Nation: The Use of Power With a Passion for Peace

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In 1949, Bundy began lecturing at Harvard, in four years was dean. While at Harvard, he met Radcliffe's associate dean of admissions, Mary Buckminster Lothrop, proposed to her after two dates, and married her in 1950. "Until he met her, he was a little too cold for comfort, too brilliant for endurance," says John Mason Brown. "She's softened him."

As dean, Bundy was known as a fine administrator and lecturer, played a key role in President Nathan Pusey's famed "Program for Harvard College," which extracted $83 million from alumni, businesses and foundations. One philanthropic organization that was not always as openhanded as Bundy would have liked was the Rockefeller Foundation. Shortly after John Kennedy was elected President, Mac told the President-elect: "I admit I have an interest in seeing Dean Rusk as Secretary of State. It would get him out as head of the Rockefeller Foundation."

As it happened, Bundy was also under consideration for a high State Department job, but when Kennedy offered to make him the Deputy Undersecretary for Administration, Bundy turned the job down. "Too much like being dean again," he said. Finally Bundy accepted the position of Special Presidential Assistant for National Security.

Threading the Needle. There is no neat way to describe the powers and functions of this job. As Bundy himself says, it is "the despair of chartmakers." But Budget Bureau Executive Assistant Director William D. Carey, whose job is to analyze administrative operations, has summed it up this way:

"The Bundy group works with a minimum of paperwork, keeping their fingers on the troublesome points of defense and foreign policy, being sure they are in the stream of intelligence but in no sense in the line between the President and the heads of State or Defense. Bundy is a convener and a catalyst, certainly active rather than passive, alert to spotting gaps in the fabric of national security planning and, if you will, quick in 'threading the needle' to close them."

Ghastly Week. Bundy sees it as a "staff officer's" job, designed to "extend the range and enlarge the direct effectiveness" of the President. No matter how efficient the executive departments may be, he explains, "there remains a crushing burden of responsibility and of sheer work on the President himself." This work must be done, "to the extent that he cannot do it himself, by staff officers under his direct oversight."

At first Bundy relished the bubbling excitement and personal power that the job gave him. "Why don't you come and join the fun?" he asked a former Harvard colleague in the early days. Then came the Bay of Pigs, and Bundy, who had wholeheartedly supported the abortive effort, recalls it as a "ghastly week." But he regained his footing, and by the time the 1962 Cuban missile crisis unfolded, he was sufficiently sure of himself to set up "ExCom," the task force that ran the Cuba operation, largely from his own Situation Room in the White House basement.