Bundy, McGeorge

(b. 30 March 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts; d. 16 September 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts), dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and president of the Ford Foundation.

The Bundy saga is an emblematic story of the “American century.” Smart and gifted, this Boston Brahmin family endowed their sons with all the privileges and opportunities of the American establishment. Bundy was one of five children born to Harvey Hollister Bundy, a Yale-and Harvard-trained lawyer, and Katharine Lawrence Putnam, a homemaker and niece of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Like his elder brothers, Harvey and William, McGeorge Bundy was sent to the elite Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, from the age of twelve until he graduated in 1936. He then followed his father and brothers to Yale University, where he was tapped as a member of Skull and Bones, a secret society. Graduating from Yale in 1940, Bundy traveled in South America for a year and then was selected as a junior fellow at Harvard.

During World War II, Bundy’s father served as the executive assistant to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Bundy and his brother William were both trained as signal intelligence officers. Assigned to Bletchley Park outside of London, William Bundy became one of America’s leading cryptographers, privy to the war’s most closely guarded secret, the German military cipher, code-named ULTRA. McGeorge Bundy served as Admiral Alan Kirk’s “one-time-pad” man, decoding similar intelligence intercepts during the 1944 Normandy invasion. The experience left the Bundy brothers with an appreciation for what an important weapon intercept intelligence could be to those who had to make decisions about war and peace in a dangerous age.

In February 1947 Bundy ghost-wrote Stimson’s classic defense of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Published in Harper’s magazine in February 1947, the Stimson-Bundy essay helped to convince a generation of Americans that the atomic bombing was a justifiable act of war. Four decades later, in a scholarly book titled Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988), Bundy quietly retracted many of the arguments he had advanced in Stimson’s name to defend the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A year later he was a coauthor of Stimson’s memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War. Published in 1948, just as the cold war was unfolding, the book became a bible of the establishment’s worldview, an argument for an activist foreign policy. As a young man in his early thirties, Bundy’s mentors included Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the poet Archibald MacLeish, Henry Lewis Stimson, Walter Lippmann, Dean Acheson, Judge Learned Hand, John J. McCloy, Joseph Alsop, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Allen Dulles.

In 1949, having established himself as an up-and-coming young policy intellectual, Bundy began teaching government and world affairs at Harvard. Though he lacked a doctorate in any field, he quickly received tenure, and by 1953, at the precocious age of thirty-four, he was appointed dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. By then, Bundy had married Mary Buckminster Lothrop (on 10 June 1950), an associate director of admissions at Radcliffe. The couple had four sons.

At Harvard throughout the 1950s, Dean Bundy had to defend the university from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political witch-hunts. He protected those few tenured Harvard professors who had once been members of the Communist Party and who refused to “name names.” But as a cold war anticommunist liberal, Bundy also felt compelled to sacrifice some of the untenured scholars who refused to cooperate with the FBI.

When John F. Kennedy occupied the White House in 1961, McGeorge Bundy was named the president’s special assistant for national security affairs and William Bundy became a deputy assistant secretary of defense. In the early 1960s, Bundy managed one crisis after another: the Bay of Pigs, Laos, Berlin, and the most dangerous nuclear confrontation of the entire cold war—the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also supervised numerous covert intelligence operations, including Operation Mongoose, which aimed to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But it was Bundy’s role as an early architect of the war in Vietnam that engulfed his career in controversy. At every stage of the war—from the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 to the Gulf of Tonkin affair in 1964, from the bombing campaign of Operation Rolling Thunder to President Johnson’s July 1965 decision to send hundreds of thousands of American combat troops to Vietnam—Bundy helped to fashion a policy of gradual escalation.

When Bundy initially recommended a sustained bombing campaign to Johnson in February 1965, he warned the president, “We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail, and we cannot estimate the odds of success with any accuracy—they may be somewhere between 25 percent and 75 percent. What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will dampen down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.”

During the critical decisions of 1964–1965, Bundy urged President Johnson not to make an open-ended commitment of American ground troops. In June 1965, Bundy warned Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara that his proposal to introduce large numbers of troops was “rash to the point of folly.” The president’s national security adviser clearly understood the risks associated with any attempt to wage a ground war in Southeast Asia.

When the conflict nevertheless escalated into a major land war, Bundy persevered in a policy that he had known from the beginning was dubious. But like Robert McNamara, he now defended the war in public even while in private he increasingly acknowledged that it was not going well. In November 1965, Bundy informed President Johnson that he had decided to accept the presidency of the Ford Foundation.

Two weeks before he finally left the White House in early 1966, Bundy wrote a memorandum for his files in which he took issue with what he called the “Lippmann Thesis.” Contrary to syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann’s assumption that the United States didn’t belong in Southeast Asia, Bundy noted that “we have been the dominant power” for twenty years. “The truth is that in Southeast Asia we are stronger than China.” The war’s casualties were terrible, but the “danger to one man’s life, as such, is not a worthy guide. … If the basic questions of interest, right, and power are answered, the casualties and costs are to be accepted.” As to Lippmann’s frequent argument that where the French had failed, the Americans were no more likely to succeed, Bundy retorted, “There has been no serious proof of French political effectiveness since 1919.”

How could Bundy warn against the “folly” of intervention and then barely nine months later tell himself that the “casualties and costs are to be accepted”? One explanation seems to rest in the fact that as a liberal he feared the conservative alternative. Bundy knew he could hold his own in any debating forum with the antiwar students and his critics in the academy. Indeed, some of the war’s critics included his Cambridge friends and former colleagues, intellectuals like David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, and Hans Morgenthau.

If opposition to the war came from the left, Bundy understood that the real threat lay to their right. Once President Johnson had decided to take a stand in South Vietnam, the job of men like Bundy was to contain the war. If not managed by liberals, he felt this war could easily have become a Chinese-American war, a rerun of the Korean War. If the Chinese communists intervened with large numbers of ground troops, Bundy knew that the pressures from the Joint Chiefs to use tactical nuclear weapons would become irresistible. There were, as Bundy said, “wild men waiting in the wings.”

Caricatured as a war criminal by the New Left in the 1960s,” Bundy in the decades afterward remained a liberal in every sense of the word. As president of the Ford Foundation, he lent intellectual and financial support to a whole range of liberal causes, including affirmative action, the environment, arms control, public television, and public interest law. He became an eloquent critic of institutionalized white racism. It was, he wrote in 1968, the “white man’s fears and hates that must have first place” in explaining the condition of the American Negro.

In 1982 Bundy—together with George Kennan, Gerard Smith, and Robert McNamara—wrote a major essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that the United States should abandon its policy of “first use” of nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The essay made headlines around the globe.

Even in his twilight years, Bundy helped to frame the debate on arms control negotiations with the Soviets, the future of NATO, and the nature of the national security state at the end of the cold war. And yet, on the issue of the war that will forever be associated with his name, he remains an enigma.

Bundy died in Boston of heart failure at the age of seventy-seven. His funeral service was held in St. John’s Church in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. His old Harvard friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wistfully noted that Bundy represented “the last hurrah of the Northeast Establishment. He was the final executor of the grand tradition of Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy—patricians who, combining commitment to international responsibility with instinct for command and relish in power, served the republic pretty well in the global crises of the twentieth century.” On a personal level, Schlesinger remembered his friend as a man of “sparkling personality, witty and elegant.” Bundy, he said, had displayed the courage to “transcend the politics and the complacencies of his class.” Born a privileged Republican, he had become a liberal Democrat. “A single tragic error,” Schlesinger concluded, “prevented him from achieving his full promise as a statesman.”

Some of Bundy’s papers are in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library together with numerous oral history interviews. Kai Bird wrote the only biography of McGeorge Bundy: The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). Many books on the Vietnam War feature Bundy, including Milton Viorst, Hustlers and Heroes: An American Political Panorama (1971); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972); Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (1982); John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA from Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey (1986); Raymond L. Garthoft, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (1987); Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (1992); H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (1993); Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (1995); Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy, an anthology on the atomic bomb edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz (1998); and Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (1999). Bundy himself is the author of Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988), and the editor of The Pattern of Responsibility: From the Record of Dean Acheson (1952). An obituary is in the New York Times (17 Sept. 1996).

Kai Bird