|
 Alexander
M. Haig Jr. was a United States Army officer, Secretary Of State under
President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), and White House Chief Of Staff
during the final months of the administration of President Richard M.
Nixon (1969-1974). Haig was credited with keeping the U.S. government
running while Nixon became ever more deeply embroiled in the Watergate
scandal.
Secretary Haig was born in Bala-Cynwyd, a suburb of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the United States
Military Academy at West Point in1947, launching a distinguished
military career in which he eventually achieved the rank of four-star
general.Haig graduated from the Naval War College in 1960, earned a
master's degree from Georgetown University in1961, and attended the
Army War College in 1966. In late 1968, Henry Kissinger, who was then
reorganizing the foreign affairs staff for President-elect Nixon,
appointed Haig as his military adviser on the National Security
Council. In 1970 Haig was named deputy assistant to the president for
national security affairs, and his diplomatic authority expanded to
include secret peace talks in Paris aimed at ending the Vietnam War
(1959-1975).
When Nixon's top two aides—White House Chief of Staff H.
R. Haldeman
and domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman—resigned in 1973 amid
growing evidence of their involvement in the Watergate cover-up, Haig
reluctantly left the military to become Nixon's chief of staff.
Haig reportedly played a significant role in talking the
president into
resigning, which Nixon did on August 9, 1974. Six weeks later, Haig
resumed his military career as supreme allied commander of North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe. Haig was
appointed secretary of state in 1981 during President Reagan's first
term in office, but resigned in 1982 amid disagreements with other
administration officials. He wrote one book about the Reagan
administration, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (1984), and
ran an unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican nomination for
president. In 1992 Haig published his memoirs, Inner Circles: How
America Changed the World.
|