Alexander Haig died today at 85.  Most of those years were dedicated toward serving his country.  He was an Army General and after his retirement from the Army he was Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.  He will probably be remembered most for his statement from the White House after Reagan was shot in 1981, “I am in control here.”  At that moment the White House could not reach Vice President Bush and the nation was temporarily left with no one in charge. 

Haig was lambasted for that statement by the press because everyone in the media knew that the succession laws specified that Vice President Bush would succeed the president if Reagan should die and if both the President and the Vice President were gone, the Speaker of the House would be next in line.

I wonder if the press also knew that the line of succession in the Executive Department was from the President to the Vice President and then to the Secretary of State in the event the President and Vice President are temporarily incapacitated, not dead.  I wonder if they might not have benefitted from a moment to realize that it was important to a nation in the middle of a cold war to signal to our Russian enemy that we were not in a state of pandemonium but that someone with the intelligence and the strength of character of an Alexander Haig was “in charge.” 

I believe we lost an American hero this morning and hopefully General Haig will be posthumously given the praise he really deserved 29 years ago.