Thanks for motivating me to read his bio. Here’s the Wiki cut & paste.
Early life
Woolsey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he graduated from Tulsa Central High School. In 1963 he received his BA from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa), and in 1965 his MA from Oxford University — where he was a Rhodes Scholar — and an LLB from Yale Law School in 1968.
Woolsey was founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President from 1967 to 1968. He was prominently active in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Career
Woolsey has been known primarily as a neoconservative Democrat — hawkish on foreign policy issues but liberal on economic and social issues. He endorsed Senator John McCain for president and served as one of McCain’s foreign policy advisors. He has called himself a “Scoop Jackson Democrat” and a “Joe Lieberman Democrat”, with “social democratic” domestic views. He regards the label ‘neoconservative’ as a “silly term”.
Woolsey has served in the U.S. government as:
Advisor (during military service) on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1), Helsinki and Vienna, 1969–1970
General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970–73
Associate, Shea Gardner law firm, 1973–77; partner, Shea Gardner, 1979–89, 1991–93
Under Secretary of the Navy, 1977–1979
Delegate at Large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983–1986
Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), Vienna, 1989–1991
Director of Central Intelligence, 1993–1995
Woolsey was supportive of former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta, whom he has compared to Kennedy-era CIA head John McCone
Controversies
Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank, has accused Woolsey of both profiting from and promoting the Iraq War. Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and former CIA division chief, told the Washington Post that “…Woolsey was a disaster as CIA director in the 1990s and is now running around this country calling for a World War IV to deal with the Islamic problem.”
In 2010, Woolsey supported the Oklahoma ban on Sharia law, recording a message aired for thousands of Oklahomans. Woolsey, along with co-authors such as former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin and neoconservative activist Frank Gaffney, Jr., released a book entitled “Shariah: The Threat to America,” published by the Center for Security Policy. The book “describes what its authors call a ‘stealth jihad’ that must be thwarted before it’s too late,” and argues that “most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.” According to the Washington Post, “Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center’s book inaccurate and counterproductive.”
Woolsey was also criticized for his participation in the controversial films The Third Jihad and Iranium produced by the Clarion Fund.
Woolsey was CIA director when Aldrich Ames was arrested for treason and spying against the United States. The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in Ames standard of living; and there was a “huge uproar” in Congress when Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. “Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled,” Woolsey declared. “Sorry, that’s not my way.” Woolsey was forced to resign
He was “under” a Navy Secretary, 1977–1979
So do you see why I questioning him being referred to as Admiral? I always thought one had to be commissioned as an officer and work up through the ranks to be an Admiral. Perhaps he made himself an Admiral when he was Under Secretary of the Navy.