Talk:McGeorge Bundy

What's with the bizarre first name?
I would love to see a short note of what stuff his parents were on when they gave him a last name as his first name. Grr82 (talk) 05:58, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

McGeorge Bundy Has First Name Troubles --152.94.82.117 (talk) 15:47, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
 * McGeorge was his first name, but he was commonly addressed as "Mac" rather than McGeorge.--A.S. Brown (talk) 22:14, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

POV?
This article starts good but gets bad when it comes to politics (of course);


 * He was one of Kennedy's "wise men," a noted political scientist and academic at Harvard University. He moved into public life in 1960 becoming national security advisor.  He played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defence 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.


 * Along with other government leaders during Vietnam, he has been accused of war crimes.

I'm sure he did something good under Kennedy and Johnson, his only listed accomplishments are failures. I don't know enough about this person to fix the article, but it even goes on to assert critics claims inline with historical reference. Can't or shouldn't this be seperated when dealing with biographies? Thanks for looking into it. JoeHenzi 18:19, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is where the "accused" originated from the statement, "Along with other government leaders during Vietnam, he has been accused of war crimes."

Who accused him? Telford Taylor.

And who is Telford Taylor? Well for one, in 1972, he visited Hanoi together with Joan Baez and others. He published his views in a book entitled Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, which appeared already in 1970. He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II.

I would say to use Taylor as the "accuser" the "other" in government leaders would mean ALL.

I wonder why Jane Fonda wasn't used as the "accuser" since she is at least from the same generation as the soldiers of the war and don't really think she supported the parallel of our troops conduct as that of the Nazis?

This link appears to have a lot of insight:

For instance the statement, "He spent much of the rest of his career trying to understand how he and so many others had made such a terrible mistake." The link above reveals:

A previous heckler came up to him asking, "But Mac [his nickname], you screwed it up, didn't you?" Glacial silence. Then Bundy suddenly smiled and replied: "Yes, I did. But I'm not going to waste the rest of my life feeling guilty about it."

To add some creditability without evidence the article at the link above also says, "When he died, McGeorge Bundy was working on a book about the war whose main message was that Vietnam was a terrible mistake." This was in 1996 so I also doubt the claim, "He later came to strongly regret the decision, one of the first administration members to do so."

I personally think the article is heavily biased and probably doesn't represent Bundy life very well. But it does represent his adversaries' opinion of him well, I suspect.

--SamsHere 08:59, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

What's up with his name?
Does anyone know the background to his first name?Notmyrealname (talk) 05:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Wife, kids? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.94.197.60 (talk) 19:02, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

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Errors in famous article in Foreign Affairs
The article mentions an "influential article in Foreign Affairs in 1983." The principal article was published in Spring 1982, rather than in 1983. The 4th author of that article was Gerard C. Smith, rather than Herbert Scoville. (Foreign Affairs has a minor error on their website, so you'd have to look elsewhere to verify that Smith was the 4th author. But their website correctly reports the year of the article.) The article was noteworthy because Bundy, personally, had changed his opinion. He had previously disagreed with Kennan on no-first-use, but changed his mind to agree with Kennan. Oaklandguy (talk) 10:04, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Native American ancestry?
This article is in the category "American people of Native American descent", but I am having trouble finding any sources that state this. Yohan Anthony Sunanda (talk) 10:13, Friday 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * That seems very unlikely. Bundy came from a Boston Brahmin family, which means that he was very much a WASPy American. It is possible that he might had Native American ancestors, but I have not read a single RS saying that. It was a common practice with wealthy and socially prominent American families in the 19th and 20th centuries to claim distant Native ancestry, usually with the claim that they came from an "aristocratic" Indian family as a way to improve their social standing. The implication was their ancestors had been socially notable in wherever they were living for thousands and thousands of years. Even Winston Churchill engaged in this practice, claiming that his American mother, Jenny Jerome, was descended from an "aristocratic" Iroquois family. Most of these claims are bogus. To use the example of Churchill again, he  made much of his supposed Iroquois descent, but there is no evidence that Jenny Jerome had any Indian blood in her. Anyhow, the Indians did not have an aristocracy in the way that the Europeans would understand the term, so this misunderstanding of the very basic nature of Indian society in the pre-Colombian era is further evidence of the fraudulent nature of these claims. It is possible that Bundy or somebody else in the Bundy family made such a claim, but such a claim if made would be dubious. I would delete that category. --A.S. Brown (talk) 22:22, 13 August 2020 (UTC)