James Schlesinger

It is a serious warning, and it is for real.

You may not know that many, many years ago I worked with James Schlesinger, at that time the Secretary of Defense in Washington, in the Nixon administration.

He stayed for a short time in the Ford administration.

And Schlesinger was the author of the so-called concept of select nuclear options.

And, and he was very devious with the press, but the press loved him because he'd give little tidbits to them.

Um, so comparing Jim Schlesinger, who was...

People don't remember who he is now, but he was the Secretary of Defense at the fall of Vietnam, and I was his special assistant then, so I watched him interacting with Henry and President Ford, and it was an education.

Because Schlesinger stayed with the troops.

He said, "We have to continue to support V- South Vietnam.

We have to continue to give them aid.

We have to continue to bomb in the north." And, and Henry had gone over to this idea that we were going to have a détente with the Soviet Union, and that v- Vietnam was something we just had to get rid of.

And President Ford was not a bright person, so he went along with Henry.

realization that it could that the Watergate thing was going to potentially expose a lot of secrets and an effort to unearth you know what the CIA was up to because I think Helms understood that Nixon believed that CIA elements were involved in this in this scandal and were essentially wanting to destroy Nixon and so Helms as a for good reason, realizes that this is a vulnerability.

And then it's similar to how it's when James Schlesinger, who is the guy that replaces Helms, it's when he looks at how the CIA was involved in facilitating the activities of the Watergate burglars.

That's what made him realize, holy shit, we need to I need to get a handle on what the CIA has been up to.

And I want to know everything that they've done that's violated their charter because they seem to be this force that's not under the control of the president and is actually hostile to him, perhaps catastrophically so.

He was shit-faced half the time.

So much so that Alexander Haig, General Alexander Haig, his chief of staff and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, called up James Schlesinger, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, and they said, I'm paraphrasing, they said, Jim, we got a little problem over here at the White House.

The president is crazy and he's drinking heavily.

And it's possible, it's just possible, in the middle of the night, You might get a phone call from the president ordering you to launch a military strike somewhere.