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.