Nye Settles Into New Job

For Dillon Professor of International Affairs Joseph S. Nye, the days have just gotten a little bit longer and the reading load a little bit heavier.

Nye, who was sworn in Monday as chair of the National Intelligence Council, arrives at the Central Intelligence Agency building in McLain, Virginia at 7 a.m., just as the sun peeks over the horizon.

Thirteen hours later, with daylight no more than a memory, he leaves for his nearby apartment and a few hours of much-needed rest.

But Nye--whose life as the nation's top civilian intelligence analyst has taken on the dimensions of a Tom Clancy mystery--seems to be loving every minute of it.

"I've got a big office with windows on two sides. On the one side I can see the Washington Cathedral and on the other side, Virginia," he says. "If you look at my desk, it has piles of papers that have covered all the wood, all of which are marked urgent and all of which have to be done before I go home tonight."

What keeps Nye so busy?

"I can't tell you that, because it's classified," he says. "But if you think about the major issues of the day, [they include] the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons [and] problems that go on in regional and ethnic conflicts, like Bosnia and Somalia and so forth."

Nye's day begins with a top level conference with CIA Director James Woolsey. And then it's "constant meetings ever since," he says. The heavy reading comes later, when most of his colleagues have gone home.

A onetime state department adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, Nye is no stranger to classified information. But this, he says, is different.

This time, his security clearance is very high, indeed. So high that he can't say.

"There are different compartments in security and I seem to have a very long list of them," he says. "Much more than I'd had before."

Even at this level though, Nye says he still has use for the basic political theory he has taught thousands of Harvard students in Historical Study A-12, "International Conflicts in the Modern World," his popular core course.

"A lot of the problems that we talked about in lecture are certainly coming up in terms of concerns that go into the President's daily briefing and into the various intelligence reports," Nye says.

Sure, but is Bill Clinton up on his Thucydides?