HAIG: `I`M IN CHARGE` IS AN ASSET - Chia Sẻ Kiến Thức Điện Máy Việt Nam

WASHINGTON — Former Gen. Alexander Haig is still in command.

He remains convinced that he was absolutely right in taking the White House podium that day back in 1981, when President Reagan lay wounded in the hospital, and declaring: ”I`m in charge.”

He told reporters Tuesday that this famous quote is not the political liability they might think it is in his long-shot quest for the Republican presidential nomination.

”The fact that somebody is in charge today in America stirs a certain nostalgia,” he said over breakfast. ”I don`t find this the albatross your question suggests.”

The former secretary of state said that wherever he goes, people tell him: ”Thank God you did what you did that day.”

Heads of state in Europe and Asia tell him that, and so do ordinary people who ask him questions on television call-in programs, he said. It removed uncertainty and enabled him to wind down an unauthorized defense alert by the Pentagon that would have ”sent a signal to Moscow that they tried to murder the President.”

Haig said critics take the incident out of context and show only the one quote to imply that he was trying to seize power and didn`t know the pecking order for succession of power.

”I`m the only American alive or dead in the history of this country who presided over the removal of a president or a vice president,” he said. ”Let me tell you: I know the pecking order.”

Haig was White House chief of staff when President Nixon resigned in August, 1974.

Haig said he is now a solid third nationally in the Republican race and is second in Tennessee and Kentucky.

The Iran-contra affair never would have happened if he had still been secretary of state, Haig said, because he was strenuously opposed to covert operations and would have insisted on an internal policymaking discipline.

He said his plan for dealing with Nicaragua is to go to the source: Cuba. ”We have to tell Castro: `Out, or he`s going to pay a price,` ” he said. With Cuban troops in many countries, ”There are a lot of prices to be paid,” he said. But he wouldn`t spell out how he would extract this ”price.”

”I don`t think it would take marines in Havana Harbor to solve that problem,” he said.