Nation: The Use of Power With a Passion for Peace

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Seated around the massive mahogany table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, President Johnson and his top diplomatic and military advisers last week discussed the unsolved dilemmas of Viet Nam and the Dominican Republic. Midway through the meeting, McGeorge Bundy glanced at his watch, slid his chair back from the table and silently departed. The President, half amused and half annoyed, gazed after him. "There," he said, "goes my debater."

As it happened, McGeorge Bundy, 46, was off for two days of discussion and debate with Harvard faculty members and students about the current course of U.S. foreign policy. In recent months, while criticism of that policy has reached a crescendo, particularly in academic circles, Bundy has increasingly come to the fore not only as Johnson's debater but as a chief public articulator of U.S. aims and purposes.

The Galvanizing Words. This is not a role that he fancies. He would prefer to stay behind the scenes—or rather, below them, working out of a basement office in the White House. His title is Special Presidential Assistant for National Security Affairs. As such, he is the President's foremost personal analyzer, arranger and adviser on all matters touching the fields of foreign policy, defense and intelligence. Half a dozen times each day, a red light on Bundy's telephone console flashes, and "Mac" picks up the receiver to hear L.B.J. ask: "What do you think about . . .?" And dozens of times each day Bundy, in talking to others, utters the most galvanizing words in U.S. Government: "The President wants . . ." During the first days of the Dominican crisis, President Johnson, by his own count, talked to Bundy 86 times. It is probably safe to say that after each talk, Bundy passed the word to some high-ranking official that "The President wants . . ."

What brought Bundy out of the basement? Answer: the tide of professorial and otherwise scholarly criticism of President Johnson's stay-with-it policies in Viet Nam and the Dominican Republic. At scores of colleges, professors who were unsympathetic to the Administration's policies staged "teach-ins"—which often turned into "drum-ins" of their own views. Students donned black armbands and hoisted protesting placards; some even took up collections for those oppressed farm boys, the Viet Cong. Into the act got such bleary-eyed outfits as the Filthy Speech Movement on the University of California's Berkeley campus, and the Sexual Freedom Movement at San Francisco State College. Just in case anyone wonders what the Sexual Freedom Movement might have to do with Viet Nam, Founder Jefferson Poland, 22, had an explanation: "People's lives are more important than sexual freedom."