Alexander Haig: General, Statesman, Director

Alexander M. Haig Jr. is one who got away. I say that about someone who I tried to get to write an article for Directors & Boards and he or she has demurred for one reason or another. There will be no more opportunity for me to revisit this proposal with Gen. Haig. The former Army leader who was a key principal in the Nixon White House and Secretary of State in the early years of the Reagan administration died yesterday at the age of 85.

You won't find much in his obituaries, such as the ones in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, about his business activities in between his public service engagements and after his retirement from government. He founded a consulting firm, Worldwide Associates Inc., in 1983, serving as its chairman. His corporate directorships included America Online Inc. (where he was a founding director), Interneuron Pharmaceuticals Inc., MGM Grand Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., and United Technologies Corp., where he did a stint as president of the company — "his first job in the private sector since high school," according to AP's obit, after stepping down as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in the late 1970s and before rejoining the Reagan administration.

As a budding journalist in J-school during the Watergate affair, I was always fascinated with the whole cast of characters from that period, including Gen. Haig. I followed his career in and out of business. When he came to Philadelphia in 2004 to address a conference of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) on East-West relations, I was there, listening closely to what he had to say on the state of world affairs. He took the occasion to, as he put it, "engage in a little intellectual hygiene." To wit:

"A few bad ideas need to be washed away. For example, the notion that the United States can remake the world in its own image, on its own, as a reaction to violence from abroad dates from Woodrow Wilson's time. Its an old populist con detached from reality. . . . Does anyone believe that the United States can turn Afghanistan and Iraq into thriving democracies; reconcile India and Pakistan; transform the Middle East and do it all with a 10-division army and a $500 billion deficit? Frankly, we're lousy imperialists. We have neither the civil service nor the patience. Further, we lack ambition. As [then] Secretary of State Powell told the Archbishop of Canterbury, the only territory we've ever asked for is enough ground to bury our dead."

That is exactly the kind of "intellectual hygiene" that I thought he could bring into the pages of Directors & Boards if I could have gotten him to write on the state of corporate governance.

Gen. Haig served as a trustee of the FPRI since 1990. His FPRI essays can be found here.

[Photo: Reagan Library]

A Christmas Day Story: The 'Vertical Leap'

For many, there will be no tears shed for year 2009 coming to an end. Some say the Great Recession is over, but many are beset with great troubles. And if we're lucky enough not to have great troubles, we're still probably feeling troubled about the state of the economy and world stability.

But today, Christmas Day, let's be properly thankful for the blessings we do have. As troubled as the times are, a big blessing is to be living in the world at this moment in time. Consider the following, from a speech that I heard recently:

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"Economists have tried to reconstruct what the average income of people would have been through time. By the way, this is not easy. Obviously we didn't have price indexes and statistical agencies, and so on, until the 20th century. But using a kind of 'economic archaeology,' economists have estimated that between the time of Christ and 1800, the average world income was flat.

"Just think about that. Although incomes in some parts of the world were higher than others, on average people throughout the world were no better off in 1800 than they were 1,800 years earlier.

"That's remarkable! And yet, in the last 200 years, U.S. income per capita has increased by a factor of 30 or 40. If you were to look at any chart of per capita income in the world — or by country — you would see an almost vertical leap starting from the Industrial Revolution and continuing on thereafter."

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Robert Litan, an expert on banking and finance, told the above to an audience of Foreign Policy Research Institute members and guests. You could hear jaws dropping all over the room at the Union League when he unveiled this economic fact of life — 2,009 years of life since the birth of Christ that is being celebrated today — to the rapt crowd.

Yes, Virginia, it's a good day, and a good time, and a good place, to be alive. As tough as the year may have been, there have been tougher years — many many more tougher and leaner years — in the history of humankind. Let's celebrate and be thankful. Merry Christmas!

The Foreign Policy Research Institute is a Philadelphia-based think tank on global affairs. Robert Litan is vice president for research at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a senior fellow of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is an economist and lawyer who has served in a variety of federal agencies and White House posts. Click here for a full copy of his FPRI speech, "Innovation and the World Economy: The Second Annual Rocco Martino Lecture on Innovation."

Illustration: "The Carpenter" by Nathan Greene