The Best and the Brightest (79 page)

Davies himself began to work again as a consultant and as a writer, and when the Nixon Administration recognized China a year and a half later and it reappeared on the face of the map, Davies found himself something of a celebrity. Important journalists began to talk about him as a candidate to be the first American ambassador to Peking. In the summer of 1971 his young son was getting married and the Davieses sent out invitations for a reception; in the past they had usually gotten only a 50 percent acceptance to their parties, but this time everyone showed up, including, as the children put it, “the real chickens.”

John Davies remained shy about going on radio and television and had a feeling he might be exploited now that he had been rehabilitated. In late 1971, sensing that they were being used by the people around them, and tired of having their young daughters mugged on the way home from public schools, John Davies and his wife decided it was time to pull up stakes again, that adventure lay elsewhere, and moved to Spain.

So John Paton Davies or Jack Service could not serve—men, extremely knowledgeable about the area, whose primary viewpoint was political. And yet the post was crucial, doubly so, because the Secretary of State himself was a man who believed in force, whose first love had been the Pentagon, and who did not like to challenge the views of the generals. So the selection for the man to fill the slot below him, to replace Hilsman, was of genuine importance. But instead of it going to a man of the area, it went to a man classically of the bureaucracy, a believer in force, and a man whose last job had been at the Pentagon under McNamara, who was in awe of McNamara, and who brought a photograph of McNamara to hang on his wall at State. As well he might, for the idea of his new job had come from McNamara; McNamara, good bureaucrat, always liked to have his people spread around the government, and it would not hurt to have Bill Bundy, his own man, at a crucial slot at State. The suggestion had gone in from McNamara and finally came back to Harriman for his response, and Harriman, who still had some control over this area, did not fight the appointment. He thought Bill Bundy was a very good bureaucrat and bright, and that he might give State some badly needed muscle. Besides, he was sure he could handle him. So he acquiesced. Consequently, by the middle of 1964 State did not have its men at Defense; Defense had its men at State. There was Bill Bundy, a classic insider’s man. His name would probably be on more pieces of paper dealing with Vietnam over a seven-year period than anyone else’s, yet he was the man about whom the least was known, the fewest articles written. There were no cover stories in the news magazines, no long profiles. A shadowy figure on the outside center of power, lowest man on a very high totem pole. In photographs of the group, the other faces were recognizable: Bob, Dean, Mac, Lyndon, and then that tall thin fellow on the side. A patrician, you could tell that, perhaps a slight resemblance to Mac. Mac’s younger brother? No, he would get tired of telling people, he was not Mac’s younger brother, he was Mac’s older brother. What was it Lyndon called him? (Lyndon always professed to have trouble with people’s names when he wanted to put them down a little. Kissinger would become Schlesinger, Dick Goodwin became Good
man,
George Hamilton the actor-suitor would become Charley.) Johnson respected Bill Bundy but did not like him, spotting in him that supercilious quality which, so long in developing, was not easy to shed, even for the White House. Hating all superciliousness, but particularly Groton-senior-prefect superciliousness, Johnson would call him “that other Bundy.” That other Bundy.

William Putnam Bundy, two years older than McGeorge Bundy, had left remarkable records wherever he went, Groton, Yale, Harvard Law School (which inclined him to tell others who sometimes doubted him and his positions that their problem was that they lacked a lawyer’s training and eye). More of an ambitious mother’s hopes were invested in him, and yet always pursued by that younger meteor, always living in the shadow of Mac’s extraordinary achievements and accomplishments, which somehow dimmed the luster of his own quite remarkable career. He was not as quick as Mac, and not as open. Mac had competed in the somewhat more open environment of Harvard, where sheer brains counted, whether they were immigrant brains, blue-collar brains or WASP brains, and he had triumphed there, his connections not hurting a bit. But the process had ventilated him (Mac knew the value of a Kaysen or Wiesner), and he liked brains for brains’ sake, whereas Bill had made his way up through the more closed profession of the inner bureaucracy, particularly the CIA, where connections and birthrights were far more important. He had done very well at the CIA, at a time when it was decidedly the profession of the upper-class elite, the right people looking out for one another’s sons and friends. It was a profession and a craft which demanded considerable ability, which he had, but which also responded even less to new forces and egalitarian pressures of America. There was a tendency in Bill Bundy, when challenged, to rely, or at least to seem to rely, even more on his background, to seem more the snob and more arrogant, a belief that Bundys are just a little different and better than mere mortals.

He himself was not without his own political scars from an earlier period. He had always done well in the government, and had been a particular protégé of Allen Dulles’, an affection which he reciprocated. Dulles had been more than a boss, he had been a friend and also a protector. When William Bundy had one rather frightening run-in with Joseph McCarthy in the fifties, he had the good fortune to work for the right Dulles, who had chosen to protect his staff. The incident took place in July 1953. McCarthy went after Bundy partly as a general means of attacking Acheson, and partly because it was fresh governmental meat, the CIA this time. There were two points McCarthy used against Bundy, the first being a brief period of time in 1940 when Bundy was an employee of the Library of Congress and for four months belonged to a group called the United Public Workers of America. The second was more dramatic, McCarthy’s desire to question Bundy on $400 that Bundy had contributed to the defense fund of Alger Hiss. (He had not, Bundy explained later, known Hiss, but he had worked as a young lawyer in the same firm with Alger’s brother Donald Hiss. He sensed that the Hiss case was going to be very important and he wanted Hiss to have a very good attorney “the first time around. We had some knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in my family and I thought it important that he had a good lawyer the first time around,” the latter being a reference to his great-uncle A. Lawrence Lowell, who had upheld the Sacco-Vanzetti decision, and whose reputation was thereupon tarnished.) Bundy had told all this to Allen Dulles, who said not to worry. Then, in the summer of 1953, when McCarthy went after him, Bundy was about to leave for Europe, and there was a question as to whether McCarthy would subpoena Bundy. Allen Dulles worked out a deal with the White House by which there would be no subpoena; Bundy would be allowed to go on his European vacation, and Dulles would develop a special procedure to check all loyalty at the Agency. McCarthy tried to fight the European trip, but Dulles absolutely refused to cave in, no one on his staff was going to be exploited by McCarthy; Bundy went off, and came back to continue working at the CIA. Allen Dulles, he thought, was a very different man from Foster (on the day that Foster had let George Kennan, perhaps the State Department’s foremost intellectual of a generation, leave the service “because I don’t seem to have a niche for you,” Allen had driven into town to see Kennan and to offer him almost any job he wanted at the CIA). But it was not a pleasant experience, just as the tormenting of his father-in-law, Dean Acheson, had not been a pleasant experience; it had a profound effect on the young and ambitious career servant and made him very careful about leaving himself open for any future attacks on his softness.

He was extremely well connected in the inner traditions of American government, the Stimson-Bundy connections and the fact that he was Dean Acheson’s son-in-law, but there were also many who felt that he was Allen Dulles’ long-term choice to be the eventual head of the Agency. Though he was the nominal Democrat in the Bundy family, he had not done particularly well at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration, partly because he had mouthed the Acheson anti-Kennedy line during the 1960 period, and his father-in-law felt that he should have had the job which went to Mac. Instead he went from CIA to Defense in 1961 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under the Assistant Secretary, Paul Nitze, who was Acheson’s special favorite (he had been head of Policy Planning under Acheson). When Nitze was appointed Secretary of the Navy, Bundy was moved up to his job. Those who worked under Bill Bundy in those days remember an almost electric sense of power: he worked for McNamara, he had a brother at the White House, there were links everywhere to the very top, decisions were made and Bill and his shop were in on it. He liked the McNamara job, and friends there felt that when he was made Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs he left reluctantly, that there had been a virtual father-son relationship, despite the similarities in age. He was totally happy there.

While Rusk and McNaughton, both very good bureaucrats, had worked in the outside world, Bill Bundy had spent most of his adult years working within the government. After CIA and Defense, an even more successful career was beckoning. Becoming Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense or head of the CIA was a very real possibility for him in 1964 at the comparatively young age of forty-six. He was extremely adept at playing the bureaucracy, savvy, able to finesse it, there was no better interdepartmental and crossgovernmental man than Bill Bundy, cutting across lines if necessary, and then, if someone was a person to be wary of, going back later and healing a wound. He could cut through it and he could go outside it if need be. Very good at paper, just like his younger brother and like the Secretary of State, letting both sides speak their piece, and then Bill Bundy grabbing the middle position and dictating the paper, getting both sides in, and moving the paper to his view. During those years at State he was very careful to follow all the paper traffic. He was a good dictator, and knew who at State was good at taking dictation and who was not, insisting on the best clerks, a good clerk was someone who could take dictation and handle paper. He read quickly, and if anything, too quickly; there were those around him who believe that in 1967 he misread Hanoi’s answer to the San Antonio formula because he read it too quickly and was preconditioned to think that they were never going to respond.

Yet he was a puzzling man too. He had such good manners and came from such a fine tradition, yet he was the classic mandarin, abusive and rough on those who worked for him, obsequious to those above him, with almost no such thing as an equal relationship. The one eventual exception was John McNaughton, who held Bundy’s old job at Defense and was thus equal in rank and ability and toughness, although Bundy tested him out at the beginning, trying to let him know that Bill Bundy was just a little more senior, a little more superior. On the phone, with just a trifle of condescension, trying to help McNaughton really: I’m sure, John, that if you check with Bob you’ll find that it’s all okay . . . No, Bob wasn’t there . . . but Cy was there, and it’s really all cleared, John . . . I’m sure you’ll see . . . But McNaughton was just as shrewd a bureaucratic player and he soon let Bundy know that he spoke for McNamara, and thus gained a rare parity. Subordinates had to suffer what bordered on temper tantrums, as if all the contradictions of Vietnam were too much and produced resulting seething tensions: Get off that goddamn phone. . . . Where the hell is that paper? . . . This damn paper isn’t fit for an eighth-grader. Yet to his superiors it was yes, Mr. Secretary . . . no, Mr. Secretary . . . yes, Mr. President—which reminded those around him of nothing so much as the best senior boy at the old school working between the headmaster on one side and the boys on the other, or the beloved senior clerk in a great firm who anticipates every whim of his superiors and terrorizes the clerks beneath him. He was the classic civil servant really, who believes he has succeeded if he meets the demands on him from the top of the matrix, and does not represent the bottom to the top (in contrast with his eventual successor at Defense, Paul Warnke), which is all right if the top of the matrix knows what it is doing. So he was this great Brahmin, William Bundy, really a very great clerk.

He did not bring his subordinates into the play at all, and would brook no faintheartedness; in fact, it was believed by the fall of 1964 that real doubters on Vietnam could not serve in his section. Nor, and this was equally important, did he bring subordinates into any kind of discussion on Vietnam but quite the opposite; he worked to head off any serious questioning. When doubts arose among some of the younger men, he would stop them, they would not go further. “The President had already decided on that,” was a favorite line, or “We won’t chase that hare,” or “We won’t open that can of worms,” but the message was the same: don’t argue with us, we know where we are going. Since his subordinates were almost completely excluded from discussions on Vietnam with Bundy, except for minor technical matters, they found that if they wanted to pick up a trend of the direction of policy, the best way was simply to be in his office when he was talking to trusted outsiders on the phone, where he would ruminate, talk more openly, give a sense of the play. Only certain people could be trusted and they had to have certain credentials, and those credentials would turn out increasingly to be breeding and a fondness for the use of force.

Bill Bundy was extremely well read, a deeply educated man who brought a real intellectual background to his work, a bureaucrat, thought his friends, who had a secret craving to be a historian. In addition, unlike the other top players, he knew something about Southeast Asia. He had dealt with the problem in the past working with the Office of National (Intelligence) Estimates at the CIA from 1951 to 1959, where Chester Cooper, the staffman who was writing pessimistic notes to McGeorge Bundy, was charged with Far East evaluation and Bundy was doing overall general evaluation. During the French war he had read all the traffic, and had thus, unlike the others, gained a sense of the history which they were contending with. Later, in 1964, when a squadron of outmoded B-57 bombers were routed back to the Bien Hoa air base from the Philippines, some of the younger men at State and the White House argued vigorously against leaving them there, saying that they were useless and could only serve as a temptation to the Vietcong, who would be almost obligated to attack them and blow them up; besides, security was undoubtedly terrible. So the real risk was that if the Vietcong moved, we would have to make a countermove. In a rare exception to his general rule, Bundy agreed, and he even went to see Rusk and posed the problem (the B-57s would not really change the direction of the war, but they would present unnecessary risks). Rusk listened and more or less agreed, and then called McNamara, who said that the military needed the planes, and Rusk called back to his subordinates and said that the military said they needed them, and State had not given a good-enough reason not to put them there. So, foolishly, they stayed there, until in November the Vietcong did blow them up, prompting the JCS and Taylor to recommend immediate retaliation, which surely would have taken place then, except that it was Election Eve. But what the incident showed was that Bill Bundy knew something about Vietnam, and had more sophistication about the war and the enemy than most of the players. Brains were not his problem; it was a question of assumptions, and ambition.