Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. He started out as a Republican, working in the office of Sen. Thomas Kuchel, R-Calif., in the late 1960s. (Kuchel belonged to the now-vanished species of moderate Republican and actually supported both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.) He moved up quickly to become director of the Office of Civil Rights under Richard Nixon.
In 1971, Panetta quit the Nixon administration in protest over its racist policies, switched parties and went to work for New York mayor John Lindsay, another Republican-turned-Democrat. In 1976 he was elected to Congress, where he served until 1993. He then became director of the Office of Management and Budget and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama‘s CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he’s got extensive experience would an understatement.
