The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms - Softcover

Bird, Kai

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684856441 ISBN 13: 9780684856445

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

"Grey is the color of truth."
So observed Mac Bundy in defending America's intervention in Vietnam. Kai Bird brilliantly captures this ambiguity in his revelatory look at Bundy and his brother William, two of the most influential policymakers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is a portrait of fiercely patriotic, brilliant and brazenly self-confident men who directed a steady escalation of a war they did not believe could be won. Bird draws on seven years of research, nearly one hundred interviews, and scores of still-classified top secret documents in a masterful reevaluation of America's actions throughout the Cold War and Vietnam.

About this title

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

About the Author:

Kai Bird is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. His other books include The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). Bird’s many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Kathmandu, Nepal, with his wife and son.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684856441
• ISBN 13: 9780684856445
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496