McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966.

Despite his career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

[1] His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a prominent attorney in Boston serving as a clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his younger days.

At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; thus, Bundy would never earn a doctorate.

On 6 June 1944, as an aide to Admiral Kirk, Bundy witnessed first-hand the Operation Overlord landings from the deck of the cruiser USS Augusta.

[2] After Dewey's defeat, Bundy became a political analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he studied Marshall Plan aid to Europe.

An effective and popular administrator, Bundy led policy changes intended to develop Harvard as a class-blind, merit-based university with a reputation for stellar academics.

At the first meeting of the National Security Council under Kennedy, Bundy was told the four areas of worry were Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam.

He supported escalating United States involvement, including commitment of hundreds of thousands of ground troops and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965.

According to Kai Bird, Bundy and other advisors well understood the risk but proceeded with these actions largely because of domestic politics, rather than believing that the US had a realistic chance of victory in this war.

[33] On 22 November 1963, Bundy was at his office in Washington when he received a telephone call from the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara telling him that Kennedy had just been assassinated while visiting Dallas, Texas.

"[38] Johnson was annoyed by Bundy's habit, which started when Kennedy was president, of popping in and out of the Oval Office as it suited him, and asked him to stick to a strict schedule.

"[40] Bundy advised replacing Harkins with General William Westmoreland, saying Vietnam is "much too important to be decided by Bob McNamara's reluctance to offend Max Taylor, saying that Johnson had the power "to give him a direct order to do what in his heart he knows he should.

"[41] Johnson distrusted Bundy because of his family's inherited wealth and his elite status as a product of Ivy League universities, and much preferred McNamara who only became rich as an executive with the Ford Motor Company and had only attended Harvard Business School.

[41] For his part, Bundy found many of Johnson's mannerisms highly offensive such as his practice of exposing his penis to prove that he was well endowed and refusing to close the bathroom door when he was using the toilet.

", Bundy emerged as Ball's leading critic and offered Johnson a detailed memo arguing there was no comparison between the French and American wars in Vietnam.

[44] In a cable to Maxwell Taylor, the ambassador in Saigon, Johnson gave domestic reasons why he would not bomb North Vietnam at present, saying he was to introduce his Great Society reforms soon, complaining about conservative Republicans and Democrats that: "They hate this stuff, they don't want to help the poor and the Negroes, but they're afraid to be against it at a time like this when there's all this prosperity.

[49] Upon his return to Washington, Bundy in a memo to the president wrote: "The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable-probably not in a matter of weeks or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so.

[52] Bundy told the president he should create a multi-billion dollar Southeast Asia Development Corporation that would build an enormous dam on the Mekong River which he wrote would be "bigger and more imaginative than the TVA and a lot tougher to do".

[55] Subsequently, Bundy accepted a challenge from George McTurnan Kahin, a Cornell University professor who specialized in Southeast Asia, for a public debate to be televised live on 15 May 1965.

[56] One of the debate's organizers, Barry Commoner, a biologist at the University of Washington, stated that Bundy might give other professors bad marks for their letters, but he "has turned in a terrible record on attendance".

[58] On 21 June 1965, the television debate was aired live under the title Vietnam Dialogue: Mr. Bundy and the Professors with Eric Sevareid as the moderator.

[60] Though Johnson kept changing his mind about whatever to sack Bundy, he could see his time at the White House was quite limited, and he contacted Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard asking if he could return to academia.

[67] Bundy had difficult relations with Johnson by this point, but he felt it was his patriotic duty as an American to leave government service in a manner that did not embarrass the president.

[67] Furthermore, the Ford Foundation had an endowment of $200 million to be spent annually, making it the world's biggest charity, which appealed to Bundy, as it allow him to maintain that he was still engaged in important work.

[67] Through Bundy had discussed his interest in the Ford Foundation with Johnson previously, when the president learned from reading the New York Times that the offer had been made, he was notably angry.

"[71] After testifying before the Church Committee in 1975, Bundy issued a statement: "As far as I ever knew, or know now, no one in the White House or at the Cabinet level ever gave any approval of any kind to any CIA effort to assassinate anyone."

Bundy added: "I told the committee in particular that it is wholly inconsistent with what I know of President Kennedy and his brother Robert that either of them would have given any such order or authorization or consent to anyone through any channel.

During this period, he helped found the group known as the "Gang of Four," whose other members were George F. Kennan, Robert McNamara and Gerard Smith; together they spoke and wrote about American nuclear policies.

They published an influential 1983 Foreign Affairs article that proposed ending the US policy of "first use of nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe".