Death of Al Haig

The old warhorse Al Haig, effectively Deputy President for Nixon's last year, then Reagan's first Secretary of State who got himself in trouble by rushing in front of the TV cameras to assert that he was "in control" at the White House in the aftermath of the 1981 Reagan shooting, has just died.

Nostalgia time for former Nixon aficionados such as myself.

After the flap over his response to the Reagan shooting, I was moved to write a very short fiction or fantasy piece about Haig, which began as follows:

"In the beginning there was HAIG, brooding and preening and gathering data to be processed and shredded as silently and simultaneously as possible."

It went on from there to imagine him strutting around in the mirrored corporate boardroom one mile down from the acknowledged headquarters of United Technologies (where he had in fact been CEO either just before or after his Reagan Administration stint), plotting his secret campaign against the Department of Agriculture.

And I posited that the single most tormenting thing to him in the world was the fact that the same letters stand for both "commanding officer" and "comic opera."

But in retrospect, against the background of say, Cheney, what an innocent guy, and what innocent times.