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. Daniel Freeman
    December 26th, 2015 @ 2:02 pm

    They know exactly where they left their hearts. The boxes are all clearly labeled. That’s where they belong, so they’re in the right place.

  2. Finrod Felagund
    December 27th, 2015 @ 1:11 am

    I regret that I have but one upvote to give this comment.

  3. Ilion
    December 27th, 2015 @ 12:20 pm

    I’m thinking that those boxed and labeled hearts aren’t so much *theirs* as some they bought from Planned non-Parenthood.