Huntington D. Sheldon

Who was Huntington D. Sheldon?

Huntington Denton "Ting" Sheldon served as the Director of the Office of Current Intelligence of the US Central Intelligence Agency from 1951 to 1961, serving under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Sheldon was the second Director of the OCI, and developed it into a major Office. Sheldon briefed all three Presidents; the President's Intelligence Check List, which became into the President's Daily Brief, was developed by Richard Lehman under his direction. He was also the husband of science fiction writer Alice B. Sheldon.

As an undergraduate, he earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and was a member of Scroll and Key.

I would like to talk a bit about [Huntington D.] "Ting" Sheldon, because he was a great man. He had been in Air Force intelligence in England during the war and then went off into private life again, where he was not a great success. He came back in 1951 or 1952 to be the second D/OCI, and he really was the man who built the place. He built an empire while he was at it, because OCI had its own security, its own courier service, its own print shop, and a lot of other things that were all justified by the fact that communications intelligence needed special handling. And so he really had a self-contained operation.