The President's Men; 4; McGeorge Bundy

The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. Behind every president is a group of men who advise the chief executive and carry out his policies. Handpicked, they serve at his pleasure, and in turn, they help run the national government. Cabinet members, special assistants, agency heads. Collectively, they are known as the President's Men. This is a series of programs dealing with some of those President Johnson has selected as his men. They discuss with reporter Paul Niven, their function, their thoughts, and their aims.

Tonight, Mick George Bundy, who has special assistant for national security affairs, has been the personal foreign relations adviser to two presidents. Within the White House is a small group of men who work directly for the president, who see him more often than cabinet members, who on occasion have more influence with him. Since the time of Washington, presidents have always had personal advisers, but it was not until Franklin Roosevelt took over the White House that these staff men were elevated to formal status and given the title Presidential Assistance. Every president since is carried on with the system. No one knows better the role of an assistant than Mick George Bundy, a 46-year-old former Harvard dean who is completing five years as special assistant for national security affairs. That title scarcely conveys his importance. On the contrary, he has also been described as dean of the world and manager of the process

of decision. His name is as much identified with the foreign policy of this country during the past five years as those of Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara. With a small staff and a so-called situation room in the White House basement, Bundy serves as the funnel for foreign policy, fact, and opinion coming in to the president from defense and state and a wide variety of other sources. Presidential advisers always insist that they do not make decisions, but they do decide what decisions the president must make, considering the competing demands on the time and attention of the chief executive, that function alone is enormously important. Bundy has served two presidents. Though he was a Republican in his pre-White House days, it was John Kennedy who brought him to Washington. Together they tasted failure in the Bay of Pigs Fiasco and shared success in the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear test band treaty. After the assassination, when the dead president and the new president were flown back from

Bellas, Bundy was at the airport with a dispatch case in his hand, a symbol of the continuity of government. The continuity has been preserved in the Johnson administration with Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy advising the president on foreign policy. President Johnson is called Bundy invaluable and has sent him on important missions to Vietnam as the bombing of the North began to the Dominican Republic after the coup to television studios and college campuses to defend the administration's foreign policy. Now Bundy is leaving his post to become president of the Ford Foundation, but he's agreed to remain available to do occasional chores for the president, and no one will be surprised if one day he returns to Washington. Mr. Bundy, if you were now going back to Harvard to teach government again, would your lectures be much changed as a result of your five years experience here? I have thought a little bit about going back into teaching, and I still hope that one day I may have that chance, Mr. Nevin, but I must say that I think it would be difficult

to do it now. When I was teaching at Harvard before coming to work in Washington, we spent a good deal of the time working on very immediate contemporary issues. I was free then to express my views and to comment on immediate and recent events in a way that I would hardly be free to do now, so I think there is a certain difficulty about going straight back to teaching, and that's one of the reasons I'm not. But teaching political science in the abstract, have you had concepts of decision-making and government, other facets of government changed a great deal as a result of your experience here? No, I don't think so. I think that there is no major area of the subject of American foreign policy that I would treat in a drastically different way, and no major part of the process of making decisions about which I've learned something that would have been wholly foreign

to me five years ago. Of course, you've had government experience before you came into this post, but when you come into the White House full-time, isn't the great deal that surprises you? No, I don't think so. There is an enormous difference between watching what happens in the government and having a continuing part of it, and there is, when you move into the White House for some considerable time, a certain feeling of awe and astonishment that you should be in a place so full of American history and so full of importance for all of us as the White House is. Besides advising the President, which of course you sometimes do, it is your duty to get to him a great deal of opinion with some of which you disagree, and you've been praised for your fairness and summarizing opinion with which you disagree. Is this difficult to

do? Is it difficult to stand up and make a case that you don't agree with at all? Well you have to be careful about it, and one is constantly beset by the temptation to state the other man's views in one's own way rather than in his way. I think one can exaggerate the importance that any one individual has in making sure that information gets to the President. Ours has been more a job of trying to help limit and manage the flow so that the President gets in a reasonable compass all the things that do press in upon him. But the truth is that the two presidents I've worked for were both men of President Johnson, his President Kennedy was a man of very great curiosity, a man eager to know anything relevant to the discharge of his duties to the work he wanted to get done as President, and therefore there has not been a feeling that if one didn't get something

to the President, he wouldn't hear about it. The President's office, that Oval Office in the West Wing, is the most powerful vacuum cleaner for information, I think perhaps in the world, and when a man chooses to use the office as President Johnson and President Kennedy chosen to use it, the information tends to get into the President's hands. But there are only a certain amount of, a certain number of hours in any man's day and in the middle of a complex foreign policy problem, isn't it very difficult to ensure that every point of view and everything he needs to know gets there? Well, it's certainly important to try to pay attention to all the different kinds of information that are needed and it in a very fast moving situation that can be quite hard work. But I would repeat that the pressure are people who think they have something

that the President ought to know, to get that information to the President is very great, and ours is more a problem of sorting and briefing and ordering the information than it going out to get it. Mr. Sorensen says that one or two of the President's advisors, he does not name you, became much more effective once they learn cheerfully to accept presidential decisions overruling their own points of view. When you first start and the President makes a decision overruling of your own strong feeling, do you go home a little blue or do you get used to this and feel it's his responsibility? I gave him every side and that's it. I have never had any particular trouble distinguishing between my role and the President's role, and I, both President Kennedy and President Johnson in different ways have been eager to know the views of those with whom they were working and eager to keep the argument open

right up to the moment of decision. Neither of them has expected the argument to be continued after the decision, and that seems to me the right way to go about it. I must say I don't recall any decision of President Kennedy or President Johnson with which I had the kind of passionate disagreement that would lead one to either to Salkin-Won's Tand or perhaps to leave. Nothing of that sort has happened. Your job has been described as keeping the President's alternatives open as long as possible. Can you generalize about the moment when the doors have to be closed and the decision has taken it? No, you can. There are a few things that present or rather flat definite deadlines. One thing, for example, of stated occasions for major speeches, the State of the Union speech, there are things in the legislative year that forced the moment of decision. President's budget has to go up at a given time. The President's

proposals for legislation, while they're not fixed by a particular date, should nevertheless go as early as possible in the session, and that puts a constraint of time. Then, of course, in a rapidly changing international situation, you sometimes have moments where you have to make an immediate decision. A parliamentary situation in the General Assembly or in the Security Council can require a decision almost in a matter of minutes over the telephone, so that Ambassador Stevenson or Ambassador Goldberg could be confident that he was acting in the way in which the President would want in a situation in which some action to vote yes to vote no to abstain was required. The larger questions don't have this kind of immediate pressure requiring immediate decision, in most cases. In that respect, the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962, was an exception in that there, the President did wish to make

his decision and to make it public in its broad outline before there was general international knowledge of what the Soviets were doing, and that gave him only a very few days in which to make some very large decisions. One account of the crisis gives a breakdown of a head count around the table, a nine in favor of this course, three in favor of that, and so on. Do you often have a feeling that the President is counting heads in the National Security Council or an ad hoc committee? No, I don't. I don't think that presidents make their decisions in terms of a head count, and I do think they're concerned to know what the arguments are and what the main strands of both opinion and a feeling may be, opinions of this kind require not only an understanding of the issues, and one way of getting

them is to hear men of contrasting views, getting that understanding, and they also require an awareness of what the political forces within this country will be, and also in other countries. Secretary of State is usually the man to whom a President will turn for an appreciation of the thinking of other countries, although often there is useful intelligence information from other channels on that point too, and then the President needs to know whether his political advisors, his congressional colleagues, his military associates have sharply different views because those will be reflected in the thinking of the country as a whole, but a head counting no. And I might add that most of the time when I see accounts of this group thinking this and another group feeling the other, I find that they are badly simplified. Moreover, in really tough cases, Cuban Missile Crisis was certainly one of them.

Thoughtful men are not likely to live with these issues without modifying their opinions in one way or another as the discussion proceeds. And my own feeling about that week is that one of the good things about it was that there was a very conscious effort made to keep the alternatives open and to keep the different possibilities under full examination right up until the moment when the President made his own final clear decision. When they different alternatives, including invasion and quarantine were being weighed, you never felt when you were called upon that you were about to vote or that votes were being counted. It's about, you've been increasingly identified in public with the Vietnam policy and there have been an eloquent advocate of it. May I ask, sir, when the bombings began early in the year and about the time you were in

Saigon, was it not generally felt in the administration that they would be a result by this time? That there would be results in terms of a willingness of the other side to come to a conference. Wasn't that the hope when the rage was started? It's always difficult to sort out all the elements in the thinking of a government as it makes a difficult and important decision. I myself do not think that we have ever been of the view that there would necessarily be a prompt move to the peace table either in response to our air tanks on North Vietnam or in response to the very substantial build up of ground and air forces in South Vietnam. The government in Hanoi has made a very great effort and a series of very determined decisions about its intent to bring

about a communist takeover in South Vietnam. I at least, and I think the President have never supposed that it was going to be an easy or short business to bring that government to change its position. Until and unless it does, it's hard to see, especially in the light of the very entrance and statements which continually come from Hanoi, how this matter can be moved from the battlefield to the peace table. Given the mutually exclusive character of the position of the two sides now, the communist saying that the Americans must leave and that the country must be governed in accord with the National Liberation Front Program are reiteration that we determined to keep a freed independent South Vietnam. What is there to talk about in the

conference if we get there? Well, there are great many things to be talked about. If there is a readiness on the part of the communists to work toward arrangements which do not guarantee a takeover on their terms, it is the position of the United States firmly held and repeatedly expressed that what we want is simply to find a way by which there can be effective guarantees of the right of choice by the people of South Vietnam of the way in which they wish to live in the kind of society and political organization under which they wish to live. The arrangements put forward, the proposals put forward, the conditions stated as the only acceptable basis for negotiation on

the other side are conditions carefully designed to ensure that the future of South Vietnam shall be communist. What we want is that the future of South Vietnam shall be settled by the South Vietnamese. If that is really the intent of Hanoi too, then there is a great deal to be discussed. How do you get there? How do you move from the high level of military action which characterizes the situation there now, to a lower level, to a ceasefire, to arrangements in which both sides can have confidence for the expression of the will of the people of South Vietnam. And for guarantees that when that will is expressed, it will be respected by all of the neighbors of South Vietnam and by all of the powers concerned. That's very long, hard, important diplomatic work. It's quite true that until there is a readiness to engage in that work, there is not a real prospect that we cannot say that Hanoi is ready to move from fighting to talking. We are.

What about public opinion in this country, Mr. Bundy, is the volume and the quality of dissent about what you would expect in a situation of this kind? Well, this is each situation in these respects is in a way a new situation. But I believe it has been true that at critical turning points in our relations with the communist world in the last 20 years, American opinion has in the main been strong in its support of a policy which combines firmness with a constant readiness to find any honorable, peaceful solution. This is true in the first years after the war in Europe. It was true in Korea. It was true in the new Berlin crisis of the 50s that had been true in Cuba. I think it's true now in Vietnam. It is also true that at each stage,

throughout this 20 year period, there has been a section of opinion which would take a more drastic and more energetic and perhaps more completely military line and a smaller but perhaps also a more vocal section of opinion which would pull back somewhat and which would wish that the matter did not have the elements of danger and difficulty which confrontation with communist pressure does sometimes bring. The counter-reaction is troubling some civil libertarians, for instance, a Gallup poll saying that showing that one in three of those polls believe that people shouldn't be allowed to demonstrate on Vietnam. Do you ever feel that the administration in its vigorous defense of what it clearly considers to be a vitally important policy

has overstated in its case? I think the administration has tried to make be guided by two principles and has been so guided. One is that, of course, all Americans have a right to express their opinions, to register their protest or to argue their case and the other principle is that the administration has the same right. I don't really think that people who are engaged in very strong criticism of the administration should cry foul if they receive a little criticism and return and I certainly would be sorry to believe that my colleagues in the university world could dish it out and couldn't take it, Mr. Nevin. I do not believe there has been any substantial amount of persecution. I'm surely convinced myself that there ought not to be that we are strong enough to tolerate violent differences of opinion. It's my impression that worst things were said about this administration from the right in 1964 than have been said about

it from the left in 1965 and the administration is quite capable of taking care of itself and all that I would say as one citizen is that I don't think people who engage in protest and in argument and in efforts of political pressure and the matter in which feelings do run high should be surprised if they arouse some resentment. One more question, sir. There's been controversy in this administration as in previous ones and under both the presence you shared is to how much secrecy a government is entitled to in negotiating with foreign governments. Do you agree with Churchill and open-covenant secretly arrived at or do you agree with those Americans who demand that all correspondents with heads of foreign government be made public at once? Leslie, we'd be taken and led up the garden path by Wiley Foreigners. Well I would agree much more with Sir Winston than with the unidentified American critics that you speak of. I don't think you

can conduct all your business every day-to-day message by putting it out to the press at the same moment that you communicate it to a foreign diplomat over to a foreign head of government. That prevents the very kind of candidate exchange since that is necessary in many, perhaps most cases for understanding or for agreement because foreigners have problems of political statement and expression. So do we? It's just a natural part of diplomacy that a large share of its preliminaries should be private. I don't think that a democratic state can have secret agreements except in the rarest and most extraordinary circumstances on major policy issues. You can and do have secret understandings with countries in which you're in

friendly association. For example about the sharing of intelligence or about assignments of military responsibility. Many of the plans of NATO defense for example are quite properly highly classified and ought not to be discussed in public. Well when it was known that President Kennedy had had correspondence with Russia but refused to publish it, suspicions immediately rose in charges of the price of secret agreements. How do you avoid these suspicions? Well you could publish every one of President Kennedy's exchanges with Chairman Khrushchev and still not be able to answer the question that there must be something else. And as I recall it, there was great controversy of this kind over the y'all to meeting and the y'all to papers. And finally a very large number of volumes, this all happened 10 to 12 years ago, were printed. Most of them of extraordinary, extraordinarily boring character. And while the controversy gradually died away,

you can still find a great many people who think there must be something else that wasn't in those papers. Have public and congressional understanding of the subtleties of foreign affairs increased any? Oh yes I think so. I think the American people have a much wider and deeper general understanding of international affairs today than they had 25 years ago say in 1940. And as a matter of fact, my own impression, Mr. Niven, is that there is a persistent lag in the understanding by so-called experts or by government officials of the degree of public understanding of the principle realities of international affairs. I think that in each case the experts are tempted, and I speak also of some of the so-called political experts,

even some in the Congress, are tempted to judge a new set of events by what the public reaction was to a related set of events 10 or 12 years earlier. Whereas the public itself moves on. I use thinking by any chance in particular of the President Kennedy's and then President Johnson's desire to build bridges in eastern Europe and the American University speech at East West relations generally. Do you think that the Congress is behind public opinion and sensing a change in this area? Well I don't think even someone who's on a very short term in the executive branch ought to engage in sweeping judgments on the Congress, Mr. Niven. I was trying to avoid just that and of course there are very many varieties of opinion on the Hill with respect to the ways and means of working on East West relations in the future. No, I don't want to say that I think the Congress is out of step with the people on this issue.

I think it's more complex than that. Sir, on your return to private life you had to give some advice to someone who was coming into a post such as yours. Is there anything that occurs to you that would be particularly sage? Every time you agree to an interview you're a luxury to regret it. Thank you Mr. Bundy. Next week, Lawrence F. O'Brien, the Postmaster General and former Special Assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.