The president's man.

• Author: Destler, I.M.
• Position: McGeorge Bundy

MCGEORGE BUNDY invented the position of presidential national security advisor. In the service of John E Kennedy, he converted a job established by Dwight D. Eisenhower to coordinate formal interagency planning into one providing day-to-day staff service to the chief executive on the most urgent current international issues. He continued in this role for over two years under JFK's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Supported by a small staff of action intellectuals recruited specifically to serve the current president, and aided by a system they established to monitor the foreign affairs agencies' cable communications to and from overseas posts, Bundy provided intimate, informed staff support no prior president had ever received and no subsequent president would want to do without. In The War Council, historian Andrew Preston summarizes its historic importance: "Perhaps no other bureaucratic change of the past forty years has had such momentous consequences for the conduct of America's foreign relations." (1)

For the most part, Bundy played his advisory role in cooperation with the principal cabinet officials. He was their colleague and frequent communications channel to the president. He conveyed their views honestly, he brought them together to argue before the president and he handled countless first- and second-order issues with a brilliance and fluid efficiency that has yet to be matched. A Cold War pragmatist, he did not push any overall policy line with the president but addressed matters as they arose and kept the confidence and respect of his peers. Successors would exclude the secretary of state from key decisions (Henry A. Kissinger under Richard M. Nixon) or press a policy line at variance with that which the president was currently pursuing (Zbigniew Brzezinski under Jimmy Carter). Bundy kept to the role of honest (albeit activist) broker.

Most of the time. The big exception was Vietnam. Bundy joined with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in late 1964 and early 1965 to press a policy of escalation on a reluctant President Johnson. His role in America's largest foreign policy tragedy, pre-Iraq, is set forth in impressive detail in this book. Committed to active U.S. global engagement in the tradition of his mentor, Henry Stimson, and believing in the necessity of avoiding defeat and the United States's capacity to use military force for good ends, Bundy moved, to quote Preston's chapter titles, from "adviser" acquiescing in...