Reagan: The Life (58 page)

“What it all meant, what it all served, who was turning the faucets, were questions that could not be answered with certainty,” Haig reflected. His protests to Baker, Meese, and the other staffers yielded nothing. “Al, it’s just newspaper talk,” Meese told him. “Don’t pay any attention.” The leaks continued.

Reagan’s practice was to ignore intra-administration squabbling. “
Sit down and work it out” was his standard response. Yet he wondered why Haig, of all those in the administration, seemed so beset. Haig complained at discovering secondhand that George Bush was being named chairman of the administration’s crisis council, a post that would normally have been held by Dick Allen as national security adviser. “
Al thinks his turf is being invaded,” Reagan remarked in his diary. “We chose George because Al is wary of Dick. He talked of resigning. Frankly I think he’s seeing things that aren’t there. He’s secretary of state and no one is intruding on his turf. Foreign policy is his, but he has half the cabinet teed off.”

Haig repeatedly threatened to resign, and Reagan repeatedly talked him out of it. But one thing and then another kept popping up. Reagan, for obvious reasons, didn’t see Haig’s overwrought performance on the day the president was shot, but he heard about it afterward. And he heard about it again, and again. In November 1981 he got a call from Haig, who had just found out that columnist Jack Anderson was going to report that the secretary of state would be fired shortly. Anderson’s source was an unnamed White House official. Reagan assured Haig that there was no truth to the story. He called Anderson and told him that Haig was the best secretary of state the country had had in years. Anderson killed his column and ran Reagan’s endorsement instead. “
Of course he wouldn’t reveal the White House source,” Reagan remarked in his diary.

Reagan didn’t bother trying to discover the source. But he gradually concluded that something about Haig caused unresolvable friction. Amid the Falklands crisis Haig got into a carping match with Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose sympathy toward Argentina angered Margaret Thatcher and the British as well. Thatcher complained to Reagan that Kirkpatrick had attended a dinner hosted by the Argentine ambassador even as the Argentine invasion of the Falklands unfolded. From Haig’s perspective,
Kirkpatrick’s actions and statements cast doubt on his ability to speak for the president in his efforts to defuse the crisis.

Reagan tried to get Haig and Kirkpatrick to work together. He met separately with the two and urged them to display greater team spirit. He judged the meetings a success. “
I think we can get a lid on it with no further damage,” he remarked to himself.

He was wrong. Haig grew ever more convinced that the White House staff was conspiring to do him in. His shuttle diplomacy between Britain and Argentina began just as Reagan was to leave for some meetings with friendly Caribbean leaders. “
I was startled to hear reports from the White House that I had undertaken the Falklands mission as a means of upstaging Ronald Reagan in his visits to
Jamaica and
Barbados,” Haig recalled. “The White House term for my peace mission, I was told, was ‘grandstanding.’ ” He read a report in the
New York Times
that he had refused an airplane from among those assigned to the administration and insisted on something fancier. In fact he had. But the issue wasn’t style or comfort. “The issue was working space and communications.” The plane he wanted was better equipped. Haig declined to level accusations regarding this leak, but one of his assistants told a reporter that the
Times
story must have been planted by Jim Baker.

The charge simply fed the fire. Unidentified White House officials told reporter
Hedrick Smith that Haig’s job depended on the success of his Falklands peace mission. “
You can say Haig needs a win,” one of them declared. When Haig didn’t deliver, the secretary heard the knives being sharpened. “
Shortly after my return,” he recounted, “a lifelong friend who has never failed to tell me the truth, and who is in a position to know the truth, called to say that there had been a meeting in the White House at which my future had been discussed. ‘Haig is going to go, and go quickly,’ James Baker was quoted by my friend as saying. ‘And we are going to make it happen.’ ”

B
AKER DID WANT
him to go, but chiefly because he had become a distraction and a burden to the president. “
He was suspicious of everybody,” Baker recalled of Haig. “He was fighting with everybody.” Baker later granted that Haig had some cause for complaint. He told of a day when Michael Deaver dressed up in a gorilla costume and paraded outside a cabinet meeting, in a gibe at Haig’s belief that the White House staff were out to get him. On a London visit Deaver deliberately assigned Haig a
military helicopter that was noisy and windy, in contrast to the quiet civilian model the White House staff rode in. “I don’t blame him for being pissed off,” Baker said. But he added, “I had nothing to do with it.”

Whoever was responsible, Haig’s days were numbered. The Falklands War was just ending when Haig presented the president with a list of the slights he had suffered at the hands of White House staff and other cabinet secretaries. “
Mr. President,” Haig said, “I want you to understand what’s going on around you. I simply can no longer operate in this atmosphere. It’s too dangerous. It doesn’t serve your purposes. It doesn’t serve the American people.” He again offered to resign but said his resignation would not take effect until after the November elections, to avoid embarrassment to the president.

“
The Al H. situation is coming to a head,” Reagan wrote. “I have to put an end to the turf battles we’re having and his almost paranoid attitude.” The president thought it a shame that things had grown so fractious. Describing a meeting of the NSC on the Lebanon crisis, he wrote, “Al H. made great good sense on this entire matter. It’s amazing how sound he can be on complex international matters but how utterly paranoid with regard to the people he must work with.”

Haig apparently expected Reagan to refuse his resignation, as he had done before. But the president decided he had had enough of the Haig problem. Haig was getting too much attention, for the wrong reasons. Reagan had no particular policy quarrels with Haig, but he didn’t like being overshadowed. He told Haig he would read his bill of particulars and get back to him.

He called Haig into the Oval Office the next day. He handed him an unsealed envelope. Haig read the letter it contained. “
Dear Al,” it said, “It is with utmost regret that I accept your letter of resignation.”

Haig was nonplussed. “The president was accepting a letter of resignation I had not submitted,” he recalled. Haig realized that an immediate, unexplained resignation in the middle of a foreign policy crisis would not look good on his résumé, and he requested time to compose a letter. He explained that he would ascribe his departure to policy differences.

Reagan nodded. But while the secretary was finding the words to frame his departure, the president called George Shultz, formerly secretary of labor and secretary of the Treasury under
Richard Nixon. Reagan had met Shultz in Sacramento when the then governor had some questions about the finances of government. The meeting lasted three hours. “
He gave me the most intense grilling I ever had on the federal government,”
Shultz recalled later. Shultz had guessed that Reagan wanted to run for president. But Reagan’s interrogation signaled something more substantive. “He wanted to
do
the job,” Shultz said. Subsequently, Shultz invited Reagan to a gathering of academic and policy types at Shultz’s home on the campus of Stanford University. “He was impressive,” Shultz remembered. Reagan had strong views, which wasn’t unusual in a politician. But Reagan’s views were remarkably well-informed. “He understood why he had the views.”

At the time of Haig’s departure, Shultz was president of Bechtel Corporation, a global construction and engineering firm. Reagan’s call reached him in a meeting in London. “
Al Haig has resigned,” Reagan said, “and I want you to be my secretary of state.”

Shultz wasn’t sure he had heard the president correctly. “Haig has already resigned?” he asked Reagan. “It has already happened?”

Reagan fudged. “He has resigned,” he said. “It hasn’t been announced, but it has happened. I have accepted his resignation, and I want you to replace him.”

Shultz suddenly realized that Reagan expected an immediate answer. “Mr. President, are you asking me to accept this job now, over the phone?”

“Well, yes, I am, George,” Reagan said. “It would help a lot because it’s not a good idea to leave a post like this vacant. When we announce that Secretary Haig has resigned, we’d like to announce that I have nominated you.”

Shultz thought a few seconds, then said, “Mr. President, I’m on board.”

Reagan hung up and headed for the White House press room. While Haig was still composing his resignation letter, Reagan announced his successor. Then he flew off to Camp David.

Haig told his side of the story from the State Department later that day. Reagan was informed Haig would be holding a news conference, and he and Nancy turned on the television. Haig ascribed his resignation to a disagreement on foreign policy. Reagan shook his head. “
The only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the secretary of state did,” he wrote that evening.

R
EAGAN RARELY LOOKED
backward. From boyhood he had always looked forward—beyond his father’s drunken binges, beyond the emotional dislocations of moving from town to town, beyond the narrow confines of Dixon, beyond Illinois to Hollywood, beyond Hollywood to Sacramento and then Washington. Ambition had driven him to look forward, to the next level of achievement and renown, but so also had temperament. He preferred action to reflection, moving ahead to contemplating the past. He almost never admitted mistakes, partly because he didn’t think he made many of them but also because admitting mistakes required the kind of retrospection he disliked. If his career had been less successful, he might have found his self-imposed amnesia untenable. He would have had to ask himself why his achievements had fallen short of his ambitions. But his career was astonishingly successful. So why worry about the past?

Reagan never admitted that choosing Al Haig for secretary of state had been a mistake. Nor did he admit that his detached style of leadership lent itself to the kind of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare that drove Haig to distraction before it drove him from office. Reagan simply blamed Haig for the troubles of the secretary’s tenure and moved on.

George Shultz soon learned that the truth was more complicated than that. Shultz flew by supersonic Concorde across the Atlantic and by helicopter to Camp David. “
President Reagan and I had lunch under a canopy of trees outside Aspen Cottage,” he recalled. “Bill Clark, Jim Baker, and Ed Meese joined us. The shells were falling in Beirut, the press was howling, and pressure on the United States was mounting at the United Nations to take some kind of action against Israel. The president
was calm and affable. But he and his aides, I could see, were also gripped with a sense of urgency, frustration, and crisis.”

Reagan had felt the pressure since the Israelis crossed the border into Lebanon. “
We’re walking on a tightrope,” he wrote in his diary.
Elias Sarkis, the Lebanese president, seemed willing to let the Israelis neutralize the several thousand PLO fighters in southern Lebanon, but he couldn’t say so in public. That put Reagan in a bind. “The world is waiting for us to use our muscle and order Israel out,” he said. “We can’t do this if we want to help Sarkis, but we can’t explain the situation either. Some days are worse than others.”

Reagan’s days didn’t get any better. The president understood the Israeli government’s reasons for going into Lebanon, although he disbelieved their public declaration that they simply wanted to drive the PLO back from Israel’s border. He guessed that Begin and Sharon intended to destroy the PLO or at least force it out of Lebanon. They made no secret of their desire to eject Syrian forces from the country. Reagan recognized that much of the world saw Israel as America’s stalking horse and blamed the United States for the casualties Israeli forces were inflicting in Lebanon.

He declined to lecture Begin publicly, not least because he supposed that such a course would simply make the prime minister more intransigent. But behind the doors of the White House, when Begin again visited Washington, the president let him know he didn’t have carte blanche from the United States. “
I was pretty blunt,” Reagan wrote after the meeting. Begin responded that Israel had to defend itself. Reagan said Israeli forces were taking too many casualties. Begin denied it. Reagan said it again. Yet to himself, in his diary, he admitted, “It’s a complex problem. While we think his action was overkill, it still may turn out to be the best opportunity we’ve had to reconcile the warring factions in Lebanon and bring about peace after seven years.”

Peace was what Reagan wanted, both for the sake of Lebanon and for the credibility of the United States in the Arab world. Yet he realized this was a tall order, and in the meantime he would settle for a cease-fire. He sent special envoy
Philip Habib to mediate between the belligerents. Habib got an agreement, only to have each side violate the truce and blame the other. Habib’s central problem was that the Israelis didn’t intend to call off their offensive until they had accomplished the purpose of their invasion. But his task wasn’t made easier by the long-standing refusal of the United States to negotiate directly with the PLO. Habib,
the American mediator, had to employ mediators of his own—Lebanese go-betweens—to exchange messages with the Palestinian leadership. When, in the interest of efficiency, he edged physically closer to the Palestinians, the Israelis complained, and he had to step back.

He nonetheless got his messages across, thanks in part to a striking diplomatic style. “
Habib never ceased to rave and rant and wave his arms in perpetual motion as he shouted imprecations at anyone in range,” George Shultz recounted. “Habib’s tantrums were at once theatrics and persuasively serious. Beneath the surface everyone discerned a just and good-natured gentleman … Habib could convey unpleasant truths and stark realities in a manner that would often ultimately win agreement without resentment.”