Faculty Profile

McGeorge Bundy, recently made an Associate Professor, didn't receive his appointment by researching his way up the academic ladder. Instead he has worked on everything from the GOP Policy Committee to plumbing, and his career has been refreshingly non-academic.

During the last war Bundy started on intelligence work with the signal corps but soon was transferred to the staff of Admiral Kirk (now the ambassador to Russia) as a military attache. In this capacity he took part in the landings at Sicily and those at Normandy. It was in France that he received his training in the art of plumbing.

As a military attache his routine jobs amounted to sending and relaying secret dispatches and advising Kirk on Military Affairs. But he also had a few extra-curricular obligations, one of which was running an old chateau near Louvenciennes. At one point, the chateau's maintenance crew, all member of the French underground, left their jobs to take part in shearing off the locks of the town's women collaborators. Since Admiral Kirk had to get his daily shave, Bundy had to take charge of the chateau's ancient plumbing.

There were other irregularities as well. Once small arms fire suddenly broke out all over the grounds. After investigating, Bundy found that the guards, men relived from front line duty because of battle fatigue, had mistaken the chateau's decorative statues for Nazis and were shooting them full of holes.

When the war ended, Bundy left the plumbing, the pock-marked statues and military affairs, to resume the status of Junior Fellow at Harvard which he had been awarded in 1941. He did not stay for long because in 1946 he was invited to work with Henry Stimson, former secretary of War, on the later's memoirs.

The Memoires "On Active Service" came out in 1948 but Bundy stayed on in Washington as a consultant to ECA. "I never have quite known what the job was," says Bundy. "It consisted mostly in trying to get qualified economists past the Civil Service barrier by setting our requirements to fit the one man we had in mind."

That same year the Republican Party asked Bundy to join the Dewey campaign as foreign policy adviser, and he accepted. Since the opinion polls predicted a sure victory for Dewey, the GOP foreign office became an embryo State Department. Bundy and his fellow counselors fully expected to move their offices to Washington after election day and many foreign diplomats treated them as if they already had. However, they were disillusioned between five PM and five AM on their moving day. Bundy still feels that Dewey could have won with a more energetic campaign; he hopes by 1952 the GOP will have learned this lesson.

Instead of moving to Washington Bundy returned to Harvard as a lecturer in the fall of 1949 where he concentrated on international relations and party politics. Bundy's students consider him as one who "knows his stuff" but who tends toward grandiloquence. Some of them also complain about the length of his reading list, but they might as well get used to this. "If the lists are long," says Bundy, "that is intentional." He thinks the average undergraduate at Harvard is underworked, a thought "reinforced," he says, when he served as an examiner in the government generals. He frequently caries his campaign for longer reading lists into the Government Department meetings.

In the meantime Bundy keeps up his extra-curricular work by contributing regularly to the Reporter Magazine, a bi-weekly political commentary, and editing a collection of Dean Acheson's statements that will be published by Houghton Mifflin this fall. Bundy has always had plenty of contact with the practical aspects of his field, and appointment or no he will probably continue to do so.