Mac Bundy

When McGeorge Bundy became Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in August 1953, he passed several hundred men on the Academic ladder, many of whom were shocked at the sudden good fortune of this 34 year-old product of Yale. But their amazement soon gave way to satisfaction, as Bundy proved equal to the high expectations.

As Dean of the central core of the University's Faculty, Bundy is in effect second in importance only to President Pusey. Jointly responsible to both the Corporation and the Faculty, he is a key director of educational policy, budgets, and appointments and serves as the President's chief administrative deputy. In his University Hall office, decisions are made that influence the lives of a sizeable part of the University community.

In the past three years, Bundy has been an effective complement to President Pusey in advising and carrying out the latter's educational programs. "Where Mr. Pusey strikes you with his directness and his strong-minded stability," one Faculty member recently remarked, "Mac Bundy positively scintillates. He goes off like a fireworks factory, bing, bing, and thinks so fast that he often outruns his troops."

This quickness proves the despair of his secretaries as well as his adversaries in argument. Bundy talks and thinks so fast that no stenographer can transcribe his dictation fast enough without using a dictaphone to slow him down. In Faculty meetings and in his Government 185 lectures on foreign policy, his forceful and rapid diction can leave his listeners more awed than enlightened. "He thinks of every aspect of what he is talking on and then he covers it with ease, wit, and stylistic brilliance," a friend said. Before a Faculty meeting or in his paper-filled office, he listens to a speaker abstractly, ruling perfectly straight lines at close intervals on a scratch pad. And generally his explication is as precise as his doodling. "For the first time that I can remember," a senior professor said "the details of appropriations are carefully and understandably explained in Faculty meetings."

Bundy has been impressing people since his days at Groton. Raised in Boston, he majored in mathematics at Yale, where his scholastic average was consistently in the high 90's and where he was a member of Skull and Bones, the apex of the secret societies.

Shortly after graduation, he contributed an essay entitled "They Say in the Colleges" to an anti-Fascist collection entitled "Zero Hour." He set out to speak "not for my fellows but about them," but first he established his own position: "I believe in the dignity of the individual," the young graduate wrote, "in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life, and more ...."

Bundy came to Harvard as Junior Fellow in Government in September 1941. While here he decided to run as the Republican machine candidate for a Boston City Council seat from the safe Back Bay district "to gain laboratory-experience in politics," as he puts it. He lost by 35 votes. When war broke out in December, he tried to volunteer for military service, but was turned down because he was underweight and his eyes were weak. Disappointed in his wish to see combat, he was recruited by an old family friend, Archibald MacLeish, to serve with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Charles Poore, and E. B. White in "that magnificent stable of writers," the Office of Facts and Figures. For seven months in 1942, Bundy wrote what he calls obscure pamphlet propaganda in Washington, meanwhile reportedly eating bananas and carrots and keeping himself in a dark room in an effort to meet the physical requirements for the Army. "Finally they lowered the eye qualifications," he says, and he was inducted.

After the war, Bundy returned to Harvard and the Society of Fellows. He was soon called on by another family friend, Henry Stimson, to collaborate on Stimson's On Active Duty in Peace and War, the memoirs of his lifetime in government service. Bundy, son of Stimson's Assistant Secretary of State during the early '30's, saw the ailing diplomat every day for three or four hours over a period of eighteen months, living in his Long Island home and communiting to Cambridge for the Fellow's weekly dinners. During this period, Bundy became what associates describe as "unbearably Republican" before the other young scholars in the Society. He worked for E.C.A. in Washington, and then joined the foreign policy staff of Thomas E. Dewey for the 1948 election.

After the election, he remained at Harvard as a lecturer and later as associate professor, on what was in his mind a trial basis. He was appointed Senior Tutor of Winthrop House in 1951, where he and his wife Mary lived until his elevation to the Deanship in 1953. During this period he wrote several foreign policy articles and edited a documentary record of Dean Acheson's utterances and strung them together with descriptive tissue."

While still an associate professor, Bundy served as chairman of the department of Government for two months in the summer of 1953. Then, a new Harvard president appointed him as his right hand man, and since then Bundy has effectively aided Pusey's concerns. First he helped steer the University through the attacks by congressional committees for harboring "fifth amendment Communists," and he promoted the University's policy of turning down classified research. Bundy has been particularly concerned with smoothing the transition from school to college and preparing Harvard for the pressures of expansion. Regarding physical growth of a university, he has said that he believes that no ideal criteria exist by which expansion can be guided, but that an institution's decisions must spring from its own particular abilities to face its peculiar problems.

Bundy's own response to the problems he has met as Dean has been generally well received by his Faculty. "His is not an unrelated academic intelligence," a friend remarked. "He perceives and works with facts and makes them move." Some, of course, find fault with him for his hardness, particularly in his control over appointments, but others see a very warm and human man beneath the facade of detatchment required by his post, "a position that requires hard judgements in order to defend the University from mediocrity," according to one Housemaster.

In answer to charges of brusqueness, friends cite his willingness to give "a helping hand to people who are seriously in trouble," and his warmth as father of three sons. A casual visitor in his office commented that "he charms everyone with his interest, and extends this feeling of 'having the Dean's ear' to the vast numbers of people who seek him out."

One observer, who has closely watched McGeorge Bundy mature as Dean, attributes the 37 year-old administrator's attractiveness to the "real quality that underlies his efficient manner--the fact that he can apply one of the keenest possible intelligences to practical problems that involve human beings."