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The report he wrote became a seminal document in America's escalation of the war: "The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating, and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable...There is still time to turn it around, but not much...The international prestige of the U.S. and a substantial part of our influence are directly at risk." And so a new policy, dubbed by Bundy "sustained reprisal," was born. "Well," Johnson said, "they made a believer out of you, didn't they?"
For a while after he resigned in 1966, Bundy continued to support the war. "Getting out of Vietnam is as impossible as it is undesirable," he told Johnson at a meeting of elder statesmen in late 1967. But when the elders assembled again the following March, Bundy told Johnson there had been "a significant shift" in their thinking. The meeting marked the disintegration of the cocksure knights of the cold war, and along with them America's sense of moral hegemony.
In the ensuing years, Bundy epitomized a fascinating subspecies of fallen statecraft wizards--including his brother Bill and McNamara--who seemed sentenced to wander in a purgatory where they sought to expiate their Vietnam sins and exorcise memories of being in cars surrounded by chanting protesters. "Mac is going to spend the rest of his life trying to justify his mistakes on Vietnam," commented his closest friend, Kingman Brewster, who was named president of Yale in 1963 after Kennedy talked Bundy out of accepting the job. He became president of the Ford Foundation (which in a different world would have come later, after being Secretary of State), wrote a thoughtful tome on the relationship between the atom bomb and diplomacy (with scant mention of Vietnam), and headed a Carnegie Corporation project studying nuclear proliferation.
In 1986 when Evan Thomas and I were writing The Wise Men, a history of American cold war diplomacy, Bundy told us that there was no such thing as the Establishment. If so, it was Bundy as much as anyone who brought about the end of an era in which foreign policy was entrusted to a noble club of gentlemen secure in their common outlook and bonds of trust. As his successor Walt Rostow recalled thinking at the end of the 1968 meeting of elders that Bundy helped convene, "The American establishment is dead."