With all due respect to Senator Feinstein, a lifetime of intelligence experience is no guarantee of greatness in a DCI. Only two Directors - Helms and Colby - were true "pros", and both ran into political difficulties. So did Dulles and William Casey, who learned espionage tradecraft during the OSS whackiness of World War II. More recently, President Bush’s appointment of former CIA Case Officer Porter Goss, who became DCI after resigning as a Republican Congressman, only highlighted Democratic suspicions that the Bush Administration was trying to "politicize" the Agency.
Esoteric experience isn't everything. What's far more important in a DCI is simple Stature - a word, like Honor, not often found in today's political lexicon. When President Kennedy appointed another Californian, John McCone, to replace Allen Dulles at CIA after the Bay of Pigs, the multi-millionaire Bechtel Corporation founder and former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, on his first day in office, startled his new aides by demanding, point-blank, "Now what exactly is a double agent?"
Yet McCone proved to be a fast learner and he quickly gained the admiration of his Agency underlings as a tough executive with an incisive mind. "Outsider" Directors who fail to garner that respect - like the Admiral who succeeded McCone - are courting trouble. The CIA is full of expert manipulators, well-trained in techniques of character assassination, and a hapless Director who finds the requirements of the job beyond him may find himself laughed out of the Beltway.
No danger of that with Leon Panetta. He has administrative ability. He can inspire the people with whom he works. He has a wide range of experience in both the public and private sectors - including a Directorship of the New York Stock Exchange. Once a liberal Republican and Civil Rights official in the Nixon Administration, he's liberal, but not too liberal to direct a sometimes-ruthless secret service.
Most importantly, Panetta has the potential to become a genuine Senior Statesman of the Obama years. And there have been all too few larger than life foreign policy figures of the caliber of George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Paul Warnke and Warren Christopher in Democratic or Republican Administrations since the Vietnam tragedy.
Turning 71 next year, Panetta would, I believe, become the second oldest DCI after Casey, but it's not just a matter of age. What's important for the CIA - indeed, what's important for America - is that the President have a Director at his side with far-sighted good judgment.
Nearly 25 years ago, when Casey's departure as DCI was impending, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times suggesting that "with all the demands on the CIA today, lofty and judicious wisdom about the world is too much to expect of any Director. Even experienced civilians like Dulles and Casey fall prey to the official delusion that troubles all secret bureaucracies, or, at best, find themselves caught up in the stresses of day-to-day crises." And yet, "there ought to be a man of wisdom who can look out on the world - and down on the mundane, sleazy workings of the intelligence community - a wise man who can be placed on that height by the stroke of a presidential pen...someone of unquestioned integrity and experience, of the caliber of a U.S.Supreme Court justice..."
After 9/11, the post of "Director of National Intelligence" was created to help coordinate all the disparate agencies of the Intelligence Community and avoid the kind of right hand-left hand confusion which helped the terrorists of 9/11 to fall through the cracks. But this wasn't what Truman intimate Clark Clifford had in mind when he advised President Kennedy to appoint an Intelligence "czar". Clifford had envisioned a Cabinet-level official who would sit at the President's right-hand, not only presenting him with the highest quality of foreign intelligence, but also with the sage advice and counsel to translate intelligence into policy.
It's impossible to say now whether Leon Panetta can fill that bill, but his prior service as President Clinton's Chief of Staff offers a basis for hope. So does his presumed close friendship with Mrs. Clinton - holding out the possibility of the closest working relationship between a DCI and a Secretary of State since the Dulles brothers of the 1950s. To say nothing of a President who will deserve advisers of that caliber.
Like it or not, sooner or later, global crises are certain to impinge on the immediate domestic concerns of the Obama Administration. Crises far more complex and thorny than the so-called "War on Terror". We are entering an era when the Cold War concept of "National Security" must be re-defined and restructured into new ideas of "Global Security". Terrorism was just the wake-up call. Think Climate Change, Pandemics, Mass Migration, Economic Globalization, Nuclear Proliferation. Even Piracy, for heavens sakes. We are all in this together.
The American Intelligence Community will soon face new and very different challenges and requirements and it won't be easy to escape from old mind-sets. Much will depend on the man at the top.
"It's hard", President Eisenhower once said of the DCI appointment, "to find exactly the right man". For better or worse, he found Allen Dulles who, four years before he took office, had laid out the job requirements this way:
"Judicial temperament...discriminating judgment...common sense which can only come of long experience and profound knowledge" - and constant vigilance against "the human frailty of intellectual stubbornness".
Does Leon Panetta fit the bill? Does anyone? At least he will come to the job with a fresh perspective - and maybe one hell of a good shot at aiming for greatness.
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