The Best and the Brightest (15 page)

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 who 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.

As Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Bundy soon became the invaluable man in the Kennedy Administration. Keeping the papers moving, reminding the President when a decision was coming up, occasionally helping to channel a promising young man in State who might give a slightly different viewpoint to the President, protecting the President against people who wanted his time but were not worthy of it, making sure that people who needed his time got it, learning quickly what the President’s tastes, needs, reservations were, always moving things. In his own words, the traffic cop. Doing it with style, which would show at an early press conference. Kennedy usually did well on these occasions, but this time he was hampered by a lack of news to reveal. Someone suggested that Kennedy’s decision to reverse the last Eisenhower decision—to bring home the dependents of U.S. troops overseas—would be a dramatic announcement. But the Kennedy decision had not yet been cleared through the bureaucracy, and normally something like that takes weeks and weeks. While others were talking about whether it could be done, Bundy was on the phone, calling Douglas Dillon at Treasury and then the Pentagon and then State, saying, “The President would like to announce today that . . . Do you see any objections?” In five minutes he was back, it was all cleared, all very nifty. So he was busy, protecting the President against the bureaucracy, cutting through the red tape where he could. Being above the petty factional and emotional fights of the bureaucracy, being of course neither a man of the right or of the left but disinterested and realistic, which meant that all things being equal, he was more a man of the status quo than anything else. The changes he would bring, the openings, would be very small, more tactical than anything else. He was not, for example, a great help on the question of disarmament; he stood aside on that one, as did Rusk, while the Defense Department, with John McNaughton and McNamara, was far more helpful.

He was invaluable, functioning very easily. At meetings the President would ask him to sum up, and then, looking for all the world as if he had not even paid attention, Bundy would instantly give the quickest, most incisive, most complete summing up imaginable. He was a great list man, too. They always needed prospective names, and Mac of course had the list, a job here, a committee there. Mac knew who should go on it, how far left or right it could go, who was acceptable, who was not. Mac was a terrific memo writer, facile, brief and incisive. It was not, as publication of documents would later prove, exactly something which would make the literary world envious, but to be a good memo writer in government was a very real form of power. Suddenly everyone would be working off Bundy’s memos, and thus his memos guided the action, guided what the President would see. For example, friends think that he killed the ill-conceived, ill-fated plan for a multilateral nuclear force, first by determining the crucial bit of evidence, and then by a memo. It was a major policy decision and it was done in typical Bundy fashion. He was against the MLF from the start, it jarred the cleanliness of his mind, and he bided his time as the evidence on the proposal came in; then he dispatched Richard Neustadt of Columbia to make a special investigation, knowing that Neustadt, a specialist in operational procedure, would be appalled by it, which Neustadt was, and thus Bundy summed up the case pro-MLF and anti-MLF, which left the MLF bleeding to death on the floor, speared, as it were, by a memo.

State was of course large and unwieldy (Acheson liked to tell of how much it had grown; when he became Secretary he had gone by to see Cordell Hull and had suggested that that venerable gentleman come by and meet the Assistant Secretaries. “Well, Dean, you don’t mind if I refuse,” Hull answered, “I never was very much good in a crowd . . .”). This natural clumsiness, coupled with Rusk’s cautiousness, soon created a problem in the bureaucracy. Kennedy was quickly dissatisfied with State, and Bundy, sensing the vacuum, moved deftly to fill it. He began to build his own power, looking for his own elite staff, a mini State Department of very special experts who could protect the President and give alternative answers. They could move papers quickly, something State could never do, and through an informal network at Defense and CIA, they could exploit sympathetic friends and thus create an informal inner network in the government. State, after all, was given to missing deadlines with papers and then answering with last year’s myths. Bundy created an extraordinary staff, bright young men summoned from all areas of the government and academe. They were Robert Komer and Chester Cooper from CIA, Carl Kaysen from Harvard, Jim Thomson from Bowles’s staff, Michael Forrestal, Francis Bator. He worked well with them, and exhibited the rare quality in Washington, in Thomson’s words, “of being able to evoke whatever excellent existed in a person. Every encounter was like a mini Ph.D. exam.”

Bundy tried to hide his disdain for Rusk as best he could, though in rare moments it would slip through. (It was said that Rusk held his counsel so closely that no one, including the President, was privileged to hear it, and sometimes Bundy would tell the story about a meeting of the six top officials, with Rusk asking all the others to leave so he could talk to the President. When they were alone, the President asked Rusk what it was, and Rusk said, “Well, if there weren’t so many of us in the room . . .”) Rusk, the least incandescent member of the group, bore it well. He resisted the impulse to react to stories being told about him, but at times the anger and irritation would flash through. “It isn’t worth being Secretary of State,” he once told Dick Goodwin, “if you have a Carl Kaysen at the White House.” Substitute for the name Kaysen the name Bundy.