McGeorge "Mac" Bundy was an American academic who served as the US National Security Advisor to Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson from 1961 through 1966.
66 Facts About McGeorge Bundy
2.
McGeorge Bundy was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979.
3.
McGeorge Bundy worked with a study team on implementation of the Marshall Plan.
4.
McGeorge Bundy 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.
5.
McGeorge Bundy's father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a prominent attorney in Boston serving as a clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
6.
McGeorge 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.
7.
Later McGeorge 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.
8.
William and McGeorge Bundy grew up knowing Stimson as a family friend and colleague of their father.
9.
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.
10.
McGeorge Bundy [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.
11.
McGeorge Bundy was admitted to Yale University, one year behind his brother William.
12.
McGeorge Bundy was on the staff of the Yale Literary Magazine and wrote a column for the Yale Daily News, and as a senior was awarded the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize.
13.
In 1941, McGeorge Bundy ran for the Ward 5 Seat on the Boston City Council.
14.
McGeorge Bundy was endorsed by the outgoing incumbent, Henry Lee Shattuck, but lost to A Frank Foster by 92 votes.
15.
On 6 June 1944, as an aide to Admiral Kirk, McGeorge Bundy witnessed first-hand the Operation Overlord landings from the deck of the cruiser USS Augusta.
16.
McGeorge Bundy was discharged at the rank of captain in 1946 and returned to Harvard, where he completed the remaining two years of his Junior Fellowship.
17.
From 1945 to 1947, McGeorge Bundy worked with Stimson as ghostwriter of his third-person autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War.
18.
Stimson suffered a massive heart attack two months after completing his second appointment as United States Secretary of War in the fall of 1945, and McGeorge Bundy's assistance was integral to the completion of the book.
19.
McGeorge Bundy had expected Dewey to win the 1948 election, and to be rewarded with some sort of senior post in a Dewey administration.
20.
In 1949, McGeorge Bundy was appointed as a visiting lecturer in Harvard University's Department of Government.
21.
McGeorge Bundy taught the history of US foreign policy and was popular among students; after two years, he was promoted to associate professor and recommended for tenure.
22.
An effective and popular administrator, McGeorge Bundy led policy changes intended to develop Harvard as a class-blind, merit-based university with a reputation for stellar academics.
23.
McGeorge Bundy was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954.
24.
McGeorge Bundy was listed as one of the "young American scholars known as 'New Conservatives'" by Peter Viereck in 1956.
25.
McGeorge Bundy was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991.
26.
Kennedy considered McGeorge Bundy for Secretary of State, but decided that since he was a relatively youthful president, that he wanted an older man as Secretary of State, causing him to appoint McGeorge Bundy National Security Adviser instead.
27.
In common with other members of Kennedy's cabinet, McGeorge Bundy considered the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, to be ineffectual.
28.
McGeorge Bundy, a registered Republican, offered to switch parties to become a registered Democrat when he entered the White House.
29.
One of Kennedy's "wise men," Bundy played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense decisions of the Kennedy administration and was retained by Lyndon B Johnson for part of his tenure.
30.
McGeorge Bundy was involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.
31.
At the first meeting of the National Security Council under Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy was told the four areas of worry were Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam.
32.
McGeorge Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War during his tenure, believing it essential to contain communism.
33.
McGeorge Bundy supported escalating United States involvement, including commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965.
34.
McGeorge Bundy knew Kissinger well and told Kennedy that he was a schemer who was not to be trusted.
35.
On 22 November 1963, McGeorge Bundy was at his office in Washington when he received a telephone call from the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara telling him that Kennedy had just been assassinated while visiting Dallas, Texas.
36.
McGeorge Bundy broke down in tears at the news of the death of his friend.
37.
In December 1964 after the Vietcong bombed the Brink's Hotel in Saigon, McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson to begin a strategical bombing campaign against North Vietnam, giving in a memo five reasons not to bomb North Vietnam vs nine reasons to bomb North Vietnam.
38.
McGeorge Bundy predicated that bombing North Vietnam would solve South Vietnam's morale problems, saying the South Vietnamese soldiers would fight better once they knew the United States was involved in the war.
39.
McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson to begin a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam in retaliation.
40.
McGeorge Bundy afterwards visited the Pleiku base where he was disturbed by the sight of the wounded servicemen, saying he never seen so much blood in all his life.
41.
The columnist Walter Lippmann contacted McGeorge Bundy asking him to advise Johnson to change his Vietnam policies, only to find that the National Security Adviser was solidly loyal to the president.
42.
Lippmann was astonished by McGeorge Bundy's ignorance about Vietnamese history as he discovered McGeorge Bundy had no idea that South Vietnam was a recent creation.
43.
McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson that the best way to "sell" the Vietnam War to the American people was as an extension of the Great Society.
44.
McGeorge Bundy told the president he should create a multi-billion dollar Southeast Asia Development Corporation that would build an enormous dam on the Mekong River which he wrote would be "bigger and more imaginative than the TVA and a lot tougher to do".
45.
McGeorge Bundy suggested the proposed Southeast Asia Development Corporation and its dam on the Mekong would be able to bring electricity to all of Southeast Asia and thereby industrialize the entire region within the next 20 or so years.
46.
In March 1965, the first "teach-in" to protest the Vietnam war was held at the University of Michigan and McGeorge Bundy was challenged to a debate, which he declined, saying in a public letter "if your letter came to me for grading as a professor, I would not be able to give it high marks".
47.
Subsequently, McGeorge Bundy accepted a challenge from George McTurnan Kahin, a Cornell University professor who specialized in Southeast Asia, for a public debate to be televised live on 15 May 1965.
48.
One of the debate's organizers, Barry Commoner, a biologist at the University of Washington, stated that McGeorge Bundy might give other professors bad marks for their letters, but he "has turned in a terrible record on attendance".
49.
When McGeorge Bundy realized that Johnson had sent him to Santo Domingo to prevent him from debating Kahin, without informing the president he contacted Fred Friendly, a television producer at CBS, saying he wanted to debate Hans Morgenthau, an international affairs professor at the University of Chicago, live on television.
50.
McGeorge Bundy then brought up a statement Morgenthau made in 1956, praising President Diem of South Vietnam for creating a "miracle".
51.
McGeorge Bundy was generally considered to have won the debate, but Johnson was still furious with him.
52.
McGeorge Bundy privately conceded that his time as National Security Adviser was coming to a close.
53.
In June 1965, McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson not to step up the bombing in response to the execution by the Viet Cong of an American POW, Sergeant Harold Bennett, warning that this mean in a certain sense losing control of the level of the bombing as such a precedent would mean the United States would have to step up the bombing in the future in the event of more atrocities.
54.
However, McGeorge Bundy told Ball at the time that his influence over Johnson was in decline and he did not expect his advice to be accepted.
55.
Johnson ordered the bombing to increased as McGeorge Bundy feared that he would.
56.
In July 1965, McGeorge Bundy recruited a group of elder statesmen known as "the Wise Men" to advise Johnson from time to time.
57.
However, the "Wise Men" expressed their approval of Johnson's Vietnam policy, and McGeorge Bundy afterwards thanked Acheson, saying that Johnson felt more confident now that he was acting correctly.
58.
McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson not to send more troops to South Vietnam as a way to pressure the South Vietnamese to make reforms.
59.
McGeorge Bundy had difficult relations with Johnson by this point, but he felt it was his patriotic duty as an American to leave government service in a manner that did not embarrass the president.
60.
On 8 November 1965, McGeorge Bundy was offered the presidency of the Ford Foundation, whose annual pay was $75,000 compared to the $30,000 he made as National Security Adviser.
61.
McGeorge Bundy left government in 1966 to serve as president of the Ford Foundation, remaining in this position until 1979.
62.
McGeorge Bundy was professor emeritus from 1989 until his death.
63.
McGeorge Bundy wrote Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years.
64.
McGeorge Bundy was employed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1990 until his death, serving as chair of the Committee on Reducing the Nuclear Danger and scholar-in-residence.
65.
McGeorge Bundy died on 16 September 1996 from a heart attack at the age of 77.
66.
McGeorge Bundy is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.