McGeorge Bundy

McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American expert in foreign and defense policy, serving as United States National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his distinguished career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

After World War II, during which Bundy served as an intelligence officer, in 1949 he was selected for the Council on Foreign Relations. He worked with a study team on implementation of the Marshall Plan. He was appointed as a professor of government at Harvard University, and in 1953 as its youngest dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, working to develop Harvard as a merit-based university. In 1961 he joined Kennedy's administration. After serving at the Ford Foundation, in 1979 he returned to academia as professor of history at New York University, and later as scholar in residence at the Carnegie Corporation.

Early life and education

Born in 1919 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Bundy was the second son of a wealthy family long involved in Republican politics. His older brother was William Putnam Bundy.^[1] 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 prominent attorney in Boston.

The couple met Colonel Henry L. Stimson and became friends. As Secretary of State under Hoover, in 1931 Stimson appointed Harvey Bundy as his Assistant Secretary of State. Later Bundy served again under Stimson as Secretary of War, acting as Special Assistant on Atomic Matters,^[2] and serving as liaison between Stimson and the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush.^[3] William and McGeorge grew up knowing Stimson as a family friend and colleague of their father.^[4] The senior Bundy also helped implement the Marshall Plan.

McGeorge Bundy attended the elite Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts and the Groton School, where he placed first in his class and ran the student newspaper and debating society. Biographer David Halberstam writes :

He [McGeorge Bundy] attended Groton, the greatest "Prep" school in the nation, where the American upper class sends its sons to instill the classic values: discipline, honor, a belief in the existing values and the rightness of them. Coincidentally, it’s at Groton that one starts to meet the right people, and were connections which will serve well later on – be it at Wall Street or Washington – are first forged; one learns, at Groton, above all, the rules of the Game and even a special language: what washes and does not wash.^[5]

He was admitted to Yale College, one year behind his brother William. At Yale, where he majored in mathematics, he served as secretary of the Yale Political Union and then chairman of its Liberal Party. He was on the staff of the Yale Literary Magazine and also wrote a column for the Yale Daily News. Like his father, he was inducted into the Skull and Bones secret society, where he was nicknamed "Odin". He remained in contact with his fellow Bonesmen for decades afterward.^[6] He graduated Yale in the class of 1940.

Military service

During World War II Bundy served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer.^[7]

Career

From 1945 to 1947, Bundy worked with Henry L. Stimson as co-author of his third-person autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War (1947).^[8] Stimson had recently retired as US Secretary of War.

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, commanding general of the Allied forces; Allen Dulles, Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and George Kennan, diplomat to the Soviet Union. The group's deliberations were sensitive and secret, dealing as they did with the classified fact that there was a covert side to the Marshall Plan, by which the CIA used certain funds to aid anti-communist groups in France and Italy.^[9]

Due to his high-level experience, Bundy was appointed at Harvard University as a tenured professor of government. (He had a bachelor's degree and had not taken academic classes in government.) In 1953, Bundy was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard at the age of thirty-four, the youngest dean in the school's history. An effective and popular administrator, Bundy led policy changes intended to develop Harvard as a class-blind, merit-based university with a reputation for stellar academics.^[10] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954.^[11]

Bundy moved into public political life in 1961 when appointed as National Security Advisor in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. One of Kennedy's "wise men," Bundy played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense decisions of the Kennedy administration and was retained by Lyndon B. Johnson for part of his tenure. Bundy was involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. From 1964 under Johnson, he was also Chairman of the 303 Committee, responsible for coordinating government covert operations.^[12] Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War during his tenure, believing it essential to contain communism. He supported escalating United States involvement, including commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965. Studies of the memorandums and policy papers since those years have revealed that Bundy and other advisors well understood the risk but proceeded with these actions largely because of domestic politics, rather than believing that the US had a realistic chance of victory in this war.^[4]

He left government in 1966 to serve as president of the Ford Foundation, serving in this position until 1979.

From 1979 to 1989, Bundy served as a professor of history at New York University. He helped found the group known as the "Gang of Four," whose other members were Robert McNamara, George F. Kennan and Herbert Scoville; together they spoke and wrote about American nuclear policies. They published an influential article in Foreign Affairs in 1983, which proposed ending the US policy of "first use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe".^[4] During this period, Bundy wrote Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988). Their work has been credited with contributing to the SALT 2 treaty a decade later.^[4]

Bundy was scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation from 1990 to 1996.

Death

Bundy died in 1996 from a heart attack.^[13]

Legacy

• In 1969 he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, one of 20 to receive the medal "in the last 24 hours of [Johnson's] presidency in January 1969".^[14]

• Bundy was later included on President Richard Nixon's "Enemies List", his compilation of political opponents.

• Views of Bundy's role in the Vietnam War changed over the decades. Gordon Goldstein's 2008 book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, was reported in late September 2009 as the "must-read-book" among 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 in 2009 a member of the team of Presidential advisers.^[1][15]

Representation in other media

Bundy and his role have been featured in feature and TV films:

• He was played by James Olson in the made-for-TV film, The Missiles of October (1974).
• In the 2000 film Thirteen Days, McGeorge Bundy is portrayed by Frank Wood.
• In the 2002 HBO film Path to War, Bundy is portrayed by Cliff DeYoung.
• In the 2013 TV film, Killing Kennedy, Bundy was portrayed by Ray Nedzel.

See also

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

Notes

Further reading

• Bird, Kai. The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-684-80970-2.
• Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. ISBN 0-394-52278-8.
• Bundy, McGeorge. "The Issue Before the Court: Who Gets Ahead in America?", The Atlantic Monthly 240, no. 5 (November 1977), pp. 41–54.
• 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. Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. pp. 204–229. ISBN 0-299-13740-6.
• Goldstein, Gordon M., Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008. pp. 300. ISBN 0-8050-9087-8.
• Halberstam, David. "The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy". Harper's Magazine 239, no. 1430 (July 1969), pp. 21–41.
• Kabaservice, Geoffrey. The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004. pp. 136–140. ISBN 0-8050-6762-0.
• Nünlist, Christian. Kennedys rechte Hand: McGeorge Bundys Einfluss als Nationaler Sicherheitsberater auf die amerikanische Aussenpolitik, 1961–63. Zurich: Center for Security Studies, 1999. ISBN 3-905641-61-5.
• Preston, Andrew. The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-674-02198-3.
• Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy. On Active Service in Peace and War. New York: 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 on YouTube
• NY Times Obituary
• Oral History Interviews with McGeorge Bundy, from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library

Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs Cutler Anderson Jackson Cutler Gray Bundy Rostow Kissinger Scowcroft Brzezinski Allen Clark McFarlane Poindexter Carlucci Powell Scowcroft Lake Berger C. Rice Hadley Jones Donilon S. Rice