Nation: The Use of Power With a Passion for Peace

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At the time of Kennedy's assassination, Bundy was recognized as one of the genuinely important officials in the foreign-policy field. When Lyndon Johnson returned from Dallas on Nov. 22, he invited three men from the crowd that met him at Andrews Air Force Base to join him in the helicopter flight to the south lawn of the White House—McNamara, Under Secretary of State George Ball (Rusk was out of the country) and Bundy.

Stressful Months. But Bundy's first days with Lyndon added up, in his own words, to "a stressful three months." Early in the transition period, Bundy, as he had always felt free to do with Kennedy, poked his head into the oval office while Lyndon was conferring with Henry Cabot Lodge. He got a blistering rebuke. "Goddammit, Bundy," snapped the President, "I've told you that when I want you I'll call you."

Johnson was not exactly sure of what to do with the Bundy operation. He found out soon enough. During the Panama crisis in January 1964, Bundy was off in Antigua on vacation. The President did not summon him back, but he gradually became aware that the memos on national security were not so crisply phrased, the advice was not so succinct and pointed as when Bundy was around. From that time on, Bundy had President Johnson's full confidence. And when Bundy routinely submitted his resignation after Johnson was elected in his own right in 1964, he got it back with a notation: "Why do you do things like this? Stop it."

A measure of Bundy's current value to the President was his role in the Dominican crisis. From the first, he was in the thick of it. He took charge of a high-level committee of Pentagon, State Department and CIA men that met every morning for weeks in his Situation Room to ride herd on day-by-day developments in Santo Domingo. It was Bundy who came up with the idea of establishing a U.S. "line of communication" as a buffer between rebel and junta forces in the city.

Then, last month, the man behind the scenes became the man on the scene. On orders from the President, he flew to the Dominican capital with three other high-ranking U.S. officials to see whether a compromise government could be pasted together that would satisfy both sides. Bundy spent ten busy days sounding out officials, learned that the man Washington had in mind to head the government had no real support and could offer no guarantees against Communist domination. The mission was unsuccessful, but not for lack of trying.

Gored—but Good. As a Boston Brahmin in a Texas corral (half of Johnson's twelve special assistants are Texans), Bundy is far from Johnson's ingroup. But he is fascinated, almost transfixed by the President's elemental energy and earthiness. He recognizes Johnson as the political supreme, and he has come a long way from the days when he thought of politics as a grubby little game. "A politician's life is like a bullfighter's," Bundy now says. "The bull can get him any day."