<em>War serves to provide a definitive answer to a dispute. War may kill many people in a short time but a bad peace will kill more and worse destroy more lives. It is just a slower evil. Nations or elements in nations are experiments. Conflicting idealologies fight for supremacy and when that fight reaches a stalemate war is the only way to break it without decades of slow simmering conflict that often creates the most violent outbursts and is most typically associated with genocide. Hatreds boil for too long and what happens when they boil over is often the worst evils attributed to war. Ironically they are really the evils of a bad peace. A peace kept too long when a short violent episode could have resolved the matter and real peace developed.</em>
Kennedy’s close advisers believed that Eisenhower’s foreign policy establishment was stultified, slow moving, overly reliant on brinksmanship and massive retaliation, and complacent. Their fear was that after eight years, the State Department would be unable to implement their new international vision. The new President was determined to control foreign policy through a young and energetic White House and NSC staffers who would make their own informal contacts within the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Furthermore, Kennedy thought that Eisenhower and Secretaries Dulles and Herter had all but ceded the newly emerging states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to the communists.
