Bundy, William P.

▪ 2001

      U.S. presidential adviser (b. Sept. 24, 1917, Washington, D.C.—d. Oct. 6, 2000, Princeton, N.J.), was one of the foremost architects of the U.S. policy in Vietnam. He and his younger brother, McGeorge, who was national security adviser in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were the sons of parents from prominent Boston families. William graduated from Yale University in 1939 with a B.A. in history and in 1940 earned an M.A. in history from Harvard University. He left Harvard Law School in 1941 to enlist in the Army Signal Corps and served in England in intelligence, for which he received the Legion of Merit and was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. He received his law degree in 1947 and worked for a private firm until 1951, when he entered government service preparing estimates for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1960 he served as the staff director of the Commission on National Goals, appointed by Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, which in the following decade influenced civil rights laws and poverty programs as well as policy on women in the workforce. In 1961 Bundy moved to the Department of Defense and in 1964 to the Department of State, becoming assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. Although he at first reportedly argued against escalation of the fighting in Vietnam and even proposed withdrawal, he later refused to support those who took a dovish position. He left government in 1969 to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a target for antiwar protesters who once tried to bomb his office. In 1972 he became editor of the journal Foreign Affairs and beginning in the mid-1980s taught part-time at Princeton University. His book A Tangled Web (1998) was a critique of the foreign policy of Pres. Richard M. Nixon.

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