Nation: The Use of Power With a Passion for Peace

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The dissenters—backed by such respectable citizens as the editorialists of the New York Times and Senior Pundit Walter Lippmann—almost made it sound as if they spoke for the majority of Americans. No such thing: the latest Gallup poll showed that for every two citizens who want the U.S. to get out of Viet Nam, three favor its present policy there or want to escalate the war further; that 76% support U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. Still, the decibel count of criticism is high, and Johnson is supersensitive to any sort of criticism. He therefore gave Bundy a go-ahead to answer the critics on their own home grounds.

"A Little Scary." To the job of Ambassador to Academe, McGeorge Bundy brings solid-gold credentials. A summa cum laude Yale graduate in mathematics, at 34 he became the first Yale-educated dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. A compactly built man (5 ft. 10 in., 165 Ibs.) with greying brown hair, his pink cheeks, furrowed brow and plastic-rimmed glasses give him the air of a slightly perplexed professor. A professor he has been, but there is not a pennyweight of perplexity in him. He is self-confident to the point of arrogance, intelligent to the point of intimidation. "I've always thought Mac was maybe a little scary to people when they first met him," says his oldest brother Harvey, 49, vice president of a seafood firm in Gloucester, Mass., "but very warm when you get to know him."

Family connections have given Bundy a remarkable range of contacts. His mother is related to the Lowells; his father was secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, served for seven years as an assistant to Henry L. Stimson. Older Brother William P. Bundy, 47, is a 14-year Government veteran who was Allen Dulles' deputy at CIA for nearly ten years, later headed a 360-man shop at the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, is now the State Department's Far Eastern expert. At the Pentagon, Bill occupied an office in the outermost "E" ring just down the hall from where his father once worked for Stimson. Now, in the State Department, Bill is a seasoned pro and is in a position to give Mac, the gifted amateur, sound advice on any sensitive subject. Bill is married to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson's daughter Mary. And there is also a Bundy link with the clan Kennedy, though admittedly a very slender one:

Mac's younger sister Katharine, 41, is the wife of New Jersey Physician Hugh Auchincloss, a first cousin once removed of Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather.

A Certain Inconsistency. In his current capacity as public advocate of the Administration's foreign policies, McGeorge Bundy has in his favor the fact that, as a student in pre-World War II days, he was exposed to—and agreed with—the strongly interventionist views of most of his college professors, who insisted that the U.S. had a duty to go to war against Nazism and Fascism. This puts him in an ideal position to point out the inconsistency of the professors' present isolationist position. In an essay published in 1940, when he was all of 21 and fresh out of Yale, Bundy wrote that "though war is evil, it is occasionally the lesser of two evils."