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SUMMARY
When McGeorge Bundy unexpectedly died of a heart attack in September 1996, he
was working on a book about the Vietnam War. Inspired by Robert McNamara's
startling „mea culpa“, Bundy - as national security adviser to the Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson a major architect of the American escalation in Vietnam - had also
intended to break his thirty-year silence. Bundy’s fate had already been the central
theme in David Halberstam’s celebrated bestseller The Best and the Brightest (1972), a
scathing indictment of the Washington policy-makers who crafted and escalated the
Vietnam War. Halberstam wondered how Kennedy’s smart foreign policy elite - the
so-called „action intellectuals“ - could have marched America into the endless quagmire
of Vietnam. Halberstam’s sarcastic portrait of Bundy, with its provocative title
The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy, has deeply influenced the modest
literature about McGeorge Bundy in the Kennedy and Johnson years. Most of the
obituaries stressed his role as a Vietnam hawk under Johnson and, even in the scholarly
literature, the name Bundy seems to be forever associated with Vietnam.
On the other hand, Bundy’s influence on Kennedy’s foreign policy is a nearly uninquired
topic. Yet, during his tenure, the function of the national security adviser
changed from an anonymous secretary into a prominent and personal assistant to the
President. Bundy skillfully filled the bureaucratic vacuum that had occurred due to
Kennedy’s dissatisfaction with his Secretetary of State Dean Rusk. His job was to
evaluate, compress, and clarify the avalanche of foreign affairs information into the
White House and to present them to the President in a concise way. Controlling the
flow of information to the President gave him great power in determining what issues
received priority and which policy options Kennedy could choose from. More importantly,
he also controlled the access to the President. As Kennedy’s foreign affairs
mandarin he helped shape American foreign policy in the early 1960s, although his
work was almost entirely behind-the-scenes. Arisen from dean of Harvard to the „dean
of the world“ (as Max Frankel summarized Bundy’s career in 1965), he experienced
his golden years in the Kennedy era.
In the early sixties the Cold War reached its climax: there were communist challenges
everywhere from Fidel Castro’s Cuba ninety miles south of Florida to Khrushchev’s
pressure on Berlin. This detailed analysis of Bundy’s influence on Kennedy’s Cuban
and European policies traces the evolution of his role in the presidential decisionmaking
and expounds his shaping of Kennedy’s foreign policy. Taking into account
the huge literature aboonut Kennedy’s presidency and recently declassified documents