The Nation: Watching Birds and Budgets

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"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.