Nation: The Use of Power With a Passion for Peace

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Talk turned to the Dominican Republic, and one professor wanted to know why the U.S. had chosen to support a "political primitive" and "rascal" like General Antonio Imbert Barreras. In such fast-moving and complex situations, Bundy patiently explained, it was difficult to find a man who had "the virtue of Pericles."

The Four Strands. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa exercises the following day, Bundy the Arguer became Bundy the Articulator. Hunched over the lectern in musty, dusty Sanders Theater, he spoke without a text, only occasionally referred to notes written on a yellow legal pad in his cramped southpaw hand —a handwriting so small that his White House secretaries use magnifying glasses to read it.

"I have been unable to get it out of my mind," he began, "that it was just 25 years ago this spring that we were drawn from isolation into engagement."

That "garish spring," he said, had been "the watershed of our modern history." From it emerged the four great strands that have shaped the fabric of the past quarter-century. As Bundy put them, they are: 1) an acceptance by the U.S. of the responsibilities of world power, 2) a dedication by the U.S. to "the purpose of peace," 3) a "commitment of concern" by the U.S. for the needs and aspirations of other nations, 4) a U.S. awareness of the "reality of Communism."

All four strands are interwoven, said Bundy, and any attempt to deal with one of them by itself threatens the whole fabric. A case in point was the late Senator loe McCarthy, who in making anti-Communism the touchstone of truth impeded "the actual understanding of the reality of Communism."

Bundy recalled that this would have been the year of lohn F. Kennedy's 25th reunion at Harvard, and he speculated about what the late President might have said on the occasion. Perhaps, said Bundy, it would have gone something like this: "We must hold to one another across the generations and not allow misunderstandings or specific arguments to separate us. America can do nothing if it is not together, and she is not much if she is not in touch with the hopes of others. One must have a passion for peace, respect for power, awareness of friends. He might even have said, 'Now the trumpet summons us again.' "

Heart of the Matter. This is a favorite theme of Bundy's. "Very near the heart of all foreign affairs," he wrote 14 years ago in a preface to a collection of Dean Acheson's state papers, "is the relationship between policy and military power."

With its immense power, he says, the U.S. is repeatedly faced with the crucial choice of when to use it and when to withhold it, when to act and when not to act. Yet there are all too many men, he believes, who are reluctant "to give full weight to the role of power and its necessity in the world's affairs."