President Bill Clinton's first secretary of defense, Les Aspin (1938-1995) spent 20 years of service in the House of Representatives. Despite his acknowledged intellect, he was a controversial committee chair in Congress and continued in that stance in the Cabinet, being replaced in late 1993. He served as head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until his death in 1995.

Les Aspin was born July 21, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of a Yorkshireman, Leslie Aspin, who had moved to the United States from England via Canada, and Marie Orth. Aspin graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1960 with a degree in history. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University where he earned an M.A. in economics in 1962. He then studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received a Ph.D. in economics in 1965.

Even before he finished his dissertation at MIT he had landed...