Most of the obituaries of fractious former Secretary of State Alexander Haig focused on his white-knuckled appearance at the White Hose podium on March 30, 1981, when in the uncertain, fearful hours immediately after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, he tried to reassure a shaken public that “I am in control here, in the White House.” Anyone old enough to recall the events of that bizarre day will tell you that Haig’s jittery appearance was about as convincing and reassuring as Tiger Wood’s recent mediacentric mea culpa over his Olympic-class priapism.
Haig (right) with former National Security Advisor Richard Allen, March 30, 1981
Rarely has public ambition been so naked or unappealing. Tim Weiner’s treatment of Haig’s life and career in The New York Times is worth reading, however, for its wonderful dissection of Haig’s bumptious, short-lived tenure as “the vicar of foreign policy” in Reagan’s first term, as well as his crucial service as Richard Nixon’s last White House chief of staff as the Watergate scandal finally, irrevocably unwound, leading to Nixon’s 1974 resignation. As Nixon, besieged by reality, retreated into the comfort of the bottle, Haig emerged as the de facto president during the last, awesome, crisis-ridden year of that criminally inclined administration.
What tickled me, however, was Weiner’s description of Haig’s uniquely tenuous grip on English. Long before Bush-speak, there was Haig-speak, which carried on an equally long-distance relationship with the mother tongue:
He had a unique way with words. In a 1981 “On Language” column, William Safire of The New York Times, a veteran of the Nixon White House, called it “haigravation.”
Nouns became verbs or adverbs: “I’ll have to caveat my response, Senator.” (Caveat is Latin for “let him beware.” In English, it means “warning.” In Mr. Haig’s lexicon, it meant to say something with a warning that it might or might not be so.)
Haigspeak could be subtle: “There are nuance-al differences between Henry Kissinger and me on that.” It could be dramatic: “Some sinister force” had erased one of Mr. Nixon’s subpoenaed Watergate tapes, creating an 18 1/2- minute gap. Sometimes it was an emblem of the never-ending battle between politics and the English language: “careful caution,” “epistemologically-wise,” “saddle myself with a statistical fence.”
Now it’s my turn to caveat something: When politicians start sounding like Prof. Irwin Corey on a bad day, it is usually intentional, because they are trying to cover their tracks and/or backsides. Weiner concludes:
But [Haig] could also speak with clarity and conviction about the presidents he served, and about his own role in government. Mr. Nixon would always be remembered for Watergate, he said, “because the event had such major historic consequences for the country: a fundamental discrediting of respect for the office; a new skepticism about politics in general, which every American feels….
He was brutally candid about his own run for office and his subsequent distaste for political life. “Not being a politician, I think I can say this: The life of a politician in America is sleaze,” he told the authors of “Nixon: An Oral History.”
“I didn’t realize it until I started to run for office,” he said. “But there is hardly a straight guy in the business. As Nixon always said to me — and he took great pride in it — ‘Al, I never took a dollar. I had somebody else do it.’
As Haig might have said, there’s absolutely nothing nuance-ly about that.
Brave New Whirl 