Why Is This Man Running?

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Haig, thrice decorated, now hates being asked about one legendary war story. As the U.S. Army evacuated Hungnam, he went back and blew up General Almond's sunken bathtub so that Chinese generals couldn't soak in it. Haig says what he did was "routine" and thinks some accounts make him sound like "some kind of martinet fanatic." Exasperated, his feet tapping nervously, Haig laments, "The whole thing was told as a joke." Haig often complains that people can't tell when he is kidding. Sometimes they can't understand what he's saying. Haigspeak was a term invented to explain such neologisms as "vortex of cruciality" and "contexted."

Haig saw combat again in Viet Nam as a lieutenant colonel in 1966. He won the Distinguished Service Cross at the battle of Ap Gu, displaying the kind of hard-driving leadership that later drove some of his civilian subordinates crazy. There it saved lives. After the first attack subsided, Haig drove his exhausted men to keep digging trenches late into the night. When the Viet Cong launched a second massive attack at 4 a.m., Haig's men were protected and ready.

After Viet Nam, Haig was assigned to West Point as a regimental commander. He soon tangled with a rebellious cadet, Lucian Truscott IV, who partly modeled the villain of his West Point novel, Dress Gray, after Haig. Haig remembers Truscott as a troublemaker ("he had a proclivity for challenging authority"), but says he holds no grudge. He confides, "Norman Mailer -- he's a friend of mine -- told me that Truscott now respects and admires me greatly." Truscott disagrees.

Though other cadets do not remember him as Truscott's devious nitpicker, Haig is defensive about the caricature. He was particularly annoyed that Truscott accused him of making decisions without consulting his West Point superior, a charge Haig vehemently denies. But Armed Forces Journal Editor Benjamin Schemmer obtained a 1967 report about Haig by Bernard Rogers, then West Point commandant, who later succeeded Haig at NATO. "I have complete confidence in his ability to handle serious matters," Rogers wrote, "whether or not they fall within his purview."

He went to Kissinger's National Security Council in 1969 as a military adviser. Haig shone in the Nixon White House, cheerfully outdoing other workaholics. He became indispensable as "Kissinger's Kissinger." He advised Nixon on the covert war in Cambodia and also helped negotiate the secret Vietnamese peace talks. Once he returned in disgust from a Saigon meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and told a colleague, "I should have shot the son of a bitch."

Haig proved to be a tough bureaucratic infighter in a notoriously rough-and- tumble White House. Kissinger grew to resent the way Haig insinuated himself with Nixon. The two once fought over who would have the room closest to Nixon's on a trip to the Kremlin in 1974. Haig got the room, but now says that his aides -- "the maniacs down the line" -- led the charge. "It didn't make a bit of difference to me," Haig insists, adding with a chuckle, "It might have made a difference to Mr. Nixon, though." Haig and Nixon remain close, talking by phone about politics and world affairs at least once a week.

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