Tag: James Webb

Complete coverage of the election, transition and new administration of Barack Obama and Joseph Biden

By naming Dennis C. Blair as his nominee for the nation’s top spy post – director of national intelligence – President-elect Barack Obama gets a brainy, retired four-star admiral with an independent streak.

Blair is a 34-year Navy veteran and Asia expert who was reportedly passed over for the post of chairman of the Joint Chiefs by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who considered him too independent. His last job in the military was as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, the highest-ranking officer over forces in the Asia-Pacific region.

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Blair is extraordinarily well-connected in the worlds of politics and military – a plus for someone who will be called on to coordinate a sprawling, 16-agency intelligence bureaucracy ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He has also worked the intelligence business from virtually every angle – military commander, White House staffer and CIA official – but has no significant ties to controversial Bush administration policies like offshore renditions and harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, since he resigned from the military in 2002.

Born in Kittery, Maine in 1947, Blair is a 6th-generation naval officer and great-great-great grandson of Confederate chief engineer William Price Williamson of North Carolina. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968 with Virginia Sen. James H. Webb and former Reagan adviser Oliver North, and then majored in Russian Studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University with Bill Clinton.

He was a White House Fellow in 1975 and 1976, along with retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Marshall Carter, who later became chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

Famous for his workaholism, Blair is not without a zany streak. Most famously, he tried to water ski behind a Navy destroyer while commanding the ship in Japan.

Blair was not a close adviser to the Obama campaign, but has reportedly impressed the president-elect with his intellect and his nuanced view of intelligence, as well as of U.S. power.

“The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived,” Blair testified before Congress in November, 2007.

Blair has handled intelligence in a number of capacities: He worked as the Central Intelligence Agency’s first associate director of military support, and served a tour on the National Security Council. He was also director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and commanded the Kitty Hawk Battle Group and the destroyer Cochrane.

After his retirement in 2002, Blair has served as president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research group largely financed by the federal government to analyze national security issues. He stepped down from that post in 2006 amid conflict-of-interest concerns.

The Pentagon’s inspector general concluded he had violated the institute’s conflict-of-interest standards by serving on the board of a military contractor working on the Air Force F-22 jet while the institute was evaluating the program for the Pentagon. However, the inspector general also found that Blair did not influence the organization’s analysis of the F-22 program.

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