Leon E. Panetta, the former Monterey Bay area congressman and White House chief of staff, is President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to national news reports quoting Democratic insiders. Panetta has degrees in political science and law from Santa Clara University. “He couldn’t have picked a better guy,” says San Jose attorney Bill Gates, a longtime friend who spent two years in the mid-1960s at a desk facing Panetta’s at Fort Ord, when the two were Army officers. “I’m surprised because I know how much he enjoys heading up the Panetta Institute, but he cares a lot about what is going on.”
Panetta, who headed up the Office for Civil Rights under President Richard Nixon, will be thrust in the middle of the controversy over incarceration and interrogation of international terror suspects. Panetta left the Nixon Administration and the Republican Party after becoming disillusioned with its failure to enforce the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. He switched parties in 1971 and was elected as a Democrat to represent California’s 16th congressional district, which includes his home town of Monterey as well as the liberal bastion of Santa Cruz. President Bill Clinton named Panetta as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and in 1994 Panetta became White House Chief of Staff.
For the past ten years he has devoted himself to the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University, Monterey Bay — a college he helped build at the site of the decommissioned Fort Ord. In 2006, he served on the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan committee appointed by Congress that returned a blistering critique of the war.
Interesting that Dianne Feinstein is getting so huffy about the appointment. Given her judgements over the last few years, I’d be inclined to take that as a recommendation for Panetta.
LA Times (still in business so far today) has a good article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-cia-panetta6-2009jan06,0,5514283.story
I think it’s not such an important appointment as it once was, since the CIA is considerably weaker now than when Bush took office. It’s slightly surprising, since Bush’s father was CIA chief, but Cheney has had it in for the CIA since the CIA had the nerve to contradict the Reagan team in the 1980s by stating that the Soviet Union was getting weaker rather than stronger. That the subsequent collapse of the USSR proved the CIA analysis to be correct only rubbed salt in Cheney’s wounds. And Cheney could write the Wikipedia entry on holding a grudge. Hence turning the CIA into a scapegoat at every possible occasion.
Appointing an agency insider would do little to clean up the situation. So I think it’s an interesting choice. California is certainly getting back into the corridors of power after being frozen out for 8 years.
I too was somewhat mystified by DiFi’s outburst… And I agree that it recommends the appointment… When combined with Sen. Rockefeller’s similar reaction, doubly so… Both Senator’s seem to have a another horse in the race, the Deputy Director, which is really change I can believe in… NOT!
The job of rebuilding our Federal Govt is going to require a thorough housecleaning, under Bush we have seen a systematic attempt to undermine the both the truth and anyone capable of seeing it… If we are going to let this malevolent weasel off the hook with his plaintive wail of “If only the intelligence had been right…” then we know where we need to start.
Mr. Panetta is a not a left-wing radical and I would not be surprised to learn that, like GHW Bush, he will be no stranger to the CIA when he takes over. Not only does the CIA recruit broadly, deeply and silently, it would also seem to me that if anyone in the White House knows where the dollars are buried it is the OMB and it can also reasonably be assumed that if the President knows something, his Chief of Staff does as well…
And finally, if he really wanted to shake ‘em up he would’ve chosen Ray McGovern…
RGJ