James R. Schlesinger, CIA Chief And Cabinet Member, Dies

James R. Schlesinger, a Republican economist, died of pneumonia at 85.

He gained a reputation as someone willing to cut jobs and implement unpopular policies with little regard for what other people thought of him. In 1969, Mr. Schlesinger joined the Nixon White House staff as deputy director of the Bureau of the Budget, where he overcame Pentagon opposition to cut $6 billion from the defense budget during the Vietnam War. Impressed, Nixon named him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which ran the nuclear weapons complex and regulated the nuclear power industry.

After Nixon won reelection in 1972, he effectively fired CIA Director Richard Helms after the two clashed over Helms’s refusal to impede the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in, the botched political operation that ultimately led to the president’s resignation.

Schlesinger also served President Jimmy Carter as top energy adviser. He backed nuclear power, incurring the wrath of activists like Jane Fonda and politicians like Jerry Brown.

Mr. Schlesinger became a symbol of the long gas lines that “marked the beginning of the end of the Presidency of Jimmy Carter,” wrote energy analyst Daniel Yergin in “The Prize,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the American oil industry. Mr. Schlesinger left office in July 1979, part of a Cabinet reshuffling by Carter, whose poll numbers were sagging. At the time, Mr. Schlesinger said he was leaving the “onerous and miscellaneous responsibilities falling to the lot of the ‘energy czar.’ ”

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.