemisphere, were slashed. Discreet liaison continued with the military, and encouragement was given the Chilean elements chafing under Allende's own financial mismanagement.

Although no CIA track could be documented by Congressional investigators looking into the 1973 military coup that eventually overthrew and murdered Allende midway through his term. the former U. S. Ambassador in Chile reportedly contended that as many as nine assassination attempts were triggered by Track II. including one against Allende himself. Officially, the 1975 Senate inquiry found no evidence of direct CIA involvement, but there were also investigators who believed that Haig and Kissinger not only had known about but had sanctioned an effort to kill the Chilean president. In any case, the junta that took power was decidedly conservative and pro-U. S. It was also one of the world's most savage, but the 40 Committee called no meetings to mourn the extinction of human rights, political parties or an independent press in Chile after 1973 as it had once met in alarm over Allende.

Was it Haig's policy as well as Kissinger's and Nixon's? Or was he, as he claimed so vaguely before Congressional questioners, merely the neutral staff blotter? The CIA officers who worked closest with him, who took his calls and gave him their briefings, obviously felt, as Phillips said, that he, too, had "launched" the policy. But while the responsible CIA officers spoke candidly about Track II and Schneider's murder in the later hearings, Haig would always shirk accountability. The assassination was "a profound and unacceptable mistake," he said once at his confirmation. But when he was asked at the same moment whether or not the U. S. had done anything "at all improper" in trying to overthrow Allende in 1970, he replied, "I would not be the one to give you a blanket answer to that." It was not an answer he would give, blanket or otherwise. Intervention was a "high-risk" policy, he told a Senator at another point. The effort in Chile not only had not worked, it had been found out. Still, as he lectured the committee, there were "vital interests" to be protected by unusual means. "There are many ways," he told the Senators in a moral from his Chilean experience, "to skin a cat."

Haig was discovered by the outside world--in the form of The New York Times--on the eve of his advance trip to China at New Year 1972. "A button down ivy-league-style career Army officer, who is, above all, loyal to the next man up in the chain of command," has a "passion for anonymity . . . thrives under pressure" and advances by "not disagreeing on issues," said a profile in terms that would fix his public image for years. Califano pronounced him "the ultimate professional . . . doing the job and doing it right." The man who kept "the machinery moving" while Kissinger dazzled with diplomacy, Haig was, thought the times, "the next best thing" to his celebrated boss. The profile noted that after barely two years as a brigadier general, he was again up for promotion. "Selection boards pay attention to commendation letters from the White House [and] recognize who a guy works for," offered a senior Pentagon official.

In March, Haig was made a major general, at the age of 47 one of the youngest in the Army and now far ahead of men who had ranked higher academically in his West Point class. Looking at him from the inside that winter, Zumwalt drew a picture more candid than that of the Times. Haig "manages details and routine expertly," remarked the admiral, but also was "extremely ambitious" and "coveted daily contact with the President." As for Kissinger's relationship with his "next-best" aide, "his dependence on Al was matched by his suspicion of Al," Zumwalt thought. And there was more than simply keeping "the machinery moving" when Kissinger was away at secret statesmanship. "The decision about which one of them would take a specific trip overseas," noted the Naval chief, "often depended on whether Kissinger's love of high-pressure, highly visible diplomatic activity outweighed or was outweighed by his fear of leaving the President alone with Haig for several days."

By the spring of 1972, Kissinger's fear seems to have been justified, if not fully realized. Haig--the clerk of the taps and the envoy to Cambodia, the deputy for a coup in Chile and the discreet ally of Haldeman, the man of action who worked late and self-effacingly while Kissinger courted both opponents and personal celebrity--already stood out as the only other foreign-policy advisor trusted or preferred by Nixon. Had the relationship climaxed there, Haig almost certainly would have gone on eventually, like other favored military aides to the President, to sure rewards of rank and office in the bureaucracy. But Haig's influence and symbolic standing with the vulnerable leader were now fortified by an extraordinary series of events.

With the long-forecast North Vietnamese offensive across the demilitarized zone on March 30, 1972, the Administration began more than nine months of alternating negotiation and ferocity, which ended in the final U.S. settlement with Hanoi and in which Haig played a central, sometimes decisive part. Hanoi's thrust that spring threatened to collapse the ever-fragile structure of South Vietnam. Launched just after Nixon's triumphal visit to Peking and on the eve of the long-planned SALT summit in Moscow, the attack also stood to make brutal mockery of the most sensational White House diplomacy, not to mention the President's re-election prospects, which he had deliberately tied to his foreign-policy finesse. Through April, North Vietnamese troops took Quang Tri and swept south to occupy a major portion of the country just below the 17th Parallel. Kissinger, meanwhile, flew to Moscow and Paris in a desperate effort to stave off the advance and save his secret diplomacy on all fronts. His concessions at that stage were historic. To both the Russians and the North Vietnamese he formally renounced the old tenet of mutual withdrawal, a point he had been coyly ignoring for some months. Without bothering to consult his ally in Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu, he now agreed to the presence in the South of at least 100,000 North Vietnamese troops. It was a surrender that ever after haunted his diplomacy, became an important factor in Haig's rise and would sooner or later doom any post-settlement non-Communist regime in Vietnam.

On the crest of its battlefield victories, however, Hanoi for the moment ignored the capitulation and stalled the talks. And while Kissinger negotiated vainly in a Paris suburb, Nixon's diary of deliberations back in the White House bore out vividly what Zumwalt and others saw as the famous advisor's worst fears at court. "I had a long talk with Haig, in which we concluded that we had to have a two-day [bombing] strike . . ." Nixon wrote before Kissinger left Paris. "Haig emphasized that even more important than how Vietnam comes out," the President went on, "is for us to handle these matters in a way that I can survive in office." The President noted that Kissinger, the diplomat, was "understandably obsessed" with a negotiated settlement; his deputy, the general, was obviously of sterner stuff. When Kissinger returned, empty-handed, to Washington late in the evening of May second, he found Haig together with a belligerent Nixon, a rump Government of two bent on a new onslaught of American bombing.

Nixon's resort to escalation was instinctive and practiced. He proceeded to resurrect the three-year-old plans of the September Group to bomb the North intensively and mine Haiphong Harbor. As Nixon then ordered the bombing and his blustery Treasury Secretary, John Connally, joined Haig's advocacy in the face of the usual equivocations of Rogers and Laird and the transparent public-relations straddling of Kissinger, the moral the President drew was momentous. Haig and Connally clearly personified that private bravado, the marriage of machismo and politics, that was the darker side, the longing, of the man they served. "Only Al and John understand," Nixon told Charles Colson that May, adding wistfully, "You know, Chuck, those are the only two men around here qualified to fill this job when I step down."

Vietnam was the arena of Haig's continuing rise and crucial, somewhat serpentine policy influence through 1972. The North Vietnamese offensive petered out in front of Hué, and Haig, believing that Hanoi was "beginning to back down" because of the bombing, was in Saigon twice that summer, urging the reeling Thieu regime to invade the North. He returned home to Nixon with the usual optimistic report. At the same moment, however, Haig was complaining to Zumwalt that he "had to exercise considerable dexterity to stiffen the President's backbone when the President was in a bug-out mood." His chief vacillated between the urge to "get out of Vietnam as fast as possible at almost any price," explained Haig, "and an equally strong impulse 'to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.'" Nixon, it seemed, was not always as strong as he had been in May, and Kissinger was not the only fearful courtier. Haig "lived in dread," he told Zumwalt during lunch at the Pentagon, "that some day the President would be with Henry instead of him when the bug-out mood came on and Henry would be unable to handle it."

At the same lunch, Haig also asked Zumwalt what he should do next in his career. The admiral needled him about taking an obscure post in Panama to earn his way into high command, evoking a "totally untrue-to-life picture of Al Haig, chin in hand, thoughtfully watching the Gatun Locks slowly open and then close." But if the pre-Nixon Haig might have come to languish in the Canal Zone, that was by now only his Navy rival's fantasy. On September 7, 1972, a grateful, admiring Commander in Chief lifted Haig to full general and, over the heads of some 240 senior officers, to Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army.

Gulley, like others, believed that at that juncture, Haig already "saw what might be coming" with Watergate (just two and a half months since the breakin, the pressure was already beginning to mount) and "started making plans to get the hell away from the politicians." But that assumption seems largely hindsight. There were other reasons for his ostensible departure. After all, he had wrung four stars from his White House patrons and may well have contemplated leaving the court intrigues with some natural relief. More to the point, his departure was not his choice alone. Kissinger had persistently urged his appointment, in part to dispose of an obvious rival but also, as he told Nixon, to have "one of your men" at the upper reaches of a recalcitrant Pentagon, whose spies had been uncovered in the very bosom of the NSC. Intent on subduing the bureaucracy in his second term and replacing those who "stick the knife in" with proven loyalists, Nixon agreed to the transfer on the condition that Haig remain at the White House for what loomed as the final round of Vietnam negotiations. The irony was that the promotion only positioned Haig to rival Kissinger more powerfully than ever, for it opened his avenue back into the White House he was supposed to be leaving.

The promotion also provoked the expected grumbling and what the well-connected Gulley called "stiff resistance" in the Army officer corps. But Time welcomed the "glamorous and politically sophisticated" Haig as "just what the Army needed," and the nomination sailed through the pliant Senate Armed Services Committee in early October with only perfunctory questions. Typically, the Senators at the same hearing penalized the already demoted and retired Air Force Lieutenant General John Lavelle another star for his involvement in unauthorized bombing in Southeast Asia, while passing over Haig in willing obliviousness to his role as one of the three men ultimately responsible for American policy in the region.

Early in October, Kissinger was back in Paris, still hoping for an agreement. He also knew it was time to tell Thieu the bitter news of concession on the North Vietnamese troops in his country. For those first few days, Haig was silent, all but invisible. Then, on October 12, Kissinger and Haig flew home to meet with Nixon. To celebrate what he perceived as a near-complete settlement, the President ordered steaks and Château Lafite-Rothschild, while, he noticed, "Haig seemed rather subdued." Haig "honestly felt this was a good deal for Thieu," he told Nixon in Kissinger's presence, though he was worried about how Thieu himself would react. The next morning, a smiling Haig, Kissinger and Rogers were photographed as they breakfasted with Nixon. The general repeated his support of the agreement, and Kissinger then flew off on a taut schedule for Paris, Saigon and, finally, Hanoi for the dramatic conclusion of the settlement.

A week later, as the world soon learned, Kissinger's timetable came apart in Saigon as Thieu was asked to sign the fail accompli of a peace treaty he had never seen or approved. The blunder was one of the worst among many in America's diplomacy in Asia, and it was largely the result of Kissinger's heedless momentum and of more than a year of his calculated avoidance and duplicity with a temperamental client, whose culture and politics--as Kissinger should have known by now--required preparation and prolonged cajolery. Yet, like most of their record since 1969, the notoriety of Kissinger's failure obscured how much of the tragedy could be traced as well to Haig.

To add to Kissinger's problems in Saigon, his cable traffic with the White House suddenly presented him with new complications. On October 20, Haig arranged for Nixon to see General Westmoreland, the former commander in Vietnam who had recently retired as Army Chief of Staff. As Kissinger described it later. Westmoreland now "suddenly surfaced objections" to the settlement all but concluded with Hanoi and being urged on Saigon, a turn Kissinger found "amazing," if only because the Joint Chiefs had all endorsed the main terms for the past two years. Without telling Kissinger about the Westmoreland conversation or the gravity of a potential Pentagon defection on the peace treaty, Nixon and Haig then sent him a cable stressing "solidarity" with Thieu and the necessity of Saigon's "wholehearted" acceptance.

At Kissinger's reports to Washington of what he saw as "the first hints" of Thieu's opposition, Haig cabled the American party in Saigon on October 21 that in case of a "blow-up," the U.S. should "denounce" the political terms of the settlement entirely and attack Hanoi's previous concessions as perfidy. Determined to resist "proclivities in Washington to reverse course," Kissinger replied to Washington that it should not "poormouth an agreement that we will not be able to improve significantly and that we should use instead as a tremendous success."

With Thier's refusal the crucible, Kissinger and Haig now fought out a transpacific war of telegrams over the peace settlement. The mood came through in the careful language of Kissinger's memories, in which "tempers were further frayed [and] rose dangerously on both sides [in the] escalating misunderstanding." At one point, the protocol and the pretense of responsiblity broke down altogether, and Kissinger noted almost casually "a flood of cables from Haig in Nixon's name." How often they had acted in Nixon's name--from the taps, to Chile to myriad other policies--in the same pre-emption Kissinger now disdained when the orders were aimed at him.

In his own memoirs, Nixon later claimed authorship, of course, of all those October cables to Kissinger, but his diary makes Haig's role too plain. As Kissinger pressed Thieu, Haig brought the President a stream of intelligence about prospective Communist terrorism after the cease-fire. "Haig was seriously concerned," Nixon recorded, adding in a diary entry his fear of a "murderous blood bath." Watching from the Pentagon, the attentive Zumwalt described it more bluntly: "Haig thought that Kissinger was going too far and giving up too much--he talked the President into backing off his time schedule. ..."

By October 23, Kissinger's mission was obviously at an end, hoisted on its own folly in Saigon and nakedly undercut at home. There was to be no more pressure on Thieu for the moment, and the final leg to Hanoi was canceled as Kissinger was called back to Washington. But before he returned, the Harvard professor who had hired Haig and had helped him come so far sent the general an extraordinary cable that was an epitaph for the moment and, in some ways, for the moment and, in some ways, for Haig's undreamed-of future as Secretary of State. "As for your characterization of the content of the agreement, I would like to recall your view that it was a good agreement when we concluded it," Kissinger told him in a bitter reminder of the meeting on October 12 and their breakfast on the 13th. "It has since been greatly improved. . . ." And then the cutting point of intellect and station:

Many wars have been lost by untoward timidity. But enormous tragedies have also been produced by the inability of military people to recognize when the time for a settlement had arrived.

There followed Kissinger's famous and all-too-premature pronouncement that "peace is at hand," the temporary collapse of negotiations as Nixon was distracted in the last days of the Presidential campaign and the continuation of the war while the President was re-elected by an overwhelming margin. To those observing Haig most closely during these weeks, his exact position and motives remained uncertain, though there was evident conviction in his aversion to the peace treaty. No doubt there was also a bureaucratic challenge to Kissinger in the manipulation of Nixon, as well as some element of personal revenge on the man who had so often humiliated him.

Early in December, Kissinger was back in Paris, facing a new intransigency by Hanoi as well as by Saigon. But this time, as a precaution, he had Haig at his side. Thought too powerful to be left in the White House, Haig had accepted Kissinger's assignment with alacrity, ironically because even his own feared access to the mercurial President had become sporadic. While other courtiers crowded around the throne, Haig's work in Paris was perfunctory, including what Kissinger acidly described as writing cables to the White House "in his best Army prose."

On December ninth, however, Haig was back in Washington as the talks sputtered, and he met Kissinger at Andrews Air Force Base on the night of the 13th, when the advisor returned once more in diplomatic failure. As they drove back to the White House, Haig told him what had been implicit since the October fiasco. The general favored large-scale B-52 raids against the North Vietnamese. Coming back from Andrews that night, Kissinger knew once again that the decision to attack had been made essentially without him. Haig's influence in the President's anxious impulse to strike out was so clear that their meeting with Nixon the next morning was almost pro forma. Haig advocated a "massive shock," Nixon "accepted Haig's view" and "I went along with it," Kissinger wrote afterward. Four days later, Nixon ordered Linebacker II, the B-52s dropping their payloads on Hanoi and other targets in a saturation pattern a mile by a half mile, leaving untold civilian casualties (with neither side, for its own reasons, admitting the toll) and paying with the loss of 26 planes, 93 missing airmen and 31 more U. S. prisoners. The diplomacy ended in 12 days of barbarism in the skies over North Vietnam, partly as the price of Kissinger's deceiving Thieu. But Haig had watched the lethal course of that deception no less intimately than Kissinger, and now the bombers flew again, not because the responsible Cabinet officers urged it or because Kissinger schemed at it but because the President had "accepted" the view of his court general.

As the bombs fell and public outrage grew, Kissinger felt a "painful rift" with Nixon, while Haig was dispatched on another mission to Saigon. "Still the man to carry the message to Garcia," as Nixon described him at the moment, Haig this time took a virtual ultimatum to Thieu to prepare for the same agreement he had rejected in October--or face a separate peace between Hanoi and Washington. In mid-December and again four weeks later, as the North agreed once more to the old terms in Paris, Haig confronted Thieu with Nixon's threat. And on January 21, the South Vietnamese relented, much as they would have been compelled to do months earlier, before the Christmas bombing, had Kissinger--and Haig--practiced different politics and diplomacy.

The rest was almost Greek tragedy, the fate of their policy ordained in its flaws. After they had promised Thieu massive future aid in the bargain, their savage bombing and furtive diplomacy only provoked a Congressional backlash that eventually choked off the aid and left South Vietnam hostage to the cruel court politics of October and December 1972 in the Nixon White House. "There are at least two words no one can use to characterize the outcome of that twofaced policy," thought Zumwalt, ironically echoing critics on the left as well as in the Pentagon. "One is peace. The other is honor."

But while the Vietnam negotiations were twisting to their close, Haig, the bureaucratic Everyman, was at last formally transferred back to the Army as Vice-Chief of Staff. In an Oval Office ceremony on January 4, 1973, Nixon awarded him a Distinguished Service Medal and lauded him as a "superb military commander" and "a statesman and diplomat." Haig would need to call on all of those qualities--and more--sooner than he knew. For just four months later, he was summoned again to the White House for the most sensitive assignment he had ever handled--as Nixon's Chief of Staff during the final siege of Watergate.

Epilog

A gray, humid August morning in Washington. On the south lawn of the White House, poised at the end of a red carpet, an Army helicopter waits for its final passenger. The familiar, slightly stooped figure climbs to the doorway of the craft, pauses, turns for a last time toward the small, silent crowd gathered near the house at the edge of the lawn, thrusts his arms up and out once more in characteristic, now defiant and poignant V-for-victory signs and vanishes inside. The helicopter lifts slowly and wheels away to the south. Olive-drab against the overcast sky, it soon recedes in the distance beyond the chalky spike of the Washington Monument and then, suddenly, is out of sight.

It is the finale of a disgraced Presidency, the close of a remarkable era in American Government, and there is a sense of anticlimax and irony about the event. To one onlooker, the historic passenger, with all the turmoil he embodied, seemed "to have just floated away." Long afterward, the new President, an earnest but vulnerable successor, remembered another symbolic ending as he turned away from the disappearing helicopter and the "guards rolled up the red carpet behind us."

Yet inside the White House, later that day, there is still another last act. In the small private-secretary's room adjacent to the Oval Office, cool and air-conditioned against the rising heat outside, an aide to the new President smells the acrid, unmistakable odor of papers burning in the fireplace. That evening, the office of the ex-President's Chief of Staff and most trusted aide is crowded with bulging "burn bags." Routinely sealed and then shredded and burned, such sacks ostensibly hold duplicates or other superfluous classified material. This August night, however, there are far more documents to be destroyed than any day's official effluence. At the end of the worst, most corrosive political scandal in modern American history, a scandal swarming with deception and vital missing evidence, the Chief of Staff has clearly purged his files.

When the new President is anxiously warned about the ominous bags, he wearily shuns what may be discovered. "I don't want to know about that," he is said to tell an assistant. "Just let him get 'em out of this house."

"Nixon's chief foreign-policy advisor talked sneeringly with his own staff about 'our meatball President.'"