Gen. Alexander Haig, White House adviser, dies

AP

Alexander Haig Jr., the four-star general who served as a confrontational secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and a commanding White House chief of staff as the Nixon administration crumbled, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to a hospital spokesman. He was 85.

Gen. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his ambition to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, the Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that “the third paragraph of his obit” would detail his conduct in the hours after Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981.