Richard Lehman, a high-ranking Central Intelligence Agency analyst who, on orders from a perturbed President John F. Kennedy, developed the succinct intelligence summary that has been handed to presidents each morning for 45 years, died last Saturday near his home in Concord, N.H. He was 83.

The cause was a stroke, his son David said.

Mr. Lehman created the Presidents Intelligence Check List (referred to as the pickle) in 1961, after President Kennedy complained of being overwhelmed by intelligence memorandums, many duplicating material while sometimes leaving out vital information.

Kennedys enthusiastic response to the PICL ensured that it became an agency institution, Richard Kovar, a C.I.A. analyst, wrote in 2000, in an introduction to an interview he conducted with Mr. Lehman for Studies in Intelligence, the C.I.A.s quarterly in-house journal. For many years thereafter, Lehman played a key role in supervising the agencys current intelligence support for the White House, including briefings of presidential candidates.

In his interview with Mr. Kovar, Mr. Lehman recalled how Kennedy was blindsided a couple of times because he had not received important briefings. The president complained to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who, Mr. Lehman said, came down on the senior White House military aide, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, like a ton of bricks.

Mr. Lehman said General Clifton told him to produce a daily memo that would fit into a breast pocket so the president could carry it around with him. What the general wanted, Mr. Lehman said, was a single publication, no sources barred, covering the whole ground, and written as much as possible in the presidents language rather than in officialese.

On a Saturday morning in June 1961, President Kennedy read the first PICL while sitting on a diving board at a hunting farm in Virginia.

In his 1981 book, The C.I.A. Under Reagan, Bush and Casey (Acropolis Books), Ray Cline, a former deputy director for central intelligence, called Mr. Lehman the longtime genius of the presidents special daily intelligence report. During the Johnson administration, the PICL was renamed the Presidents Daily Brief.

Born in St. Louis on June 12, 1923, Mr. Lehman was the son of Edwin and Margaret Maxwell Lehman. Besides his son David, of Lexington, Mass., he is survived by another son, Michael, of Concord; a sister, Lois Knaus of Chevy Chase, Md.; and six grandchildren. His wife of 54 years, the former Diane Harris, died in 2002.

Mr. Lehman graduated from Harvard in 1944. After serving in the Army for four years, he earned a masters degree in Russian studies at the University of Virginia in 1949.

Soon after, Mr. Lehman joined the C.I.A. He spent much of his 33-year career in the agencys Office of Current Intelligence, which provides the presidents daily briefings, and was its director from 1970 to 1975. He was also director of the Office of Strategic Research, in 1975 and 1976; deputy for national intelligence to the director of central intelligence, from 1976 to 1977; and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the C.I.A.s in-house research group, from 1979 to 1981.

Mr. Lehmans duties included briefing presidential nominees and presidents-elect on world affairs. He recalled how in the winter of 1976 he had gone to President-elect Jimmy Carters home in Plains, Ga. At one point, Mr. Carter asked whether the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev ever lied to us.

I told him you had to make up your mind whether the Soviets are what we think they are, or whether they are a different kind of animal, Mr. Lehman said, that is, whether they are out to do us in or whether they are people you can negotiate with.

As it turned out, Mr. Lehman said, the scales dropped from his eyes only after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.