Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger Dies

While at the CIA in 1973, Schlesinger was angered to learn that the spy agency had provided support to ex-CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, who were convicted of burglary in the Watergate break-in. He also expressed dismay that the CIA was spying on U.S. citizens in violation of its charter.

He ordered "all senior operating officials of this agency to report to me immediately on any activities ... outside the legislative charter" that barred the CIA from spying inside the United States.

The result was 693 pages of memos about spying on Americans, opening their mail and plotting to kill foreign leaders. Schlesinger's successor, William Colby, shared the contents with the Justice Department and made them available to congressional investigators.

Also, at Schlesinger's direction, a new highway exit sign publicly identifying CIA headquarters for the first time was hung outside its sprawling suburban Langley, Va., campus. Previously, the complex had been disguised — not very convincingly — as a federal highway-research agency.

In his earlier stint at the Atomic Energy Commission, Schlesinger brought his wife and two of his daughters to Amchitka Island in the Aleutians to witness a 1971 nuclear-bomb test and prove to critics that it could be carried out without harm to people or the environment.

James Rodney Schlesinger was born in 1929, in New York City. He earned bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees in economics — all from Harvard.

Schlesinger taught economics at the University of Virginia and published "The Political Economy of National Security," a look at the economics of foreign policy. The Rand Corp. hired him and later he became director of the think tank's strategic studies. In 1969, he joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as assistant White House budget director, specializing in defense matters.


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