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

by David Halberstam

The early White House years were golden years for Bundy. He seemed to gloss over the problems of the world, it was a dream realized, the better for him, the better for the nation. Some of those who knew him felt that although he was not a negative figure, there was something lacking: his thinking and performance were too functional and operational, he was not considering the proper long-range perspective, instead he was too much the problem solver, the man who did not want to wait, who believed in action. He always had a single pragmatic answer to a single question, and he was wary of philosophies, almost too wary (during the great Vietnam debates of 1965 he would call George Ball, a more philosophic man, “the theologian”). But pragmatic thinking is also short-range thinking, and too often panic thinking. A government is collapsing. How do we prop it up? Something is happening; therefore we must move. Thus, in 1965 Bundy was for getting the country into the Dominican mess, because something had to be done, and then very good at extricating us when he realized that extrication had become the problem, though as he and the men around him would learn, not all countries were as easy to get out of as the Dominican Republic.