The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  This foray into Boston politics was important in the shaping of his political outlook. Although American elective politics is often an imperfect thing, sometimes cheap and degrading, perhaps too much for men who lack the fiber, it is at the same time a great humanizing force, particularly for the strong, for those who already have advantages and resources. These men can manage to overcome the tawdry and cheapening aspects, and absorb, sometimes almost in spite of themselves, a feeling for the country, a certain respect and almost affection for its foibles. Those who knew Jack Kennedy well felt he was a different man after the West Virginia primary in 1960; similarly, Robert Kennedy was a changed man as he went from running a campaign to becoming a candidate himself. But Bundy gave it up, and instead turned to using power in the private, elitist sense, ignoring public pressures. (When he finally decided to talk about his role in Vietnam he did it, significantly, at the Council on Foreign Relations, off the record, with no question-and-answer period.)

  He left Harvard for the war. Although he had been rejected by his draft board because of weak eyes, he managed to memorize the eye charts, and he ended up serving as an aide to Vice-Admiral Alan Kirk, a family friend. (When Bundy went to the White House in 1961, one of the few people he wanted to get a job for was Admiral Kirk, who became ambassador to Taiwan; Kirk’s son-in-law Peter Solbert became a deputy to William Bundy at Defense, and Kirk’s son Roger moved up in the State Department under William Bundy.) On board the Augusta, Admiral Kirk’s flagship, he participated in much of the planning for the D-Day landings. He was remembered for his intelligence and audacity, and those who were aboard said he was not afraid to correct General Omar Bradley on minor matters. The brashness was clearly there; on June 9, when Bradley was leaving the ship, Bundy reminded the general that when he was gone, Captain Bundy would once again become the ranking Army officer aboard the Augusta.

  Restless with Army staff work, he managed to get himself transferred to the infantry and was on orders to participate in the invasion of Japan when the war ended. When he returned to civilian life he worked for a time on some of the postwar planning that went into the Marshall Plan, became a political analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote speeches for John Foster Dulles in his New York Senate campaign, and eventually ended up at Harvard as a lecturer in government, where he also did some discreet recruiting for the CIA. (This was not surprising—brother Bill being in the Agency and Allen Dulles being a good friend of the family’s—since the CIA needed the right people on the right campuses to find the right young men with both muscular Christianity and brains who also knew the rules of the game.) In those years you had a feeling, as one friend said, that he was not so much changing jobs as working for the same people and simply changing offices.

  He spent the fifties at Harvard and they were happy years for him. He was immensely popular with the undergraduates, he was very accessible and not at all pompous; rather, he was considered open and challenging. In an atmosphere sometimes distinguished by the narrowness of professional discipline, Bundy was a generalist, in touch with the world at large, and he brought a sense of engagement of energy and vitality to his work. He loved taking on students, combating them and their ideas, challenging them, bright wits flashing back and forth, debate almost an end in itself. In the world of the Harvard government department, where towering figures like Carl Friedrich and William Yandell Elliott seemed distant and unapproachable, men who belonged more to the graduate students than the undergraduates, Bundy was quite a contrast. He particularly liked teaching freshmen, he was a spectacularly good Government 1 section man, a role that few other bright instructors cherished, and he held on to his freshman sections as long as he could.

  His major undergraduate course, Government 180: The U.S. in World Affairs (his successor in teaching it was, fittingly enough, a young German émigré intellectual named Henry Kissinger), was taught with great style and enthusiasm. His Munich lecture was legendary at Harvard, and when word got out that it was on the day’s schedule, he played to standing room only. It was done with great verve, Bundy imitating the various participants, his voice cracking with emotion as little Czechoslovakia fell, the German tanks rolling in just as the bells from Memorial Hall sounded. The lesson was of course interventionism, and the wise use of force. He was already surfacing with a commitment to force which would be important in his own make-up years later and which was quite fashionable in the Harvard government department—and government departments of other Eastern universities—of those days. This was known as the ultrarealism school. Its proponents believed that they were tough, that they knew what the world was really like, and that force must be accepted as a basic element of diplomacy. Toughness bred toughness; Stalin had been tough in Eastern Europe, so the West would be tough somewhere else. The Communists legitimized us; force met force. John Kenneth Galbraith, a friend and colleague of Bundy’s but far more a Stevenson disciple, later remembered that he and Bundy always argued at Harvard and later in Administration days about the use of force, and Bundy would tell Galbraith with a certain element of disappointment, “Ken, you always advise against the use of force—do you realize that?” Galbraith would reflect on that and then note that Bundy was right, he always did recommend against force, in the belief that there were very few occasions when force can be used successfully.

  Though Bundy was a good teacher, he was not in the classic sense a great expert in foreign affairs, since he had not come up through the discipline. He was not particularly at ease with Ph.D. candidates, those men who might be more specialized in their knowledge than he. Yet, he was such a star of the government department that it was quickly decided that tenure must be awarded. The idea was advanced to President James Bryant Conant, who had been a distinguished member of the chemistry department before he took over the university. Conant was a little uneasy about endorsing the recommendations; Bundy, it seemed, had never taken any graduate or undergraduate courses in government. Was that correct?

  “That’s right,” the representative of the government department said.

  “Are you sure that’s right?” asked the puzzled Conant.

  “I’m sure,” the professor answered.

  “Well,” Conant sighed, “all I can say is that it couldn’t have happened in Chemistry.”

  Bundy was a genuinely popular figure at Harvard. Despite his breeding and traditions he was not pompous and not a blue blood in style. If he did not rebel against that which produced him, he seemed not to take it too seriously, he did not rely on it; it did certain things for him, and he was sure enough of its authenticity and value not to flaunt it. When in 1953 James Conant left Harvard to become U.S. High Commissioner to Germany, there was considerable talk that Bundy, at the advanced age of thirty-four, might succeed him. If ever there was a faculty candidate for the job, it was Bundy. Instead, Harvard chose Nathan Pusey, since the university was under severe attack from McCarthy and since the prospect of a deeply religious figure from the Midwestern heartland was somehow reassuring to alumni. Bundy became merely dean of the College, inspiring a Yale colleague to pen this doggerel:

  A proper young prig, McGeorge Bundy,

  Graduated from Yale on a Monday

  But he shortly was seen

  As Establishment Dean

  Up at Harvard the following Sunday.

  The faculty of Harvard came quickly to dislike Nathan Marsh Pusey (when he wrote letters to John Kenneth Galbraith which began “Dear John,” Ken Galbraith would reciprocate by answering with “Dear Marsh” letters). No sooner had Pusey arrived at Harvard than he announced that the first piece of business would be the renovation and modernization of the Harvard Divinity School, a subject as far from the hearts of that secular faculty as anything could be. The faculty’s misgivings about Pusey soon came to match what would later be the intellectual community’s feelings about Dean Rusk, a suspicion that there was simply too little flexibility for a first-rate mind. Pusey was bland and cautious, and looking, in the words of Sir Isa
iah Berlin, like a retouched photograph; Bundy was dashing, bright, brittle, the antibureaucratic man, the anticonventional man. Bundy, playing on a field where he had grown enormously sure of himself and living in his own environment, seemed to dominate Pusey, who appeared to prefer the background spot to which Bundy relegated him. After Bundy left Harvard, however, Pusey took more than a year to name a successor and was heard to say that he wanted the pleasure of running the university himself for a while. With that particular style of his, Bundy seemed to denigrate Pusey’s role without ever having to say anything (years later, after the great bust at Harvard in 1970, Bundy wrote a long article about the university in which he paid homage to Conant seven times and mentioned Pusey once; for Bundy-watchers it was a revealing document: it showed that he felt about Pusey as they had always suspected).

  By the standards of very tough critics, Bundy was a magnificent dean. It was a virtuoso performance, designed as much as possible to open up the university, to bring it greatness despite the usual bureaucratic restrictions. David Riesman (social sciences), Erik Erikson (psychiatry), Laurence Wylie (French civilization)—all were brought in by Bundy despite the opposition of the departments to which they would be assigned; Bundy had, for instance, been impressed because Wylie, a Romance-languages professor, had retooled himself in middle age, learned about cultural anthropology and gone on to co-author a landmark book called Village in the Vaucluse. And Lillian Hellman, the playwright and a good friend of Bundy’s, remembers being with Bundy in Cambridge one night when he suddenly said to her, “Why don’t you come up here and teach?”

  “Oh,” she said, “the English department wouldn’t want me.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. Off he went and in about an hour he called her. “It’s all set.”

  “But I don’t know how to teach,” she protested.

  “But you know something about writing,” he answered. “Give them some real work. Teach them how to take from what’s really around them and how to use it.”

  Even the slight nastiness, which has from time to time been a Bundy trademark, was an advantage; he had the ability to be unfair, to go after special men and give them special privileges, people like Riesman and Erikson who did not teach as much as other members of the faculty. Perhaps a less aristocratic, less arrogant man with a greater sense of fairness and a greater sense of risk (the name Rusk comes to mind, Rusk would never have broken the rules) might not have done it. Bundy took the complex Harvard faculty—diverse, egomaniacal—and played with it, in the words of a critic, like a cat with mice. This feat was partly due to the very structure of his mind. Although he was not a great reader (there were a surprising number of books one would have imagined that he had read which he had not), he was brilliant at learning things in conversation, in absorbing. The great skill of his mind, the training in classics and math, allowed him to see and understand how other people’s intellectual processes work; he was considered better at understanding how the minds of the scientists worked than any nonscientist in Cambridge. He was a deft bureaucratic politician; he knew the men around him, whom to flatter, whom not to. Later his successor, Franklin Ford, gave long statistic-crammed reports to the faculty, which would not be impressed, whereas Bundy had told very little in his reports, but deftly, with the Bundy style. He used such understated eloquence that if the performance was not satisfactory, there was a lingering feeling that it was somehow the fault of the listener rather than Bundy. “He was so good,” said one of his friends who knew his strengths as well as his weaknesses, “that when he left I grieved for Harvard and grieved for the nation; for Harvard because he was the perfect dean, for the nation because I thought that very same arrogance and hubris might be very dangerous.”

  Mac Bundy was a good and true Republican (Bill was the family Democrat) and had voted twice for Eisenhower, but in the late fifties he began to forge a relationship with Jack Kennedy, a relationship in which Arthur Schlesinger served as the main intermediary. Bundy and Kennedy got on well from the start, both were quick and bright, both hating to be bored and to bore, that was almost the worst offense a man could commit, to bore. Rationalists, both of them, one the old Boston Brahmin, the other the new Irish Brahmin, each anxious to show to the other that he was just a little different from the knee-jerk reactions of both his background and his party. Whereas a generation before, the gap between them might have been far greater than the common ground (the thought of Harvey Bundy getting on easily with Joe Kennedy does not, to use their word, wash), now they seemed to be free of the prejudice of the past. Indeed, the achievement of a close relationship between his son and a Lowell-Bundy was what it had been all about for Joe Kennedy. If they had much in common, Jack Kennedy still had some advantages; though he was a new kind of Brahmin he was nonetheless a product of outsiders, he knew the difference between theory and practice in the society, the little things about America that the history books never tell. He had traveled a far longer and harder road than Bundy; he had triumphed in electoral politics and had thus created a real base for himself, whereas Bundy had no personal base. If he was to play a role in American policy making he would have to be dependent upon someone like Kennedy. He had to sense Kennedy’s moves, his whims, his nuances. To an uncommon degree, Bundy possessed that capacity to sense what others wanted and what they were thinking, and it would serve him well.

  And so he joined the new Administration. He came full-blown, a man of definite characteristics. By a curious irony he arrived, in Washington’s mind, a full-scale intellectual, though in Harvard’s mind the super administrator, a man who often took the side of the individual against the bureaucracy (though eventually in Washington some of the men around him would realize that he was, above all, the administrator, the supreme mover of papers. “Clerk of the world,” said Mark Raskin, a disenchanted man who once worked for him on disarmament. Raskin had been hired as an opening to the far left, but it never worked, Raskin leaving early as a bitter critic of the government’s directions, firing off letters and documents critical of the Administration. “Please stop identifying yourself as a former White House aide,” Bundy enjoined him). He was bright and he was quick, but even this bothered people around him. They seemed to sense a lack of reflection, a lack of depth, a tendency to look at things tactically, functionally and operationally rather than intellectually; they believed Bundy thought that there was always a straight line between two points. He carried with himself not so much an intellectual tradition as a blood-intellectual tradition, a self-confirming belief in his origins and thus himself, all of this above partisanship. “I was brought up in a home where the American Secretary of State is not the subject of partisan debate,” he once said during the McCarthy period when Acheson was under attack. It was the Establishment’s conviction that it knew what was right and what was wrong for the country. In Bundy this was a particularly strong strain, as if his own talent and the nation’s talent were all wrapped up together, producing a curious amalgam of public interest and self-interest, his destiny and the nation’s destiny; a strong conscious moral sense of propriety, which he was not adverse to flashing at others, and a driving, almost naked thrust for power all at once. Partly as a result, he had what one friend called a “pugnacious morality.” McGeorge Bundy, then, was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country; in their minds they become responsible for the country but not responsive to it.

  Thus, foreign policy was not a chord running through the country and reflecting the changes, and in 1964 and 1965 when Martin Luther King, Jr., began to make public speeches criticizing the war, the entire Establishment turned on him to silence him. They assured him that he knew about civil rights, but not about foreign policy; he was not an expert and they were. He remained bitter about this put-down to the day he died, feeling that he had in effect been told that, Nobel Prize or not, there were certain things that were not his business. Others w
ho were in the Administration felt similarly excluded. “Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people,” Galbraith would recall years later. “We knew that their expertise was nothing, and that it was mostly a product of social background and a certain kind of education, and that they were men who had not traveled around the world and knew nothing of this country and the world. All they knew was the difference between a Communist and an anti-Communist. But that made no difference; they had this mystique and it still worked and those of us who doubted it, Goodwin, Schlesinger, myself and a few others, were like Indians firing occasional arrows into the campsite from the outside.”

  The other strain running through Bundy, not surprisingly, given the first strain, was a hard-line attitude which was very much a product of the fifties and the Cold War, the ultrarealist view. That this attitude also made one less vulnerable to attacks from the right about softness on Communism did not hurt; it dealt at once with totalitarians abroad and wild men at home. Force was justified by what the Communists did; the times justified the kind of acts which decent men did not seek, but which the historic responsibilities made necessary. This was very much a part of Bundy, a willingness to accept the use of force and to concentrate his energies on operational tactical questions.