William Putnam Bundy (September 24, 1917 – October 6, 2000) was an American attorney and analyst with the CIA. Bundy served as a foreign affairs advisor to both presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He had key roles in planning the Vietnam War, serving as deputy to Paul Nitze at Defense under Kennedy and as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Johnson.
After leaving government service in 1969, Bundy served as a historian of foreign affairs, teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Princeton University, from 1972 to his death. His book A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998) is considered his most important work.
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Early life and education
Born in 1917 and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, he came from a family long involved in Republican politics. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, served as an assistant secretary of state to Colonel Henry L. Stimson beginning in 1931, and later as his special assistant on atomic matters when Stimson was Secretary of War under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bundy as a diplomat also helped implement the Marshall Plan. Bill was raised in a highly accomplished, highly intellectual family, with a brother McGeorge Bundy who was two years younger.
After attending Groton School and Yale University (where he was one of the first presidents of the Yale Political Union and a member of Skull and Bones), Bundy entered Harvard Law School. During World War II, he left to join the Army Signal Corps. In August 1943 he led the nine-man 6813th Signals Security Detachment to the UK secret code breaking Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He and six other cryptanalysts worked in Hut 6 and the two translators worked in Hut 3. They fitted in well and he later described his time there as "the most satisfying of my career."