Legacy of a Two-Fisted Loser

By Ed Magnuson

One verdict: a Kissinger without the grand design

The luncheon meeting of the National Security Council at the White House last Friday seemed fairly routine.

The principal item of business was tying up some odds and ends on President Reagan's proposal for a sharp reduction in strategic nuclear arms. Several of the participants noted that there was something unusual about the meeting: it was not contentious. And that, they realized, was because Secretary of State Alexander Haig, even while arguing his department's position forcefully, seemed uncharacteristically at ease. Instead of thumping the table to emphasize his feelings, he viewed the problem with almost philosophical detachment. When a presidential decision went against him, he actually seemed to accept defeat gracefully.

Recalled one of the participants later: "For the first time at one of those meetings, he seemed at peace with himself. He seemed very un-Haig-like." Later that day, the reason for Haig's equanimity became obvious. The Secretary of State was about to leave the Government. Winning every argument no longer meant all that much to Haig; he could be generous to those he had long seen as his rivals for Reagan's attention.

Haig, in fact, had rarely been at peace with himself in perhaps the most difficult job in the Cabinet. He had not been at ease with the Administration he served, or with the world full of problems that he had hoped to help solve. He had vowed to take charge of U.S. foreign policy. Having done so, Haig inevitably saw each challenge to his authority, each questioning of his wisdom and experience as a battle to be waged and won. A general as well as diplomat, he yearned to snap out crisp orders and enjoy the quick responses. He tended to look at the world as an army commander would look at a battlefield, measuring supply lines, possible alliances and the adversary's ability to inflict or withstand judgment.

But Haig discovered, as he should have known after serving as Henry Kissinger's top assistant in the Nixon Administration and then as White House chief of staff during Watergate, that policymaking in Washington is a multiheaded monster. He could hardly have forgotten Kissinger's rantings at what the NSC chief saw as unwarranted interference by Secretary of State William Rogers. Or perhaps he learned too well from Kissinger that each little fight for bureaucratic turf, each squabble over who gets the fanciest globe-girdling aircraft, or who sleeps closest to the President in some foreign capital, can be of political as well as personal importance.

While Haig's contentiousness and personality were handicaps, he nevertheless fought a valiant fight against huge obstacles. A practical man with formidable experience in world affairs, he was up against a President and a White House staff with no similar background. Reagan and such influential Cabinet officials as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, moreover, were ideologues who tended to heed rather than carefully consider the likely result of their actions. Without the wholehearted backing of a strong President who had a clear vision of America's global role, Haig's attempt to forge a consistent policy was doomed.

Yet even some admiring colleagues who thought Haig was most often correct in his position on specific foreign issues, and generally on the wiser side of broad ideological debates within the Administration, felt a twinge of relief when he resigned. He had become what his critics in the White House called "the Haig problem" and what many of the faithful termed "the seventh-floor problem," referring to Haig's office at the State Department. As Winston Churchill once said about one of Haig's predecessors, John Foster Dulles: "He is the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet with him."

A Secretary of State must be an effective politician, combining the skills of combat with those of reconciliation, of confrontation with efficient management, of statesmanship with soldiering. This was extremely difficult for Haig, sometimes even impossible. When trying to manage and reconcile, he was frequently belligerent and aggressive. As a result, his allies--whether intramural or transatlantic--became nervous and his opponents more stubborn in their resistance. His frenetic style left a lingering resentment even after the contention of the moment had faded.

"Haig liked to win battles--over turf, over policy options, over appointments," said one of his colleagues. "But he had a way of making everything into a battle. Even if he was arguing for a compromise or a consensus, it sounded like a do-or-die struggle, in which the President should back him or face the collapse of the Western world."

This Haigian trait would have been a problem in any Administration. It was more so in the present one, since he had joined it as an outsider and was distrusted by some Reagan intimates because he had been a protege of Kissinger's. Reagan and his California coterie prefer an unemotional laid-back style of reaching decisions. They like to "round table" issues, meaning to discuss them, often repetitively and inconclusively, in committee meetings.

Quite aptly, Haig once referred to the White House as a "rain barrel" that, he thought, too often produced an echo rather than an action.

He tended to come on like gang busters rather than like one of the gang. At one recent NSC meeting, for example, Haig, whose position may have been justified, pounded the table and warned of "disaster" if the State Department did not prevail. Said a White House official afterward: "The President does not like that. He felt Haig was threatening him. Yet that has been Haig's style."

That same conflict between confrontation and accommodation, between the soldier and the diplomat, carried over into Haig's formulation and execution of foreign policy. This was most evident in two areas: in Central America and in East-West relations. In both cases, Haig's policies were basically sound and balanced. But he undercut his own position with overly apocalyptic, two-fisted rhetoric.

In Central America, Haig put an appropriate emphasis on the indigenous, socioeconomic roots of leftist revolution, placing them in perspective against the external threat of mischief making backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative, however tentative and inadequate in scope, is a positive Haig accomplishment. His personal and public diplomatic efforts involving the region, however, were mainly to proclaim that Central America was a showdown theater between the superpowers. That kind of talk cooled the support of Western allies and moderate nations in the hemisphere. It also virtually guaranteed that any leftward drift in El Salvador would be seen as much more of a setback for the U.S. than it might actually prove to be. "Al has been unintentionally part of the problem in our Central American policy," concedes one of his aides, "even though he has presided over initiatives and diplomacy that were part of the solution."

In East-West relations, Haig championed a moderate line within the Administration, urging arms-control negotiations and opposing tougher sanctions against the Soviet Union for its intervention in Poland. The European allies, who welcomed those positions, were sometimes turned off by Haig's strident anti-Soviet rhetoric and wondered how sincere he was about moderation.

Nevertheless, they were saddened by his departure from office. Moscow's diplomats also were puzzled. Haig often presented himself to Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in private meetings as a "good cop," playing himself off against Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's "bad cop." Still, one Soviet official who has seen Dobrynin's reports of these meetings concluded recently: "We listen to Haig. We watch his behavior. And we don't know whether we can regard him as much different from Weinberger or not."

In other areas, Haig's record contains both triumphs and failures. Reagan assumed office as an ardent advocate of U.S. support for Taiwan; Haig was reasonably successful in persuading his boss that open support for a "two China" policy would destroy America's crucial strategic partnership with Peking. Haig also played a vital role in modifying the President's early determination to impose a mechanistic, punitive kind of linkage on Soviet-American relations, and to shelve arms control indefinitely until the U.S. could regain superiority and negotiate from strength. Haig won a major victory in persuading Reagan to propose a more negotiable position in the strategic arms talks due to begin this week.

Most at home in dealing with matters that affected Europe, Haig never really mastered--as Kissinger so clearly did--the subtle and exasperating complexities of Middle East politics. His idea of a "strategic consensus" of moderate Arab states and Israel grew out of a kind of tunnel vision regarding the Soviet threat to the area. That threat does exist, but Haig failed to recognize, until quite recently, that the unresolved Palestinian problem created the conditions that allowed the Soviet Union to expand its influence in the Arab world. Beyond that, he took no practical steps to shape the consensus he sought.

When Haig took over the State Department, vowing to be Reagan's "vicar," he apparently assumed that he must do all the important things himself. His unwillingness to delegate chores to others became a serious flaw in his performance as a manager. The best example may be Haig's insistence on assuming a staggering shuttle diplomacy chore: trying to arrange a negotiated settlement after the Falkland Islands takeover by Argentina. He made six flights between Washington, London and Buenos Aires, covering 32,965 miles. Haig really cannot be blamed for the fact that the effort failed. Still, if he had used as special envoy or the U.S. ambassadors in Buenos Aires and London, the failure would not have been so damaging to U.S. prestige. "Al had to do it himself, by himself," notes one of his advisers. "He's got this thing about coming to the rescue. Maybe it's the Kissinger legacy, the Lone Ranger thing. But I think it's something deeper."

Looking back at Haig's record at State, Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard, concludes that Haig was indeed mainly a creation of Kissinger. "He was Kissinger minus the grand design," contends Hoffmann. "Haig's policies were defined largely by what he learned from Kissinger." Hoffmann thumbnails the key similarities as follows. On U.S.-Soviet relations: "Be tough. But keep negotiating." On Western Europe: "The best way to deal with the Europeans is not to brutalize them." On Central America: "When faced with even the most minute challenge, hit hard." On the Middle East: "A generally pro-Israel line."

Hoffmann cites the Administration's recent willingness to enter into arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union as Haig's major accomplishment, but warns that "the battle is still going on for Reagan's soul." Hoffmann is not yet certain that Haig "has converted the President to arms control and convinced him that the U.S. must keep talking to the Soviets."

Clearly, Haig tried in too acrimonious a manner to give U.S. foreign policy a cohesiveness that it sorely needs and, in failing to do so, only dramatized the internal conflicts of the Administration. Yet Haig also faced a problem that has not yet been solved. It is that no one is clearly in charge. The Defense and State Departments have sharply contrasting perspectives on world affairs. Rarely, if ever, has there been an Administration headed by a President and a White House inner circle that is less equipped to reconcile those differences. The result is a gaping vacuum at the center. And that, of course, was not Al Haig's fault.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Strobe Talbott and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

With reporting by Strobe Talbott, Gregory H. Wierzynski

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