The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms

National Review, Nov 23, 1998 by Andrew J. Bacevich

The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms, by Kai Bird (Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $27.50)

'THE war in Vietnam was thought up and is being managed by the men John F. Kennedy brought to Washington." Thus did Daniel Patrick Moynihan, addressing a gathering of Americans for Democratic Action in September 1967, confront liberals with the embarrassing reality that they have labored ever since to dodge: the administration embodying the self-image of postwar liberalism gave birth to the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe in the history of the Republic. Subsequent efforts to portray Vietnam as "Johnson's war" or "Nixon's war" have failed to expunge that central fact. Kai Bird's impressively researched biography of McGeorge and William Bundy offers a fresh chance to explore the yawning gap between promise and performance in the Kennedy era.

Bird, author of a well-received biography of John J. McCloy, pointedly advertises his own conventionally left-of- center sympathies. He opens the book by recounting his college-boy participation in anti-war demonstrations, undertaken when the U.S. role in Vietnam was all but over. He dismisses the entire Cold War as contrived, unnecessary, and pointless. Above all, Bird broadcasts his disdain for conservatism and all its works. But these prejudices do not afford a coherent framework for coming to grips with his subjects.

Bird does offer a well-organized account of how the Bundys rose to the status of foreign-policy mandarins. Rendered here with all the obsessive detail of one enthralled with the American elite, the Bundy story is a familiar one of inherited privilege providing a springboard to position and power in Washington. Bird lingers over the Bundys' comfortable upbringing as Boston Brahmins and their schooling at Groton and Yale. At the university, of course, the brothers were tapped for Skull and Bones. Bird details their service as junior officers in World War II, when family connections helped them secure sensitive assignments. After the war, they cultivated influential mentors-Henry Stimson, Walter Lippmann, and Felix Frankfurter, to name only a few. By 1953, McGeorge Bundy, age 34, was dean of Harvard College. Elder brother William was serving the government behind the scenes as an influential official with the CIA.

After the election of John Kennedy, William Bundy would occupy key posts in the Defense and State departments, where he became increasingly enmeshed in Vietnam policy. Kennedy lured McGeorge from Cambridge to serve as his national-security adviser. He finally left the White House in 1966 with the United States fully engaged in a war that both brothers doubted it could win.

When it came to Vietnam, the Bundys were reluctant warriors. As self-professed liberals of the "vital center," they agonized over the risks entailed in deeper American involvement. If in the end they put aside those doubts, it was, according to Bird, because the alternative posed still greater risks: turning the conduct of military affairs over to the generals who hankered to fight World War III and conceding the conduct of U.S. foreign policy to "the simple-minded anti-Communism of the right wing."

To avert that dire prospect, the Bundys and their compatriots adopted a strategy of ill-conceived pragmatism, wading progressively deeper into Southeast Asia. From behind their desks in Washington, D.C., they would manage the war, limit its fall-out, and devote all of their formidable creativity and cunning to the task of eventually finding a way out. The result was improvisation masquerading as strategy. This approach promised at best to defer the final day of reckoning. For this, tens of thousands died, nations were devastated, and the United States was all but torn apart.

Bird cannot quite bring himself to haul his protagonists into the dock for contributing to such an outcome. He prefers to cast the Bundys as well-intentioned and honorable victims of circumstance. Theirs, he concludes, was a "peculiarly American tragedy." The Bundys struggled to keep at bay the forces of reaction and irrationality-all those people who actually believed Communism to be evil and who took seriously the crusading rhetoric of John Kennedy.

Yet for those less contemptuous of the views shared by most Americans at the time, the careers of William and McGeorge Bundy reveal the essence of the Kennedy era, stripped of the President's personal style. Among the men John Kennedy brought to Washington the absence of fixed principles became a hallmark of sophistication. Prizing flexibility and toughness above all, they flinched when confronting the really difficult issues-and then blamed others for the mess that their own hubris and fecklessness had created. To lay responsibility for their failure at the doorstep of a "conservative era," as Bird does, is genuinely bizarre. Kennedy's men held sway at the high-water mark of postwar liberalism. Blundering into Vietnam, they showed just how morally hollow the "vital center" had become.