Silent Coup by Len Colodny

Author:Len Colodny [Colodny, Len]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Watergate Affair
ISBN: 9781634240536
Google: Iq6SCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1634240537
Publisher: TrineDay
Published: 2015-09-21T23:00:00+00:00

Book Three

Exit

The President

18

The Return of Alexander Haig

THE espionage and conspiracy trial of Daniel Ellsberg and his associate Anthony Russo in the Pentagon Papers case was in its closing days on April 25, 1973, when a surprise prosecution witness entered, took a front-row seat in the Los Angeles courtroom, and created quite a stir. He wore a crisp Army uniform with a chest full of medals and four polished stars on his shoulder boards. It was Alexander Haig, vice chief of staff of the Army. “Many of the jurors seemed to stare” at those stars and “a nearly full chest of decorations,” the next day’s story in the Washington Post reported, and the New York Times suggested that “court observers felt that he had been called more for the dazzle of his appearance and background than for the substance of his testimony.” Haig took the stand briefly as a government rebuttal witness whose role was to attack the credentials of two defense witnesses, his former NSC colleague Morton Halperin and University of Michigan professor Allen S. Whiting, a former State Department intelligence analyst. In Haig’s testimony, writes biographer Roger Morris, he “misrepresented significantly Halperin’s role” at the NSC, going so far as to deny that Halperin had been a key Kissinger aide in the early months of the first Nixon administration.

Haig also did not testify that he had known that Halperin was among those wiretapped after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, nor that he had seen the fruits of the wiretap on Halperin’s phone that had yielded fifteen of Halperin’s conversations with Daniel Ellsberg. To reveal that information would have blown the case sky-high, and damaged himself in the process. Haig also denied under oath that he had any evidence that was material to the trial, though it must be pointed out that he was not specifically asked about an Ellsberg-Halperin tap. As we have shown, such taps were suspected, but Federal Judge Matthew Byrne would not reissue his demand for such evidence until April 30, and that demand would not be answered and the existence of the tap on Halperin revealed until May 8. So when Haig left the courtroom after his thirty-five-minute appearance on April 25, that secret and his role in the wiretapping remained safely hidden.

On April 30, 1973, after the departure of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean, the White House was in an uproar. Haldeman convinced a reluctant Nixon that he would need a new chief of staff, and recommended Alexander Haig, someone Nixon already knew and could trust, someone with a penchant for making order out of chaos, a strong man who knew how to shield a boss from unwanted intrusions into his privacy. On May 3 Haig came in for an interview.

The Washington Post of May 3 had a story by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that had the effect of shielding Haig from the wiretap scandal, just at the moment when the participants in the wiretapping knew it was about to be publicly exposed, and just as Haig was about to return to considerable power in the White House.

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