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McGeorge Bundy, LL.D. '61, national security advisor during the Vietnam War, began teaching government and world affairs at Harvard in 1949. Although he lacked a doctorate, in 1953, at 34, he was named dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He defended academic freedom against the political witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy, seeming to stand on principle, writes Kai Bird in his dual biography, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (Simon & Schuster, $27.50). But "what Harvard said was not necessarily the same as what Harvard did."
Bundy's official papers as harvard's dean are closed to scholars for a period of 50 years--until the year 2003. Without access to these papers, it is difficult to judge Harvard's record on McCarthyism. But from the evidence released to date, it seems clear that the university had two policies. In public, Harvard stood simply for academic freedom. In private, however, Harvard negotiated with the FBI a much more complicated and compromised policy. Under the Pusey-Bundy regime, Harvard would not knowingly hire a communist to teach; Harvard would not spend any of its own money to provide a legal defense for faculty accused of security violations; Harvard would not fire tenured professors who took the Fifth Amendment so long as they were wholly candid with the university about their political associations; Harvard would discourage anyone from taking the Fifth Amendment; Harvard would terminate the contracts of any untenured scholars like Sigmund Diamond or Robert Bellah who refused to name names; and finally, Harvard would share information, sometimes from its own confidential personnel files, with the FBI and use confidential information from the FBI to screen its employees.
...As Robert N. Bellah put it in 1977, "The notion of Harvard as a 'bulwark against McCarthyism' was deserved only on the narrowest of grounds. No one with tenure was fired. But privately Harvard's efforts were all in the direction of cooperation, not resistance." Dean Bundy had sometimes urged his people to name names, and when they refused he required them to suffer the consequences, quietly and alone. And for that, many would never forgive him.
To be sure, only a handful of such people--like Sigmund Diamond, Robert Bellah, Leon Kamin, and Helen Deane Markham--were forced to leave Harvard. Wendell Furry survived, but only after fighting a costly legal case. Many others were forced to endure the humiliation of naming names. No one went to prison, and most made their way in the world and otherwise created new lives for themselves. So did Harvard's conduct during the trial of McCarthyism bring with it any larger costs? We cannot know, but if Harvard had adopted a policy of forthright resistance, and not quiet cooperation, this might reasonably have created a different political atmosphere.
McCarthyism and the academic community's muddled response to it may also explain why such ignorance existed in the 1960s over the nature of Vietnamese and other Asian nationalisms. How many bright Harvard students decided against a career as a scholar of East Asia after reading in the Crimson about the treatment accorded a China scholar like John King Fairbank? As Ellen W. Schrecker has argued, "Naturally, greater access to better scholarship would not by itself have prevented the Vietnam war, but there is no doubt that the legacy of McCarthyism in the academy and elsewhere did make it difficult for the government to act wisely in Asia." If so, Dean Bundy paid dearly for what seemed at the time a perfectly reasonable policy in defense of Harvard.