HENRY A. KISSINGER

PERSONAL

September 24, 1996

Dear Punch:

I was traveling when McGeorge Bundy died and therefore missed the extraordinarily unfair obituary of *The New York Times*.

McGeorge Bundy lived to be 77 years. He had a distinguished career before he served in Washington and an equally significant one afterward. Yet the *Times* obituary deals only with the five years of his government service and then only from the self-righteous point of view of a Vietnam protester, without any historical context or mention of the personal anquish to the participants in that process.

The *Times* author alleges that Bundy was kept on by Johnson largely because of his ability as a drafter of memoranda. How can he possibly know this? My impression is that Johnson kept the entire Kennedy team for reasons of continuity.

The *Times* writer dismisses Bundy's contribution to foreign policy as a heritage of Acheson's Cold War thinking. To me, Acheson's heritage is not pejorative. But in any event, what does your obituary writer recommend as an alternative? Acheson served during the Soviet Union's establishment of its Communist satellite orbit in Eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade and the Korean war. During Bundy's service the Soviets delivered a brutal Berlin ultimatum, built the Berlin Wall and exploded a fifty megaton bomb in the atmosphere. The Cold War was real; it was not invented by Acheson nor continued by Bundy as a personal idiosyncrasy.

Your writer quotes a Bundy phrase about the relationship between power and diplomacy, again in a pejorative sense. A reading of history or of most theoreticians of foreign policy would indicate that to be effective diplomacy must be accompanied by credible power. The *Times* author is surely entitled to a different point of view but I wonder whether snide comments in an obituary are the place for it.

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AND
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October 2, 1996

Dear Henry:

Thank you for your letter of September 24 which I found at my apartment upon returning from the Hamptons last weekend.

Not being an expert on the life of McGeorge Bundy, I sought help from Joe Lelyveld. Joe acknowledges that you made some valid criticisms but takes exception to the accusation that we "falsified the record." He notes that the "imperfections" you ascribe to either political bias or editorializing were actually the result of writing under extreme deadline pressure. He also notes that what may be vivid in your or my memory is "musty history" for many of the younger journalists who handled the story. (I guess what he is trying to say is that we are growing older.)

To be candid (and I would appreciate it if you would keep this to yourself), we found Mac's advance obituary to be wholly inadequate when retrieved. The Times had not been informed of his death until the afternoon and we had to start from scratch. Believe me, that is not the way it is supposed to happen but, on occasion, such things do occur.

The News Department had one reporter assigned to make calls to Harvard, another to the Ford Foundation and a third, who was the oldest among the lot, pulled it all together. It wasn't the best solution but it was all we could do at the time. The obit was worked on through the first edition and we did manage to get a number of admirers, such as Schlesinger and Auchincloss, to comment. But there is no question but that you are