Haig’s Tracks on U.S. Policy

As a retired Foreign Service officer concerned mostly with Latin America, I join Roger Morris in deploring the sinister antics of Alexander Haig.

To that list of his sins and follies, I would add his public demotion of President Carter’s human rights policy. Coming at the start of Haig’s tenure as secretary of state, I believe this significantly encouraged the worst excesses of the Salvadoran death squads.

Also occurring on Haig’s watch was the incredibly stupid decision to involve Argentine “security advisers” in training the Nicaraguan contras and the Salvadoran police forces.

Our unseemly wooing of the Argentine military junta, especially by Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, may well have been a crucial factor in the junta’s ill-fated decision to invade the Falklands.

In subverting the National Security Council, however, the original villains, I think, were Richard Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, motivated by their passion for power and secrecy. By designating Kissinger as his assistant for national security affairs, while also letting him act--for all important policy purposes--as secretary of state, Nixon was able to shield himself from congressional involvement in foreign affairs, since presidential staffers, unlike Cabinet members, could not be called up to the hill.

One early and blatant example of the misuse of the National Security Council by Nixon and Kissinger was their ordering of the CIA--behind the back of our ambassador--to destabilize the government of Chile’s Salvador Allende, which probably would soon have fallen anyway.

The mind boggles at the thought of Haig as President. This prospect, however, looms less menacingly in the light of his diminished reputation after being exposed to a job of high visibility. This was when “Haigspeak” became the new standard for sheer, impenetrable bureaucratese. For all his eager-beaverness, he could not overcome his essential mediocrity nor come close to matching Kissinger’s intellect and prestige.

A caveat: In this “age of information,” perhaps all a politician needs is a TelePrompTer plus a noisy helicopter to shield him from irreverent questions.

MARSHALL PHILLIPS

Long Beach