Haig joins Cabinet

[WORDS MISSING HERE] ...with the memory of pleasant evenings in Palm Beach, Florida, during the Kennedy honeymoon because it's very relevant to the fuss and feathers that are exciting Washington just now about the president-elect's Cabinet appointments. I hope this recollection will also show how unimportant in the American system the Cabinet is – all except one member of it.

The presidential honeymoon of President-elect Kennedy was spent mostly in his father's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida and this gave the White House press corps and one British correspondent the rare opportunity of getting to know, in an easy, social way, far from the busy distractions of Washington, all the men who would become his working cronies – what we facetiously called at the time, the Irish Mafia, since they were, almost to a man, old friends, Boston Irishmen who'd worked to get him elected to the House, then to the Senate and then to the White House.

They became his 'Kitchen Cabinet' and I'd better say right away that that term is carefully used. Every president has a ring of old cronies, friends, unelected to any office whom the people have never heard of, but men the president will work with night and day. Which of you had ever heard the names of Jody Powell or Hamilton Jordan before they came up from Georgia and moved to the right hand of President Carter to become, overnight, the most constant and powerful of the president's advisers?

We all take this for granted, just as pretty soon we will be taking for granted the daily mention of Ed Meese, a man who's never run for anything. This is a point that should be stressed now when President Reagan, like every president before him, promises to do over the American system and give strange new powers to his Cabinet.

Well, I say again, as I've said every four years for quite some time, that the American system is not a system of Cabinet government, that is, a system of politicians chosen from the legislature – the parliament or the Congress – who are going to help the chief executive – the prime minister or the president – run the legislature. In this country, the Cabinet is part of the executive. They are not politicians. Very rarely, indeed, have they ever been in Congress which is one reason why you've never heard of them.

It's a pity, indeed, that the founding fathers ever took over the word 'cabinet.' It has led to continuous misunderstanding with foreign powers. Cabinet meetings here are not held to thrash out a policy over single issues that effect the nation, with every man having an equal say. They review what each man has to say about what's going on in his department, whether it's the treasury, agriculture, labour or whatever. Cabinet officers – they're not ministers – stay with their specialty. There's no compulsion for them to know anything outside their specialty. There's certainly no obligation for them to agree on anything, only for the president to agree on how one man is conducting his department.

In Britain, on the contrary, wasn't it Lord Melbourne who ended some terrific Cabinet argument over a national issue by saying, 'It doesn't matter, gentlemen, what we agree on, provided we all agree'. Such a scene would be impossible in Washington.

If a Cabinet officer feels very strongly about something outside his department, if he gets out of line or he's seen to be incompetent, the president fires him. The government does not fall. The thrashing arguments, the working out of policy go on between the president and his kitchen Cabinet, with maybe one Cabinet officer being called in. The president then goes to the Cabinet and tells them his decision. More often than not, he doesn't tell them. They read about it in the papers.

In fact, after the first few months, the Cabinet – made up, remember, also of, invariably unelected men – tends to meet less and less. Quite regularly, some of them resign in a huff when they discover that they are not, after all, going to be high muckamucks of American policy. The business of government goes on and it's conducted by the president and his Hamilton Jordans and Jody Powells and, in the case of Kennedy, by men with names like O'Bryan and O'Donnell.

To the exclusion, too, most of the time, of the vice president. I doubt you've heard much lately of the name of George Bush. He's there from now on mostly as a precaution against the hardening of the arteries of the 70-year-old President Reagan.

Lyndon Johnson, an old Washington hand if ever there was one, Lyndon Johnson was so amazed to discover how rarely he was consulted by the president that after a silent interval of six weeks or so, he dropped a hurt little note to President Kennedy. Kennedy sighed, one evening, over a drink with his O'Bryans and O'Donnells and said, 'I can see the way Lyndon, as vice president, feels. I'm sorry about it, but the only men you can see in this job are the men who see the overnight cables.' It's a sentence that ought to be engraved over the entrance to every Cabinet department.

There are, however, two exceptions to this general rule of Cabinet unimportance. The secretary of state and, lately, also, the secretary of defence. Since the United States became a world power, the secretary of state, more than anybody, has been an officer of crucial interest to the country and to foreign countries. Like all other Cabinet officers, he must, in accordance with the constitution, be looked into and confirmed by the Senate, by, in the first place, the Senate committees which have their separate specialties – in this case, the Senate committee on foreign relations.

You have only to think back to the deep and constant involvement in policy of such as Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger to see why the appointment of the secretary of state is of prime concern to the Senate, which must ratify all foreign treaties and so – by the extension of general curiosity – to the public.

Well, under the proud persuasion of some of his advisers and against the anguished advice of others, Mr Reagan has made his appointment, General Alexander Haig. Let's take a quick look at his life and times.

He was born 56 years ago in Philadelphia, the son of a comfortable Catholic lawyer who died in the pit of the Depression when his son was only ten, and this threw the family into not dire, but pinched circumstances. In the old American way, young Al, as he was to be called from then on, delivered newspapers, got a small job in the post office, became a security guard in a department store.

He could afford only one year at Notre Dame but then achieved his boyhood dream to be a soldier by winning an appointment to West Point. His career there was modest. He graduated 214th out of a class of over 300, but he got to be a very junior aide to General MacArthur during the occupation of Japan. He married. He was in Korea. He took a university degree in international relations and by 1962 he was a staff assistant at the Pentagon.

Safe for good, you might guess, in an armchair job. But he revolted at this sanctuary, asked for combat duty, got a field command in Vietnam, saw action and earned the distinguished service cross. He came back as a full colonel and was made deputy commandant at West Point.

From there, he started the great leap forward. At the age of 45, he was brought into the White House to be Henry Kissinger's assistant and here began a period of travel and ferocious working hours that will rightly be recalled when he comes up in January before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearings.

He was the man responsible for President Nixon's daily briefings on what was going on around the world. He made 16 fact-finding missions to south-east Asia. He was in Paris at the first so-called peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He was the advance man who arranged President Nixon's famous trip to China in 1972. The following year, he was given his glittering prize: President Nixon promoted him over 240 senior generals to be vice chief of staff of the army with the rank of four-star general, at 49, I believe, the youngest there has ever been. Next to Henry Kissinger, he was President Nixon's closest confidant, a dream of power that very soon turned into a nightmare.

Watergate was a'brewing. Nixon's two chief aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned and Haig was made the new, the lone, chief of the White House staff. Within a month, we knew about the presidential conversations on tape and General Haig's job, day and night, was advising Nixon on how to confess to them or how not.

Needless to say, General Haig is on those tapes. In one of them already played over a national network news programme, he suggested that forgetfulness on the president's part might be the best policy. He also agreed that the awkward existence of that $114,000 paid to finance the Watergate raid might better be explained by Haldeman. In the last Nixon days, it was left to General Haig – who'd been inflexibly loyal to the president – to tell him there was no way out of resignation.

After that, the new President Ford thought to make him army chief of staff but, in the pervasive odour of Watergate, the president learned that there would be little chance of Haig's confirmation. Instead, he appointed him supreme commander of NATO. And nobody, I believe, needs to be told that in the succeeding five years, he overcame some very lively prejudice against a man who had never commanded a division and emerged as the first NATO commander to gain the admiration of the generals and the heads of government of all the allies.

Well, there are rough days ahead for him and the promise by the Democrats of a scrutiny and hours on the witness stand before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that are already being advertised as Watergate Revisited.

There are hundreds of hours of tapes to be heard. There is the fact, testified by General Haig himself, that he placed wire taps on the phones of many officials and journalists. There is the fact that he advised Mr Nixon to bomb North Vietnam. There is the alarming statement made by William Safire, an old Nixon man who dined with Nixon this week, that it was Nixon who sold Haig to President-elect Reagan and, I quote, 'to Reagan directly hailed Haig's deviousness, ruthlessness and other virtues'.

Come January, the Washington hearings could prove the president-elect's honeymoon to be the shortest in history.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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