Gossipy Washington focuses on Haig

Press, 19 April 1982, Page 8

Gossipy Washington focuses on Haig

By

LOYE MILLER of the

Newhouse News Service (through NZPA) Washington Whatever it has done for diplomacy, the Falkland • Islands dispute has vastly increased the visibility of the American Secretary of State (Mr Alexander Haig). . That is not to say that the outspoken Mr Haig was anonymous before. But his trans-Atlantic attempts at shuttle diplomacy have greatly multiplied the opportunities for Haig-watching in gossipy Washington. And, as so often happens in Washington, it has become a little hard to separate the real Al Haig from the ones in some vivid . Washington imaginations. Depending on which newspaper story you read, Mr Haig: Has a vital amount of power and prestige at stake in his intervention over the Falklands; Has much to gain from success but very little to lose if he fails on the Falklands; Makes his illustrious predecessor, Henry Kissinger, look like a piker with all this rushing around; Looks like a piker when compared to Kissinger’s more profound approach to shuttle diplomacy; Ought to be mediating in a much more important arena, the Middle East, rather than tearing about over an obscure bunch of sheep-covered islands; Is lucky he has the Falklands to. divert everyone’s attention, because otherwise he’d be expected to get

something done in the Middle East; Has been acting oddly every since he had his heart bypass operation; Has not been acting oddly, that’s just his normal behaviour; None of the above. Whimsical as ail this sounds, the latest attempts by normally serious journalists have been all over the lot on Mr Haig. Writing in the “New York Times,” a Washington correspondent, Hedrick Smith, made the Falklands affair out to be a very big deal for the secretary’s reputation. Smith quoted a White House source as saying, “You can say Haig nee'ds a win. We all need an ‘in’ foreign-policy right now. The Administration has invested all their chips on Haig in trying to work out a settlement. He seems to be revelling in it.” But the "Baltimore Sun’s” Henry Trewhitt, one of Washington’s most respected diplomatic reporters, saw it differently. “At last Alexander Haig has a diplomatic mission in which he .stands to gain personally more than he risks.” Trewhitt wrote. “If the Secretary of State can bring Britain and Argentina to a peaceful resolution ... he will have registered a diplomatic coup. A State Department official cheerfully calls it ‘Al’s Nobel Prize mission’. Yet if he fails, he will at least have earned credit for trying.” One thing for sure, though: whatever success Haig may have in international diplom-

acy will stand in stark contrast to his latest acrimonious dust-up with the White House staff. The “New York Times” triggered thatone by reporting that Mr Haig left half a day late on his first trip to Argentina because he refused to go in the windowless transport plane the White House staff originally assigned to him. The secretary was still travelling abroad when the gossip item appeared, but it did not escape his sharp eye and elephantine memory. When he got back, he had an aide telephone a “New York Times” reporter to say Mr Haig had insisted on getting another plane because it had better communications, riot because it had windows. The aide said Mr Haig was “furious” at the erroneous report and accused the White House chief of staff, James Baker, of “planting” it. That rekindled the old Haig-White House feud which most administration folk hoped had ended when the National Security Adviser, Richard Allen, resigned, taking his Japanese watches with him, last December. By the time Mr Haig’s blast at Baker was in print, the secretary was airborne, on the'was back to Buenos Aires — and a good thing it was too. Otherwise, the White House brass who have had a bellyful of Mr Haig’s prima donna-isms, might have sent him off in the plane with V.I.P. seats over the bombbay doors.