Who cares what Alexander Haig said?
The death of Alexander Haig comes at an interesting time for me, because I’m in the middle of reading a fantastic oral history of the Reagan White House (Reagan: The Man and his Presidency, 1998). Discussing Secretary Haig’s infamous “I’m in control” moment, Lyn Nofziger is quoted as saying “that’s going to be the third paragraph in his obit.”
And sure enough, in the literal third paragraph of his obituary in The New York Times:
Hours after the shooting, then Secretary of State Haig went before the cameras intending, he said later, to reassure Americans that the White House was functioning.
”As of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending the return of the vice president,” Haig said.
If you’re not familiar with the larger story, when Reagan was shot, Vice President Bush was airborne, flying back to Washington from some event in Texas. This caused a brief power vacuum in the White House, and, at least according to some of the insiders interviewed in this book, the cabinet and White House lawyers encouraged Haig, as Secretary of State, to temporary act as leader of the administration.
Says Haig:
In the cabinet meeting, the White House lawyer said, ‘We have to deal with the matter of transition of power.’ I said, ‘No way! The president is not in extremis.’ What I was taking about [with the 'I'm in control' statement] was the pecking order within the executive branch of the government. [...] That’s why I went into that press room … to tell the Russains, ‘Hey! Look. We’ve got a functioning government.’
There was outrage that Haig was trying to assert unconstitutional power at a time of crisis, but really, in retrospect, the episode seems like little more than a common-sense, short term strategy to deal with an unusual situation. Regardless, it’s not a terribly important story in the grander scope of the history of the Reagan Administration, or even the more limited scope of Alexander Haig’s political career.
The disproportionate attention the anecedote is given, however, I think reflects an unhealthy obsession educated, media-type people have with what I’d describe as the “quirks” of government. I was exposed to a lot of this when I was studying political science. People were always way too interested in the most quirky, far-out aspects of constitutional government, the stuff that only becomes relevant in the most extreme, unlikely, “what-if?” situations. Stuff like faithless electors in the electoral college, the reserve powers of the Crown, parliamentary coalitions, and yes, the presidential order of succession. I think it’s problematic because it’s a mindset that views government as this entertaining, fascinatingly complex thing that requires lots of specialized knowledge to understand, rather than just a limited, uninteresting prover of a few public services, which I think is what government should be.
The idea that Haig’s main relevance to American political history is the way he tried to establish a new precedent regarding the temporary transfer of executive power during the immediate aftermath of a botched assassination attempt is a sad commentary on the warped way we have come to understand the role of government in the modern era.
