System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!William Bundy dies
World War II code breaker and advisor to presidents
By David M. Campbell
Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2000
William Bundy...central figure in Vietnam policy-making
William P. Bundy, World War II code breaker and a central figure in Vietnam policy-making under three presidents, died Friday at his home on The Great Road in Princeton Township. He was 83.
During World War II, Mr. Bundy commanded a small unit in the Army Signal Corps that worked with the British in the ULTRA operation at Bletchley Park that broke high-level German ciphers, said Mary Bundy, his wife.
"My husband had been a teacher in the Army Signal Corps cipher school, and himself picked the group of Americans that went over and worked with the British," Ms. Bundy said Monday. "It's quite a story, and historians now generally think this breaking of the German High Command code shortened World War II by two or three years."
From 1961 to 1969, Mr. Bundy was a political appointee in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as a deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Pentagon and then for five years as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
During this period, Mr. Bundy served a crucial role as advisor in the Vietnam War. "My present feeling," Mr. Bundy wrote in 1989 concerning his role in Vietman, "is that it was a tragedy waiting to happen, but one made much worse by countless errors along the way, in many of which I had a part."
Mr. Bundy was born in Washington. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was an aide to Henry L. Stimson, President Herbert Hoover's secretary of state and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of war.
His mother, the former Katherine Lawrence Putnam, was descended from a number of prominent Boston families, including the Cabots, the Lowells and the Lawrences.
William Bundy and his brother, McGeorge, who was 18 months younger and served as national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were products of Groton, Yale and Harvard.
William Bundy graduated from the Groton School at the top of his class in 1935, studied history at Yale, where he worked on the Yale Daily News, played hockey and was president of the Yale Political Union.
After his graduation from Yale in 1939, Mr. Bundy entered Harvard Law School, but his schooling was cut short by the war. In 1941, he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps, eventually working in Britain, decoding intelligence intercepts.
Mr. Bundy left the Army as a major, and was later awarded the Legion of Merit and made a member of the Order of the British Empire.
In a recent NOVA program on the Bletchley Park code breakers called "Station X," Mr. Bundy is quoted as saying, "Although I have done many interesting things and known many interesting people, my work at Bletchley Park was the most satisfying of my career."
Mr. Bundy returned home after the war to finish his law degree in 1947, after which he worked for three years as a lawyer in Washington. Mr. Bundy considered returning to the Army when the Korean War began, but at the invitation of one of his Harvard professors, he instead joined the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of National Estimates, where he prepared and coordinated briefing papers for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's National Security Council.
By 1953, Mr. Bundy was writing briefs on Vietnam.
In 1961, he joined the Kennedy administration as deputy to Paul H. Nitze, who later became secretary of the Navy, a job Mr. Bundy eventually took over. In 1964, President Johnson named him assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he served as liaison between the secretary, undersecretary and lower-level advisors and policy experts.
According to documents from the period, Mr. Bundy recommended a policy early in the Vietnam conflict aimed at stemming escalation of the war, at one point even advising the Johnson administration to negotiate a withdrawal, but his recommendations went unheeded.
In the summer of 1965, when the decision was made to escalate American involvement in Vietnam by sending in troops in large numbers, Mr. Bundy had conceded to escalation but with reservations.
According to a memorandum dated July 1, 1965, Mr. Bundy advised a "middle way" of action in South Vietnam, involving complete deployment that would bring combat strength in the region to 85,000 troops.
"This is a program to hold on for the next two months, and to test the military effectiveness of U.S. combat forces and the reaction of the Vietnamese army and people to the increasing U.S. role," reads the memo filed with the U.S. Department of State.
The program rejected withdrawal or negotiation in any form but also recommended no further escalation for the time being, because "we have not tested whether our forces can really find and hit the VC (Viet Cong)," and because "we simply do not know, and probably cannot know, whether raising the U.S. force level and combat involvement to the point where we take over much of the combat load would (1) cause the Vietnamese government and especially the army to let up; (2) create adverse popular reactions (among the Vietnamese) to our whole presence."
The memo continued, "We must also reckon the Congressional and public opinion problems of embarking now on what might appear clearly to be an open-ended ground commitment." Mr. Bundy warned that escalation could lead the U.S. "into a truly disastrous situation."
Mr. Bundy left government in 1969 to teach at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1972 to 1984, he was editor of Foreign Affairs, a publication for which he wrote several articles. In his later years, he taught part-time at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He had lived in Princeton since 1972.
In 1998, he published "A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency," which was included in the New York Times' list of notable books of that year.
Mr. Bundy is survived by his wife, Mary; sons Michael of Waltham, Mass. and Christopher of New York; daughter Carol Bundy of Cambridge, Mass.; sisters Harriet B. Belin of Cambridge and Katherine L. Auchincloss of Westwood, Mass.; and three grandchildren.
Burial and a memorial service will be held at a later date at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass.
