James R. Schlesinger

Background

James Rodney Schlesinger was born in New York City on 15 February 1929 to Julius Schlesinger and Rhea Rogers, a Jewish-Lithuanian family. He converted to Lutheranism as an adult. Schlesinger received an A.B. (1950), A.M. (1952), and Ph.D. (1956) in economics from Harvard University; his doctoral dissertation was published as The Political Economy of National Security: A Study of the Economic Aspects of the Contemporary Power Struggle (Praeger, 1960). He taught economics at the University of Virginia from 1955 to 1963 before joining the RAND Corporation in 1963 as a research economist working on national-security questions.¹

Schlesinger's RAND tenure (1963–69) was the formative institutional period of his subsequent national-security career. RAND in the 1960s was the principal civilian institution working on the systems-analysis and game-theoretic methodology that the Kennedy and Johnson Departments of Defense had adopted under McNamara; Schlesinger's work there focused on strategic-nuclear questions and on the application of cost-benefit analysis to procurement and force-structure decisions. He became director of strategic studies at RAND in 1967.²

Schlesinger entered government in 1969 as Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget (subsequently the Office of Management and Budget) under Robert Mayo, with portfolio over national-security programmes. The OMB role made him substantively responsible for the budget-side review of the CIA, which had operated through the 1960s with substantial discretion in resource allocation. Schlesinger's 1971 Review of the Intelligence Community report — the "Schlesinger Report," produced at the request of President Nixon and the OMB — identified the absence of community-wide budget discipline, the duplication of collection capability across CIA, NSA, DIA, and the military intelligence services, and the absence of a senior official with the authority to coordinate across the community. The report recommended the elevation of the Director of Central Intelligence to a community-coordinating role separate from the directorship of the CIA itself — a recommendation not implemented in 1971 but which became the structural basis for the 2004 establishment of the Director of National Intelligence.³

Schlesinger was appointed Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in August 1971. The AEC chairmanship (1971–73) gave him operational responsibility for the US nuclear-weapons-production complex and for civilian nuclear-power regulation; the latter function would be transferred to the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, and the former would become the basis for the Department of Energy's nuclear-weapons portfolio after the 1977 reorganisation in which Schlesinger himself would oversee the establishment of DOE.⁴

Director of Central Intelligence

President Nixon appointed Schlesinger as the eighth Director of Central Intelligence on 21 December 1972, in the Cabinet reshuffle following Nixon's November 1972 reelection. Schlesinger was sworn in on 2 February 1973 as the successor to Richard Helms, whose six-year tenure (1966–73) had encompassed the substantive operational period of CIA programmes that would, in the subsequent two years, become the principal subjects of public reckoning. Helms was, simultaneously with Schlesinger's appointment, named United States Ambassador to Iran.⁵

Schlesinger's tenure as DCI lasted approximately five months — from 2 February 1973 to 2 July 1973, when he was confirmed as Secretary of Defense in the post-Watergate Cabinet reshuffle that followed the May 1973 forced resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Across that compressed period Schlesinger took two consequential actions whose institutional effect substantially exceeded the duration of his directorship.

The Family Jewels

On 9 May 1973, Schlesinger issued an internal directive to all CIA Deputy Directors and senior officials requiring each to report to him "any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency." The directive — issued in the context of the unfolding Watergate disclosures and the contemporaneous press attention to the Bay of Pigs–era CIA work in support of the Cuban exile community — produced over the following six weeks a compilation of approximately 693 pages of internal reports describing CIA activities that Agency officials judged might be construed as exceeding the statutory mandate.⁶

The compilation became known internally as the "Family Jewels." Its contents included reports on:

• The 1960s assassination plots against Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and General René Schneider of Chile.
• The CIA mind-control and behavioural-modification programme MKULTRA, including the use of LSD on unwitting US citizens.
• The CIA's domestic surveillance programme Operation CHAOS, conducted from 1967 against the US anti-war movement.
• The mail-opening programme HTLINGUAL, conducted from 1953 to 1973.
• The wiretapping of journalists and US citizens at the request of the Nixon administration.
• The CIA cooperation with Project SHAMROCK and the broader pattern of CIA work against US persons that the agency's statutory mandate had been understood to prohibit.⁷

The Family Jewels compilation was retained internally by the CIA through the remainder of 1973 and 1974. Its existence was disclosed publicly by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times on 22 December 1974 — the article "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" — drawing on confidential discussions with multiple CIA sources who had been involved in producing the compilation. The Hersh disclosure was the precipitating event for the Senate Church Committee's establishment in January 1975 and for the parallel House Pike Committee inquiry; the Family Jewels supplied the substantive evidentiary base from which both committees worked.⁸

The Family Jewels compilation was substantially declassified in 2007 under a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The 2007 declassification confirmed in detail the substance of the Church Committee's 1975–76 reconstruction.⁹

The personnel reduction

In parallel with the Family Jewels directive, Schlesinger ordered an aggressive reduction-in-force across the CIA. Approximately 1,500 personnel — approximately 7% of the Agency's then-workforce of roughly 22,000 — were dismissed across the spring and summer of 1973, with disproportionate impact on the Directorate of Operations (the clandestine-services arm). The cuts were understood at the time as a budget-discipline measure consistent with Schlesinger's prior OMB and Schlesinger Report work; they operated in retrospect as a structural disruption of the operational culture that the Helms period had built.¹⁰

The personnel reduction was experienced inside the Agency as the most disruptive reorganisation of the CIA's clandestine services since the Bay of Pigs aftermath of 1961. Schlesinger reportedly required Agency security to maintain a portrait of him under guard during the period of the dismissals; the institutional resentment toward Schlesinger within the operational community persisted across his subsequent SecDef and SecEnergy tenures and into the published memoirs of CIA officers from the period.¹¹

Subsequent positions

Schlesinger was confirmed as Secretary of Defense on 2 July 1973 and served until 3 November 1975, when he was dismissed by President Ford in the "Halloween Massacre" Cabinet reshuffle that simultaneously removed CIA Director William Colby and reassigned Henry Kissinger from National Security Adviser to retain only Secretary of State. Schlesinger's removal was attributed at the time to disagreements with Kissinger over US strategic posture toward the Soviet Union and to Schlesinger's resistance to administration positions on detente.¹²

Schlesinger served as the first Secretary of Energy from 6 August 1977 to 23 August 1979 under President Carter — overseeing the consolidation into the new department of the energy-research, nuclear-weapons-production, and energy-policy functions previously distributed across the AEC, the Federal Energy Administration, the Federal Power Commission, and the Department of the Interior. He resigned from the Carter Cabinet in 1979 in the same period as the broader Cabinet shake-up that followed Carter's "malaise" speech.¹³

Schlesinger held no further appointed federal office after 1979. He remained active as a consultant and as a member of various advisory boards — including the Defense Policy Board under successive Republican administrations — until his death on 27 March 2014.¹⁴

Legacy

Schlesinger's institutional legacy operates principally through the consequential effect of his five-month CIA directorship rather than through the longer Cabinet tenures that followed.

The Family Jewels compilation was the document whose existence permitted the post-Watergate institutional reckoning with the Cold War CIA to occur. Without it, the Church and Pike Committees of 1975–76 would have had to reconstruct the agency's record from scattered reporting and from individual ex-officer testimony; with it, the committees had a single internal-CIA inventory of the activities that the agency's own officials had judged might exceed the statutory mandate. The 1976 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1976 Levi Guidelines, the 1981 Executive Order 12333 framework on intelligence activities, and the standing oversight authority of the Senate and House intelligence committees were all institutionally responses to the substance the Family Jewels exposed.¹⁵

The personnel reduction had a parallel but less measurable effect. The structural disruption of the Helms-era operational culture in the Directorate of Operations — the loss of approximately 1,500 personnel including senior case officers in the spring of 1973 — produced an institutional discontinuity that the post-Schlesinger CIA never fully recovered. The 1976 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reform of CIA covert-action reporting, the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act, the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act revisions, and the post-9/11 CIA reconstruction under successive Directors all operated against the institutional baseline Schlesinger had reset.

Schlesinger himself characterised his CIA tenure, in subsequent published statements, as having been substantially defined by what he found on arrival rather than by what he intended to accomplish. "I had been led to expect that the CIA had reformed itself," he stated in a 1990 oral history interview. "It became evident very quickly that this was not the case." The Family Jewels directive was, on Schlesinger's own account, a discovery exercise rather than a reform programme — a request for the institutional record of what the agency had been doing, conducted with the understanding that the record might subsequently be required for external review.¹⁶

The ambiguity of Schlesinger's role — institutional disrupter rather than institutional reformer, his five-month directorship producing the conditions for reform he himself did not design — is the substantive question the historical record poses. The post-1975 framework of CIA oversight is the work of the Church Committee, the Carter and Reagan-era reforms, and the successive Directors of Central Intelligence and Directors of National Intelligence who built it; Schlesinger's role was the precipitating one of having ordered the inventory that made the framework's construction necessary.

1. James R. Schlesinger entry in the Biographical Directory of the United States Executive Branch; Schlesinger, The Political Economy of National Security (Praeger, 1960).
2. RAND Corporation institutional history; Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Harvard University Press, 1966).
3. James R. Schlesinger, A Review of the Intelligence Community, March 1971 (the "Schlesinger Report"), commissioned by President Nixon and the Office of Management and Budget; subsequent declassification on file at the Foundation for the National Archives. The structural recommendation became the basis for the 2004 establishment of the Director of National Intelligence under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.
4. Atomic Energy Commission institutional history, 1971–73; Richard Hewlett and Jack Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (University of California Press, 1989) for the AEC structural context.
5. CIA institutional history; CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, Studies in Intelligence, multiple articles on the 1973 directorship transition; Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (Random House, 2003).
6. CIA Director's directive of 9 May 1973, on file at the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST); reproduced in the 2007 Family Jewels declassification.
7. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222: The CIA's Family Jewels, 21 June 2007 (the principal scholarly compilation of the declassified document); CIA Office of the Inspector General, Family Jewels Memoranda, 1973, declassified 2007.
8. Seymour M. Hersh, "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," The New York Times, 22 December 1974; Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
9. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, op. cit.
10. CIA institutional history on the 1973 reduction-in-force; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (Simon & Schuster, 1986); Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007), chapter on the Schlesinger directorship.
11. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, op. cit.; David Wise, The American Police State: The Government Against the People (Random House, 1976).
12. Gerald Ford Presidential Library record on the November 1975 Cabinet reshuffle; James Cannon, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford's Appointment with History (HarperCollins, 1994).
13. Department of Energy institutional history; DOE Office of Legacy Management, Department of Energy History; Carter Presidential Library record on the August 1977 establishment of DOE.
14. Schlesinger obituary, The Washington Post, 27 March 2014; The New York Times, 27 March 2014.
15. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book II: Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 26 April 1976; Final Report, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports, 23 April 1976; Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., Democracy in the Dark (The New Press, 2015).
16. James R. Schlesinger, oral-history interview, Studies in Intelligence, 1990 (subsequent partial declassification); Schlesinger's published commentary in successive symposia on the 1973 CIA period.