“Mac,” said Brewster, “is going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify his mistakes on Vietnam.”
Bundy is from Boston. The rest of the world which is not from Boston thinks of him as being very Boston and the name as being very Boston. This is not true, since the Bundys are from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the name by itself means very little in Boston history, a view corroborated by Shreve’s, a famous jewelry store in Boston. In 1966, when Bundy was leaving government, a group of his aides in the White House decided to give him something better than the traditional silver ashtray and came up with the idea of silver dice on a silver tray, something to roll as a means of determining foreign policy. In Washington several jewelry stores said it couldn’t be done, but since most of his people were from Cambridge in the first place, they remembered Shreve’s, and one of them was dispatched to arrange it. Silver dice on a silver tray? Yes, said a proper old gentleman at the shop. He thought it could be done. And what name would go on it?
“McGeorge Bundy,” said the White House aide.
“McGeorge Bundy . . . McGeorge Bundy . . . Bundy . . . oh, yes, isn’t he the boy who married Mary Lothrop?”
Bundy is by Boston standards not a Bundy but a Lowell (on his mother’s side. “His father is from Michigan someplace,” a Bostonian noted). Katharine Bundy is also a Putnam, which by Boston standards is very good too, but the pedigree is on the Lowell side, as is much of the determination and the drive. The family descended from Percival Lowle, who came to America in 1639 and sired a great family which became noted for its inventiveness, its shrewdness, its industry, its success and, by the nineteenth century, its dominance of Harvard College and the New England textile mills. The problem of a labor force for these mills had always been a serious one, but the Lowells came up with a brilliant solution, the hiring of what came to be known as Lowell Mill girls. All the good young country girls of New England came to the mill towns, where in return for chaperoning, religious training and proper housing they worked in the mills, a solution which at once satisfied both religious and economic drives, a happy Calvinist ending indeed. Although much was made at the time of what a good and virtuous idea this was, a showpiece, in fact, for foreign visitors, the working hours were long and the pay was small.
It was against this backdrop that the great fortunes were made, fortunes which allowed the first families to dominate the society of that era. Theodore Parker, a crusading minister in the 1840s, wrote of the Lowells and these other great families: “This class is the controlling one in politics. It mainly enacts the laws of this state and the nation; makes them serve its turn . . . It can manufacture governors, senators, judges to suit its purposes as easily as it can manufacture cotton cloth. This class owns the machinery of society . . . ships, factories, shops, water privileges.” They were also families which had a fine sense of protecting their own position, and they were notorious for giving large grants to Harvard College, which was their college, and just as notorious for doing very little for public education.
John Amory Lowell, the great-great-grandfather of McGeorge Bundy, was a towering figure of his era in Boston, having picked no fewer than six presidents of Harvard; Augustus Lowell, his son, increased his share of the family inheritance six or seven times, and in addition produced a remarkable family even by the standards of a Lowell: Amy Lowell the poet, A. Lawrence Lowell the educator, and Percival Lowell the astronomer. The fourth child was Elizabeth Lowell, who married William Putnam and gave birth to Katharine Lawrence Putnam, who later married Harvey Hollister Bundy.
A. Lawrence Lowell had married a cousin, and since they had no children, Kay Putnam, his favorite niece, became something of an unofficial hostess at Lawrence Lowell’s gatherings. She was a vivacious, bright, intense, argumentative woman, with a strong sense of her own rightness, aware of who she was, where their tradition had come from and where it was going next, an intellectual heiress letting others know that she had accomplished something intellectually, a woman known by her contemporaries for force of mind and a capacity to dominate a conversation. “Mother never forgot for a minute that she was a Lowell. She was one of those people who believed that there are three classes in society—upper, middle and lower—and you know which one she belonged to. We sometimes kidded her about it, but it was assumed in the family that none of us would want to become bus drivers. Mother took this position that you have this tradition, so why not use it, and I suppose we did,” her daughter and Bundy’s sister Mrs. G. Andelot Belin, wife of a Boston lawyer, said to reporter Milton Viorst. “We were,” Mrs. Belin added, “a noisy family, and Mother was the noisiest among us. For her, things were black and white. It’s an outlook that descends directly from the Puritans and we all have it. But Mac has it more than the rest of us.”
By contrast Harvey Hollister Bundy was a mild, reserved figure. “Most of us remember the evening we celebrated the election to honorary membership of Henry Lewis Stimson,” says a yearbook of the Century Association, an exclusive New York club for upper-class gentlemen, primarily white and Protestant, interested in letters, “the occasion was no less moving because it was also gay. The speakers were Stimson’s friends and associates: Dwight Eisenhower, John Davis, and Harvey Bundy. Bundy told some stories about the Secretary fishing for trout in Europe in the wartime; stories that made some of us say to one another, 'Is this the man that has been called “dry and stiff”?’ ” Surely that warm evening at the Century he was anything but, and those who met him then for the first time found him responsive and engaging. But a Centurian who knew him well for a long time has explained that Harvey could be extremely dry and stiff to those who tried to persuade him to compromise with his principles or betray a confidence. This same friend speaks of him as a “Bostonian not born in Boston. Coming from the Midwest, he surprised those who supposed that rigid adherence to principle is an exclusive Boston characteristic . . .”
Harvey Bundy graduated from Yale in 1909 with high honors, and was later first in his class at Harvard Law, an achievement which brought him an appointment as law clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes. He returned to Boston in 1915 and here the Lowell connections did not hurt. In Boston in those days one of the chief industries was taking the vast fortunes of the great families and turning them into trust funds in order to avoid taxes, and Harvey Bundy became the lawyer for many of them. A few years later he also became a close friend and confidant of Henry Stimson’s, “Colonel Stimson” as he liked to be known, after he reached that rank in World War I. Stimson had been very close to Teddy Roosevelt, and at Roosevelt’s urging even ran (unsuccessfully) for governor of New York in 1910, served under Taft as Secretary of War in 1911 as a Taft gesture to the Roosevelt wing, though when the 1912 split came, he stayed loyal to Taft. 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. The suggestion that this also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service, though in fact this was typical of an era when many of the great rich families withdrew from the new restless grab for money of a modernizing America, and having already made their particular fortunes, turned to the public arena as a means of exercising power. They were viewed as reformers, though the reforms would be aimed more at the newer seekers of wealth than at those who already held it. (“First-generation millionaires,” Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, “give us libraries, second-generation millionaires give us themselves.”)
Harvey Bundy was typical of this era. He served Stimson loyally as an aide when he was Hoover’s Secretary of State. (“There was no dearth of men who wanted to be Assistant Secretary of State,” according to Stimson’s biography, “but in one of Stimson’s favorite phrases, the men who made themselves applicants were usually men who were thinking 'what the job would do for them’ and he was hunting for men whose first interest was 'what they could do for th
e job’!”). In Stimson’s opinion Franklin Roosevelt, running for the Presidency in 1932, was an untried and untested figure, and Stimson found the general public antagonism toward Hoover surprising, though he noted that “the people of sobriety and intelligence and responsibility” were on Hoover’s side. He wrote at the time: “The people of this country are in a humor where they don’t want to hear any reason . . . they want a change and I think they are going to get it, but if they get it, in less than a year they will be the sickest country that ever walked the face of this earth or else I miss my guess.” Though he missed that guess, he would eventually meet with Roosevelt and find to his surprise that the new President was intelligent and competent, and a few years later, when Roosevelt was in the subtle process of preparing the country for European intervention, he brought Stimson back to the government as Secretary of War, since Stimson was a strong and forceful advocate of preparedness. (“In our house,” Bill Bundy, Mac’s brother, once noted, referring to the Stimson tie, “the State Department and the Pentagon were interchangeable,” a comment not just about his family but about an era, which he himself would confirm in 1964 by moving from a job as Assistant Secretary of Defense and taking a comparable one at State.)
As Secretary of War, Stimson worked with Frank Knox, who was Secretary of the Navy, a man who had been a friend for more than twenty-five years, since he had first shown up in Stimson’s office with an introductory note from Teddy Roosevelt saying: “He is just our type!” At War, his first assistant was Robert Patterson, and after him, his assistants were John McCloy, Robert Lovett and Harvey Bundy. “All,” says the Stimson biography, “were men in the prime of their life, the forties and fifties, but all were so much younger than Stimson that none ever called him by his first name. All four had been conspicuously successful in private life, three as lawyers, and one as a banker; all of them had come to Washington at serious financial sacrifice. None of them had ever been politically active, and none had any consuming political ambition. All four were men of absolute integrity and none was small-minded about credit for his labors. All but one were Republicans, but not one of them ever aroused partisan opposition . . .”
The Stimsonian tradition of public service and power, and the Stimsonian philosophy of preparedness and force, had made a deep mark on the Bundy household; it is Stimson’s photograph which sits on Bundy’s desk to this day. After the war, when Stimson decided to publish his memoirs and wanted some help, he naturally chose as his literary aide McGeorge Bundy, the bright and ambitious son of his friend Harvey Bundy; together they produced his biography, On Active Service in Peace and War.
The Bundy youth was not unlike that of the Kennedys in some respects; lots of children everywhere, lots of intellectual and physical competition, lots of energy and lots of confidence. There were violent games of their own lawn sport, a somewhat more physical form of croquet, with Mrs. Bundy leading the pack. According to friends of the family, she seemed to center her hopes on Bill, two years older than Mac; in fact, some of Mac’s old friends attribute his intense drive and competitiveness, the combination of what they feel is calm on the surface and considerable seething tension underneath, to boyhood competition with an older and slightly favored brother.
Mac Bundy was born in 1919. He attended Groton, the greatest prep school in the nation, where the American upper class sends its sons to instill the classic values: discipline, honor, a belief in the existing values and the rightness of them. Coincidentally it is at Groton that one starts to meet the right people, and where connections which will serve well later on—be it Wall Street or Washington—are first forged; one learns, 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 wash.”) Cui servire est regnare is Groton’s motto. “To serve is to rule.” The overt teaching was that the finest life is service to God, your family and your state, but the covert teaching, far more subtle and insidious, was somewhat different: ultimately, strength is more important; there is a ruling clique; there is a thing called privilege and you might as well use it. That is the real world and it is going to remain that way, so you might as well get used to it. If not, you can rebel, but only within the prescribed rules. Groton is a school more than a little short on Catholics, Negroes, Jews and hyphenated Americans, and it reflected in its real values what some students there called “a muscular Christianity.” Bundy was of course part of this and has always accepted the special privilege that his advantages offered, working perhaps discreetly to change it from within (but never so much as to be tabbed as something odd, like a reformer), but accepting it nonetheless, an acceptance which has made some outsiders a little suspicious. If he is really that egalitarian, what is he doing in all those clubs? At Yale, for instance, where his friend Kingman Brewster turned down the secret societies, Bundy joined (the best, naturally) Skull and Bones, and later, in Washington, he would similarly resist requests from friends that he resign from the Metropolitan Club, which ten years after the great storm about its membership in 1961 was not noticeably more egalitarian.
At Groton, Bundy was something of a legend in his time, as he would be everywhere he went. Besides capturing every available honor, he could have been a good second-team quarterback—excellent play calling—but he thought that athletics took too much time, so he played club football instead. He was a brilliant debater when debating still meant something, and won the Franklin D. Roosevelt Debating Trophy three times, a prize named for an old boy. Louis Auchincloss, a contemporary at Groton, has said that Bundy was ready to be dean of the school at the age of twelve. Richard Irons, the school’s best history teacher, said that even then it was astonishing to read Bundy’s essays, they were always better than the books he had used as reference. 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.”
After Bundy graduated from Groton when he was sixteen—summa cum laude, of course, just as Bill had before him—he took the college board exam. 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 should stop this inanity. A third grader, the head of the English section, was called over. Having read about too many pets and vacations, he marked down Bundy’s English score: 100.
From Groton he went to Yale. The very choice of Yale was somewhat unorthodox, since Bostonians usually sent their children to Harvard after Groton, but the Bundys had decided that after both Boston and Groton, Yale might be somewhat broadening. On arrival, the freshmen were summoned to a mass meeting where the dean announced that there were two distinguishing features about the class: first, it comprise
d 850 students, which was the desired number; second, one member of the class was the first Yale student to get three perfect scores on his college entrance exams. Bundy of course. (Bundy recalled this thirty years later with a certain annoyance: “I thought it was a very improper thing to do—I don’t think you should talk about grades that way, either good ones or bad ones.”) And he continued to excel; his Groton history teacher, Richard Irons, afraid that Bundy and a few contemporaries might be ahead of themselves and the normal curriculum at Yale, had arranged for some special advanced standing freshman courses for them there. In one of them, which was taught by David Owen, a distinguished historian, 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.
Bundy was class orator and also became a columnist for the Yale Daily News, refusing to try out for the paper, as most young men did, because it was too time-consuming, but because of his special abilities, he was allowed to write for it, anyway. And he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Altogether he was a formidable figure on the campus, so much intelligence harnessed to so much breeding, all that and the competitive urge as well. The Yale yearbook for 1940 noted: “This week passed without Mahatma Bundy making a speech.” He was—not surprisingly, given his background, the ties of his family to Stimson—already deeply involved in foreign affairs, a committed internationalist and interventionist. In 1940 in a book called Zero Hour, in which young writers discussed the threat to the United States, Bundy, writing in a style which reflects the sureness of his upbringing and the values instilled in him, said: “Let me put my whole proposition in one sentence. I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolf Hitler.”
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