Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [77]
To many outsiders, Haig had seemed like the perfect secretary of state when the president nominated him to the post the previous December. During his years in the army, he had risen quickly through the ranks, earning a number of decorations; later, as President Nixon’s chief of staff, he earned the respect of many for his part in holding the government together during the Watergate scandal. From 1974 to 1979, he served as supreme allied commander of NATO forces and became well known in European capitals. A staunch conservative who took a hard line toward the Soviet Union, he was tough, intelligent, and fearless.
Richard Allen, however, was not an admirer. Allen had worked briefly with Haig during the Nixon years and considered him too blunt and bullheaded and volatile. As well, he felt that the backbiting culture of the Nixon White House had permanently damaged Haig’s ability to collaborate with others. On a more personal level, Allen was privately concerned that a heart bypass operation in April 1980 had made Haig even more erratic, if that was possible.
Only weeks into Reagan’s presidency, a number of others in the administration had come to share Allen’s views. Haig was constantly trying to augment his own authority, and he had upset some of Reagan’s closest advisors by raising the unlikely prospect of U.S. military intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean at a time when the administration was working hard to keep the country’s focus on its economic message. As for Haig, he wasn’t happy either. He felt the Troika—in a recent conversation with Allen, he had called them a “three-headed monster”—went out of its way to interfere with his relationship with the president, making it difficult for him to do his job. Only two months into his tenure, he worried that he wasn’t one of Reagan’s confidants. He also didn’t believe that he was the president’s primary foreign policy advisor, which was the role he’d expected to play as secretary of state.
Just a week earlier, Haig’s relationship with others in the administration had grown so acrimonious that he’d nearly resigned. What sparked his frustration was a bureaucratic spat with the White House over who would be in charge in the event of a crisis. Word of the battle quickly leaked out, and Haig didn’t help his cause when he criticized the administration’s policy-making process during a congressional hearing. That same day, the White House issued an official statement declaring that Vice President Bush would play a major role in all crisis planning and would take the lead if a crisis occurred in the president’s absence. Afterward, Reagan and Haig smoothed over their differences—the president even issued a public statement declaring his confidence in Haig—and in his diary Reagan recorded the hope that “the Haig issue is behind us.”
But Haig remained aggrieved, and now, only days later, he overheard a conversation in the Situation Room that immediately got his back up. Speaking to Allen, Secretary of Defense Weinberger said that he would tell his commanders “to get alerts to the Strategic Air Command and such other units that seem … desirable at this point.”
“What kind of alert, Cap?” interrupted Haig, sounding incredulous. Any change in the status of U.S. forces might be detected by the Soviets, and Haig was concerned that they would respond by raising their own alert levels. If the alerts spiraled and the escalation became public, tensions and fears would rise worldwide. In Haig’s view, the potential consequences of raising the alert level were incalculable.
“It’s a standby alert,” Weinberger said. “Just a standby alert.”
“You’re not raising readiness?” Haig asked.
“No, no, no.… The alert, they’ll probably put themselves