The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The ‘Brilliant’ Fool McGeorge Bundy

Posted on | December 24, 2015 | 53 Comments

 

Just yesterday, in describing the decadence of the Ivy League elite, I casually mentioned McGeorge Bundy, a Yale-educated policy “expert” in the JFK/LBJ administrations who played a prominent role in creating the Vietnam War debacle:

A descendant of the Boston Lowells on his mother’s side, a product of Groton, Yale and Skull and Bones, and a Harvard dean in his early 30’s, Mr. Bundy was the very personification of what the journalist David Halberstam, in the title of his 1969 book, labeled “The Best and the Brightest”: the well-born, confident intellectuals who led the nation into the quagmire of Vietnam.
After leaving Government in 1965, Mr. Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation, serving until 1979. He was then a professor of history at New York University for 10 years. In 1990, he joined the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He was chairman of its committee on reducing the danger of nuclear war and was its scholar-in-residence at the time of his death [in 1996].
“He was a man of notable brilliance, integrity and patriotic purpose,” said the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who served in the Kennedy White House with Mr. Bundy and counted him among his oldest friends.

McGeorge Bundy was a blundering fool. This cannot be repeated often enough. The “notable brilliance” of these “confident intellectuals” is always dangerous. McGeorge Bundy was a clever exponent of bad ideas, and the fact that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was willing to praise such a fool tells you that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was also a fool. Our understanding of history is warped by the tendency of liberals to protect each other’s reputations. Merely by supporting the Democrat Party and advocating liberal policies, any prominent fool can guarantee that he will be praised by the liberals who control academia and mainstream journalism. Only when you are aware of this bias and are always vigilantly on guard against pro-Democrat propaganda, can you read history critically, separating actual facts from liberal spin. But I digress . . .

After referencing Bundy in my discussion of the decadent elite Wednesday morning, I had no thought of following up, but late Wednesday night, while doing further research on radical feminism (checking the background of a Women’s Studies professor named Susan Hartmann), I stumbled onto a blog article titled “Explaining Patriarchal Funding of Feminism.” Included there was a link to a 2004 article by Kimberly Schuld, “How the Ford Foundation Created Women’s Studies”:

Women’s Studies professor and feminist author Susan M. Hartmann credits the Ford Foundation with being a substantive force that created the feminist movement. . . . It is safe to say that without the Ford Foundation, feminism would not have been successful in gaining such a strong foothold in academia, and by extension, politics. . . .
The first [Women’s Studies] program was established at San Diego State University for the 1969-70 school year and in 1970 there were approximately 100 women’s studies courses being offered at schools across the country. By 1971, more than 600 courses were being taught and by 1978 there were 301 full-fledged programs in operation. That number more than doubled to 621 programs by 1990.
In 1971, a group of feminists approached Ford president McGeorge Bundy with a request to involve itself in the feminist movement the way it had in the Civil Rights movement, essentially, creating it out of whole cloth. The result of those early discussions was a full-fledged women’s project to fund the small number of existing women’s advocacy organizations, and also to create a whole new field within academia known as “women’s studies.” In 1972, Ford announced the first $1 million national fellowship program for “faculty and doctoral dissertation research on the role of women in society and Women’s Studies broadly construed.” A 1996 article by Heather MacDonald reported that women’s studies programs had received $36 million between 1972-1992 from Ford and other foundations.

During a two-decade period, major foundations poured an average of $1.8 million annually into Women’s Studies programs, and the man who did the most to create this tax-exempt academic feminist boondoggle was none other than “brilliant” McGeorge Bundy.

Vietnam wasn’t the only quagmire he created, and perhaps not the worst. No ordinary fool can out-blunder a Yale-educated fool.




 

Category: Education, Intellectuals, Sex Trouble

Comments

53 Responses to “The ‘Brilliant’ Fool McGeorge Bundy”

  1. Steve Skubinna
    December 24th, 2015 @ 12:49 pm

    The juxtaposition of Schlesinger and McBundy is particularly jarring, as you’d be hard pressed to find two better exemplars of the educated elite’s ability to be abysmally stupid about some very important topics.

    As for Schlesinger I have long considered him an academic whore, a man so seduced by Camelot that he abandoned any pretense of historical objectivity in favor of a religious quest dedicated to his idol JFK. In fact, all of progressiveism is best understood as a religious quest cloaked in secular language. Don’t be fooled by their pretense of scorn for religion, it’s only the hatred a cultist holds for any competing idea combined with the unspeakable fear that his belief system is the inferior.

  2. robertstacymccain
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:01 pm

    It’s interesting to me, as an ex-Democrat, the way partisanship functions to make people blind to their own selfishness. The Democrat thinks of himself as a champion of underdogs — “the little guy,” the “masses” who are supposedly oppressed by the rich and the powerful — and this self-concept of party allegiance as moral virtue has a way of shutting down the capacity for skeptical thought.

    Exactly how does an idea that can be summarized as “vote Democrat” count as moral virtue? Examined critically, the philosophy known as “liberalism” or “progressivism” is nothing but a series of arguments for why people should vote Democrat and hate Republicans. And as someone who was raised to think of Republicans as the Devil, this worldview was something I just took for granted, which is easy for Democrats to do, considering how the fields of education, journalism, book publishing and entertainment are all dominated by Democrats. Not until I was in my mid-30s did a series of events — especially including the policies of Bill Clinton, for whom I had voted in 1992 — bring to my attention the basic error of my political belief system. Most liberals are simply incapable of questioning their own worldview, and this accounts for how fools like McGeorge Bundy go through life creating disaster after disaster without ever suffering any real consequence for their failures.

  3. M. Thompson
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:11 pm

    Two disaterous ideas from one man. I wonder what else he did to mess up our country.

  4. robertstacymccain
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:25 pm

    “I wonder what else he did to mess up our country.”

    Everything he could possibly do, I’m sure. Intellectuals are nothing if not persistent.

  5. Fail Burton
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:26 pm

    It’s amazing to me that with all the bloggers and journalists in America struggling to find stories to write about, you are the only one I am aware of who has connected the dots and done the homework.

    Scratch the surface of the manifestos delivered by Black Lives Matter, the controversies killing art and entertainment in video games, SFF and comics, the kangaroo rape courts in colleges, the whining about race and gender in every movie from Harry Potter to The Martian, the weekly Twitter witchhunts getting people fired and censored across America and you see Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde and Judith Butler staring you right back in the face.

    This is a supremacist sociopathic cult riding a wave of lies about “social justice.” The challenge I have for everyone is to imagine how you would’ve viewed Nazism before its symbols became recognizable as watchwords for evil. What principles and tools of self-criticism would you have resorted to?

    The lesson here is not to watch out for Nazis, but for the tell-tale signs before evil works out its inevitable damage. A swastika is only a design; it can change shape and fly about in any new disguise it wishes.

  6. Soviet of Washington
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:45 pm

    Sounds like a (posthumous) candidate for the Gorelick prize for disasters created.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:51 pm

    The Ford Foundation…Henry Ford should have put in his will that all his money be pilled up and then cremated his corpse on top of it.

  8. robertstacymccain
    December 24th, 2015 @ 1:57 pm

    “It’s amazing to me that with all the bloggers and journalists in America struggling to find stories to write about, you are the only one I am aware of who has connected the dots and done the homework.”

    Almost as if someone said, “You’d have to be crazy to spend two years researching radical feminism” — and that meant it had to be me.

  9. CrustyB
    December 24th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    “Idol of idiot-worshippers.” -Shakespeare

  10. DeadMessenger
    December 24th, 2015 @ 3:14 pm

    You might be crazy, but at least you’re not an academe.

  11. Steve Skubinna
    December 24th, 2015 @ 4:01 pm

    A later generation has Jamie Gorelick, a truly horrifyingly inept mover and shaker.

  12. NeoWayland
    December 24th, 2015 @ 4:43 pm

    With all due respect, how does “vote Republican” count as moral virtue?

    This is an easy shot right now because the national Republican leadership hasn’t done their job in years. But even beyond that, why does the label Republican make anyone special?

    I think the vice or virtue is in the person and not the label.

    I think the parties should be abolished.

  13. theBuckWheat
    December 24th, 2015 @ 5:00 pm

    A lot of the funding for the left comes from tax-exempt foundations. Because they only have to give away 5% of their endowment every year, as long as the investment manger of a foundation can earn more than that amount, the foundation has eternal life to fund whatever anti-liberty, anti-freedom causes it chooses. Further, foundations don’t have customers that can force it to change its behavior by boycotts or shareholders who can agitate via proxy fights for revised policies. Foundations also control a surprising percent of our GDP in their investment portfolios, free of tax on gains.

    The answer for this is simple: raise the 5% limit to something north of 7%. This would cause foundations to spend their endowments faster than they can earn through investment, it would flush more of the endowment out into the economy where it will raise tax revenue, and it will bring them eventual mortality.

  14. theBuckWheat
    December 24th, 2015 @ 5:02 pm

    See DiscoverTheNetworks.com for a graphical view of the relationships based on public filings.

  15. Fail Burton
    December 24th, 2015 @ 6:30 pm

    It’s weird to me because you’ve laid the groundwork and now all other journalists have to do is read a half-dozen foundational texts. How hard is that? After that it’s the grammar of a language so to speak and the goals and motivations of this nonsense become immediately transparent. When Anita Sarkeesian uses a word like “performance” – boom! It’s like opening a can of sardines. I’ve heard enough about Leftism and liberalism and Cultural Marxism. One is never going to get anywhere chasing that ghost; it’s just too generic. How does one go after Nazis by calling them “socialists”? The easy answer is you can’t.

  16. Steve Skubinna
    December 24th, 2015 @ 6:42 pm

    Odd. Where do you see anyone claiming “Vote Republican” is a moral virtue?

  17. Mike G.
    December 24th, 2015 @ 7:12 pm

    OT, but what the heck.

    The ultimate definition of trust is two cannibals performing oral sex on each other.

    Okay, I thoroughly denounce myself for that.

  18. NeoWayland
    December 24th, 2015 @ 7:29 pm

    It certainly hasn’t been lately.

    But if you’re a Republican telling people that “Democrats are bad because…” and they should vote Republican, you’re implying it.

    Much of the difficulty comes from the party system itself. When there are only two practical choices, over time the party staff and leadership focus on preserving the party as an institution, not on what the voters want.

  19. Wombat_socho
    December 24th, 2015 @ 7:48 pm

    You may be inferring that from what RSM wrote, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t implying that.

  20. NeoWayland
    December 24th, 2015 @ 8:35 pm

    I know it’s an iffy issue, an uppity outsider saying that the brand name has problems.

    The reason I found this site to begin with is because one of my political groups had pretty much had the rug pulled out from under it by the John McCain organization. I was looking for alternatives.

    John McCain is considered a respected elder Republican leader. He was a Presidential candidate. Now, what virtue does this man derive from being Republican? What part of that gives him the moral authority to criticize Democrats?

  21. NeoWayland
    December 24th, 2015 @ 8:42 pm

    Ted Cruz is the only practical candidate I trust. And he did it by defying the leadership and showing character.

    It’s one reason I don’t like group labels. Everyone gets tossed in, good and bad. Sometimes the reputation outlives the quality of the label.

    It’s the parity test again. If it’s wrong for Democrats to tar Republicans just because, it’s equally wrong for Republicans to tar Democrats.

    Otherwise, what’s the difference?

  22. Finrod Felagund
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:37 pm

    I like to say that while around half the Republicans are unworthy of our political support, pretty much all the Democrats are unworthy.

    This is why voting in primaries is important. Voting in the general to keep Democrats out is important, but only by voting in the primaries can we purge the GOP of its idiots.

  23. Finrod Felagund
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:39 pm

    Given that our generous host refers to John McCain as “crazy cousin John”, you really aren’t that far off from most of the rest of us.

  24. Quartermaster
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:55 pm

    The manner in which you try to make things about you, then fain virtue truly makes your oddity breathtaking. Attempts at virtue “signaling” doesn’t reflect well on you. I doubt you care, however.

  25. Quartermaster
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:55 pm

    RSM wasn’t, but you know Neo, alas.

  26. Quartermaster
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:57 pm

    You know how the bumbling elites are. If they fail, they ask for more money so they can try harder. They usually just fail harder, but their hearts are in the right place so that has to count for something, I suppose.

  27. Quartermaster
    December 24th, 2015 @ 11:59 pm

    That’s one of the few things Horowitz has done that’s truly useful. It almost makes up for publishing that leftard fool Dershowitz.

  28. Phil_McG
    December 25th, 2015 @ 3:55 am

    Mr McCain, there might be a book in this topic “The Elite Who Are Destroying America”.

    Merry Christmas.

  29. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 6:47 am

    It’s a natural blind spot. “‘Group A’ is better than ‘Group B’ and I’m a proud member of ‘Group A.'”

    RSM does an amazing job pointing out what certain people do and say.

    But I disagree with RSM that just because someone shares a label with someone else, they share their vices and virtues BECAUSE of that label. John McCain is a lousy example of a conservative and a Republican. So was Evan Mecham. Neither of them matches up to Barry Goldwater. Yet all three have the label.

  30. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 6:55 am

    “I think the vice or virtue is in the person and not the label.

    How is that making things about me?

    You illustrate exactly this point so very well. You’d be cheering me along if this point didn’t strike close to home.

    Are there Democrat scumbag politicos? Absolutely, and keelhauling would be too good for some of them.

    Are there Republican scumbag politicos? Absolutely, etc.

    It’s not the labels Democrat or Republicans that make them villians (politicos, maybe). It’s what they individually do and say.

    Maybe we should stop judging on labels and focus on character.

  31. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 7:04 am

    In some respects I am very much like conservatives.

    And I have personal reasons for disliking and distrusting the dislustrious United States Senator from my state,

    Yes, that’s a word now.

  32. Ilion
    December 25th, 2015 @ 8:47 am

    The problem with the simple-minded slogan, “Vote the man, not the party” is that when you vote for the man, you *are* voting for the party.

  33. Ilion
    December 25th, 2015 @ 8:48 am

    Well, they *say* their hearts are in the right places.

  34. Dana
    December 25th, 2015 @ 12:55 pm

    As noted by Mr Halberstam, Mr Bundy’s brilliance was noted at Yale, with the expression sic transit gloria Bundy.

    The problem with Mr Bundy, his brother William, Robert McNamara and the rest of the Best and the Brightest, was a thoroughly locked in egocentrism: while they were what passed for liberals in the 1960s, they really had no concept that no everybody thought the way that they did.

    Hence the policy of “rolling thunder,” the notion that a gradually escalating bombing campaign would bring North Vietnam to the negotiating table, because the brilliant minds formulating President Johnson’s Vietnam policy thought that was how they would react to such a thing: once the potential gains of conquering South Vietnam failed to outweigh the costs to North Vietnam of that war, why of course the Communists would quit. They weren’t accountants, but they thought like accountants.

    If I remember the book accurately enough, Sam Rayburn reportedly said about all of the brilliant men President Kennedy was assembling for his staff, that he’d feel better if one of them had just run for sheriff sometime in the past. With that remark, Speaker Rayburn got to the heart of the problem: these brilliant men not only had nothing in common with ordinary Americans, but had never had to interact with them and learn what the common man wanted and needed.

  35. Dana
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:01 pm

    I think that this statement is very close to the truth, but misses a very important point: the liberal leadership are, themselves, part of the wealthy and powerful elite, and don’t really understand how the masses they purport to represent actually think and behave.

    I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the arguments from leftists that this new government program would cost the average taxpayer just $3.72 a week, which is really nothing . . . until you realize that that $3.72 is a gallon of milk which now can’t be provided for their children. The people to whom that $3.72 is really inconsequential believe that they are trying to do good for the people to whom $3.72 is consequential, without ever understanding what that $3.72 means.

  36. Matt_SE
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:01 pm

    “At some point, I think endowments have enough money.” – paraphrasing Obama

  37. Matt_SE
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:08 pm

    It seems to take big events to shake the faithful. I’m reminded of Whittaker Chamber’s account of the effect the exposure of the Nazi-Soviet pact had on American Communists.

    That event hurt their organization more than anything the political right did, and is itself reminiscent of the Obama era.

  38. Matt_SE
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:12 pm

    That’s why you’re a libertarian and I’m a conservative.
    I doubt most people will expend the effort to evaluate individual candidates on their merits. If not, then it’s better to have a party which stands as an ideological proxy.

  39. Matt_SE
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:15 pm

    The GOPe knows this, which is why they spend most of their energy behind the scenes in rigging the primaries.

    “Sitting it out” hasn’t cleaned the slates of our deadwood, corrupt incumbents. It’s time for the nuclear option of voting in the Democrat for ONE cycle. Or, if you can’t handle that, just vote 3rd party…it will have the same effect, probably.

  40. Matt_SE
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:18 pm

    The Ford Foundation did LOTS of damage to the USA. Considering what kind of person Ford was, I’m not sure if it was infiltrated and taken over, or if it was always like that.

    It was the 20th century version of the Tides Foundation.

  41. Finrod Felagund
    December 25th, 2015 @ 1:29 pm

    The root of the problem is the first-past-the-post voting system that we use. When you have that kind of voting system, it pretty much forces everyone into one of two parties, and you’re stuck with the side that better represents your views. Trying to form and popularize a third party will, due to the voting system, diminish the one of the top two parties that better represents your views and promotes the one that doesn’t, thus being strongly counterproductive.

    If you don’t like the two-party system, change the voting system. My personal recommendation is approval voting, which has the advantages of not punishing voting for third parties, being simple enough that you can explain it to your grandmother in 12 words or less, and allowing for meaningful protest votes (simply voting no on every candidate).

  42. Finrod Felagund
    December 25th, 2015 @ 3:35 pm

    Wasn’t there a road to Somewhere that was paved with good intentions?

  43. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 4:47 pm

    Actually libertarians don’t want to mess with government and we don’t want government to mess with us.

    If you don’t have the time to evaluate the individual candidates, it’s a pretty good bet that there’s too much government.

  44. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 4:49 pm

    *grins*

    One of my favorite YouTubers, CGP Grey, has a video on first past the post voting.

    You can also watch his other videos on voting. It’s worth your time.

  45. Finrod Felagund
    December 25th, 2015 @ 4:55 pm

    BTW on Disqus you don’t have to paste in the HTML code for youtube videos, just paste in the url and Disqus will automagically embed it for you.

  46. NeoWayland
    December 25th, 2015 @ 5:34 pm

    I figured that out.

    I’m so used to working with iframes.

  47. mole
    December 25th, 2015 @ 8:52 pm

    That’s probably the key, they will never themselves suffer from the failures of their ideas.
    there will always be a core group who will not allow them to ‘fall’ as they deserve, instead they end up as ‘professors’, board members for a foundation, or a similar highly paid and prestigious position.

  48. mole
    December 25th, 2015 @ 8:58 pm

    An important point, all foundations should have a defined life span, and be wound up. The number of ‘trustafarians” hanging around the zombie foundations is surprisingly large.

  49. HouseofSuffering
    December 26th, 2015 @ 4:17 am

    It’s called Pennsylvania Avenue, as I recall.

  50. Rick Caird
    December 26th, 2015 @ 1:39 pm

    The first university that goes ahead and dissolves its “black studies” and “women’s studies” will start an unstoppable trend. Both of those departments were started by those fomenting problems and both those departments continue fomenting problems for the administration. Worse, the perform no academically useful function and produce useless majors. The sooner they are gone, the better.