Watching Birds and Budgets

"Let's cut out that Pentagon baloney," the nation's current Secretary of Defense once directed an Air Force colonel. "Just give me the facts." The Secretary can be gracious and soft-spoken with visitors, as he sucks on his pipe in his third-floor office on the Pentagon's E Ring. At other times he can turn peevish, ornery and even confusing. But the particular challenge he presents to his military colleagues at the Defense Department is that, unlike his eleven predecessors, James R. Schlesinger, 45, is a professional weapons-systems analyst who knows exactly what the men in uniform are talking about.

He may, in fact, be the most highly qualified Secretary of Defense that the U.S. has yet had. Like his Harvard classmate (1950) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Schlesinger has devoted a large part of his life to a study of the age of nuclear confrontation. As Secretary of Defense, he recognizes that his function is to provide both intellectual and administrative leadership. "You cannot control a department of this size; you have to guide it," he said last week. "I'm really a revivalist."

Schlesinger spent his childhood in New York City, the son of a Vienna-born accountant whom Jim's brother, World Bank Economist Eugene Schlesinger, describes as "probably the brightest analytical mind we ever met." Jim Schlesinger earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard and taught for eight years at the University of Virginia. During this period he wrote a book, The Political Economy of National Security, which deals with the role of systems analysis in politics and strategy-making. But his advanced training in defense strategy really dates from his six years on the staff of the Rand Corp., where he was deeply immersed in the abstrusities of the nuclear age.

At Rand, Schlesinger is remembered as a tough theoretician who, in the words of one former colleague, "could out-McNamara Robert McNamara," then Secretary of Defense. Says another: "Jim challenged the physical scientists on some of their weapons-effect assumptions. He got great mileage out of poking holes into conventional ideas." Schlesinger called the Air Force to account over its reliability claims for the Minuteman missile, later published a paper attacking the flaws in his own craft of systems analysis. It was at Rand, recalls a friend, that Schlesinger became "haunted by Strangelove scenarios of accidental nuclear confrontation" and began to consider alternative strategies.

Schlesinger made the jump to the Federal Government in 1969, and since then has held--or almost held--a variety of top jobs. He was slated to become Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, but was blackballed by some Rand alumni at the Pentagon who remembered his attack on their trade. Instead, he joined the Bureau of the Budget as an expert on military affairs, with far more power over the Defense Department's budget than he would have had at the Pentagon. Almost singlehanded he succeeded in killing the Air Force's manned orbiting space lab and the Navy's antisubmarine carrier task force.

Then, in quick succession, Schlesinger became acting director and assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the AEC, he urged utility companies to pay more attention to environment safeguards. When industry leaders complained, he snapped: "Gentlemen, I'm not here to protect your triple-A bond ratings." Later, when environmentalists expressed concern about the possible effects of an underground nuclear test in the Aleutian Islands, Schlesinger took his wife Rachel and two of their eight children to Amchitka Island to be present during the test.

At the CIA, Schlesinger was equally blunt, and iconoclastic, though as usual he delivered his pronouncements in a carefully reasoned, almost donnish manner. "The trouble with this place is that it has been run like a gentlemen's club," he declared, "and I'm no gentleman." Attacking spookery for its own sake, he ordered that road signs in Langley, Va., should for the first time point the way to the CIA headquarters. He also decreed that most employees should identify themselves by name when they answered their phones. More important, he fired or retired some 1,200 of the agency's estimated 18,000 employees. When he left to become Secretary of Defense, recalls a CIA veteran, "there wasn't a wet eye in the house."

It is a safe guess that Jim Schlesinger did not care in the least. A pensive man who plays the guitar and the harmonica in his spare time, he is also a salty-tongued loner who makes little effort to keep in step. He favors vending-machine hamburgers for lunch, thinks social engagements are a waste of time, and skips White House dinners when ever he can. At the office he wears rumpled suits, scrawny ties and sagging socks, and much of the time his shirttail is out. His private car is a battered 1964 Plymouth that he bought last year after his 1960 Falcon finally fell to earth; he gave it to the CIA training school for use as a shooting target.

Despite his long hours at the Pentagon, Schlesinger occasionally finds time on Saturday mornings to indulge in his favorite pastime, bird watching, on Theodore Roosevelt Island. "It's a solitary avocation, much in keeping with Jim's personality," notes a friend. "I doubt whether anyone has ever really been admitted into his private sanctuary." In his bird log, which he keeps meticulously, Schlesinger lists the names of 575 species that he has spotted during his lifetime.

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