Dick Lehman developed the President's Intelligence Check List, or PICL (pronounced "pickle") for President Kennedy in June 1961. The Kennedy White House had become overwhelmed with publications from the intelligence community, many of which were duplicative in nature, and important pieces of information were beginning to fall between the cracks. The President and his advisers wanted one concise summary of important issues that they could rely on, and Lehman provided that summary in the form of the PICL.
Kennedy's enthusiastic response to the PICL ensured that it became an Agency institution. Former Deputy Director for Intelligence R. Jack Smith writes in his memoir, The Unknown CIA, that the President engaged in an "...exchange of comments with its producers, sometimes praising an account, sometimes criticizing a comment, once objecting to the word 'boondocks' as not an accepted word. For current intelligence people, this was heaven on earth!" (The PICL was renamed The President's Daily Brief [PDB] in the Johnson administration.)
For many years thereafter, Lehman played a key role in supervising the Agency's current intelligence support for the White House, including its briefings of Presidential candidates. Former Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Ray Cline in his book The CIA Under Reagan, Bush, and Casey, calls him "the longtime genius of the President's special daily intelligence report."
465 posted on 05/13/2018 3:34:13 PM PDT by Steven W.