The Washington Post
November 01, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition
Red, White and Blue Blood
BYLINE: James G. Blight
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X01
LENGTH: 1293 words
THE COLOR OF TRUTH
McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy
Brothers in Arms
By Kai Bird
Simon & Schuster. 496 pp. $ 27.50
By James G. Blight, professor of international relations at Brown University and co-author of the
forthcoming "Argument Without End: Searching for Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."
Given the continuing volatility of issues relating to America's involvement in Vietnam, we have
much to be grateful for in Kai Bird's unusual dual biography of McGeorge Bundy, the special
assistant for national security affairs to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and his brother William
Bundy, who served in the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department during much
of the period of U.S. involvement. Bird has written a balanced, highly original extended essay in
which he shows considerable empathy with the Bundy brothers, whom he admits he passionately
despised as a college student during the war.
One senses that this book, eight years in preparation, began as an indictment. But having gotten
deeply inside the brothers' milieu -- wealthy, Anglophile, Boston Brahmin, Groton, Yale, public
service -- in the end, Bird depicts them with nuance and sympathy. The result is therefore not a
broadside against a war that ended a quarter-century ago, but neither is it, thankfully, a literary
equivalent of a Ralph Lauren clothing advertisement full of beautiful WASPs on their ancient
seaside estates.
Bird had begun to explore the American Establishment in his fine 1992 biography The
Chairman, John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment. McCloy, the son of a
hairdresser, had clawed his way into the Establishment. The Bundy brothers were there by
birthright, temperament, supreme self-confidence and intellectual brilliance. They are fortunate
to have acquired a biographer with Kai Bird's capacity for immersion in their world, a world that
now seems as remote and alien to most of us, in some ways, as Vietnam itself must once have
seemed to Mac and Bill Bundy.
And what a world theirs was, one in which (in the election of 1936), 75 percent of their
classmates at Yale ("the Great Blue Mother," as Mac called it) preferred the now-forgotten Alf
Landon to President Roosevelt; in which World War II service consisted, for both Mac and Bill,
of using their brilliance to help decipher German codes; in which Mac became drafter of the
memoirs of Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt's secretary of war (with whom the Bundy brothers'
father, Harvey Sr., had been closely associated during much of the war); in which "summer" was
a verb associated with a compound in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.; in which Bill married a
"Mary" who was the daughter of Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and Mac also
married a "Mary," a Beacon Hill blue blood who was, when they met, director of admissions at
Radcliffe College; and a world in which Mac flourished from 1953-1961 as dean of Harvard
College, while Bill, less outgoing and flamboyant than his younger brother, became a leading
analyst of the communist threat at the CIA's Office of National Estimates. Kai Bird is deft and
sure in evoking this peculiar world of privilege and achievement, in which Mac and Bill Bundy
honed the abilities they would bring to the Kennedy administration in January 1961.
But Kai Bird is less deft and sure when he turns to address the original raison d'etre of the book:
explaining why Mac and Bill Bundy didn't try to prevent the war, or terminate it before it
reached such tragic proportions.
His answer, versions of which are threaded throughout the last half of the book, is this: "The
Bundys lacked the courage to insist on their doubts and instead consistently chose the easier path
of steering the president toward what they thought was a middle course. That is their personal
tragedy and the nation's." He rejects Mac Bundy's claim, made in a 1967 speech, that "gray is the
color of truth." Not in this case, Bird seems to say -- Mac and Bill Bundy knew the truth, knew
we could not win, knew it in black and white, and lacked the nerve to press their case on the two
presidents they served. In this way, he returns to the indictment -- the Bundys' colossal failure of
nerve -- that seems to have provided the motive for writing the book.
This indictment is not convincing. As Bird himself documents, the Bundys were not cowards. It
is far more likely that they, like other U.S. officials with responsibility for Vietnam, simply could
not bring themselves to imagine, until quite late in the day, even the possibility of a U.S. defeat
in Vietnam. Why? Chiefly, it seems, because they had no understanding of their adversary.
Recent evidence from the Vietnamese has proven the point conclusively: Hanoi was everything
the Bundys and their colleagues imagined they were not. Hanoi was very much its own master,
and did not take orders from Moscow or Beijing; Vietnamese communists believed U.S.
bombing to be a sign of U.S. weakness in the South, and a sign that they were winning, and were
therefore encouraged by it; and communists in North and South combined communism,
nationalism and other "isms" into a powerful movement that was wholly unintelligible to men
like Mac and Bill Bundy. Kai Bird notes early on, in describing their education at Groton, that
"this marriage of intellectual self-assurance and condescension toward other cultures was illfated." But condescension is not cowardice. Neither man, and few of their colleagues, had any
real curiosity about Vietnam, as such. One searches the available documents in vain for evidence
to the contrary. That was "their personal tragedy, and the nation's."
During the last 10 years of his life, McGeorge Bundy was a key adviser to scholarly projects on
the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War. On three occasions he was asked to participate in
conferences outside the U.S. He accepted an invitation in 1989 to the Moscow conference on the
missile crisis. But he refused to go to Havana in 1992, saying that "Fidel was only a bit player."
Yet in Havana it was learned that almost all the pressure in 1961 and 1962 to escalate the
confrontation with the United States came not from the Russians but from the Cubans. And he
refused an invitation made in August 1996 to participate in a Hanoi conference the following
June because, he said, there was nothing to talk to the Vietnamese about, since they would have
settled for nothing less than what they got: U.S. withdrawal and unification of Vietnam under
communist domination of Hanoi. Yet in Hanoi, U.S. participants learned that a neutral coalition
government in Saigon -- something Mac and Bill Bundy never took seriously -- was part of the
original communist plan for reunification, going all the way back to 1954.
In short, Cuba was not a bit player in the missile crisis. And there was much to discuss with the
Vietnamese. The prerequisite was lacking, however: curiosity deriving from respect for a deeply
alien culture.
The chapter on the missile crisis in McGeorge Bundy's magisterial 1988 book, Danger and
Survival, concludes this way: "We must make it our business not to pass this way again." This is
unquestionably the most important lesson of that brush with nuclear oblivion. The same might be
said of the Vietnam War. Learning this lesson will require future American leaders to muster the
same degree of curiosity and empathy for the alien beliefs of U.S. adversaries -- whether a
superpower like the former Soviet Union or resourceful little countries like Vietnam and Cuba -that Kai Bird has admirably demonstrated for the nearly vanished world into which McGeorge
and William Bundy were born, and which, alas, they never left.