John Poindexter

Poindexter was born in Odon, Indiana, the son of Ellen (Sommers) and Marlan G. Poindexter.[1] He received his undergraduate degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1958, where he graduated first in a class of 899.[2] His fellow graduates included astronaut Bruce McCandless II (who graduated second) and Senator John McCain; previous National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane was a contemporary, graduating the following year.

Poindexter received an M.S. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) in nuclear physics from the California Institute of Technology. For his dissertation, he conducted laboratory research to further develop a model for understanding the Mössbauer effect with Nobel Laureate Rudolf Mössbauer.

While commander of Destroyer Squadron 31, he was surface warfare and anti-submarine warfare commander of battle groups in the Western Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, and he developed new tactics and battle management procedures under the Composite Warfare Commander concept. As the commanding officer of USS England, he pioneered the shipboard use of computers to manage the ship's force portion of yard overhauls.

He was also an executive officer and a chief engineer of destroyers.

As deputy commander of the Naval Education and Training Command, his duties included commanding the United States Navy's extensive education and training programs, for which he initiated a project to develop a distributed data management system for more efficient management of training pipelines.

His significant staff assignments included: executive assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, administrative assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and special assistant for Systems Analysis to the Secretary of Defense. He reached the temporary rank of vice admiral but was allowed to retire in 1987 at the lower rank of rear admiral as a result of his role in the Iran–Contra affair.[3][4]

Poindexter went on to serve in the Reagan administration as military assistant to the National Security Advisor (1981–1983) and Deputy National Security Advisor (1983–1985) prior to his appointment as National Security Advisor (1985–1986).[2] From 1983 to 1985, Poindexter was responsible for leading and managing the National Security Council staff as chairman of the Crisis Pre-planning Group. As National Security Advisor, Vice Admiral Poindexter was responsible for providing recommendations to the President on national security, foreign policy and defense policy.

Major events in which he played a significant role for the executive branch included the Strategic Defense Initiative, Operation Urgent Fury, the Achille Lauro incident, Operation El Dorado Canyon (in response to Libyan terrorist attacks), and the Reykjavík Summit with the Soviets.

From 1988 to 1989, Poindexter was senior scientist at Presearch, Inc., which had primarily been involved with defense studies and analysis. Faced with anticipated defense budget reductions, Poindexter joined the firm to develop new commercial enterprises. He designed and developed hardware and software for the prototype of a digital real-time imaging system to be used for physical security of high value facilities. It was used to obtain a contract for a nuclear power plant security system.

From 1990 to 1996, Poindexter served as co-founder of TP Systems, Inc., a software development firm specializing in commercial software for the IBM PCs and compatibles; Poindexter was the chief designer and programmer. Development included a symbolic debugger for multi-tasking environments, a BBS communications program, and numerous utility programs.

From 1993 to 1996, Poindexter served as a consultant to Elkins Group. Elkins was a business alliance with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which has developed the Elkins Interactive Training Network (EITN), a satellite-based training delivery system. Poindexter was the chairman of the Maritime Advisory Committee and a member of Elkins' board of directors. He also provided advice on strategic planning.

From 1996 to 2002, Poindexter served as senior vice president for SYNTEK Technologies. SYNTEK is a small high technology firm with contracts in domestic and international defense and commercial business. Poindexter was responsible for high-level advice on management and direction of information systems projects (for example Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Project Genoa).

Currently, he serves on the board of Saffron Technology which he joined in 2000 and Bright Planet Corporation which he joined in 2007.[10] With Saffron, Poindexter played a role in Iraq, building a tool to run entity analysis on insurgent networks in the struggle against IEDs.[11]

After 2007, Poindexter branched out from National Security and worked to promote Associative Memory Base technology to civilian government agencies such as the IRS for fraud detection.[12]

Late in 2001, upon the recommendation of Science Applications International Corporation executive Brian Hicks, then Vice President Dick Cheney recommended Admiral Poindexter to head a separate anti-terrorist office and serve under US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

His wife, Linda Poindexter, was an Episcopal priest for 13 years, but retired from the clergy when she converted to Catholicism.[14] They have five children, including the late Alan G. Poindexter, a NASA astronaut, Space Shuttle pilot on the STS-122 mission to the International Space Station, and the commander of STS-131.