While reading Sunday’s NYT Book Review, I couldn’t help but notice that McGeorge Bundy is mentioned twice, though in vastly different contexts.

Bundy is best known for his role in escalating the Vietnam War under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and it’s in this role that he’s taken to task in a letter to the editor responding to Richard Holbrooke’s review of ‘Lessons in Disaster’:

Holbrooke, in his review, remarks several times on McGeorge Bundy’s brilliance, yet it’s far past the time when people like Bundy should be described as “brilliant” or “intelligent” despite the egregious mistakes they make. Bundy’s kind of intelligence is severely limited, compartmentalized; intelligence has emotional and moral components that he lacked. It is supremely unintelligent to have so little concern for the awful human cost of your decisions, or to make only one brief visit to the war you’re helping to conduct. How can the untold numbers of dead and wounded human beings and a nation still polarized and angry over the effects of the Vietnam War be regarded as the product of an intelligent mind?

Bundy appears again in — all of places — this interesting review of ‘Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street’:

McGeorge Bundy, one of “the best and the brightest” in the Kennedy administration and by then president of the Ford Foundation, sharpened the show’s political edge by homing in on the children of the urban underclass. “Sesame Street” would be the television equivalent of Head Start, the federal child-welfare program founded by Johnson in the belief, Davis writes, that “the tyranny of America’s poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs of poor children could be met.”

Interesting that the review doesn’t say exactly what kind of political edge Bundy added, considering the fact that Sesame Street was “an urban fantasy world born of ’60s idealism,” a major part of which was opposition to the war.