McGeorge Bundy was born
in Boston, Massachusetts, on 30th March, 1919. After graduating from
Yale University in 1940 he joined the office
of Facts and Figures in Washington.
After the Second World War he took up a teaching
appointment at Harvard University. Eventually
he became Dean of Arts and Sciences (1953-61).
When John
F. Kennedy was
elected he appointed Bundy as his National Security Adviser. William
Attwood was the leading advocate inside the Kennedy Administration
for talking to Fidel
Castro about
the potential for improving relations. He was supported by Bundy
who suggested to Kennedy that
there should be a "gradual development of some form of accommodation
with Castro".
In April 1963 Lisa
Howard arrived
in Cuba to make a documentary on the country.
In an interview with Howard, Fidel
Castro
agreed that a rapprochement with Washington
was desirable. On her return Howard met with the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Deputy Director Richard
Helms reported
to John
F. Kennedy on
Howard's view that "Fidel Castro is looking for a way to reach
a rapprochement with the United States." After detailing her
observations about Castro's political power, disagreements with his
colleagues and Soviet troops in Cuba, the memo concluded that "Howard
definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government with two facts: Castro
is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is ready to discuss
it with him if asked to do so by the US Government."
CIA Director John
McCone was strongly opposed to Lisa
Howard being
involved with these negotiations with Castro. He argued that it might
"leak and compromise a number of CIA operations against Castro".
In a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy, McCone
commented that the "Lisa Howard report be handled in the most
limited and sensitive manner," and "that no active steps
be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time."
Arthur
Schlesinger explained to Anthony
Summers in 1978
why the CIA did not want John
F. Kennedy to
negotiate with Fidel
Castro during
the summer of 1963: "The CIA was reviving the assassination plots
at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility
of normalization of relations with Cuba - an extraordinary action.
If it was not total incompetence - which in the case of the CIA cannot
be excluded - it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy."
Lisa
Howard
now decided to bypass the CIA and in May,
1963, published an article in the journal, War
and Peace Report, Howard wrote that in eight hours of private
conversations Castro had shown that he had a strong desire for negotiations
with the United States: "In our conversations he made it quite
clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military
hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands
and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion
throughout the Hemisphere." Howard went on to urge the Kennedy
administration to "send an American government official on a
quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro has to say." A country
as powerful as the United States, she concluded, "has nothing
to lose at a bargaining table with Fidel Castro."
William
Attwood read
Howard's article and on 12th September, 1963, he had a long conversation
with her on the phone. This apparently set in motion a plan to initiate
secret talks between the United States and Cuba.
Six days later Attwood sent a memorandum to Under Secretary of State
Averell Harriman and U.N. Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson. Attwood asked for
permission to establish discreet, indirect contact with Fidel
Castro.
On September 20, John
F. Kennedy gave
permission to authorize Attwood's direct contacts with Carlos Lechuga,
the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.
According to Attwood: "I then told Miss Howard to set up the
contact, that is to have a small reception at her house so that it
could be done very casually, not as a formal approach by us."
Howard met Lechuga at the UN on 23rd September 23. Howard invited
Lechuga to come to a party at her Park Avenue apartment that night
to meet Attwood.
The next day William
Attwood met with Robert
Kennedy in
Washington and reported on the talks
with Lechuga. According to Attwood the attorney general believed that
a trip to Cuba would be "rather risky."
It was "bound to leak and... might result in some kind of Congressional
investigation." Nevertheless, he thought the matter was "worth
pursuing."
On 5th November 5, Bundy
recorded that "the President was more in favor of pushing towards
an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the idea being
- well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out
the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal." Bundy designated
his assistant, Gordon Chase, to be Attwood's direct contact at the
White House.
Attwood continued to use
Lisa
Howard as
his contact with Fidel
Castro.
In October 1963, Castro told Howard that he was very keen to open
negotiations with Kennedy. Castro even offered to send a plane to
Mexico to pick up Kennedy's representative and fly him to a private
airport near Veradero where Castro would talk to him alone.
John
F. Kennedy
now decided to send William Attwood to
meet Castro. On 14th November, 1963, Lisa Howard conveyed this message
to her Cuban contact. In an attempt to show his good will, Kennedy
sent a coded message to Castro in a speech delivered on 19th November.
The speech included the following passage: "Cuba had become a
weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other
American republics. This and this alone divides us. As long as this
is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible."
Kennedy also sent a message
to Fidel
Castro via
the French journalist Jean Daniel. According to Daniel: "Kennedy
expressed some empathy for Castro's anti-Americanism, acknowledging
that the United States had committed a number of sins in pre-revolutionary
Cuba." Kennedy told Daniel that the trade embargo against Cuba
could be lifted if Castro ended his support for left-wing movements
in the Americas.
Daniel delivered this message
on 19th November. Castro told Daniel that Kennedy could become "the
greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last
understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists,
even in the Americas." Daniel was with Castro when news arrived
that Kennedy had been assassinated Castro turned to Daniel and said:"This
is an end to your mission of peace. Everything is changed."
President Lyndon
B. Johnson was
told about these negotiations in December, 1963. He refused to continue
these talks and claimed that the reason for this was that he feared
that Richard Nixon, the expected Republican
candidate for the presidency, would accuse him of being soft on communism.
Bundy continued to serve
Johnson as National Security Adviser and was later blamed for being
partly responsible for escalating the Vietnam War. In 1966 he left
office to become President of the Ford Foundation.
Bundy was also Professor
of History at New York University (1979-1989). He was also the author
of several books including Presidential Promises
and Performance (1980), Danger
and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
(1988) and Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Road
Away from the Brink (1993).
McGeorge Bundy died of
a heart attack in September, 1996.
Forum Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
National
Security Archive (24th November, 2003)
On the 40th
anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve
of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro,
the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the
President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing
the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape,
dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records
a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a US official at
the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret
talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures
President Kennedy's approval if official US involvement could be
plausibly denied.
The possibility
of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking
on the possibility of what declassified White House records called
"an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring
of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing
Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy
than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White
House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start
thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president,
himself, is very interested in (the prospect for negotiations)."
Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special
on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered
a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States
government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would
be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.
(2)
James C. Thompson, A
Memory of Mcgeorge Bundy, New York Times (22nd September,
1996)
Probably
the brightest of the lot, McGeorge Bundy, died suddenly of a heart
attack last week at the age of 77. Most of the obituaries stressed
his role as a Vietnam War hawk when he was national security adviser
to Presidents Kennedy and (especially) Johnson.
In my view,
the obit writers got it wrong. The man, and the circumstances, were
a lot more complex.
I was a
callow 33-year-old when he summoned me from the State Department
to join his National Security Council staff in July 1964. But I
watched him up close in those critical two years of decisions about
Vietnam, before we both left Washington in 1966.
Mac Bundy
was one of the few Kennedy loyalists to stay on under Lyndon Johnson
and adjust to the formidable and volatile new boss. Mac's job was
to evaluate, compress and clarify the avalanche of foreign affairs
information in the White House.
He was a
skilled adjudicator, not an advocate -- especially on Vietnam. He
tolerated and even encouraged dissent from conventional wisdom,
as long as it was expressed with brevity and evidence. He seemed
to have no firm convictions on the inherited Vietnam mess. His loyalty
was to the president and to our nation's security.
When I reported
that the 1964 turmoil in Saigon might result in a Buddhist-neutralist
coup and a polite invitation to the United States to withdraw, Mac
would nod and smile almost hopefully. When I would express doubts
about the whole Vietnam intervention, he would ask me to put them
very privately on paper.
In December,
after the LBJ landslide, he called me into his office to read the
chosen interagency option for dealing with Vietnam now that the
election was over. Out of three grossly oversimplified options --
the first being, roughly, turn tail and run, the second, blow up
the world -- the third, a gradual and sustained bombing of North
Vietnam until Hanoi cried uncle, seemed moderate.
I told Mac
that although I was an ignoramus on weaponry, I had learned quite
a bit about the history of Vietnam's struggles against foreign powers.
I thought we might bomb them back to the Stone Age, but that Ho
Chi Minh's deeply rooted Vietnamese revolutionaries knew that if
they retreated we would eventually go home. Mac nodded and sighed.
"Well," he said, "you may very well be right."
What happened
two months later was the critical turning point. Lyndon Johnson
wanted to make sure that South Vietnam would (italics)not(end italics)
be lost to communism. But he was uneasy about escalating the war.
So he delayed, and finally sent to Vietnam his one detached and
trusted adviser, Mac, to make a recommendation.
Mac arrived
in Saigon just before the Vietcong blew up the American barracks
at Pleiku. Much has been written about how the visual horror of
dead and wounded young Americans affected his judgment.
And, indeed,
it was only then that Mac wrote his famous message urging Johnson
to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam. Mac, the dispassionate
man, became, for a while, ardent.
But Mac,
the skeptic, was still alive, if hobbled by the suspicious, tyrannical
LBJ. After the February escalation in 1965, Mac told one of my senior
NSC colleagues to explore the possibility of negotiating with Hanoi,
but demanded that the suggestions be written out longhand, for Mac
alone, lest LBJ or the Senate hawks find out.
On June
30, 1965, Mac sent a one-page memo to the arch-escalator, Defense
Secretary Robert S. McNamara, suggesting, with amazing prescience,
that the Pentagon's plan was "rash to the point of folly."
There is
no indication that Mac shared that memo with LBJ. In any case, the
US ground forces were augmented.
Perhaps
Mac should have quit on principle. But in December 1965, he announced
that he would leave the following March to become the president
of the Ford Foundation.
In February,
he and I overlapped briefly in Saigon, and we had one quiet talk.
On my return to Washington, I learned that Mac had told the NSC
staff he was optimistic about the war, but, much to my astonishment,
that they they should wait to hear my very different views.
In 1968,
after I wrote a critique of Vietnam policy in The Atlantic, Mac
chastised me for betraying LBJ's trust. We didn't make up for eight
years. By then I was running Harvard's Nieman Fellowships for journalists,
and Mac came to talk to the fellows.
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