His laserlike intellect radiated from behind his clear-rimmed glasses with an intensity as hot as his smile was cold. Had he been half as smart, he might have been a great man. Instead, McGeorge Bundy, who died last week in Boston of a heart attack at 77, came to personify the hubris of an intellectual elite that marched America with a cool and confident brilliance into the quagmire of Vietnam.
The early '60s will be remembered as a moment when meritocracy and patrician elitism enjoyed a celebrated cohabitation, the rise and then fall of which Bundy came to symbolize. The scion...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
