According to CIA veterans, the most loathed Director of Central Intelligence was James R. Schlesinger. Schlesinger was head of the CIA for President Richard Nixon for 150 days in 1973, one the shortest directorships in the Agency’s history. It was also likely the most combative, with some staffers going so far to call Schlesinger’s leadership a “reign of terror”—an interesting turn of phrase for people involved in establishing actual reigns of terror around the world.
According to political scientist Christopher Moran, Schlesinger had to have extra bodyguards assigned to him as he traveled to and from CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia. Agency bulletin boards “were replete with unflattering caricatures.” Moran also notes that “reportedly, a special closed-circuit television camera was installed opposite his official portrait because of fears that it be vandalized by disgruntled employees.”
By accounts, Schlesinger was “abrasive.” His Harvard classmate and fellow Nixon administration member Henry Kissinger, no shrinking violent himself, “conceded him pride of place in arrogance.” Made assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget by Nixon in 1969, Schlesinger quickly built a reputation for slashing budgets and not caring what people thought about it. Or him.
“An avid birdwatcher, he kept binoculars by his office window so that he could spy on the car park and reprimand staff who arrive late for work,” Moran writes.
But it wasn’t just Schlesinger’s personality and budget-cutting that alienated CIA staffers and threw the Agency into turmoil.
Schlesinger had outright disdain for the CIA’s can-do cowboy culture. He thought the future was in SIGINT (signals intelligence), not human intelligence (HUMINT). The era of “Wild Bill” Donovan, first head of the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was over—along with nutty schemes like trying to make Castro’s beard fall out.
Then there was Schlesinger’s order for a list of all activities, past or present, that “might be interpreted as being outside the CIA’s legislative charter.” This was because the break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex in June 1972 had CIA fingerprints all over it: two of the burglar/wiretappers were CIA veterans, a couple others had been anti-Castro Cuban CIA assets.