James Schlesinger, 1929–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

James Schlesinger was by all accounts an aloof, abrasive, and often arrogant man. But those characteristics made him a valued aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. As head of the CIA, secretary of defense, and the nation’s first secretary of energy, the rugged, pipe-smoking Schlesinger earned a reputation as an effective infighter who could implement unpopular policies with little concern for how others viewed him. When he was appointed CIA director in 1973, Nixon ordered him to slash the spy agency’s workforce. Schlesinger forced out 10 percent of the agency’s 40,000 employees in just three months. When one subordinate called the mass firings ruthless, Schlesinger responded, “Ruthless? I’m just trying to clear the aisle so I can walk.”

Born in New York City, the Harvard-educated economist joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as an obscure budget official, but “drew the president’s attention by challenging a Pentagon weapons proposal in his presence,” said The New York Times. In 1971, Nixon appointed him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and two years later he was named CIA director. At the CIA, he was outraged to discover that agents, who are barred from spying on Americans, had carried out domestic break-ins for the White House. Schlesinger ordered an investigation, but the inquiry had barely started when Nixon made him secretary of defense. “He became a forceful advocate for boosting defense spending in the post–Vietnam War period,” said the Los Angeles Times, but was fired in 1975 after repeatedly clashing with President Ford.

Schlesinger returned to government two years later as head of President Carter’s newly created Department of Energy. It was a cursed position: When gas prices soared following Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, the unsympathetic Schlesinger “became a symbol” of the crisis, said The Washington Post, and was soon forced from office. In later years, Schlesinger came to realize that his prickly personality might have hampered his career. “I tended to be too self-righteous, a quibbler, stubborn, too,” he told historian Walter Isaacson. “It took me a while to understand how hard I must have been to deal with.”