Gotta Call Panetta
Leon Panetta didn’t just stumble upon Monterey as a nice place to live. He was born there. And in all his travels, to the farthest-flung places on the globe, he always kept his watch set to California time -- as a reminder of home.
Panetta graduated from Santa Clara University School of Law in 1963. What made him go, I ask. It was a “combination of elements,” he tells me. In high school he developed an interest in student politics and “help[ing] others and try[ing] to make a difference was important to me.” And his brother, who Panetta called “a model for me” had gone too. “I thought maybe I would like to do the same thing because in the end, law can give me the opportunity not only to practice if I want but also to take those credentials and bring them to government service.”
Panetta’s first stop as a lawyer was the Army, coincidentally serving as an intelligence officer, getting early experience for what was to come. But he was also called upon to represent servicemen in court martials. And he was good at it. Panetta tells me that the calls for his services were so frequent that his wife joked that his name must have been written on the stockade wall.
“I enjoyed the challenge of going into special court martials and general court martials with people who had some very difficult cases,” Panetta says. It was a difficult system for the accused, the former Army lawyer explains, “but if you studied, if you read the law, if you read what you could try and accomplish on behalf of your client, it was amazing that I could really make a difference in terms of their legal cases.”
A Rough Start In Politics
Following the Army, the still-nascent lawyer got his first taste of politics. Panetta served as a legislative aide to California Republican Senator Tom Kuchel. But it was a short stay. Kuchel was the victim of false allegations about his sexual orientation. He lost re-election not long after Panetta arrived.
Panetta landed as a special assistant to Robert Finch, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Despite being just 30 years old, Panetta quickly rose to Director of HEW’s Office of Civil Rights – overseeing nearly 300 lawyers.
Here again things ended quickly. The Office was responsible for implementing the law on school desegregation. And following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and subsequently enacted federal statutes, that mandate was clear. It offered no options. But President Nixon, seeking to maintain his support in the South, was in no rush to enforce the law. Of course only one of them could get their way. And, of course, it’s clear who that would be. Panetta woke up one day in 1970 to a headline in The Washington Daily News that read “Nixon Seeks to Fire HEW’s Rights Chief for Liberal Views.” Panetta quickly resigned.
Panetta was now 0-2 in Washington – having been victimized by the ruthlessness that can be politics. He had gone to Washington to do good. Following these initial experiences, I suggest to Panetta that nobody could have faulted him for throwing in the towel. But he didn’t. “I like challenges,” Panetta tells me. “When I am given the opportunity to face something new, and it offers a new challenge, I enjoy the opportunity to be able to get into that job and make it work. And, you know, I guess in that sense the Italian in me tells me you don’t give up. You keep fighting back.”
While Panetta could have easily been soured toward public service, and gone in a different direction, he didn’t. Today, his Institute for Public Policy, founded in 1997, has, as one of its missions, preventing young people from eschewing public service because of a belief that government is broken.
After being handed his walking papers by Nixon, Panetta went on to write a book about the experience. Then, after a year working as an Executive Assistant for New York City Mayor John Lindsay, Panetta took a break from politics and returned to Monterey. He spent five years practicing law with his brother, doing “a bit of everything.” And given his background with school desegregation he took on civil rights work.
But the public service bug bit again. Panetta ran for the House of Representatives. And in 1977 he began the first of eight terms representing the California district in which he was born and raised.
Carmelo Panetta And The Balanced Budget
In 1992 Panetta was re-elected to his ninth term in Congress. But he wouldn’t go on to serve it. Thanks to his extensive work on the House Budget Committee, including acting as its Chair for several years, Panetta was tapped by President Clinton to be his Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
In that role, Panetta orchestrated an unthinkable legislative achievement – a balanced budget. He had spent his career as a deficit hawk – guided by the principle that servicing the national debt takes away from the nation’s ability to attend to other priorities. Panetta explains it to me this way: “It goes to the heart of the ability of our democracy to get things accomplished. You cannot just simply create the kind of huge debt that we have created again now and expect that you are going to have the resources or capability to really accomplish the things that need to be done.”
Panetta had grown up hearing of the evils of debt. His father, Carmelo, was a successful restauranteur in Monterey. “My father taught me that it was very important obviously to work hard, but to also be careful with what you earn and he always operated on a cash basis,” Panetta says. “‘What the hell is that for when you can pay in cash,’” Panetta tells me was his father’s response upon seeing that his son had a gasoline credit card. “That was the ethic they built into me and it came together when I got elected and then got on the Budget Committee.”
Having been a student of his father’s lessons on debt, I suggest that Carmelo Panetta played a part in the nation achieving a balanced budget. “I think that’s right,” Panetta says, laughing.
Panetta adds a postscript to the story: “I always thought that once we balanced the budget and added surplus that we would never go back to deficit spending and to huge debts -- but that changed real fast.”
I pose this scenario to Panetta -- It’s 2020, a Democrat is in the White House, Panetta is home in Monterey – in the house his father built on a farm in the late 1940s -- and the phone rings. The voice on the other end is the President’s, telling him that the national debt is crippling the nation. We need you back to solve it, the President implores him. I ask Panetta is he’s getting on a plane to Washington? He laughs. “You know, at this stage of the game, 3,000 miles away from Washington, I’m enjoying life. I’ve certainly committed my life to public service and I’ve never regretted that. In my own way, in whatever way I can, I’ll continue to try to serve my country.”
An Eerie Road Trip
On September 11, 2001, Panetta was out of politics. But he found himself in Washington that day, testifying in the House Office Building about an oceans project in which he was involved. Following the terrorist attacks, he wanted to get back home to Monterey. But with all flights grounded, flying was not an option. Panetta rented a car and drove cross-country.
Panetta witnessed first-hand how Americans, coast-to-coast, absorbed the impact of September 11th. He would later go on to lead the CIA and be at the helm of locating Osama bin Laden and planning the mission in Pakistan that would kill him. Then he would be Secretary of Defense and oversee the hostilities that grew out of 9-11.
[Panetta was played by James Gandolfini in “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film that dramatizes the hunt for bin Laden. Of the Sopranos star’s portrayal of him, Panetta has said that he did a “great job.”]
That Panetta made such a cross-country drive is eerie, I tell him. It’s as if he was destined for his roles at CIA and the Defense Department and his 9-11 road trip was an orientation, designed to give him a first-hand view of the country, and people, whose safety he would go on to ensure.
Panetta is not unmindful of my observation. “I’ve often -- particularly when I was offered the job as CIA Director -- thought back to that trip that I took from Washington to California right after 9-11 and really got a sense how the country was responding to that attack. I could feel, wherever I stayed, that . . . there was a sense of real patriotism. It was time for the country to pull together and deal with this attack. You could just feel it at the grass roots as I drove across the country and that feeling never left me.”
The CIA And Pushing The Button
Panetta served as Director of the CIA from 2009 to 2011. Is a lawyer the best person for that job? Doesn’t the CIA act kinda lawlessly, I ask Panetta, telling him that I mean no disrespect. He doesn’t take offense -- and assures me that the laws are being followed at Langley. Panetta confronted the CIA’s legal mechanism often, he explains, as he called himself a “combatant commander” (a term coined by his predecessor, Michael Hayden).
Given the nature of the missions – taking out terrorists -- Panetta says that he found himself “making life and death decisions almost on a daily basis. And when you do that, there is not only the issue, obviously, of conscience, how you do it in accord with your beliefs about protecting life, but, at the same time, you’ve got to make sure that when you are pushing the button that the law is on your side.”
When it comes to putting targets on a list, Panetta explains that it is done with counsel “making sure that they should be on that kind of list, and doing that in conjunction with the Justice Department and their counsel, to get them to sign off, and then having the White House counsel also ultimately approve that. There is an entire legal process that is at the foundation of what you do.”
Lesson Of Compromise
Even lawyers who did not spend significant time practicing law most likely cannot divorce the experience from their alternative careers. And Panetta is no exception. Indeed, it taught him a skill that was at the very heart of his lifetime in politics – the art of compromise.
“The ability to govern and find compromise is very difficult these days as we have seen. . . . As an attorney, this is what you are going to be doing,” Panetta explains. “You are going to have to know what the other side is going to argue. How does the law support their position? How do the facts support their position? You are going to have to then determine the law and the facts with your own client but you are also going to have to look at where possibly these things can be resolved. Particularly these days with mediation and arbitration, it is almost constant and you are trying to determine how can you resolve these issues. I think having that legal background is extremely important when it comes to politics and to public service.”
Area 51: “Little Men From Outer Space”
I had one more question for Leon Panetta. And I was not throwing away my shot. I tell him that he would make me famous if he gave me a scoop. I can see the curious look on his face through the phone. I lay it on him. Would the former Director of the CIA admit that there are aliens at the Air Force’s Area 51 in the Nevada desert?
“I would love to give you that one,” Panetta says, laughing loudly. “I watch these movies and there’s always this sudden revelation that they’ve got somebody from outer space locked in a hole someplace in Area 51. You know, I have to tell you, as Director of the CIA, and also Secretary of Defense, I never found the location that I’ve seen in movies. There is a location there, but it clearly doesn’t include little men from outer space.”
Sure it doesn’t, says the man who is part of the conspiracy.
[Elizabeth Vandenberg, a student at the University of Iowa College of Law, assisted with this article.] |