Amazon.com Review
This dual biography of the brothers who were top aides to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson is an outstanding study of the mindset that allowed the United States to become slowly ensnared in the Vietnam War. Both McGeorge Bundy, a national security advisor, and William Bundy, a senior official at the Pentagon and State Department, were liberal anti-Communists trying to balance American interests in Southeast Asia between what they considered the dangerous extremes of both Left and Right. They came under enormous criticism for their roles, but author Kai Bird argues that newly declassified documents "show that the Bundys and other decision-makers registered deep doubts about the American enterprise in Vietnam and did so far earlier than most historians had thought." This hardly exonerates them, in Bird's view: "They knew how badly the war was going as early as 1964-65, yet they found a way to persist in folly." Their tale didn't end in the 1960s. McGeorge Bundy, for instance, went on to head the Ford Foundation for 13 years, where he played an enormously important role in shaping modern liberalism. Bird, a Guggenheim Fellow and contributing editor to
The Nation, tells the Bundys' story with great clarity and sound judgment;
The Color of Truth is a surprisingly absorbing book.
--John Miller
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The color of truth? McGeorge Bundy is quoted as saying it's gray, but there is nothing gray about this crisply written, carefully researched dual biography of brothers, who during the Vietnam era were regarded as fascists by the protesters and wild-eyed liberals by the right wing. The gray area comes when Bird (The Chairman) looks into motives. As stellar examples of what David Halberstam ironically called "the best and the brightest," the Bundys (McGeorge as JFK's National Security adviser; William was at the Pentagon) recognized early in Kennedy's administration that an American war in Southeast Asia was folly. But both actively pursued it into the Johnson administration. Bird is a sympathetic, but not apologetic, biographer, and his portrait shows two exceptional men who parlayed brains, a knack for cajoling influential older men and impeccable family connections into successful careers both in and out of government. He comes up with no tidy explanations for why they promoted a war they morally opposed. Perhaps, he suggests, they feared appeasement (the lesson of Munich) more than disastrous involvement, or that others would do an even worse job containing the conflict. The book, for which both brothers were interviewed, covers more than Vietnam. Besides being a sharply detailed depiction of a social class that Bird all too often calls "Boston Brahmin," the book covers breaking the enemy military codes during WWII, Harvard in the 1950s, Senator McCarthy and the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis and the liberal agendas of the Great Society. This is a careful, intelligent biography of two careful, intelligent men.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
