Within hours of the shooting, as doctors struggled to save the president and reporters clamored for information, Secretary of State Alexander Haig repeatedly insisted — wrongly — that he was in charge of the federal government.
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so,” Haig explained to reporters in the White House press room, apparently forgetting that the House speaker and the Senate’s president pro tempore come before the secretary of state in the line of succession. And then, in a dozen words that would become famous, he said, “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.”
In the 30 years since, that blurted declaration has become a classic Washington moment — and one that would end Haig’s own presidential suitability. A powerful Cabinet secretary had made a shocking mistake during a national crisis that demanded he display calm and command.
The inside story of that moment, however, is both more mundane and more worrisome.
Haig’s outburst had less to do with the day’s pressures and more to do with an acrimony toward his Cabinet-level peers that had been building for months.
Within every Situation Room of every White House, there are struggles for power, control and territory, and clashes of personality and decision-making style. When crisis erupts, as it inevitably does for each president, and as it did on March 30, 1981, those conditions can affect how smoothly the top tier of the executive branch functions. That is why a president has a crisis-management plan in place on Inauguration Day, to make clear who is supposed to do what. As national security adviser, I was responsible for putting together that plan for the Reagan White House.
Haig, who died in 2010, had been jockeying for greater power since being nominated. I had been trying to work with him. It was a notable bit of messiness in an otherwise tidy transition. Reagan prized collaboration and detested bickering, and I had decided early on that I would delay and defer to avoid having any internal warfare go public.
But important disagreements kicked down the road have a way of coming back to bite you. Haig had been objecting so vociferously to any National Security Council structure or crisis plan for so long that we barely had one in place when the president was shot.
On the day Hinckley fired at Reagan, there were other matters brewing — 12 million Polish workers had gone on strike against communism and the Soviets were threatening an invasion, and Soviet submarines were lurking closer than usual to the East Coast.
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