Career
From 1945 to 1947, Bundy co-authored recently retired United States Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's third-person autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War, which was published in 1947.
In 1949, Bundy took a position at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to study Marshall Plan aid to Europe. The study group included such luminaries as Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and George Kennan. The group's deliberations were sensitive and highly secret, dealing as they did with the highly classified fact that there was a covert side to the Marshall Plan, where the CIA used certain funds to aid anti-communist groups in France and Italy.
Bundy was one of President Kennedy's "wise men" and also served as a tenured professor of government at Harvard University, despite having only a bachelor's degree and never having taken any classes in government. In 1953, Bundy was appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard at the age of thirty-four, the youngest in the school's history. An effective and popular administrator, Bundy spearheaded modernizing policy changes aimed to revamp Harvard into a class-blind, merit-based university with a reputation for stellar academics.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954. He moved into public life in 1961, becoming national security adviser in the Kennedy administration. He played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense decisions of the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administration. These included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, most controversially, the Vietnam War. From 1964 he was Chairman of the 303 Committee, responsible for coordinating government covert operations.
Bundy was a strong proponent of the Vietnam War during his tenure. He supported escalating the American involvement and the bombing of North Vietnam.
He left government in 1966 to take over as president of the Ford Foundation, a position he held until 1979.
He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, one of 20 to receive the medal "in the last 24 hours of presidency in January 1969".
He was included on the "master list" of President Richard Nixon's infamous "Enemies List".
From 1979 to 1989, he was a professor of history at New York University. He was scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation from 1990 to 1996.
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