Wikipedia Deep Dive

Leon Panetta

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The Man Who Gave the Order

On the night of May 1st, 2011, Leon Panetta sat in the director's conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Thousands of miles away, Navy SEALs were descending on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Panetta was connected to the White House Situation Room, where President Obama watched the operation unfold. When the mission commander's voice crackled through the line confirming that Osama bin Laden was dead, Panetta had accomplished what the CIA had been trying to do for nearly a decade.

It was the culmination of a career that almost defies belief in its scope.

Leon Panetta served as Secretary of Defense, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and spent sixteen years in Congress. He worked for both parties. He helped balance the federal budget. He opened combat roles to women in the military. He certified the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." And when he finally retired, his son Jimmy took over his old congressional seat.

How does one person end up at the center of so many consequential moments in American history?

Monterey Beginnings

Leon Edward Panetta was born on June 28th, 1938, in Monterey, California. His parents, Carmelo and Carmelina, were Italian immigrants from Siderno, a small town on the toe of the Italian boot in the Calabria region. In the 1940s, the Panetta family ran a restaurant in Monterey—the kind of modest immigrant enterprise that has launched countless American success stories.

Young Leon attended Catholic grammar schools in Monterey and nearby Carmel, then enrolled at Monterey High School. It was there that he discovered politics. He joined the Junior Statesmen of America, a civics organization that teaches students about democratic participation. By his junior year, he was vice president of the student body. By senior year, he was president.

The pattern was established early: Leon Panetta would keep rising.

He enrolled at Santa Clara University in 1956 and graduated magna cum laude—Latin for "with great honor"—in 1960 with a degree in political science. Three years later, he earned his law degree from the same university. Then came a stint in the United States Army, where he served as an intelligence officer in the Military Intelligence Corps. He was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1966, having earned the Army Commendation Medal.

This two-year military intelligence posting would prove unexpectedly relevant decades later.

A Republican Who Became a Democrat

Here's something that surprises people: Leon Panetta started his career as a Republican.

In 1966, fresh out of the Army, he went to work as a legislative assistant for Thomas Kuchel, a Republican senator from California who served as the Senate Minority Whip—the second-highest position in the minority party's leadership. Panetta has called Kuchel "a tremendous role model."

Three years later, Panetta joined the Nixon administration. He became an assistant to Robert Finch, who was running the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Panetta was soon promoted to direct the Office for Civil Rights, which was responsible for enforcing civil rights laws, including requirements that schools integrate.

This is where things got complicated.

President Nixon was pursuing what historians call the "Southern Strategy"—an effort to win political support from white voters in the South, many of whom opposed civil rights enforcement. Nixon wanted Panetta to slow-walk integration. Panetta refused. He chose to enforce the law.

His bosses backed him up. Finch and assistant secretary John Veneman supported Panetta and threatened to resign if forced to fire him. But you can only resist a president for so long. In 1970, Panetta was forced out.

He didn't go quietly. He wrote a book about the experience called "Bring Us Together"—a pointed reference to Nixon's own campaign slogan. Then he left Washington to work for John Lindsay, the Republican mayor of New York City who was known for his liberal views.

In 1971, Panetta switched his party registration to Democrat. His explanation was straightforward: he believed the Republican Party was moving away from the political center. He returned to Monterey to practice law at a firm called Panetta, Thompson, and Panetta.

Five years later, he was ready to run for office himself.

Sixteen Years in Congress

In 1976, Panetta won election to Congress, representing California's 16th congressional district. He defeated the Republican incumbent, Burt Talcott, with 53 percent of the vote. It would be the closest race of his congressional career. He won reelection eight more times without ever facing serious opposition.

Panetta became known as a workhorse, not a show horse. He focused on budget issues, civil rights, education, healthcare, agriculture, immigration, and environmental protection. He was especially passionate about protecting the California coast from oil drilling.

Some of his legislative achievements:

The Hunger Prevention Act of 1988, which expanded food assistance programs
The Fair Employment Practices Resolution
Legislation establishing the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, protecting over 6,000 square miles of ocean
Legislation providing Medicare coverage for hospice care, allowing terminally ill patients to receive comfort care in their final months

He also helped establish California State University, Monterey Bay, working with the university system's chancellor to convert the former Fort Ord military base into a college campus. This was the same Fort Ord where Panetta had been stationed during his Army service in the 1960s. Years later, he would locate his policy institute on that campus.

Not everything succeeded. Panetta tried to create the Big Sur National Scenic Area, a massive 700,000-acre protected zone along the iconic California coast. The proposal would have been administered by the United States Forest Service and included $100 million to purchase land from private owners.

Local residents hated it. They mockingly called it "Panetta's Pave 'n' Save" and raised more than $100,000 to lobby against it. California senator S.I. Hayakawa blocked the legislation in committee, and it never came to a vote.

But Panetta's real power came from the House Budget Committee. He served on it from 1979 to 1989, then chaired it from 1989 to 1993. The budget committee is where fiscal policy gets made. Panetta played a key role in the 1990 budget summit, a bipartisan negotiation that tried to reduce the federal deficit.

His reputation as a budget hawk would define his next act.

Clinton's Enforcer

In 1992, Panetta won his ninth term in Congress. He would never complete it.

President-elect Bill Clinton asked Panetta to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, usually called the OMB. This is the office that assembles the president's budget proposal, one of the most consequential documents in American government. It determines how much money every federal agency gets to spend.

Panetta developed the budget package that would eventually produce something remarkable: a balanced federal budget in 1998. For the first time since 1969, the federal government took in more money than it spent. Whether you credit Clinton, Panetta, the Republican Congress, or the booming economy of the 1990s depends on your politics. But Panetta was at the center of it.

Then Clinton had a bigger problem.

By 1994, the White House had developed a reputation for chaos. Staff members leaked to reporters. Meetings started late. The policy process was disorganized. Foreign and domestic initiatives seemed uncoordinated. Clinton had promised a professional operation and wasn't delivering one.

He asked Panetta to become White House Chief of Staff, replacing Mack McLarty.

The Chief of Staff is not a well-known position to most Americans, but it may be the most important unelected job in the executive branch. The Chief of Staff controls access to the president. They decide who gets meetings, which memos reach the Oval Office, and how the White House staff operates. A weak Chief of Staff creates chaos. A strong one creates order.

Panetta was a strong one.

As one author put it: "Panetta replaced McLarty for the rest of Clinton's first term—and the rest is history. To be a great leader, a modern president must have a great chief of staff—and in Leon Panetta, Clinton got the enforcer he deserved."

Panetta served as Chief of Staff from July 1994 until January 1997. He was a key negotiator of the 1996 budget, another step toward the balanced budget that would come two years later. Then he went home to Monterey.

The Panetta Institute

After leaving the White House, Panetta and his wife Sylvia founded the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in December 1997. They located it at California State University, Monterey Bay—the campus he had helped create.

The institute's mission is to prepare people for public service and help them engage more effectively in democracy. It hosts programs for students and public officials, bringing together people from across the political spectrum. For more than a decade, Panetta served as a co-director alongside his wife.

He also stayed active in public life. He served on the board of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation. He was a Distinguished Scholar for the California State University system. He taught public policy at Santa Clara University, his alma mater.

When California's 2003 recall election created an opening for the governorship, some urged Panetta to run. He declined, partly because the compressed timeline made it difficult to raise campaign funds.

It seemed like he might have settled into a comfortable semi-retirement: teaching, advising, running his institute.

Then Barack Obama got elected.

An Unexpected Choice for the CIA

On January 5th, 2009, President-elect Obama announced he was nominating Leon Panetta to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

The reaction was mixed, to put it mildly.

Panetta had virtually no intelligence experience beyond his brief Army posting in the 1960s. The CIA was an agency in crisis, dealing with the fallout from its "enhanced interrogation" program—a euphemism for torture—and struggling to adapt to a world of asymmetric threats and digital surveillance. Did it really need a 70-year-old former congressman as its director?

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly complained that she hadn't been consulted about the appointment. She said the agency would be "best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

Others saw the logic. Former CIA officer Ishmael Jones argued that Panetta was a wise choice precisely because of his close relationship with the president and his lack of ties to the CIA bureaucracy. He could provide fresh leadership without being captured by the agency's institutional culture.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius pointed out that Panetta actually had more intelligence exposure than people realized. As OMB director and White House Chief of Staff, he had sat in on daily intelligence briefings and reviewed the nation's most secret programs. He understood how intelligence was used, even if he hadn't collected it himself.

The Senate confirmed him by voice vote on February 12th, 2009. Vice President Joe Biden swore him in a week later before an audience of CIA employees. According to reports, Panetta received a "rock star welcome" from his new subordinates.

Drones, Torture, and Bin Laden

As CIA director, Panetta confronted some of the most difficult issues in American national security.

He dramatically escalated the use of drone strikes in Pakistan. These unmanned aircraft, armed with missiles, could kill suspected terrorists without putting American pilots at risk. Panetta called drones the "most effective weapon" against senior al-Qaeda leadership. In May 2009 alone, as many as fifty suspected militants were killed in drone strikes.

The drone program raised profound legal and ethical questions. The United States was killing people, including some American citizens, in a country where we were not officially at war. There was no trial, no jury, no opportunity for the targets to defend themselves. Supporters argued this was a necessary tool against an enemy that didn't wear uniforms or respect borders. Critics called it assassination by algorithm.

Panetta also dealt with the legacy of the Bush administration's interrogation program. In 2010, working with the Senate Intelligence Committee, he conducted a secret review of how the CIA had used torture—waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other techniques—during the previous administration. This became known as the Panetta Review.

The review cast what the New York Times called "a particularly harsh light" on the interrogation program. Its findings aligned with much of what the Senate Intelligence Committee would later conclude in its own report. Both documents were primarily exercises in fact-finding and prevention, not accountability. No one was prosecuted for the torture.

But the defining moment of Panetta's CIA tenure came on May 1st, 2011.

For nearly a decade, the CIA had been hunting Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and mastermind of the September 11th attacks. In 2010, the agency discovered that a courier they had been tracking led to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 35 miles north of the capital, Islamabad. The compound had high walls, no internet connection, and residents who burned their trash instead of putting it out for collection. Someone important was hiding there.

Panetta oversaw the months of preparation that followed. Navy SEALs trained on a replica of the compound. Intelligence analysts debated whether bin Laden was actually inside. When the time came, Panetta was in the chain of command that gave the final order.

The mission was a success. Bin Laden was killed. And Leon Panetta had overseen the most significant intelligence operation in a generation.

One More Job

Three weeks after the bin Laden raid, President Obama announced that he was nominating Panetta to become Secretary of Defense. Robert Gates, who had held the job since the end of the Bush administration, was retiring. Obama wanted Panetta to replace him.

The Senate confirmed him 100 to 0—a unanimous vote that reflected his reputation for competence and bipartisanship. He was inaugurated on July 1st, 2011. David Petraeus, the general who had commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, took over as CIA director.

At 73, Panetta was now running the largest employer in the world. The Department of Defense has more than 2 million military personnel and nearly 800,000 civilian employees. Its budget exceeds $700 billion. It operates on every continent and in every domain: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.

One of Panetta's first major acts was certifying, along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the military was ready to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." This was the policy, in effect since 1993, that prohibited openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from serving in the armed forces. Panetta's certification triggered the final repeal after a 60-day waiting period.

Much of his tenure was consumed by budget battles. The debt ceiling crisis of 2011 had resulted in automatic spending cuts that threatened to hollow out the military. Panetta warned that deeper cuts would hamper the Pentagon's ability to confront rising powers like China and North Korea. He urged Congress not to go beyond the roughly $500 billion in defense cuts already required over the coming decade.

He also oversaw diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In January 2012, he stated that a nuclear-armed Iran was a "red line" that would not be allowed—and that the United States was keeping all options, including military force, on the table.

In January 2013, shortly before leaving office, Panetta announced that women would be allowed to serve in all combat roles in the military. This was a historic change. For the first time, women could serve in infantry units, special operations forces, and other positions that had been closed to them.

When Panetta finally retired as Secretary of Defense in February 2013, he had served at the highest levels of American government for four decades. He returned to Monterey.

The Long Shadow

There is something almost old-fashioned about Leon Panetta's career.

He is a creature of Washington who never lost his connection to the small California city where he was born. He worked for both parties and maintained relationships across the aisle even as politics grew more polarized. He moved from job to job not because of scandal or failure, but because presidents kept asking him to solve new problems.

His legacy is complicated. As CIA director, he oversaw both the killing of Osama bin Laden and a dramatic expansion of drone strikes that killed many others, some of them undoubtedly innocent. He confronted the agency's torture program but did not hold anyone accountable for it. He opened military roles to women and gay service members but also fought to preserve a defense budget that critics considered bloated.

Today, Panetta serves as chairman of the Panetta Institute. His wife Sylvia is co-chair and CEO, running day-to-day operations. He writes and lectures on public policy issues. He serves on various boards and commissions.

And his legacy continues in another way. In 2017, Jimmy Panetta—Leon's son—won election to Congress, representing the same district his father once served. The seat had been held by Sam Farr, who had himself been Panetta's successor. Now it was back in the family.

Leon Panetta, the son of Italian immigrants who ran a restaurant in Monterey, had done more than rise to the heights of American power. He had created a dynasty.