BUNDY, McGeorge

(b. 30 March 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts; d. 16 September 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts), Harvard University academic who served as special assistant for national security affairs to presidents John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1966), after which he headed the Ford Foundation until 1979.

One of five siblings, Bundy was the third and youngest son and third child of Harvey Hollister Bundy, a leading Boston corporate lawyer, and Katharine ("Kay") Lowell Putnam, a homemaker and the daughter of one of Boston's most prominent families. He grew up in a family ethic of public service, intensified first by his father's and (later) his own conscious adherence to the tradition of assertive but principled U.S. internationalism that dated back to President Theodore Roosevelt, and was best represented in their lives by Henry L. Stimson (secretary of state under Herbert Hoover and secretary of war under both William Howard Taft and Franklin D. Roosevelt), under whom Bundy's father served in both the state and war departments. Bundy, who attended Dexter Lower School in Boston, Groton, an elite Massachusetts private school, and Yale University, his father's alma mater, invariably excelled academically, leaving Groton at age sixteen with perfect marks and graduating first in his Yale class in 1940 with a B.A. degree in mathematics. Elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1941, after one year Bundy joined the U.S. Army, deciphering intelligence intercepts for Admiral Alan Kirk, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Sicily and Normandy invasions of World War II. Bundy, who rose to the rank of captain and was discharged in 1945, assisted in the planning of the Sicily and Normandy invasions.

After the war, for two years Bundy helped the elderly Stimson research and write his memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War (1948), which laid out for future generations that influential statesman's worldview. Soon after, Bundy edited a volume of the official speeches of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, his brother William's father-in-law. Although Bundy had only an undergraduate degree, he switched fields from mathematics in 1949 to teach government and international affairs at Harvard University. In 1950 Bundy married Mary Buckminster Lothrop, a fellow Bostonian, with whom he had four sons. In 1953 Harvard appointed Bundy, now age thirty-four, as Dean of Arts and Sciences. He remained in the position until 1961, attracting such nationally known scholars as sociologist David Riesman to Harvard. Bundy was known for his intellectual brilliance, energy, swift assimilation of information, and wit, though his critics subsequently suggested that in Bundy's roles as dean and public official these superficial qualities masked an absence of deeper reflection and a tendency to accept prevailing conventional cold war wisdom.

Though nominally a Republican, Bundy was close to center-left Harvard liberals such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and like them Bundy supported and advised John F. Kennedy, his local Democratic senator, in Kennedy's 1960 campaign. In 1961 Kennedy appointed Bundy to the White House as presidential assistant for national security affairs, where his ambition, intellectual brilliance, and empathy with the president allowed him to greatly overshadow the secretary of state, Dean Rusk. Bundy's critics argue that he lacked a firm moral compass and often accorded overly high priority to pragmatic considerations of political expediency, as when he supported increases in strategic nuclear missiles he knew were unnecessary and a civil defense program whose ineffectiveness he recognized. Bundy's acquiescence reflected the degree to which he thought it his function to be a competent manager rather than an innovative formulator of policy. As Kennedy's gatekeeper on foreign affairs, Bundy controlled the access of both information and individuals to the president, prepared the agenda for National Security Council meetings, and selected the personnel for the task forces Kennedy established to handle specific foreign policy problems. Both Bundy and Kennedy shared a lively appreciation of the central significance of U.S. power and the need to employ it in situations—Cuba, Berlin, and Vietnam, for example—where U.S. interests or prestige might be at stake. Bundy considered it his role to ensure that the president was briefed on both sides of any issue and to this end sometimes played devil's advocate. Even so, within a few weeks of taking office, he approved the disastrous March 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt to overthrow the pro-Communist Cuban government of Fidel Castro that ended in fiasco and brought international humiliation to the United States.

Bundy was involved in every aspect of foreign policy formulation and implementation, including the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the United States discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba and demanded their withdrawal. It fell to Bundy to inform Kennedy that American intelligence overflights had detected the presence of these weapons. Surprisingly indecisive, Bundy initially supported airstrikes to destroy the missiles, subsequently endorsed the naval quarantine option Kennedy eventually selected, yet then switched once more to airstrikes. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent two somewhat contradictory responses to the United States' ultimatum on Cuba, it was Bundy who suggested replying only to the first, less confrontational message. Reflecting later on this crisis, in his book Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988), Bundy suggested that Kennedy employed "a certain excess of rhetoric," when more moderate language would have been less alarming to Americans. It also seems that, to resolve the 1958–1963 crisis over Berlin, Bundy would have welcomed a U.S. agreement with the Soviet Union whereby both recognized the separate existence of West and East Germany and their post–World War II boundaries and the two Germanies signed a non-aggression pact, suggestions prefiguring détente and Ostpolitik, but Bundy accepted without demur Kennedy's decision that such moves were politically infeasible. Bundy and Kennedy both emphasized that the United States would react forcibly should the Soviet Union or East Germany try to annex West Berlin—it was Bundy who drafted Kennedy's 1961 speech proclaiming Ich bin ein Berliner—but acquiesced in the Soviet decision that year to staunch the hemorrhage of East German refugees to the West by erecting the Berlin Wall.

By far the most controversial aspect of Bundy's government service was his responsibility for the escalation of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Dissenters pilloried both Bundy and his brother William, assistant secretary of state for East Asia under President Lyndon B. Johnson, for their part in the growing U.S. entanglement. As early as 1961 Bundy suggested a limited deployment of U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam, though Kennedy sent further military advisers instead, and in the following two years Bundy endorsed various paramilitary operations. When army officers opposed to South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem planned a coup in autumn 1963, Bundy acquiesced and kept himself closely informed of their developing plans. After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Bundy continued to serve President Johnson. Convinced by early 1964 that South Vietnam's government was ineffective and corrupt and that victory in the war would demand major domestic political reforms within South Vietnam, Bundy volunteered to go there himself as U.S. ambassador, an offer Johnson declined. Despite some personal misgivings over its likely success, Bundy acquiesced in Johnson's decision to react to the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident with a gradually escalating bombing campaign, accepting that the president best comprehended the political implications. In early 1965 Bundy visited Vietnam for the first time, a trip that coincided with Viet Cong attacks on U.S. Air Force personnel based at Pleiku. Bundy immediately demanded heavy U.S. retaliation through an escalated bombing campaign of "sustained reprisals" against North Vietnam. Despite some doubts about the efficacy of large troop deployments, in mid-1965 Bundy accepted Johnson's decision to commit U.S. ground forces. Bundy himself later suggested that, had Kennedy lived, he would have avoided full-scale American intervention, but that in mid-1965 political and psychological considerations made Johnson so determined to commit troops, he would have ignored whatever arguments his advisers made to the contrary. Critics, however, assailed Bundy's own contemporaneous failure to undertake any serious efforts to dissuade Johnson.

Personal incompatibility with Johnson led Bundy to leave his administration in January 1966 to head the Ford Foundation. He remained until 1979, moving that institution to support aggressive and often controversial policies on race relations, the environment, the creation of public television, and ethical investing. Yet Vietnam perennially dogged Bundy, effectively destroying his chances of becoming secretary of state or president of a major university. Following the gentleman's code in which he was reared, Bundy refused either to defend his record or to publicly criticize Johnson administration policies, and for the rest of his life rarely even discussed them. Until early 1968 he supported the war, albeit in March 1967 warning against any further escalation and in November 1967 advising Johnson to persevere but gradually to de-escalate the U.S. commitment while enhancing South Vietnamese self-reliance. After the massive early 1968 Tet Offensive, Bundy finally advocated a bombing halt. Shortly afterward, with most of the other "Wise Men" the administration consulted, Bundy told a shocked Johnson that victory was unattainable and recommended that the United States open peace negotiations with North Vietnam. While defending the war's conduct to date, in October Bundy publicly called for steady U.S. troop withdrawals until 100,000 were left in place, if necessary indefinitely, and a bombing halt. In 1971, moreover, Bundy testified before Congress in favor of limiting presidential power to fight wars without congressional consent, an indirect commentary on Johnson's behavior in 1965. For ten years, from 1979, he taught at New York University, writing on nuclear policy. In 1982, together with George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith, he called for no U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons. Bundy died suddenly of heart failure in Boston and was buried at Saint John's Church, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

Bundy embodied the strengths, virtues, limitations, and weaknesses of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, whose heir he considered himself, and the credibility of whose outlook the Vietnam War helped to destroy. Although preeminent among those whom journalist David Halberstam termed "the best and the brightest," despite his outstanding ability and intelligence Bundy was unwilling to question conventional wisdom beyond certain limits. His lengthy and distinguished subsequent career notwithstanding, his reputation never entirely recovered from the damage wreaked by his perceived responsibility for Vietnam, and until his death this record made him a controversial figure.

Collections of Bundy's papers are at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Additional manuscript material on his time in government service is in records of the Department of State in the National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. The Ford Foundation Archives, New York City, contain his records as president of the foundation. The relevant volumes of the series Foreign Relations of the United States contain numerous materials produced by Bundy, and his evolving position during the Cuban Missile Crisis may be followed in Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (1997). Bundy reflects on various aspects of his government service in Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988), and also in David A. Welch and James G. Blight, eds., On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (1989). The only biography is Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms: A Biography (1998). Shorter assessments include Joseph Kraft, Profiles in Power: A Washington Insight (1966); and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "A Man Called Mac," George (Dec. 1996). David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972), focuses heavily on Bundy's responsibility for Vietnam. Bundy features extensively in numerous other works on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, including David M. Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (1993); Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (1995); and Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000). Bundy's activities at the Ford Foundation may be followed in that institution's Annual Reports from 1966 through the 1970s; they are also discussed in Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Golden Donors: A New Anatomy of the Great Foundations (1985). Among tributes to Bundy are Peter Solbert in the Century Association Yearbook (1997): 272–275, and Francis M. Bator, "Glimpses of Mac," Groton School Quarterly (May 1997). Bundy recorded oral histories for the Kennedy and Johnson Libraries. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 17 Sept. 1996), and the Daily Telegraph and the (London) Times (both 18 Sept. 1996).

Priscilla Roberts