Decades before the Presidential Daily Brief became a morning fixture in the diaries of D.C.’s most powerful politicians, President Harry S. Truman demanded his intelligence officers draw up The Presidential Summary.
Truman, annoyed at the contradictory post-WWII intelligence reports, tasked the CIA and its immediate predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), with providing a synthesized daily briefing on the latest foreign intel. The first summary arrived in February 15, 1946.
President Truman & the first Presidential Summary, February 15, 1946
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Decades before the Presidential Daily Brief became a morning fixture in the diaries of D.C.’s most powerful politicians, President Harry S. Truman demanded his intelligence officers draw up The Presidential Summary.
Truman, annoyed at the contradictory post-WWII intelligence reports, tasked the CIA and its immediate predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), with providing a synthesized daily briefing on the latest foreign intel. The first summary arrived in February 15, 1946.
President Truman & the first Presidential Summary, February 15, 1946
The first Summary was the start of a new mission for the CIA. From now on, they'd be providing strategic warnings to America’s highest leader. Truman's request established a tradition and daily intelligence briefings have continued for every president who followed.
The first Summary describes secret Yalta and Tehran agreements and an embassy report about a secret Soviet agreement with Syria and Lebanon, along with developments in Iraq, Germany, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and China.
Truman's successor, Eisenhower, typically began every day of his administration with an intelligence briefing based on The Presidential Summary received from the CIA during the night. At that point, it also included the gist of messages exchanged with the State Department as well as important communications and actions from the Department of Defense.
Over the years, the Summary evolved and expanded to meet the needs of each president. In 1961, the Kennedy White House felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of intelligence publications it received - some of them duplicates. As a result, the ‘President's Intelligence Check List’ was born, PICL (pronounced Pickle), which was renamed the President's Daily Brief during the Johnson administration.
During the Clinton presidency, the PDB was 9-12 pages long. During G.W. Bush's term, it was a series of one or two-page articles totaling a dozen pages or so - sometimes longer - and printed on heavy paper and enclosed in a leather binder.
The PDB binder carries the name Joshua Bolten, President G.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff
The 'Crown Jewel' of intelligence
In 2014, the PDB transitioned from print to electronic delivery at the request of President Barack Obama. Most PDBs - even those from many years past - remain classified although the CIA has declassified and released thousands of PDBs (or PDB predecessors) from the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.
Today’s PDB is considered the ‘crown jewels’, top intelligence distilled for the eyes of the US president and his most trusted advisers. Originally an entirely CIA product, it is now assembled under the auspices of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) but with the CIA doing most of the work.
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