Alexander Haig, a former four-star Army general, a former chief of staff for President Richard Nixon, and a former Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan (to whom he had been recommended by Mr. Nixon) died yesterday at age 85. Mr. Haig’s career during the 1980s, when we were of an impressionable age, was an object lesson for us. It seemed to us at the time impossible that anyone ever associated with Mr. Nixon would have any future in national politics—we now know better—but Mr. Haig did, even running as a Republican candidate for president in 1988. (The nomination, of course, ultimately went to another ex-Nixon staffer, George H.W. Bush.) As the Times’s obituary notes, Mr. Haig will always be remembered for the day he declared himself, incorrectly, the acting commander-in-chief of the United States.