Everything about John Foster Dulles totally explained
John Foster Dulles (
February 25,
1888 –
May 24,
1959) served as
U.S. Secretary of State under
President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early
Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against
communism around the world. He advocated support of the
French in their war against the
Viet Minh in
Indochina and famously refused to shake the hand of
Zhou Enlai at the
Geneva Conference in 1954. He also played a great part in the CIA operations to overthrow the democratic Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953 (
Operation Ajax) and the democratic Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954 (
Operation PBSUCCESS).
Biography
Born in
Washington, D.C., he was the son of a
Presbyterian minister and attended public schools in
Watertown, New York. After attending
Princeton University and
The George Washington University Law School he joined the
New York City law firm of
Sullivan & Cromwell, where he specialized in
international law. He tried to join the
United States Army during
World War I but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Instead, Dulles received an Army commission as Major on the War Industries Board.
Both his grandfather
John W. Foster and his uncle
Robert Lansing served as
Secretary of State. He was also the older brother of
Allen Welsh Dulles,
Director of Central Intelligence under Eisenhower. His son
Avery Robert Dulles converted to
Catholicism and became the first American priest to be directly appointed to
Cardinal. He currently teaches and resides at
Fordham University in
The Bronx, New York. Another son, John W.F. Dulles, is a professor of history at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Political career
In 1918,
Woodrow Wilson appointed Dulles as legal counsel to the United States delegation to the
Versailles Peace Conference where he served under his uncle,
Robert Lansing, then Secretary of State. Dulles made an early impression as a junior diplomat by clearly and forcefully arguing against imposing crushing reparations on Germany. Afterwards, he served as a member of the War Reparations Committee at the request of President Wilson. Dulles, a deeply
religious man, attended numerous international conferences of churchmen during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924, he was the defense counsel in the church trial of Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who had been charged with heresy by opponents in the denomination, a case settled when Fosdick, a liberal Baptist, resigned his pulpit in the Presbyterian Church, which he'd never joined. Dulles also became a partner at
Sullivan & Cromwell, an international law firm. According to
Karlheinz Deschner's book
The Moloch Dulles gave assets of 1 bio. $ to the Nazi party in 1933 after Hitler's election, and according to
Stephen Kinzer's 2006 book
Overthrow, the firm benefited from doing business with the Nazi regime, and throughout 1934, Dulles was a very public supporter of Hitler. However, the junior partners, led by his brother Allen, were appalled by Nazi activities and threatened to revolt if Dulles didn't end the firm's association with the regime. In 1935, Dulles closed
Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office; later he'd cite the closing date as 1934, no doubt in an effort to clear his reputation by shortening his involvement with Nazi Germany.
Dulles was a close associate of
Thomas E. Dewey, who became the
presidential candidate of the
United States Republican Party in the
1944 election. During the
election, Dulles served as Dewey's foreign policy adviser.
In 1945, Dulles participated in the
San Francisco Conference and worked as adviser to
Arthur H. Vandenberg and helped draft the preamble to the
United Nations Charter. He subsequently attended the
United Nations General Assembly as a United States delegate in 1946, 1947 and 1950. Dulles was appointed to the
United States Senate as a
Republican from
New York on
July 7,
1949, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of
Democrat Robert F. Wagner. Dulles served from
July 7,
1949, to
November 8,
1949, when a successor,
Herbert Lehman, was elected, having beaten Dulles in a special election to fill the senate vacancy.
In 1950, Dulles published
War or Peace, a critical analysis of the American policy of
containment, which at the time was favored by many of the foreign policy elites in Washington. Dulles criticized the foreign policy of
Harry S. Truman. He argued that containment should be replaced by a policy of "liberation". When
Dwight Eisenhower became President in January, 1953, he appointed Dulles as his Secretary of State. As Secretary of State, Dulles still carried out the “containment” policy of neutralizing the
Taiwan Strait during the
Korean War, which had been established by President Truman in the
Treaty of Peace with Japan of 1951.
Secretary of State
As Secretary of State, Dulles spent considerable time building up
NATO as part of his strategy of controlling
Soviet expansion by threatening
massive retaliation in event of a
war, as well as building up friendships, including that of Louis Jefferson, who would later write a good-humored biography on Dulles. In 1950, he helped instigate the
ANZUS Treaty for mutual protection with
Australia and
New Zealand. One of his first major policy shifts towards a more aggressive posture against communism, Dulles directed the
CIA, in March of 1953, to draft plans to overthrow the
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in
Iran (External Link
). This led directly to the
Coup d'état via
Operation Ajax in support of
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the
Shah of Iran.
After the war, the
United Nations conducted a lengthy inquiry regarding the status of Eritrea, with the superpowers each vying for a stake in the state's future. Britain, the last administrator at the time, put forth the suggestion to partition Eritrea between Sudan and Ethiopia, separating Christians and Muslims. The idea was instantly rejected by Eritrean political parties as well as the UN. The United States point of view was expressed by its then chief foreign policy advisor John Foster Dulles who said:
federated with
Ethiopia which was later stipulated on
December 2,
1950 in resolution 390 (V). Eritrea would have its own
parliament and administration and would be represented in what had been the Ethiopian parliament and would become the federal parliament.
Dulles was also the architect of the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) that was created in 1954. The treaty, signed by representatives of
Australia,
Britain,
France,
New Zealand,
Pakistan, the
Philippines,
Thailand and the
United States provided for collective action against aggression. In that same year, due to his relationship with his brother Allen Dulles, a member of the Board Of Directors of the
United Fruit Company, based in Guatemala, Foster Dulles was pivotal in promoting and executing the CIA-led
Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.
Dulles was one of the pioneers of
mutual assured destruction and
brinkmanship. In an article written for
Life Magazine Dulles defined his policy of brinkmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." His critics blamed him for damaging relations with Communist states and contributing to the
Cold War.
Dulles upset the leaders of several non-aligned countries when on
June 9,
1956, he argued in one speech that "neutrality has increasingly become an obsolete and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it's an immoral and shortsighted conception."
Dulles provided some consternation and amusement to the British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand ambassadors by his repeated attempts to tell substantially different versions of events to them. Apparently, unbeknownst to Dulles, the men had all attended
Cambridge together and followed up meetings with Dulles by comparing notes and reporting the discrepancies to their home countries.
In 1956, Dulles strongly opposed the Anglo-French invasion of the
Suez Canal,
Egypt (October–November 1956). However, by 1958, he was an outspoken opponent of President
Gamal Abdel Nasser and stopped him from receiving weapons from the United States. This policy seemingly backfired, enabling the
Soviet Union to gain influence in the
Middle East.
Dulles also served as the Chairman and Co-founder of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (succeeded by the
National Council of Churches), the Chairman of the Board for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Trustee of the
Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952, and was a founding member of the
Council of Foreign Relations.
Death and legacy
Suffering from
cancer, Dulles was forced by his declining health to resign from office in April 1959. He died in Washington, D.C. on
May 24,
1959, at the age of 71, and is buried at
Arlington National Cemetery. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom and the
Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1959.
A central Berlin road was (re-)named "John-Foster-Dulles-Allee" in 1959 in presence of Christian Herter, Dulles' successor as Secretary of State.
The
Washington Dulles International Airport (located in
Dulles, Virginia) and John Foster Dulles High, Middle and Elementary School (
Sugar Land,
Texas) were all named in honor of Dulles. Watertown, NY named the Dulles State Office Building in his honor.
In
1954, Dulles was named
Man of the Year in
Time Magazine.
Carol Burnett first rose to prominence in the 1950s singing a novelty song,
I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles; more recently,
Gil Scott Heron commented "John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now" in the song
B-Movie. In the book
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Switters and Case both spit whenever they refer to John Foster Dulles.
Dulles'
rollback policy was later implemented by the
Reagan Administration during the 1980's and it's sometimes credited with the collapse of, the
Soviet Empire, the
Communist Bloc in eastern
Europe as well as the
Soviet Union itself.
On December 1958, Dulles and Dr.
Milton Eisenhower attended
Mexico's new president
Adolfo Lopez Mateos' inauguration, where Dulles made the candid quote, "The
United States of America doesn't have friends; it has interests". At the time the quote was actually interpreted positively, but has with time become infamous in some sectors due to the country's future foreign policies.
Bibliography
- Biographies
- Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles by Frederick Marks (1995) ISBN 0-275-95232-0
- John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy by Richard H. Immerman (1998) ISBN 0-8420-2601-0
- Devil and John Foster Dulles by Hoopes Townsend (1973) ISBN 0-316-37235-8. Most famous book on Dulles.
- The actor; the true story of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, 1953-1959 by Alan Stang, Western Islands (1968)
- The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor by Louis Jefferson (1986), St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-44355-2
- John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power. by Ronald W. Pruessen (1982), The Free Press ISBN 0-02-925460-4
General History
- Kinzer, Stephen, Overthrow. Henry Holt and Company (2006). ISBN 0-8050-8240-9
Further Information
Get more info on 'John Foster Dulles'.
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