Approved For Release 2001/12/04: CIA-RDP84-00499R000200050001-9


James R. Schlesinger: To The Pentagons
Post Friday 11 May 1973
Impatient Fact Finder

By Stuart Aucrbach
Washington Post Stuff Writer Pentagon briefers have a shock coming when James R. Schlesinger takes over as Secretary of Defense: he hates the chart and slide shows that military men love to use to make their points.
"Let's cut out that Pentagon baloney," he once told a retired Air Force colonel. "Just give me the facts."
That's Schlesinger in a nutshell: abrupt, impatient with superficial trappings and searching for facts; a man who knows the value of using shock tactics while trying to gain control of a sprawling federal agency.
In his four years and three months In government almost the length of the Nixon administration Schlesinger has been shaking up the establishment.
In 16 months as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission he reorganized and transformed It from a promoter of nuclear power to a regulator of the atomic industry. And then, before he
left for the Central Intelligence Agency, persuaded President Nixon to pick another maverick, Dixy Leo Ray, as the new A EC chairman.
 	During the Past Four months he has put imprint print on the CIA. He took the job as CIA director with a mandate from President Nixon to clean out dead wood and to end the bickering between the nation's intelligence agencies.
	Schlesinger worked so hard at the assignment that when he came to work one day with a cast on his right hand a story went around the agency that he had broken it pounding on his desk.
	The new director complained to Congress that the CIA is overloaded with over- age spies recruited during the Cold War who have trouble adjusting to today's more peaceful world. He began pushing early retirement for some and has 'started reducing the CIA's 15,000 employees by at least 10 per cent.
	Moreover, he was ap- palled by some of the Mickey Mouse super secrecy at "the agency."
' He ordered , switchboard operators 'to answer calls with" "Central Intelligence Agency." Employees now answer the phone with their name or office identifications (such as Vietnam
Desk) intoed of merely repeating the extension number.
Schlesinger also has ordered the removal of signs Identifying' the CIA head quarters at Langley as a highway research station. He ordered new ones saying, "Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Va.," installed.
Earlier this week he brought a display of candor rare to CIA directors when he admitted to a congressional committee that CIA
assistance in a burglary attempt on the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist was "ill advised." He pointed out three times however, that it Occurred while Richard Helms was director.
This didn't endear Schlesinger to the "old boy" network in the CIA.
	One CIA veteran commented yesterday that "there wasn't a wet eye in the place" when word got out that Schlesinger was moving to the Pentagon.
 	He will not be among friends when he moves to the Pentagon either. During his two years with the Bureau of the Budget and its successor agency, The Office of Management and Budget,
Schlesinger was an overseer of the Defense Department's money requests. He had reputation for insisting that better management could save defense dollars.
 	In the Nixon administration's first year, his friends report, he was personally responsible for trimming S6 billion from the Pentagon budget.
 	'He had the hammer on the defense guys for more than a year," recalls a high ranking Nixon aide. "He's made very few friends in the Pentagon."
	Nevertheless, Schlesinger indicated recently that the era of cutting defense spending should end. In a little-noticed speech delivered last September when he was still AEC chairman, Schlesinger said:
	"I am firmly persuaded that the time has come, if it
has not already passed to call a halt to the self-defeating game of cutting defense outlays. It is an illusion to believe that we can maintain defense forces adequate for our treaty obligations to, say, NATO and Japan, with sharp curtailment in defense expenditures supposedly directed only to waste and duplication."
	Schlesinger first came to President Nixon's attention
through his work as assistant director of OMB, when he headed a survey team that in 1071 evaluated the nation's intelligence network. The report recommended the sweeping reforms that Schlesinger was eventually to undertake.


Approved For Release 2001/12/04: CIA-RDP84-00499R000200050001-9