Nation: Everybody’s Catalyst

As he saw it, McGeorge Bundy’s responsibility to two Presidents was to “get to the bare bones of the problem as cleanly and clearly as you could and state the alternatives as sharply as possible.” In his 58 months as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Bundy generally succeeded. Part confidant, part cocklebur, he served principally as a top adviser on foreign policy to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Last week Mac Bundy announced that he had accepted a $75,-000-a-year job as president of the Ford Foundation, starting March 1. He will be the last of the original top-echelon New Frontiersmen to take leave of the White House.

Bundy’s blend of wintry pragmatism and acerbic intellectuality appealed mightily to Kennedy, who knew him even before he became dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953. Kennedy fleetingly considered Bundy as a possibility for Secretary of State, but finally installed him in a cluttered basement office in the White House that came to be known as “the little State Department.” Under Kennedy, who cared little for rigid protocol or strict administrative lines of organization, Bundy often had more influence on foreign policy decisions than Dean Rusk himself. He nonetheless disclaimed any interest in power for power’s sake. “I’m no man’s competitor,” Bundy said recently, “I’m everybody’s catalyst.”

Despite an aura of unflappable self-confidence that sometimes approached arrogance, Bundy was willing—and able—to learn. Although he had been one of the Kennedy Administration’s most ardent hawks in supporting the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, he later consistently counseled caution in such tight situations as the Berlin Wall crisis and the Cuban missile confrontation in 1962.

Easy Transition. As much as any man in Washington, Bundy symbolized the crisp, bright style of John Kennedy’s New Frontier. He was dedicated to his job, and in the first hours after Kennedy was assassinated, he thought first of the continuity of the Government. In the urgency of those moments after the late President’s body was brought back to Washington, Lyndon Johnson asked Bundy to accompany him to the White House in a helicopter from Andrews Air Force Base.

“That night I followed the man, not the coffin,” Bundy recalls. “We had not much doubt about what J.F.K. would have wanted us to do. He never had the notion that because you loved the man at the center of the work he had to be the center of your being. The transition was easier for me. I hadn’t given a year of my life campaigning for him.” Bundy regarded his role as simply an “institutional assignment,” and continued to fill it as energetically for Johnson as he had for Kennedy.

Inevitably, the job lost some of its ego-tingling excitement in Johnson’s White House. Whereas Kennedy had sometimes bypassed his Cabinet members if he felt it would speed a decision, Johnson punctiliously works through the chain of command, and has increasingly sought the advice of Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara on foreign policy. However, despite columnists’ occasional claims that the President and Bundy could not get along, the two seldom disagreed on major decisions. Bundy was picked by Johnson to go on a fact-finding mission to Saigon last year, was later dispatched to the Dominican Republic for what proved to be an ineffectual attempt at peace talks during the height of the murderous fighting there.

“Hard Realities.” If he lacked the temperament and experience to be a political troubleshooter, Bundy nonetheless proved a valuable link between the worlds of intellect and action. His most notable public service to the Johnson Administration occurred last summer during the early campus-based protests against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. Applying a scathingly articulate scorn honed by years of campus oneupmanship, Bundy met the critics on their own ground. “I think many of them have been wrong in earlier moments of stress and danger,” he declared. “I think many of them misunderstand the hard realities of this dangerous world.”

Bundy’s departure from the White House staff had been predictable for weeks (TIME, Nov. 19). Indeed, the Ford Foundation job was hard to resist. It will allow him to keep in touch with national and. foreign affairs while maintaining contact with the worlds of politics and academe—all fine points for a man who might still aim to be Secretary of State. Characteristically, Bundy slammed no doors. Though he was a registered Republican when he signed up with John Kennedy, he told a reporter last week: “I am no longer a Republican.” Asked the newsman: “You mean you’re a Democrat?” With a smile that indicated he might be his own best catalyst, Bundy replied: “I didn’t say that.”