“He held that office together.” 
 
 Henry A. Kissinger , his mentor and master in the Nixon White House, also said the nation owed Mr. Haig its gratitude for steering the ship of state through dangerous waters in the final days of the Nixon era. Ronald Reagan made him secretary of state, a brief and stormy appointment in which he famously tried to assert command after the attempted assassination of the president. Retired Army Gen. Alexander Haig, who held influential positions in the U.S. military and government and who as White House chief of staff shepherded Richard M. Nixon toward peacefully resigning the presidency, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore of complications from an infection. General Haig exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.” 
 
 Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 1924, the son of a lawyer and a homemaker. "Your commander in chief has given you an order," Gen. Haig told him. In 1973, after a brief stint as the Army’s vice chief of staff, General Haig was summoned back as chief of staff, replacing H. R. Haldeman, who later went to prison. When Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Jaworski's predecessor, pursued his investigation too aggressively for Nixon's comfort, the president dispatched Gen. Haig in October 1973 to instruct the acting attorney general, William D. Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. “When I finished reading it,” he says in “Nixon: An Oral History,” “I knew that Nixon would never survive — no way.” 
 
 On Aug. 1, 1974, the general went to Vice President Gerald R. Ford and discussed the possibility of a pardon for the president. Critics said later that he brokered a deal that got Nixon a pardon in exchange for stepping down. After leaving the White House in October 1974, he became supreme allied commander in Europe , the overseer of NATO . And Gen. Haig himself, a tall man with blue eyes who kept his chin-up military bearing long after he left the service, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.
– Alexander Haig died this morning at age 85. The former four-star general served as White House chief of staff during the tumultuous final months of the Nixon administration—he kept the place running and guided Nixon toward a peaceful resignation, reports the Washington Post—and he ran for the top office himself in 1988. But he's perhaps best known to Americans as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, who incorrectly told the nation "I am in control here" after Reagan got shot. Another former Reagan aide, Lyn Nofgizer, said Haig knew that despite all his accomplishments, the third paragraph of his obituary would harp on that, notes the New York Times—in the third paragraph of its obituary. Prior to the news conference in which he made the declaration, Haig told fellow Cabinet members that the "helm is right here, and that means in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here." The Constitution, of course, disagrees, and Haig's words forever earned him the reputation as being hungry for power.