McGeorge Bundy

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Though associated with academic affairs and philanthropic enterprises for most of his career, McGeorge Bundy is best remembered for his years (1961–66) as special assistant for national security affairs to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During that time Bundy participated in many crucial foreign policy episodes, and effectively transformed the role of national security assistant from that of a behind‐the‐scenes coordinator, as it had developed in the 1950s, into a policy adviser operating on a par with cabinet officials.

Born into Boston Brahmin society, Bundy was educated at Groton School, Yale College, and Harvard University. Deemed unfit for military service because of nearsightedness, he memorized the eye chart in order to join the army as a private and rose to become a captain by the end of World War II. In 1949 he joined the Harvard government department, teaching a popular world affairs course, and in 1953, at age thirty‐four, he became dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was a foreign policy consultant to Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, and afterwards accepted Kennedy's invitation to come to Washington to reorganize and oversee the National Security Council (NSC).

At Kennedy's request, Bundy adopted a broad view of his responsibilities at the NSC, and came to enjoy a close working relationship with the president and other senior officials. As a result, Bundy was at the center of practically all major foreign policy deliberations, including Kennedy's decision to launch the ill‐fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Berlin Wall episode, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the escalation of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.

As the United States became involved in Vietnam War, Bundy emerged as a leading advocate of “sustained reprisals” against North Vietnam. When in January 1965 it appeared that the South Vietnamese were nearing collapse, he joined with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in urging President Johnson to step up the use of U.S. military power and to expand the air war against the North. Many historians have since come to see this as a major turning point, setting the stage for the large‐scale U.S. intervention later that year. Much criticized for his role in Vietnam policy, Bundy left government in 1966 to become president of the Ford Foundation. In later years, Bundy devoted himself to research and writing on the threat of nuclear war and ways of curbing it.

Bibliography

• David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 1969.
• McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, 1988.
• Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms, 1998

Bundy, McGeorge (1919-96) historian, educator, and government official. As the special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson for national security affairs (1961-66), Bundy supervised the National Security Council staff and played a key role in foreign policy. He supported the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), counseled the president during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and joined Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in urging increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam, advocating “sustained reprisals” against the North Vietnamese.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

McGeorge Bundy (1919-1996) served as national security adviser to both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson. He later was president of the Ford Foundation and was instrumental in expanding its programs to emphasize equal opportunity in the United States. When he died at the age of 77, he was serving as a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Corporation.

McGeorge Bundy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 30, 1919. His father was a close associate of Henry L. Stimson, who served Herbert Hoover as secretary of state and Franklin D. Roosevelt as secretary of war. Bundy graduated first in his class at Yale in 1940 and became a junior fellow at Harvard in 1941. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II as an aide to Admiral Alan Kirk. In that capacity he assisted with the planning for the invasions of Sicily and France.

After he left the armed forces in 1946 Bundy had the opportunity of working with Stimson on the latter's autobiography, On Active Service (1948). He then worked briefly in Washington on implementation of the Marshall Plan before joining Thomas E. Dewey's presidential campaign as a consultant on foreign policy issues. Any doubt that he was a rising star of the foreign policy establishment was dispelled by his appointment as a political analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations in late 1948.

Bundy stayed with the Council for less than a year and then accepted an appointment to teach foreign policy at Harvard. There, despite the absence of the usual graduate degrees or scholarly publications, he rose rapidly, becoming a full professor within five years. Even before that, at the age of 34, he was appointed dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. Popular with students and faculty, Bundy had an extraordinary academic career.

Although he considered himself a Republican and campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Bundy rejected Richard M. Nixon in favor of John F. Kennedy in 1960. In 1961 Kennedy appointed him special assistant to the president for national security, a post he held until his resignation five years later.

Bundy assembled a brilliant staff and, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, he shared responsibility for advising the president on foreign policy. Unlike his successors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bundy engaged in no ostentatious struggle for power with the secretary of state. He deferred publicly to the courtly Rusk, content with the knowledge that he was closer to the president, had superior access to him, and controlled much of what the president heard or saw. More than anyone else, Bundy controlled the process by which decisions were made. Anyone unaware and/or unappreciative of his modus operandi was unworthy of his concern. He was confident that those who mattered - establishment figures such as Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy and great journalists like Walter Lippmann and James Reston - all recognized the advantages of mind and position he held.

In temperament Bundy was closer to Kennedy than Rusk. Rusk perceived some of the world's problems as intractable. They had antedated his appointment and would doubtless persist long after he was gone. He did not believe that there was an American action that would soothe Indian and Pakistani, Arab and Israel relations. Some problems were best left unaddressed. Bundy, like Kennedy, had little patience for Rusk's approach. They were men of action, always ready to take the necessary risks, confident that as long as they were leading, the United States could fashion the world as it chose. And they did not hesitate to use American power. Kennedy liked action and quick decisions. Bundy's staff was more likely to provide both than was the Department of State.

After Kennedy's death, Bundy stayed on to serve Lyndon Johnson. He played a central role in the decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, joining McNamara in urging the president to approve the bombing of North Vietnam opposed by Rusk. Bundy was also instrumental in the decision to send American troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Although Bundy and Johnson worked well together initially, by 1966 the relationship had deteriorated. Johnson was more comfortable with Rusk, also from the South, than with the upper-class Eastern intellectuals Bundy seemed to personify. Bundy found Johnson's style of leadership disorderly and irritating. He was offended by Texas hyperbole and the concomitant loss of credibility so essential to maintain public support of policy. When offered the presidency of the Ford Foundation in 1966, Bundy was less eager to stay in Washington than he had been in the days of the Kennedy administration and found Johnson less determined to keep him there than Kennedy had been. Bundy accepted the Ford Foundation offer in February 1966.

The Ford Foundation had long played an important role in international development and education. During Bundy's presidency the foundation continued those activities, but it also added major new programs to fight racism at home. The struggle for equal opportunity became its highest domestic concern.

Bundy retired from the presidency of the Ford Foundation in 1979 and joined the Department of History at New York University. Throughout those years, both at Ford and at NYU, he retained his interest in foreign policy and his prestige in the foreign policy community. He was one of the "wise men" who advised Johnson to end the war in Vietnam in 1968. In the 1980s he joined forces with McNamara and George Kennan in an effort to alert Americans to the growing danger of nuclear war and to the need to end the arms race. They failed to persuade President Ronald Reagan.

Bundy later became a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Corporation. While he was there he was deeply concerned with issues of science and survival in the age of nuclear technology. He espoused the importance of proper understanding and implementation of nuclear technology on the part of the President of the United States, and he bemoaned the apparent lack of direction in this regard at the highest echelons of government. He was listed as a contributor to Brown University's Journal of World Affairs in 1995. He died of a heart attack in 1996. Journalist Walter Isaacson said that Bundy "came to personify the hubris of an intellectual elite that marched America with a cool and confident brilliance into the quagmire of Vietnam."

Further Reading

Among the most useful books touching on Bundy's role are David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972) and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (1965). See also Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk, Vol. 19 in Samuel F. Bemis and Robert H. Ferrell, editors, The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (1980) and Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point (1971).

Additional Sources

Bundy, McGeorge, Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Road Away from the Brink, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993.

Newsweek, September 30, 1996.

The Scientist, June 24, 1996.

Time Magazine, September 30, 1996.

McGeorge Bundy
McGeorge Bundy during a 1967 meeting in the Oval Office
5th United States National Security Advisor
In office 1961 – 1966
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson
Preceded by	Gordon Gray
Succeeded by	Walt Rostow
Born	March 30, 1919(1919-03-30) Boston, Massachusetts
Died	September 16, 1996 (aged 77) Boston, Massachusetts
Alma mater	Yale University
Profession	Foreign and defense policy advisor

McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was United States National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson from 1961 through 1966, and president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. He is known primarily for his role in escalating the involvement of the United States in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Legacy 3.1 Bundy in film 4 See also 5 Sources 6 Notes 7 Further reading 8 External links

Early life

Raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Bundy came from a wealthy family long involved in Republican^[1] politics. His mother, Katherine Lawrence Putnam, was the daughter of two Boston Brahmin families listed in the social register. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was from Grand Rapids, Michigan and was a diplomat who helped implement the Marshall Plan. Bundy attended the elite Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts, the Groton School, and Yale University one year behind his brother William. At Yale, he was a member of the Skull and Bones secret society (#322) and Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Career

For a year and a half 1945-47^[2], Bundy co-wrote Henry L. Stimson's third-person autobiography with the just-retired United States Secretary of War. Bundy's role as Stimson's "protege" is noted by Stewart Udall in Udall's 1994 assessment of the beginning of the Atomic Age and Stimson's central role in both the evolution of the "mass" (v. "strategic") conventional bombings of Japanese cities in 1945 and then of the dropping of atomic bombs on two previously spared Japanese cities.^[3]

In 1949, Bundy took a position at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to study Marshall Plan aid to Europe. The study group included such luminaries as Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and George Kennan. The group's deliberations were sensitive and highly secret, dealing as they did with the highly classified fact that there was a covert side to the Marshall Plan, where the CIA used certain funds to aid anti-communist groups in France and Italy.^[4]

Bundy was one of Kennedy's "wise men," and noted professor of government at Harvard University, though he did not have a PhD (actually he only had a bachelor's degree). In 1953, Bundy was appointed Dean of the Faculty at Harvard at the age of thirty-four, the youngest in the school's history. He moved into public life in 1961, becoming national security adviser in the Kennedy administration. He played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense decisions of the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administration. These included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, most controversially, the Vietnam War. From 1964 he was Chairman of the 303 Committee, responsible for coordinating government covert operations.^[5]

Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War early in his tenure. He supported escalating the American involvement and the bombing of North Vietnam.

He later came to regret the decision, one of the first administration members to do so, and spent much of his later career analyzing and criticizing Vietnam policies.^{[citation needed]}

He left government in 1966 to take over as president of the Ford Foundation, a position he held until 1979. Some critics such as Kai Bird have suggested that the Ford Foundation may not have been independent of U.S. foreign policy during that period (see The Color of Truth). He was also named to the "master list" of President Richard Nixon's infamous " Enemies List".

In January of 1969, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

From 1979 to 1989, he was Professor of History at New York University. He was scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation from 1990–1996.

Legacy

Gordon Goldstein's 2008 book Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam was reported to be, in late September, 2009, the "must-read-book" amongst President Barack Obama's war advisers, as they contemplated the alternative courses ahead in Afghanistan. Richard C. Holbrooke, who had reviewed the book in late November, 2008, was now a member of the team of Presidential advisers.^[6][1]

Bundy in film

In the 2000 film Thirteen Days, McGeorge Bundy is portrayed by Frank Wood

See also

• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
• Ford Foundation
• Carnegie Corporation
• Council on Foreign Relations

Sources

• The New York Times

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} 'The Doves Were Right' Review by Richard C. Holbrooke of Goldstein, Gordon M., Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 28, 2008 (Nov. 30, 2008 on p. BR12 of NY ed.). Retrieved 7/7/09.
2. ^ Search of NYTimes for "mcgeorge bundy stimson" "When Bundy Says, 'The President Wants--'"; December 2, 1962 article in paid archive. Partial quote: "After V-J Day, Bundy spent a year and a half working on the Stimson book, ...." Retrieved 7/7/09.
3. ^ Udall, Stewart L., The Myths of August, (NY: Pantheon, 1994); paper (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1998); paper p.77.
4. ^ Covert CIA side to the Marshall Plan - see Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998, (p.106)
5. ^ Miller, James E. (2001). Foreign Relations, 1964–1968 Volume XII. United States Government Printing Office. http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/covert.html. 
6. ^ Rich, Frank (September 26, 2009), "Op-ed: Obama at the Precipice", The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27rich.html, retrieved September 27, 2009 

Further reading

• Bird, Kai. The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0684809702.
• Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. ISBN 0394522788.
• Bundy, McGeorge. "The Issue Before the Court: Who Gets Ahead in America?", The Atlantic Monthly 240, no. 5 (November 1977), pp. 41–54.
• Halberstam, David. "The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy". Harper's Magazine 239, no. 1430 (July 1969), pp. 21–41.
• Gardner, Lloyd. "Harry Hopkins with Hand Grenades? McGeorge Bundy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years", in Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968, ed. by Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. pp. 204–229. ISBN 0299137406.
• Goldstein, Gordon M., Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (NY: Times Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2008) 300 pp. ISBN 0805090878 ISBN 978-0805090871
• Nünlist, Christian. Kennedys rechte Hand: McGeorge Bundys Einfluss als Nationaler Sicherheitsberater auf die amerikanische Aussenpolitik, 1961–63. Zurich: Center for Security Studies, 1999. ISBN 3905641615.
• Preston, Andrew. The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674021983.
• Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1947).

External links

• McGeorge Bundy at Harvard
• Interview about the Cuban Missile Crisis for the WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
• Biography of McGeorge Bundy (in German)
• Review of biography of brothers William and McGeorge Bundy
• McGeorge Bundy headed the Ford Foundation from 1966–1979
• point of view of Nuremberg trial prosecutor Telford Taylor on McGeorge Bundy

• Pentagon papers: Telegram From the Ambassador in Vietnam (Lodge) to McGeorge Bundy on US Options With Respect to a Possible Coup, mentioning the term "plausible denial" Alternative link: Pentagon papers, Telegram 216, same cable
• Annotated bibliography for McGeorge Bundy from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Video of assassination denials made by Bundy
• NY Times Obituary

Legal offices
Preceded by Gordon Gray	United States National Security Advisor 1961–1966	Succeeded by Walt Rostow

v • d • e National Security Advisors of the United States Cutler • Anderson • Jackson • Cutler • Gray • Bundy • Rostow • Kissinger • Scowcroft • Brzezinski • Allen • Clark • McFarlane • Poindexter • Carlucci • Powell • Scowcroft • Lake • Berger • Rice • Hadley • Jones

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