Alexander Haig Quotes

I prefer to think of it as burning down their crops. [when asked why he - a fervent anti-Communist - smoked Cuban cigars]

John F. Kennedy had consistently defied the national security state, and they wanted him gone.

Haig's problems went away with a stroke of a pen. Watergate was never investigated.

If the American people had known about Woodward's relationship with Haig, there's no way we would have fallen for the Washington Post's bogus Watergate reporting.*

When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate, he actually pardoned Alexander Haig for the JFK assassination.

Any proper investigation would have led right back to the JFK assassination.

CIA handler. George, they say, never would have befriended somebody like Lee absent an ulterior motive relevant to the CIA's involvement in the JFK assassination.

The grass around the village looked like it had been scorched by boiling water. The old people talked about airplanes that sprinkled bad rain. People were kept in the village-camp for months and then the Laotian and Vietnamese airplanes would pass overhead and many of the people would die afterwards. There was no need for guns. My mother, grandmother, and aunts did not know it, but chemical warfare was being used in the killing of the Hmong. It would be years later before U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig would state that poisonous gas had been used in Southeast Asia and the State Department could identify Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan as three places where Soviet-supervised chemical warfare attacks had taken place. The women just became afraid of the water and the grass.

...but the problem was more fundamental. Powell and the State Department hoped an agreement with North Korea would be a positive step reducing the threat of nuclear war. Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, wedded to a view of the world as a Manichean contest between good and evil, rejected the idea of negotiating with a state they deemed immoral. If the United States had brought the evil empire of the Soviet Union to its knees, why deal with a state vastly smaller, weaker, and more repressive? Bush's response to Kim Dae-Jung's visit set the tone for the administration. The United States would not enter into an agreement that kept a brutal regime in power. For Bush, foreign policy was an exercise in morality. That appealed to his religious fervor, and greatly simplified dealing with the world beyond America's borders. 'I've got a visceral reaction to this guy...Maybe it's my religion, but I feel passionate about this.' Bush's personalization of foreign policy and his refusal to deal with North Korea was the first of a multitude of errors that came to haunt his presidency. Instead of bringing a denuclearized North Korea peacefully into the family of nations, as seemed within reach in 2001, the Bush administration isolated the government in Pyongyang hoping for its collapse. In the years following, North Korea continued to be an intractable problem for the administration. By the end of Bush's presidency, North Korea had tested a nuclear device and was believed to have tripled its stock of plutonium, accumulating enough for at least six nuclear weapons. Aside from their attachment to the idea of American hegemony, the worldview of Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans was predicated on a false reading of history. A keystone belief was that Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric and policy of firmness had forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. In actuality, Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric during his first three years in office actually intensified the Cold War and heightened Soviet resistance. Not until Reagan changed course, replaced Alexander Haig with George Schultz, and held out an olive branch to the Soviets did the Cold War begin to thaw. Beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan would meet with Gorbachev five times in the next three years, including a precedent-shattering visit to the Kremlin and Red Square. What about the 'evil empire' the president was asked. 'I was talking about another time, another era,' said Reagan. President Reagan deserves full credit for ending the Cold War. But it ended because of his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev and establish a relationship of mutual trust. For Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, this was a lesson they had not learned. (p.188-189)

There are more important things than peace, there are things which we Americans must be willing to fight for. [Responding to Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee during confirmation hearing in Senate Foreign Relations Committee]

Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted that.