Classic Insider-on-the-Outs : Haig Emerging as GOP’s Sharpest Critic of Reagan

Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. had just completed his standard campaign pitch to a late-afternoon coffee klatch here when a well-tailored woman asked how he felt about his successor’s handling of the secret U.S. arms sales to Iran.

“How could (Secretary of State) George Shultz have allowed Oliver North and John Poindexter to treat him so badly?” the woman began. “Why didn’t he resign?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Haig delivered a scathing judgment on one of the leading figures in the Reagan Administration. “Some people would rather be secretary of state than be right,” he quipped. “Not Al Haig.”

It is one of the great curiosities of the current political campaign that Haig--whom President Reagan selected to be the ranking member of his original Cabinet and who once hoped to be “the vicar” of Reagan’s foreign policy--is gradually emerging among the Republican presidential contenders as the most biting critic of the Reagan Administration’s performance and decision-making.

As he tours the nation these days, Haig is a lonely figure, a candidate with far less money or political organization than most of his rivals. Lacking a strong political base within the Republican Party, he is forced to plead with party regulars to consider his possible future appeal to independents and Democrats.

But his political isolation and his alienation from the Reagan White House--he was replaced as secretary of state after serving for 17 months--give Haig the freedom to speak out. And speak out he does.

Rarely does he let an opportunity slip by to deliver a negative verdict on the policies and the principal figures of the Reagan era. The one-time White House chief of staff and scion of the foreign-policy Establishment has become the classic insider-on-the-outs.

On the stump, Haig is the vicar of mordant sarcasm. His barbs extend to many aspects of American foreign policy. He blasts Reagan’s handling of arms-control negotiations at Reykjavik a year ago as “the near-miss” and terms the Administration’s actions to win the release of U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff from a Soviet prison “the non-deal deal.”

He voices frequent opposition to one of the linchpins of Reagan Administration foreign policy: covert aid to the Contras who are fighting the government of Nicaragua.

“When we claim the right to decide what kind of regime a government has in this hemisphere, we’re claiming a Brezhnev doctrine of our own,” he explains. Instead, Haig tells audiences, the United States should press Cuba and the Soviet Union to stay out of Central America.

He heaps scorn not only upon Shultz but also on many others of the President’s men, present and former.

He tells a Kiwanis Club luncheon in New Hampshire that Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III is a great lawyer but “doesn’t know anything about the bottom line.” David A. Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, kept quiet on the nation’s budget deficits until he was lured away by “big bucks on Wall Street,” Haig says.

As for Poindexter, the former national security adviser who testified last summer that he did not tell the President about the diversion of funds from Iran arms sales to Contras, Haig quips: “I worked with Poindexter. I don’t think he’d have crossed the street without permission.”

For all that, Haig insists he is not running against Reagan himself; he insists he is not about to commit “political hari-kari.” He points out that he campaigned for Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

“I am a strong and avid supporter of Ronald Reagan’s overall contribution, and that’s the renaissance of the American spirit,” Haig said in an interview. “. . . When I said I respect Ronald Reagan and I think he’s done more good than he has bad, I mean that.”

Nevertheless, Haig evidently remains on far better terms with associates of former President Richard M. Nixon, whom he served as chief of staff, than he does with the Reagan White House. According to one source in the Haig campaign, Haig talks regularly with Nixon on the telephone.

The list of financial contributors to Haig’s 1988 presidential campaign includes Nixon’s son-in-law, Edward F. Cox; his fund-raiser, Maurice H. Stans; his congressional lobbyist, William E. Timmons; one of his leading financial backers, Leonard K. Firestone, and the family of Nixon’s best friend, C.G. (Bebe) Rebozo.

Haig, 62, a West Point graduate who spent most of his career in the Army, rose to national prominence during the Nixon Administration, serving first as the top aide to National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger and then, in 1973-1974, as the White House chief of staff during the tumultuous final days of the Nixon term.

It was Haig who, on Nixon’s orders, fired Atty. Gen. Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Atty. Gen. William D. Ruckelshaus for refusing to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the “Saturday night massacre” of October, 1973. To this day, Haig says of that episode that “the true story has not been told.” “

After Nixon resigned, Haig was appointed NATO commander in Europe, where he served until 1979. When he returned to the United States, he briefly explored a bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination but ultimately supported Reagan.

As Reagan’s secretary of state, Haig seemed to be out of place from the start. His style was different. Haig cared about questions of authority and bureaucratic turf; Reagan and his aides tended to operate more informally. It was as if Gen. George S. Patton Jr. suddenly found himself trying to give orders in the script conferences of a Hollywood studio.

“Al Haig was the cream that rose to the top in a certain, different environment,” said Richard B. Williamson, who served as a staff aide in the Reagan White House while Haig was secretary of state. “You know, Henry Kissinger would lose his temper and threaten to resign occasionally. But President Reagan had a different style from President Nixon. He did not like confrontation. . . . Haig had a hard time changing from the Nixon-Kissinger style to the Reagan-California style.”

The tensions between Haig and the Reagan White House surfaced within hours after Reagan’s inaugural address, when Haig sought the President’s signature for a proposed presidential directive making Haig’s State Department preeminent over the Defense Department, CIA and all other U.S. agencies in the conduct of foreign policy.

Haig viewed the document as simply carrying out the President’s agreement to let him be “the vicar” of foreign policy. White House aides apparently viewed it as an effort at self-aggrandizement. The proposed order was shelved, and Haig was soon embarrassed by a White House announcement that Vice President George Bush would be put in charge of “crisis management” for foreign policy and national security.

Less than two months after taking office, Haig became embroiled in a new brouhaha over his authority, in the single episode for which his tenure in the Reagan Administration is most famous.

On March 30, 1981, a few hours after Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt at a time when Bush was out of town, Haig appeared in the White House press room, sweating and out of breath. He was asked who was making decisions.

“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order,” Haig declared. “. . . As of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending return of the vice president.”

The Constitution makes the secretary of state fifth in line of succession after the President, vice president, Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate.

During his current run for the presidency, Haig and his aides joke about the “I-am-in-control-here” incident in an effort to counteract negative public perceptions.

At a nursing home here in Manchester, for example, Haig strode up to registered nurse Diana Newman and asked what she does. “I’m in charge of medical care,” she replied. “Ohhh,” said Haig loudly, winking at onlookers. “I like someone in charge.”

In his campaign these days, Haig also raises on his own the touchy subject of his abrupt departure from the Reagan Administration, carefully emphasizing that he resigned because of policy disagreements and was not fired as a personality problem.

“I resigned . . . because of the misjudgments at the time of the Lebanon war,” he told a Jewish group in New Hampshire. “We snatched victory from Israel’s hands.”

(Three years ago, in his book “Caveat,” Haig wrote that on June 25, 1982, Reagan called him into the Oval Office and handed him a letter accepting his resignation. “The President was accepting a letter of resignation that I had not submitted,” Haig noted. By his account, he had previously told the President he could not continue as secretary of state “under present arrangements” and had volunteered to step aside after congressional elections in November, 1982.)

Haig’s campaign views defy ideological characterization. Although he argues that the United States should not try to undermine the Nicaraguan government, he told an interviewer: “I don’t want to say I’m like a goody two-shoes. I’m not. . . . The problem with covert (action) is, it’s only appropriate in what I call peripheral-interest issues.”

In fact, Haig tells campaign audiences that when the Iran-Contra affair broke, Reagan should have taken a tougher line: He should have fired not only North and Poindexter but “a Cabinet member or two” and taken full responsibility for the affair.

So far, Haig seems to have had trouble finding a constituency within the Republican Party to support such views.

He lacks any strong following among conservatives. His ties to Kissinger and the foreign policy Establishment make him immediately suspect to the New Right, and he has staked out a moderate stand on social issues as the only Republican candidate who does not support a constitutional amendment banning abortions.

At the same time, Haig has been unable to compete with Bush and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas for the allegiance of the party’s moderate wing. By Sept. 30, Bush had raised $12.6 million for his presidential campaign, Dole nearly $8 million and Haig $955,000.

Haig’s campaign staff has shown signs of disarray. His original campaign manager and treasurer both resigned last summer. Haig’s own son, Alex T. Haig, is now acting as his campaign manager.

Even if Haig’s campaign fails, he will have the satisfaction of airing his views on the conduct of American foreign policy and on the operations of the Reagan White House.

“Anything I was for (as secretary of state), the White House staff was against, whatever it was,” he mused in a recent interview. “I don’t know why. I think they saw me as a threat.”