A Chat With Bundy

In an interview Friday, McGeorge Bundy, a New York University history professor and former national security advisor under the Kennedy Administration, said President Bush looks "more like Eisenhower or Ford than Reagan or Nixon" in his nuclear policy and arms control negotiation.

Bundy, former dean of the faculty at Harvard, discussed his recent book, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, explaining that he "deliberately didn't address the particular choices" the upcoming administration would have to make. Bush's major problem in dealing with nuclear policy, Bundy said, would be to "address the absence of serious compromises between the president and the legislature."

Although Bundy said he was unsure of the merit of Bush's recent nomination of John G. Tower for secretary of defense, he added that he thinks the choice of Brent Scowcroft as assistant to the president for national security affairs was a good one. Scowcroft now holds the same post Bundy did under President John F. Kennedy '40.

Following the secrecy of the Reagan years, a policy of openness about national security affairs would "clear the air," Bundy said. Intense national government confidentiality about nuclear policy has always been a problem, Harvard's former dean added, noting that "things were better off before Reagan--but not very good."