The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

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.”