{"id":189716,"date":"2010-02-20T18:33:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T23:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/20\/alexander-haig-is-dead-at-85\/"},"modified":"2010-02-20T18:33:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-20T23:33:00","slug":"alexander-haig-is-dead-at-85","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/20\/alexander-haig-is-dead-at-85\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexander Haig is Dead at 85"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1980s, I was always rather contrarian, maintaining that Alexander Haig, <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703787304575076153626209606.html\">who died today<\/a>, was among the most competent and most sane of the members of Reagan&#8217;s cabinet, though that <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">is<\/span> damning with faint praise.<\/p>\n<p>I think that he understood and appreciated our NATO allies more than most people in the foreign policy establishment.<\/p>\n<p>One interesting note, he was a west pointer, and graduated 217 out of a class of 310, which may imply that success at the Point is orthogonal to success later in life.<\/p>\n<p>I love this quote about him:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Never much of a politician, Gen. Haig in 1988 made a brief presidential run, often described by commentators at the time as &#8220;quixotic.&#8221; Borrowing a phrase from a supporter, the comedian Mort Sahl, he announced he was &#8220;throwing my helmet into the ring.&#8221; But he withdrew before the primaries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Considering the fact that he was a Kissinger prot\u00e9g\u00e9, he was relatively non evil, which is again damning with faint praise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1980s, I was always rather contrarian, maintaining that Alexander Haig, who died today, was among the most competent and most sane of the members of Reagan&#8217;s cabinet, though that is damning with faint praise. I think that he understood and appreciated our NATO allies more than most people in the foreign policy establishment. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1136,994],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}