McGeorge Bundy

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McGeorge Bundy (1967)

McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (* thirtieth March 1919 in Boston ; † 16th September 1996 ) was National Security Advisor of the United States for President Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1966. He is in this position with the design of the Vietnam War connected .

Bundy was the fifth and youngest son of a wealthy Boston family; his mother comes from a Boston Brahmin family affiliated with the Republicans . His brother William Bundy also had political influence during the Vietnam War. Bundy attended the elite Dexter Elementary School in the suburb of Brookline in a class under John F. Kennedy.

Bundy studied at Yale University , where he was accepted by the Skull & Bones fraternity there. In 1942 he worked in the United States Office of War Information in the Office of Facts and Figures . After the war he worked as a co-author on the biography of the former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson , from 1949–51 at the Council on Foreign Relations , where he studied the effects of the Marshall Plan on Europe.

He was one of the so-called wise men ("wise men") of John F. Kennedy and professor of political science at Harvard University , although he did not have a PhD degree. There he became dean of the Arts and Sciences faculty at the age of 34 . He succeeded in bringing numerous scientists to the university who later increased Harvard's reputation, among them the sociologist David Riesman , the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson , the anthropologist Cora Du Bois and the Romance scholar Laurence Wylie . Bundy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1991 .

He came into the focus of the international public as a national security advisor. He played an essential role in the general foreign policy as well as in strategic questions of the defense within the Kennedy administration and partly also in that of Johnson. This covered the period from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War.

In his early tenure, he was a proponent of military engagement in Vietnam. He supported American intervention and the bombing of North Vietnam . He later regretted as one of the first decisions the US government made at the time. In 1966 he resigned from his government offices. He was director of the Ford Foundation until 1979. From 1979 to 1989 he was professor of history at New York University .

McGeorge Bundy married Mary Buckminster Lothrop in 1950 and had five sons with her.

In the movie Thirteen Days he is played by Frank Wood .

literature

  • Gordon M. Goldstein: Lessons in Disaster. McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Times Books, New York NY 2008, ISBN 978-0-8050-7971-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: McGeorge Bundy. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 24, 2018 .