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William Putnam "Bill" Bundy (September 24, 1917 – October 6, 2000) was a member of the CIA and foreign affairs advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He had a key role in planning the Vietnam War. After leaving government service he became a historian.
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Early years
Raised in Boston, Massachusetts he came from a family long involved in politics. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was a diplomat who helped implement the Marshall Plan. Bill was raised in a highly accomplished, highly intellectual family. After attending the Groton School and Yale University (where he was one of the first presidents of the Yale Political Union), he entered Harvard Law School but left to join the Army Signal Corps during World War II. During this time he worked at Bletchley Park in Britain as part of the top secret ULTRA operation to break Nazi codes.
Positions held
During the 1950s he worked as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. During the Kennedy years he was deputy to Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs Paul Nitze and worked for the Secretary of the Navy. During much of the LBJ era he was an Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs. After resigning from the executive branch in 1969 he taught at MIT and then edited the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (of which he was a member), Foreign Affairs, from 1972 to 1984, after declining the offer of the Council's chairman, David Rockefeller, to be the Council's president.
His brother, McGeorge Bundy, was also an integral part of the both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bill was married to Mary Acheson, the daughter of Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Bill and Mary had three children, Michael, Christopher, and Carol.
Bill was somewhat to the left of his brother politically, and was a spirited opponent of Joseph McCarthy. He was also considered one of the administration's more dovish members on Vietnam.
He left politics in 1969 to teach at MIT. In 1972 he moved to Princeton University where he remained for the rest of his life. His most noted work is Tangled Web which explores the foreign policy of the Nixon administration.
William Bundy's papers are held by the Seeley G. Mudd Library at Princeton University, where he was a professor until his death at age 83.
Further reading
- Bird, Kai. The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0684809702.
External links
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- This page was last modified on 19 September 2008, at 04:06.
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