Mcgeorge Bundy Quotes

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Afterwards,

Soviet Union, he had used his iconic status to join the ranks of the liberal foreign policy establishment, counting as personal friends men like Gen. George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Liberals had then embraced Oppenheimer as one of their own. His humiliation thus implicated liberalism, and liberal politicians understood that the rules of the game had changed. Now, even if the issue was not espionage, even if one’s loyalty was unquestioned, challenging the wisdom of America’s reliance on a nuclear arsenal was dangerous.

Just the night before, he had made another national broadcast, this one calling for conscription, repeal of the entire neutrality law, and the dispatch of massive numbers of planes and munitions to Britain—if necessary, in American ships and under American naval protection. “Short of a direct declaration of war, it would have been hard to frame a more complete program of resistance to the Nazis,” noted McGeorge Bundy, the future aide to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who helped Stimson write his autobiography after the war.

In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Contrary to Stimson’s highly influential but totally misleading account in Harper’s in February 1947, “The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb”—written for Stimson by McGeorge Bundy177 while he was in the Society of Fellows, and a successful propaganda counter to the impact of John Hersey’s New Yorker report “Hiroshima” in August 1946—there was no moral agonizing at all among Truman’s civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city.† That moral threshold had been crossed long before. There was, in reality, no debate or even discussion whatever in official circles as to whether the bomb would or should be used, if it were ready in time before the war ended for other reasons.

On November 26, 1963, President Johnson had signed National Security Action Memorandum, 273, which was in diametrical opposition to JFK’s NSAM 263. While Kennedy’s body was still warm in his grave when LBJ’s signature changed future US direction in Vietnam, NSAM 273 had, incredibly enough, actually been drafted on November 21, 1963, while Kennedy was still alive. The memo was written by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (more on him later). Why would such a memo have been created, when it contradicted JFK’s policy and certainly would not have been signed by him? LBJ let it be known early on that he wanted to “win” in Vietnam, and had no intention of following Kennedy’s plans to withdraw completely by 1965.

...the William and McGeorge Bundy Memorial Tweed Salami for creative cloudy thinking...

support Diem and his brother had been “maturing for six weeks in the President’s mind,

Quoting page 115: The Hispanic civil rights organizations were heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, whose president from the late 1960s through the 1970s was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard alumni veteran of the Kennedy White House and tower of the nation’s eastern liberal establishment. In 1968 Ford had created MALDEF, as a Latino version of the NAACP, with a $2.2 million founding grant. La Raza, given a similar birthing grant of $630,000 by Ford in 1968, received $1,953,700 two years later. Between 1970 and 1999, Ford gave MALDEF $27.9 million and La Raza $21.5 million. In 1981 Ford started funding LULAC, the oldest Hispanic association. Noted since its origins in Texas in 1929 for espousing patriotism, political moderation, self-help ethnic, support for English language mastery, and bourgeois civic boosterism, LULAC in the 1970s adopted the strident tone of Chicano nationalism common to La Raza and MALDEF. In 1983 the Ford Foundation, led by Ford’s first African-American president, Franklin A. Thomas, began funding the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella association modeled on the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, to coordinate lobbying against [immigration] restrictionist organizations such as FAIR. LULAC, although joining the racialized agenda of MALDEF and La Raza in the 1970s, retained its character as a membership-based organization rooted in the Hispanic (mainly Mexican-American) community. But the constituency represented by MALDEF and La Raza was essentially the Ford Foundation and the tightly networking community of Latino political careerists.

To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.

In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.

McGeorge Bundy wrote in Foreign Affairs, “In the real world of real political leaders—whether here or in the Soviet Union—a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond human history;

Kennedy’s last public comments on Vietnam support such conclusions. At his final Washington press conference on November 14, eight days before his assassination, a reporter asked Kennedy to “give us your appraisal of the situation in South Vietnam now, since the coup.” Kennedy replied that “our object [is] to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country.” Later during the press conference, Kennedy asked rhetorically, “Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?” and answered his question: “The most important program, of course, is our national security, but I don’t want the United States to have to put troops there.”162 Kennedy did, however, publicly and privately acknowledge the difficulty of ending America’s involvement in Vietnam, and his sensitivity to the political climate had been evident from his first campaign for Congress. Far more skeptical in his private comments than in his public pronouncements, he seriously questioned whether the United States could do what the French had failed to do, and in the last days of his life wondered whether the United States should be there at all. But he never shared his doubts and concerns with the American people or educated them about the limitations that he saw. Kennedy perceived the dangers of deepening American involvement, yet his actions paradoxically contributed to this very result. As McGeorge Bundy admitted in retrospect, “When you put your thumb on the scales of domestic politics” as Kennedy did by sanctioning the generals’ coup, “you’re pretty far in.”163 Thus one president who intuitively understood the limits of American military power in Southeast Asia, who possessed the security and self-confidence to resist calls by generals and advisors to apply that power, set in motion during his last months in office an event whose unanticipated repercussions would create immense pressures for greater American military involvement. These pressures would confront another president who lacked Kennedy’s intuitive understanding, security, and self-confidence.

Kennedy had brought him into the administration to work under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara because he worried the latter was inexperienced in the political machinations of Washington. Historians have said that if not for those two men, things might have turned out differently in 1962. Gilpatric and McNamara had argued vociferously against escalating the conflict by bombing Cuba, which was the route National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wanted to take. He and McNamara proposed the blockade as a strong response solution, which turned out to be the right decision.

President Kennedy regularly asserted two contradictory propositions about Vietnam: that the South Vietnamese must do the job for themselves and yet the United States must not quit there. Unable to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of avoiding another American ground war on the Asian mainland and avoiding the loss of South Vietnam, he remained indecisive. It was uncharacteristic of him. “When he knew what he really wanted,” McGeorge Bundy said of Kennedy, “he had no problem” making a decision. Kennedy did not live to see the consequences of removing Diệm, but his advisors did, and most of them came to view it as a grave mistake. “It was not well handled,” Bundy later admitted. “There was no victory for the United States in the fall of Diem” and “still less in his death.” That mishandling was rooted in naïveté. “The consequences were so unpredictable, including the death, which was no part of our intent or expectation, which was pretty stupid,” Bundy concluded. “We should have guessed that these people would feel that if you strike at a king, you strike to kill, which they did.” That there was no evacuation plan for Diệm was only one of the wretchedly telling signs that the American consideration of the coup’s possible outcomes was shallow and incomplete. In hindsight, Mike Mansfield was probably right when he said that Diệm “was the only one, despite his frailties, who could have kept South Vietnam together.” None of the generals who followed Diệm did better at leading South Vietnam, and most did worse. All of them would be equally if not more dependent on the United States. “The only durable result of the coup against Diem,” Bundy noted, “was durable political instability in Saigon.