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May 8 - May 30, 2025
Thus had the liberals lost the important job in the Administration, though of course they could never admit this. Rather, the main literature of the era was liberal (Schlesinger, Sorensen), and in it there is no note of how Kennedy manipulated the liberals and moved for the center, partly because of a reluctance to admit that it happened, a desire to see the Kennedy Administration as they would have it, and partly to claim Kennedy for history as liberal.
He is not only the handsomest, the best dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes;
if Harvard produced generals it would have produced Max Taylor.
“Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” said Rayburn, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
the failure of American culture here at home, the failure of the quality of American life, an understanding that not all indices of American life could be found in the booming statistics of the GNP. He felt that something was desperately missing. Commenting on “a kind of blandness that I somehow see as inhuman,” he noted that “when I see a French or Italian movie, the faces seem more alive and expressive than American faces in equivalent films.
he did not feel it was worthwhile to leave Cambridge, where he was a dean, to come to Washington to be a dean.
Goddammit, Mac,” someone heard Kennedy say, “I’ve been arguing with you about this all week long,” and that was power—being able to argue with the President all week long).
“Mac,” said Brewster, “is going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify his mistakes on Vietnam.”
Bundy is by Boston standards not a Bundy but a Lowell
Stimson was firmly linked to the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt: an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed.
(“First-generation millionaires,” Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, “give us libraries, second-generation millionaires give us themselves.”)
at Groton, above all, the rules of the game, and even a special language: what washes and what does not wash.
(In 1967 John Marquand, the writer and son of the great chronicler of the Boston aristocracy, was part of a group which ran an advertisement in the Martha’s Vineyard newspaper protesting congressional testimony by Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach that the President could do what he wanted to under the terms of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Why, Johnny, why, asked Bundy, weekending at the Vineyard, did he help ruin Lydie Katzenbach’s summer? “Well, her husband helped ruin my whole year,” answered Marquand. Bundy looked at him. The small smile. “It won’t wash, Johnny, it just won’t
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“To serve is t...
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The story is told of a group of outstanding students asked to prepare a paper on the Duke of Marlborough. The next day Bundy was called upon to read his composition in class. As he started to read, his classmates began to giggle and continued all the way through his reading of a perfectly excellent paper. The teacher, pleased by the essay but puzzled by the giggles, later asked one of the students what it was all about. “Didn’t you know?” said the student. “He was unprepared. He was reading from a blank piece of paper.”
He refused to answer either of two English essay questions: “How did you spend your summer vacation?” and “My favorite pet.” Instead he wrote an essay attacking the themes as meaningless and the college board people for having chosen such foolish and irrelevant subjects when there were so many great issues before Americans in today’s world. The first grader read the essay, and annoyed by the arrogance, failed him. A second reader was called in, because of the incredible discrepancy between this mark and all the others Bundy had made. He was delighted, believing himself that the college boards
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Bundy wrote an essay entitled “Is Lenin a Marxist?” and the product so staggered Owen that he later told Irons he did not think there were two men on the Yale faculty who could have written it.
The Stimson biography is a good and serious book, and perhaps in a way more reflective of that elitist viewpoint than it intended to be, but it is hardly pioneer work. It is a subject about which Bundy retains some sensitivity, and recently, when a magazine article hinted that perhaps the Stimson book was not exactly brilliant, he was able to quote verbatim what Walter Lippmann had said about it (and Bundy’s role in it) some twenty years earlier.
“Henry Shattuck, who was a very powerful and important figure in Boston in those days, called me and asked me if I wanted to run for his place on the Boston City Council,” he once told a reporter. “He told me that for a young man with an interest in public life it was a splendid way to begin. He assured me that the election was a formality, no one but a Republican had ever won before, and he would assure the support of the Republican Ward Committee, and since it was a very heavy Republican area, I agreed. I had an opponent, he did his work and I did not, and I got licked and I deserved to be
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he was such a star of the government department that it was quickly decided that tenure must be awarded. The idea was advanced to President James Bryant Conant, who had been a distinguished member of the chemistry department before he took over the university. Conant was a little uneasy about endorsing the recommendations; Bundy, it seemed, had never taken any graduate or undergraduate courses in government. Was that correct? “That’s right,” the representative of the government department said. “Are you sure that’s right?” asked the puzzled Conant. “I’m sure,” the professor answered. “Well,”
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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.”
Bundy took the complex Harvard faculty—diverse, egomaniacal—and played with it, in the words of a critic, like a cat with mice.
“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.”
“Please stop identifying yourself as a former White House aide,” Bundy enjoined him).
“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.
to be a good memo writer in government was a very real form of power.
it would be said of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson that both had their Bay of Pigs, that the former’s lasted four days and the latter’s lasted four years.
When talk about invading Cuba was becoming fashionable, General Shoup did a remarkable display with maps. First he took an overlay of Cuba and placed it over the map of the United States. To everybody’s surprise, Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best. It was about 800 miles long and seemed to stretch from New York to Chicago. Then he took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba. “What’s that?” someone asked him. “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it
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among his advisers there seemed to be little learned. Nothing very important, nothing very serious. “A brick through the window,” McGeorge Bundy would tell friends.
As for the members of the Brigade (many of them still strung out on the beaches), he said that these counterrevolutionaries were very much like assistant professors at Harvard, who were always being reminded about the possibility of not getting tenure but who never really believed your warnings until tenure failed to arrive.
Soon there was a story going around Washington that Bobby Kennedy had come out of a meeting, jammed his fingers into Bowles’s stomach and told him that he, Bowles, was for the invasion, remember that, he was for it, they were all for it (the story did not originate with the Bowles people, either).
There are two people in the Cabinet you should have consulted on this one, men who know some things, and who are loyal to you and your interests.” “Who?” Kennedy asked. “Orville Freeman and me.” “Why Orville?” “Because he’s been a Marine, because he’s made amphibious landings and because he knows how tough they can be even under the very best circumstances. He could have helped you.” “And why you?” “Because I was in OSS during the war and I ran guerrilla operations and I know something about guerrillas.
“What about it, Bob?” Kennedy asked. “Well, they’re right,” McNamara answered. “Well, then, why the nine hundred and fifty, Bob?” Kennedy asked. “Because that’s the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered,” he answered.
Harriman came back from that trip believing that there was a possibility of a deal with the Soviets, that history had finally converged to a point where both nations were ready, that the Soviet fear of the Chinese radically changed their national security problems.
He had a serious hearing problem, which would not have been a problem except that he also had a serious vanity problem, which precluded a hearing aid.
So Kennedy had gone to Vienna, and the meeting was a disaster, harsh and tense; the tensions of the world, centering over Berlin, had seemed to intensify rather than ebb with the meeting; Khrushchev had attacked, and Kennedy, surprised, had finally rejoined. Vienna, like the Bay of Pigs, had increased the tensions in the world.
He turned to Reston and said that the only place in the world where there was a real challenge was in Vietnam, and “now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”
Khrushchev would tell Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson that the Americans were making a major mistake in Vietnam. “In South Vietnam,” he said, according to Thompson’s cable back to Washington, “the U.S. has stumbled into a bog. It will be mired there for a long time.”)
Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advis...
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“Vietnam,” said Robert Kennedy, “Vietnam . . . We have thirty Vietnams a day here.”
From the beginning it had been that way, a tiny issue overclouded by the great issues.
If Roosevelt did not like colonialism in general, he did not like French colonialism in particular.
When Moffatt warned of the rising tide of anger and resentment in Vietnam, of the willingness and capacity of the Vietminh to fight, he was told by his colleagues and superiors not to be so emotional.
One telegram from the United States, he told Ogburn, and it could all have been avoided, all this bloodshed. If in March 1946, when the French had signed a preliminary accord with the Vietminh recognizing them as a legitimate authority—an agreement from which they quickly reneged—if then the United States had been wise enough to send a telegram congratulating Paris on its forward-looking leadership and announcing that the United States was sending a minister to Hanoi, all this could have been avoided, all the heartache erased.
that man of peace had shocked Kennedy by saying that it looked like we might have to go to war over Laos.
Kennedy asked quietly how long it would take to get troops into Laos.
Meeting him in Washington for the first time, Kennedy said, “If that’s our strong man, we’re in trouble.”
called for an immediate check on weapons carried by Laotians, knowing instantly that the basic American infantry weapon, the M-1, was too large for them.
(though in 1962 we would spend millions and millions of dollars to re-create the very neutralist government we had toppled).
When the two sides finally met in early February on the strategically important Plain of Jars, General Phoumi’s army, better equipped, better paid, predictably broke and ran.
