James R. Schlesinger

Origins and early life

James Rodney Schlesinger was born in New York on 15 February 1929, the son of Julius Schlesinger, an accountant whose family had come from Austria, and of Rhea Rogen, an immigrant from Lithuania, both of them Jews, and was raised in a Jewish home; in his early twenties, after a stay in Germany during his years at Harvard, he converted to Lutheranism — the fact this fiche states first, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency did in his obituary, calling him 'the Jewish-born defense secretary'.

Work and career

A Harvard doctor of economics, he taught at the University of Virginia, wrote on the political economy of national security at the RAND Corporation, and entered government under Nixon in the Bureau of the Budget; he chaired the Atomic Energy Commission from 1971, and in 1973 served for five months as Director of Central Intelligence, purging the agency of a thousand officers and ordering the compilation of its illegal activities, the 'family jewels', whose publication would shake it for a decade.

In July 1973 he became Secretary of Defense, and in October, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur and Israel's ammunition ran short, he oversaw Operation Nickel Grass, the American airlift of twenty-two thousand tons of tanks, shells and aircraft that helped turn the war — a decision he defended as strategic rather than sentimental, and for which Israel remembered him. Dismissed by President Ford in 1975 after clashing with Kissinger over détente, he returned under Carter as the first Secretary of Energy, from 1977 to 1979, building the department through the second oil shock. He died in Baltimore on 27 March 2014.