Al Haig's dark side

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is now posthumously being recast as the quintessential soldier-patriot. The truth is, he had a dark side: wiretapping for Richard Nixon, facilitating the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified documents from the White House, sabotaging peace negotiations over Vietnam and détente with the USSR, and unduly hastening Nixon's exit from office. Haig is most lauded as the man who, according to conventional wisdom, held the presidency together during the depths of Watergate. But that evaluation obscures Haig's true role in the Nixon White House. He began to come to prominence in 1968 when Fritz Kraemer, who had helped Haig rise within the Pentagon, recommended him to another protégé, Henry Kissinger, as Kissinger's military advisor on the Nixon National Security Council. Haig shared Kraemer's militarist, simplistic, anti-Communist, anti-diplomacy view of the world and of America's place in it. At the NSC, even before Haig finished elbowing rivals out of the way to become Kissinger's deputy, he was up to his eyeballs in questionable activities, submitting the names of targets for the wiretapping of newsmen and NSC and Pentagon staffers, and reading the resulting wiretap logs, though he later denied involvement or said he had done everything at Nixon's request.