When the war ended Bundy, who married the daughter of future Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1943, completed law school. Bundy practiced law for three years before joining the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1950
When the war ended Bundy, who married the daughter of future Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1943, completed law school. Bundy practiced law for three years before joining the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1950. Between 1953 and 1955 he successfully weathered charges by Senator Joseph McCarthy that he had contributed to the defense fund of Carnegie Corporation official Alger W. Hiss, accused of spying for the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
In 1956 Bundy became deputy assistant director of intelligence, a position he held until 1960. In 1956 he recommended that the United States assist the anticommunist government of President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vientam (RVN, South Vietnam), a decision that tied successive American administrations to supporting the RVN against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, North Vietnam).
Appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense in 1961, that fall Bundy recommended that President John F. Kennedy deploy U.S. troops to South Vietnam. After three months as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, in February 1964 Bundy became President Lyndon B. Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and an influential policymaker on Vietnam. By 1964 Bundy privately doubted the value and wisdom of further long-term U.S. commitments to the RVN but publicly favored a strong line. In August 1964 he helped to draft the congressional Tonkin Gulf Resolution, granting Johnson virtually unlimited authority to use force in Vietnam. Bundy nonetheless urged—somewhat unavailingly—that besides fighting 