McGeorge Bundy

McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He is primarily remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979.

After World War II, during which Bundy served as an intelligence officer, he was selected in 1949 to work for the Council on Foreign Relations. He worked with a study team on the implementation of the Marshall Plan. He was appointed a professor of government at Harvard University, and, in 1953, became its youngest dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, working to develop Harvard as a merit-based university. 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 third son in a prosperous family, long involved in Republican politics. His older brothers were Harvey Hollister Bundy, Jr., and William Putnam Bundy, and his two younger sisters were Harriet Lowell and Katharine Lawrence. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a prominent attorney in Boston who had clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his younger days. Bundy's mother, Katherine Lawrence Putnam, was related to several Boston Brahmin families listed in the Social Register: the Lowells, the Cabots, and the Lawrences. She was a niece of Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Through his mother, Bundy grew up within other Boston Brahmin families, and remained throughout his life well connected with American elites.

The Bundys were close to Henry L. Stimson. As Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover, in 1931, Stimson appointed Bundy's father as his Assistant Secretary of State. Later, when Stimson was Secretary of War in World War II, Harvey Bundy served again under Stimson as Special Assistant on Atomic Matters, serving as liaison between Stimson and the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush. He worked on the implementation of the Marshall Plan after the war. McGeorge Bundy grew up knowing Stimson as a family friend and colleague of his father.

He attended the private Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the elite Groton School, where he placed 1st in his class and ran the student newspaper and debating society. Biographer David Halberstam writes:

He was admitted to Yale University, one year behind his brother William. When applying to Yale, Bundy wrote on the entrance exam: "This question is silly. If I were giving the test, this is the question I would ask, and this is my answer." He was still admitted to Yale as he achieved perfect score on his entrance exam. At Yale, 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, while, as a senior, he was awarded the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize. 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. He graduated from Yale with an A.B. in mathematics in 1940. The same year, he advocated for American intervention in World War Two, writing: "Though war is evil, it is occasionally the lesser of two evils." In 1941, he was awarded a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows. At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; thus, Bundy would never earn a doctorate.

In 1941, he ran for the Ward 5 Seat on the Boston City Council. He was endorsed by the outgoing incumbent, Henry Lee Shattuck, but lost to A. Frank Foster by 92 votes.

Military service

During World War II, Bundy applied to join the United States Army despite his poor vision. He served as an intelligence officer. In 1943, he was posted as aide to Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, who knew his father. On June 6, 1944, as an aide to Admiral Kirk, Bundy witnessed first-hand the Operation Overlord landings from the deck of the cruiser USS Augusta.

He was discharged with the rank of captain in 1946 and returned to Harvard, where he completed the remaining two years of his Junior Fellowship.

Academic career

From 1945 to 1947, Bundy worked with Henry Stimson as ghostwriter of his third-person autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War, published in 1947. Stimson suffered a massive heart attack, which led to a speech impediment two months after completing his second appointment as United States Secretary of War in the fall of 1945, and Bundy's assistance was integral to the completion of the book.

In 1948, he worked for Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey as a speechwriter, specializing in foreign-policy issues. Bundy had expected Dewey to win the 1948 election, and to be rewarded with some sort of senior post in a Dewey administration. After Dewey's defeat, Bundy became a political analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he studied the Marshall Plan's aid to Europe. Notable members of the study group were Dwight D. Eisenhower, then serving as president of Columbia University; future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles; future CIA official Richard M. Bissell, Jr.; and diplomat George F. Kennan. 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, Operation Gladio, by which the CIA used certain funds to aid anti-communist groups in France and Italy.

In 1949, Bundy was appointed visiting lecturer in Harvard University's Department of Government. He taught about the history of U.S. foreign policy and was popular among students; after two years, he was promoted to associate professor and recommended for tenure. After his promotion to full professor in 1953, Bundy was appointed dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at age 34, the youngest person to have received a decanal appointment in the university's history as of 2025. An effective and popular administrator, Bundy initiated policy changes intended to develop Harvard as a class-blind, merit-based university, aiming to build a reputation for stellar academics. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954.

He was listed as one of the "young American scholars known as 'New Conservatives'" by Peter Viereck in 1956. During his time as Dean at Harvard, Bundy met for the first time Senator John F. Kennedy who sat on the Harvard Board of Overseers. In 1991, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

National Security Advisor and Vietnam War

Bundy moved into public life in 1961 when he was appointed National Security Advisor in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy considered Bundy for Secretary of State, but decided that since he was a relatively youthful president, he should name an older man as Secretary of State. In common with other members of Kennedy's cabinet, Bundy considered the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, to be ineffectual. Bundy, a registered Republican, offered to switch parties to become a registered Democrat when he entered the White House but Kennedy declined the offer, saying he preferred to have a Republican as National Security Adviser to rebut charges that he was "soft on Communism."

thumb|left|Bundy with his mother and recently sworn-in President Johnson in the [[Cabinet Room (White House)|Cabinet Room, November 1963]]

One of Kennedy's "best and brightest" young political activists who also came to be known as "the New Frontiersmen,"

Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War during his tenure, believing it essential to contain communism. He supported the escalation of American involvement, including the commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965. According to author and columnist Kai Bird, 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. remaining in this position until 1979. On 12 October 1968, Bundy criticized the Vietnam War in a speech, saying: "There is no prospect of military victory against North Vietnam by any level of U.S. military force which is acceptable or desirable."

After testifying before the Church Committee in 1975, Bundy issued a statement: "As far as I ever knew, or know now, no one in the White House or at the Cabinet level ever gave any approval of any kind to any CIA effort to assassinate anyone." Bundy added: "I told the committee in particular that it is wholly inconsistent with what I know of President Kennedy and his brother Robert that either of them would have given any such order or authorization or consent to anyone through any channel."

Beginning in 1979, Bundy returned to academia as a professor of history at New York University. He was professor emeritus from 1989 until his death. During this period, he helped found the group known as the "Gang of Four," whose other members were George F. Kennan, Robert McNamara and Gerard Smith; together they spoke and wrote about American nuclear policies. They published an influential 1983 Foreign Affairs article that proposed ending the US policy of "first use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe". His body is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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".
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 a member of the team of presidential advisers in 2009.

Publications

Articles

“To Cap the Volcano”. Foreign Affairs, vol. 48, no. 1, October 1969. pp. 1–20. . .
Available online at the Foreign Affairs archives.
"The Issue Before the Court: Who Gets Ahead in America?", The Atlantic Monthly vol. 240, no. 5, November 1977. pp. 41–54.

Books

On Active Service in Peace and War (Co-authored by Henry Stimson). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947.
Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. .

Media

Appearances

Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited. Produced for The Idea Channel by the Free to Choose Network, 1983.
Phase I (U1015) (January 22, 1983)
Featuring McGeorge Bundy, Richard Neustadt, Edwin Martin, Dean Rusk & Donald Wilson in Atlanta, Georgia.
Phase II, Part I (U1016) (June 27, 1983)
Featuring McGeorge Bundy, Richard Neustadt, Robert S. McNamara, George W. Ball & U. Alexis Johnson in Washington D.C.
Phase II, Part II (U1017) (June 27, 1983)
Featuring McGeorge Bundy, Richard Neustadt, Robert S. McNamara, George W. Ball & U. Alexis Johnson in Washington D.C.
At the Brink: War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. Episode 105. WBGH, March 20, 1986.
Full transcript available.

Portrayal 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.

Books and articles

References

External links

Interview about the Cuban Missile Crisis for the WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
Review of biography of brothers William and 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
NY Times Obituary