War & Peace Quote by McGeorge Bundy

Bundy’s line is a tidy moral escape hatch disguised as sobriety. “Although war is evil” gives you the obligatory grimace, a ritual acknowledgement meant to reassure the listener that no one is enjoying this. Then comes the pivot that does the real work: “occasionally the lesser of two evils.” That phrase is the technocrat’s permission slip, a way to turn blood and rubble into a comparative spreadsheet. It doesn’t deny the horror; it domesticates it, making war sound like a regrettable but rational selection from an unfortunate menu.

The intent is to frame intervention not as triumphal crusade but as reluctant necessity. That’s politically shrewd: it preempts antiwar critique by conceding its core premise (war is bad) while still claiming the moral high ground. The subtext is that leaders possess the clarity - and the authority - to rank evils on everyone’s behalf. The public is asked to accept that the alternative is worse, even if the “worse” remains conveniently abstract, often invoked as catastrophe just over the horizon.

Context matters because Bundy wasn’t a celebrity in the pop sense; he was a high-status insider, a key architect of Cold War decisions, including the escalation in Vietnam. In that world, moral language had to be compatible with management. “Occasionally” is the crucial lubricant: rare enough to sound cautious, flexible enough to justify nearly anything. The sentence’s power lies in how it converts ethical revulsion into a tool of statecraft, offering compassion in the first clause and compliance in the second.