James R. Schlesinger '50 said his most humorous White House memory came in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter met with his cabinet--of which Schlesinger was a member--and asked them all to resign.

In an ironic twist, Robert Straus-Hupe, an American ambassador and political advisor, arrived late to the meeting. He entered the room and joked, "What you oughta do Mr. President is ask for everybody's resignation."

Schlesinger said he and Straus-Hupe laughed, the rest of the room sat in silence.

And while laughter may have seemed out of place for the occasion, Schlesinger rarely fit the typical political model. His political service spanned from the Nixon to the Carter administrations, as he crossed party lines in his public service.

He argued for the importance of bi-partisanship, an ideal he followed before it had become a Beltway buzzword. He seemed more like a professor than politician during Congressional hearings. And he was attacked for speaking his mind and not simply playing games of political networking.

"[He] isn't the world's greatest backslapper," said Robert Fri, then acting head of the Energy Research and Development Administration, in The Wall Street Journal in 1977. "I don't think he has a high capacity to suffer fools gladly."

While political pundits accused him of being politically and personally aloof, Schlesinger has stayed the political course, never searching for the media spotlight and serving his life in the political sphere in the unassuming role of a public servant for the common good.

Apt Administrator

Since his 1969 appointment by President Richard Nixon as assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, Schlesinger has led a laundry-list of governmental agencies and private organizations.

He has served as Secretary of Defense, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), director of strategic studies at the RAND Corporation and a professor of economics at the University of Virginia.

Schlesinger now works for the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research program connected with the Department of Defense.

He also works part-time as a consultant at Lehman Brothers of Wall Street. "That pays the bills," Schlesinger says, as he noted the freedom that comes with the job.

Eliot House Academic

Twenty-seven years after his graduation from Harvard, The Wall Street Journal described Schlesinger as "a Harvard Ph.D. rated by some as the most brilliant student in his college class."

Schlesinger was a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his senior year and graduated summa cum laude--"in the days before grade inflation," he said.

He lived in the Eliot House of John Finley '24, "a rather elegant master," Schlesinger says. "[The House] had more of a social tone than it does now."

Schlesinger participated in extracurriculars when he was not working for his grades, but athletics never took Schlesinger away from his studies--he considered varsity football, but decided that it was too time consuming.