McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March
30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American academic who served 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 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 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. 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
he had two younger sisters, Harriet Lowell and Katharine Lawrence. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy,
from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a prominent attorney in Boston serving as a
clerk 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 to Harvard
president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Through his mother, Bundy grew up with the
other Boston Brahmin families, and throughout his life he was well connected
with American elites.
The Bundys were close to Henry L. Stimson. As Secretary of State under Herbert 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, and
serving as liaison between Stimson and the director of the Office of
Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush. William and McGeorge
grew up knowing Stimson as a family friend and colleague of their father The
senior Bundy also helped implement the Marshall Plan. McGeorge Bundy attended
the private Dexter Lower School in Brookline, Massachusetts,
and the elite 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 where 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. 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." Despite this, he was still admitted to Yale as
he was awarded a 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, and as a senior 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 In 1939, he ran as a Republican for the Boston City
Council and was defeated. He graduated from Yale with an A.B. in mathematics in 1940. In 1940, he advocated 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. During World War II, Bundy decided to join the United States Army despite
his poor vision. He served as an intelligence officer. In
1943, he became an aide to Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, who knew his
father. On 6 June 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 at the rank of captain in
1946 and returned to Harvard, where he completed the remaining two years of his
Junior Fellowship.