ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 17, 1996 TAG: 9609170104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
McGeorge Bundy, a key adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, died onday at age 77.
Bundy, who was the youngest dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University when appointed by Kennedy, died at Massachusetts General Hospital of a heart attack, said Jim Rowe, a Harvard spokesman and family friend.
Bundy was Kennedy's adviser for national security affairs and then served under Johnson. He was a key player in such international incidents as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
``He was intelligent, really trustworthy. People always had confidence in Mac,'' said John Kenneth Galbraith, a Kennedy economic adviser and ambassador to India. ``The United States and the world have lost one of their senior citizens.''
Bundy supervised the staff of the National Security Council and was among the ``best and brightest,'' a group of young advisers Kennedy had called on that also included Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
He was a firm backer of the Bay of Pigs Invasion but more cautious about the Cuban Missile Crisis 18 months later.
It was Bundy who in 1962 broke the news to Kennedy while the president was still in his bathrobe and slippers: ``Mr. President, there is now hard photographic evidence that the Russians have offensive missiles in Cuba.''
``Mac was a brilliant adviser to President Kennedy and one of the ablest people I've ever met,'' said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. ``We couldn't have had the New Frontier without him.''
An early defender of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Bundy later expressed concern about the growing war.
In notes recently declassified at the Johnson Presidential Library, Bundy was quoted as saying at a Feb. 27, 1967 White House meeting that ``Our position may be truly untenable.
``Contingency planning should proceed toward possibility that we will withdraw with best possible face and defend the rest of Asia,'' he said.
Funeral arrangements for Bundy, who live in Manchester-By-the-Sea, a suburb north of Boston, could not be immediately determined.
He graduated from Yale in 1940, and served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army during World War II. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1949 and in 1953, with only a bachelor's degree, became the youngest dean of the faculty of arts and sciences there, serving until 1961.
Kennedy, a grade school classmate of Bundy at the Dexter School in the Boston suburb of Brookline, named him special assistant for national security affairs, a post in which he served until 1966.
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