Background

McGeorge Bundy was born on March 30, 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was a son of Harvey Hollister Bundy, an attorney and government official, and Katharine Lawrence Putnam, a niece of Harvard’s president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. In addition to the Lowells family, she was also related to such noble Boston Brahmin families as the Cabots and the Lawrences. McGeorge Bundy’s father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, came from the Middle West of the United States.

Bundy had two brothers, named Harvey Hollister and William Putnam, and two younger sisters, Harriet Lowell and Katharine Lawrence.

McGeorge Bundy was raised in the atmosphere of public service because many of his relatives were somehow related to the state service. So, his father served at the beginning of his career as a clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Then, he was an assistant secretary both of state and war under Henry L. Stimson. McGeorge Bundy’s brother, William Putnam, fulfilled the duties of a foreign affairs advisor to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Education

McGeorge Bundy received his general education at Dexter Lower School in Brookline, Massachusetts and in prestigious Groton School. He was the first student in the class, led the school newspaper and organized debating society. One of his classmates was John F. Kennedy. Bundy graduated in 1936.

Then, McGeorge passed the entrance exam at Yale University with the first-ever best result. As it was at school, he showed himself as a brilliant and active student. His academic achievements were marked by many honors.

Bundy revealed a particular interest to local and national politics, and journalism contributing to Yale Literary Magazine and to the Yale Daily News. In 1940, McGeorge Bundy received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics.

While at the university, he followed his father’s steps and became a member of the Skull and Bones secret society where he was dubbed ‘Odin’.

A year later, the young man obtained a three-year fellowship which allowed him to pursue his studies at Harvard University. After the first year, the studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.

Bundy came back to the University in 1946 and completed two years of his fellowship receiving a Master of Arts degree.

Career

The start of McGeorge Bundy’s career coincided with the outbreak of World War II. In 1942, Bundy joined the United States Army and served during the conflict as an aide to Admiral Alan Kirk. In that capacity, he assisted with the planning for the invasions of Sicily and France. He was discharged in 1946 in the rang of a captain.

After, Bundy had the opportunity of working with Stimson on the latter's autobiography, ‘On Active Service’. He then worked briefly in Washington on the implementation of the Marshall Plan before joining Thomas E. Dewey's presidential campaign as a consultant on foreign policy issues and a speechwriter in 1948. 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 New York City later that year.

Bundy stayed with the Council for less than a year and then accepted an appointment to teach the history of United States foreign policy at the Department of Government at Harvard. There, despite the absence of the usual graduate degrees or scholarly publications, he rose rapidly, becoming an associate professor after two years. In 1953, he became a dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and the following year was promoted to a full professor. Popular with students and faculty, Bundy had an extraordinary academic career.

Bundy came into political sphere at the beginning of 1960s. In 1961 John F. 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. As a Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Bundy participated in many crucial foreign policy episodes, such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis (including the chairing at the 303 Committee from 1964 to 1966), and the Vietnam War.

After Kennedy's death in 1963, Bundy stayed on to serve Lyndon B. Johnson. 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.

Bundy retired from the presidency of the Ford Foundation in 1979 and joined the Department of History at New York University. He devoted ten years to the academic activity at the institution.

In 1990, McGeorge Bundy joined the staff of the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a char of the Committee on Reducing Nuclear Danger. Three years later, he became a scholar in residence at the Corporation. In 1995, he was mentioned as a contributor to Brown University's ‘Journal of World Affairs’.

McGeorge Bundy worked in the capacity of a scholar in residence till the end of his life.

Achievements

• An accomplished political personality, McGeorge Bundy was one of the key figures of United States foreign policy during the presidency of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. 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.
  
  During Bundy's presidency of the Ford Foundation, he continued its activities in international development and education, but it also added major new programs to fight racism at home. The struggle for equal opportunity became its highest domestic concern.
  
  A book by Bundy, 'Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years' is considered one of the masterly publications on the history of nuclear weapons.
  
  McGeorge Bundy was the youngest employee in Harvard's history who occupied the post of a dean at the University.
  
  Bundy’s contribution to the political life of the United States was marked by the Presidential Medal of Freedom he received in 1969. For his academic achievements, he received a title of a professor emeritus from New York University twenty years later. He kept the status till the end of his days.
  
  Gordon Goldstein's book on Bundy’s activity related to the Vietnam War, ‘Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam’, became a table book for Barack Obama's war advisers when they searched for the alternative courses ahead in Afghanistan.
  
  The role of McGeorge Bundy was discussed in many TV movies, including ‘The Missiles of October’ of 1974, ‘Thirteen Days’ by Roger Donaldson, a biographical ‘Path to War’ by John Frankenheimer, and ‘Killing Kennedy’ by Nelson McCormick.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Road Away from the Brink

    (Three of America's top experts on nuclear affairs offered...)

    1994
  • Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years

    (Traces the evolution of the nuclear bomb from its concept...)

    1988
  • On Active Service in Peace and War

    (Written in the third person by Mr. Bundy, it is however o...)

    1948
  • The Pattern of Responsibility: from the Record of Dean Acheson

    (The book was edited by Bundy)

    1952
  • The Strength of Government 1968

Politics

Although McGeorge Bundy considered himself a Republican and campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, he rejected Richard M. Nixon in favor of John F. Kennedy in 1960.

As special assistant to Kennedy for national security, 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.

Serving both at the Ford Foundation and at New York University, Bundy 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 forming the group known as the ‘Gang of Four’. The main efforts of the group were directed to alert Americans to the growing danger of nuclear war and to the need to end the arms race. Among their influential publications were 1983 Foreign Affairs article standing for the end of the United States policy of “first use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe” and ‘Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years’. However, the group failed to persuade President Ronald Reagan.

While at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, McGeorge Bundy 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.

Views

Quotations: "Although war is evil, it is occasionally the lesser of two evils."

"There is nearly always uh, a process of wanting contingency plans made in the military."

"The most persistent of all attractive illusions in our country may be that racism can be ended by one single blow."

"I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolf Hitler."

"Well, it is alarming to have a president [Reagan] who doesn't know what he is doing."

"Vietnam, really more accurately, Laos, was almost after Berlin the top problem at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration in '61, foreign problem."

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1954

Personality

McGeorge Bundy was a thoughtful and straightforward person.

He was a gentleman standing for Victorian principles of obligation and ethical standards. Sometimes, he seemed to his surroundings to be an elitist and a Machiavellian.

Quotes from others about the person

• "McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who'd had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts of people and politicians as not to be taken all that seriously." Robert Dallek, American historian
  
  "'He [McGeorge Bundy] was ready to be dean of the faculty at Harvard when he was 12 years old." Louis Auchincloss, American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist
  
  "Perhaps the brightest star in the galaxy of brilliant young men who were going to change the course of the country, his reputation was above all else for his intellectual brilliance." David Halberstam, American journalist and historian
  
  "He is a man of sharp – often acid – brilliance, lean and trim of body and mind and almost collegiate at 46, agile, combative and confident, on the tennis court and in intellectual volley. He eats, drinks, dances, plays and, above all, speaks briskly; some say tartly." Max Frankel, American journalist

Connections

McGeorge Bundy married Mary Buckminster Lothrop, a woman from a prosperous family of Boston, in 1950. The couple had four sons named Stephen McGeorge, Andrew, William and James.

Bundy’s sons were fathers of his six grandchildren.

Father:

Harvey Hollister Bundy

Mother:

Katherine Lawrence Putnam

Spouse:

Mary Buckminster Lothrop

Sister:

Harriet Lowell

Sister:

Katharine Lawrence

Brother:

William Bundy

Brother:

Harvey Hollister Bundy, Jr.

Son:

Stephen McGeorge Bundy

Son:

Andrew Bundy

Son:

William Bundy

Son:

James Bundy

Friend:

Henry Lewis Stimson

colleague:

John Kennedy

colleague:

Lyndon Johnson

colleague:

Dean Rusk

colleague:

Robert McNamara

colleague:

Alan Goodrich Kirk

colleague:

Thomas Edmund Dewey

References

• The Color of Truth. McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms The dual biography of two brothers whose legal and political careers spanned World War II, the Cold War and Vietnam
  1998
• Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam Gordon M. Goldstein distills the essential lessons of America's involvement in Vietnam, drawing on his prodigious research as well as interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy before his death in 1996
  2009
• The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam By examining the role of McGeorge Bundy and the National Security Council, Andrew Preston demonstrates that policymakers escalated the conflict in Vietnam in the face of internal opposition, external pressures, and a continually failing strategy
  2010