John Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles died on the 24th of May, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having resigned as Secretary of State just weeks earlier as bone metastasis consumed what remained of his health. He was 71. Funeral services were held at Washington National Cathedral, and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Within months, West Berlin named a central road after him. An international airport in Virginia would carry his name for decades.
Who was this man that foreign capitals rushed to memorialize? He had served as the most powerful diplomat in America under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had shaped Cold War alliances, orchestrated coups on two continents, and defined a doctrine so extreme it became its own word: brinkmanship. He described it himself in Life magazine as "the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war."
But Dulles was also a lawyer who once required his Berlin legal staff to sign "Heil Hitler!" on outgoing correspondence. He was a deeply religious man who called communism "Godless terrorism" and helped defend a minister charged with heresy. He was the grandson of one Secretary of State, the nephew of another, the brother of the CIA director, and the father of a Roman Catholic cardinal.
How did a Presbyterian minister's son from Washington become the architect of so much of the twentieth century's dangerous geometry? The answer runs from the Versailles Peace Conference to the jungles of Indochina, from a failed Senate race lasting four months to the verge of nuclear confrontation over tiny islands in the Taiwan Strait.
John Welsh Dulles, Dulles's paternal grandfather, had been a Presbyterian missionary in India. That thread of faith and international service wove through the family for generations. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, served as Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, and reportedly doted on young Dulles and his brother Allen during summers spent at Henderson Harbor, near Watertown, New York.
The brothers grew up in Watertown, where their father Allen Macy Dulles served as a Presbyterian minister. Their parents distrusted public education enough to homeschool the children and required daily church attendance. The household blended theological liberalism with strict observance, a tension that would surface in Dulles's own career.
Uncle Robert Lansing went on to serve as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, making Dulles part of a family that had placed members at the head of American foreign policy in three separate administrations. When Dulles himself reached the State Department in 1953, the symmetry was complete. His brother Allen had by then become Director of Central Intelligence, and the two would work in tandem on some of the most consequential covert operations of the Cold War.
The other Dulles siblings also left marks. Sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles spent twenty years at the State Department contributing to the reconstruction of post-war Europe. Son Avery Dulles converted to Catholicism, entered the Jesuit order, and became the first American theologian appointed a Cardinal. Daughter Lillias became a Presbyterian minister. The family produced diplomats, a CIA director, a cardinal, and a professor of history who specialized in Brazil.
Princeton University graduated Dulles as a Phi Beta Kappa member in 1908, after which he competed on the American Whig-Cliosophic Society debate team and joined University Cottage Club. He went on to George Washington University Law School, passed the bar, and joined Sullivan & Cromwell, one of New York City's leading firms, where he specialized in international law.
When the United States entered World War I, Dulles tried to enlist but was rejected for poor eyesight. Instead he received an army commission as a major on the War Trade Board. Separately, uncle Robert Lansing, then Secretary of State, recruited him in 1917 to travel to Central America on a diplomatic errand. Dulles advised Washington to back Costa Rica's dictator Federico Tinoco on anti-German grounds, pressed Nicaragua's dictator Emiliano Chamorro to sever ties with Germany, and offered Panama a waiver on the Canal tax in exchange for a declaration of war.
The Versailles Peace Conference in 1918 placed him on the world stage. President Wilson appointed Dulles as legal counsel to the American delegation, where he again served under Lansing. His role in the reparations debate generated contradictory accounts. Some remembered him arguing forcefully against crushing Germany with debt; others recalled him ensuring Germany's payments would stretch for decades. He was then assigned to the War Reparations Committee at Wilson's request.
Back at Sullivan & Cromwell afterward, Dulles built on his grandfather Foster's expertise in international finance. In the 1920s he was involved in setting up roughly a billion dollars' worth of loans under the Dawes Plan, channeling American capital to German states and companies whose profits then flowed as reparations to Britain and France. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended that practice, and by 1934 Germany had unilaterally halted payments.
Dulles attended international conferences of churchmen throughout the 1920s and 1930s, taking his faith into public life in ways that complicated and shaped his politics. In 1924 he served as defense counsel in the church trial of Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, who faced heresy charges over the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, a fight over literal scripture versus the Historical-Critical method. The case ended when Fosdick, a liberal Baptist, resigned the pulpit in a Presbyterian congregation he had never formally joined.
The same man who defended a liberal theologian was, in the early 1930s, requiring his Berlin legal staff to sign "Heil Hitler!" on all outgoing mail from Sullivan & Cromwell. Dulles expressed sympathies for Adolf Hitler after the Nazi Party came to power. It was the firm's junior partners, led by his brother Allen, who forced Dulles to cut all business ties with Germany in 1935. He and his wife nonetheless continued visiting Germany until 1939, and he remained a prominent voice in the religious peace movement and an isolationist.
By December 1940 his focus on post-war order had found an institutional home. Appointed at the behest of theologian Henry P. Van Dusen, Dulles took charge of the Federal Council of Churches Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Drawing on liberal Mainline Protestant ecumenism and American federalist tradition, he envisioned a robust world government that would replace the League of Nations. That vision crystallized in March 1943 with the publication of Six Pillars of Peace. Franklin Roosevelt was unmoved, preferring the more cautious Moscow Declaration, but Dulles's work helped build support for what became the United Nations.
His opposition to atomic weapons was also rooted in faith. After the bombings of Japan he drafted a statement warning that if the United States, as a "professedly Christian nation," treated nuclear weapons as morally acceptable, the rest of the world would accept that verdict and set the stage for "the sudden and final destruction of mankind." The Berlin blockade and the Soviet atomic test later changed the practical expression of those views, but not the anxiety behind them.
Dulles served as chief foreign policy adviser to Thomas E. Dewey in both the 1944 and 1948 presidential campaigns, and in 1945 he helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter at the San Francisco Conference, advising Arthur H. Vandenberg. He attended the UN General Assembly as a U.S. delegate in 1946, 1947, and 1950.
Governor Dewey appointed Dulles to the Senate in July 1949 to replace Democrat Robert F. Wagner, who had resigned for ill health. The tenure lasted from July 7 to the 8th of November 1949, four months in total, before Dulles lost the special election to Democratic nominee Herbert H. Lehman. In 1950 he published War or Peace, a critique of containment that advocated instead a policy of "liberation" of communist-controlled territories.
Despite having worked against Truman in two elections, Dulles became a trusted outside adviser to the Democratic president, specifically on Japan's future under U.S. military occupation. In this role he became the primary architect of the Treaty of San Francisco, signed in 1952, which formally ended U.S. occupation and concluded the war in the Pacific. He simultaneously negotiated the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, ensuring Japan remained in the American camp and U.S. military bases stayed on Japanese soil. In 1951 he also helped initiate the ANZUS Treaty binding the United States to Australia and New Zealand.
When Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died in 1953, Eisenhower briefly considered Dulles for the Supreme Court. Some Republican insiders considered him more likely for the post than the eventual nominee, Earl Warren. Eisenhower ultimately found Dulles too old to build lasting influence on the Court and, more decisively, did not want to lose his contributions to foreign policy.
Confirmed as Secretary of State in January 1953, Dulles set about what critics called "pactomania," constructing and strengthening a web of alliances against Soviet expansion. NATO was his primary concern, but in 1954 he designed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, signed by Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States.
His preferred instrument was the doctrine of massive retaliation: the threat to respond to Soviet aggression with disproportionate, potentially nuclear, force. He articulated the accompanying concept of brinkmanship in Life magazine, defining it as the art of reaching the verge of war without crossing it. In 1958, he authorized the Secretary of the Air Force to state publicly that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in a conflict with China over Quemoy and Matsu, two small island groups in the Taiwan Strait.
Non-aligned nations drew his particular scorn. On the 9th of June, 1955, he argued in a speech that neutrality had become "obsolete" and was, except in rare circumstances, "an immoral and shortsighted conception." He made the same argument in Iowa in June 1956, calling non-alignment "immoral" and drawing repeated confrontations with India's V. K. Krishna Menon throughout the decade.
From 1957 to 1959 Dulles oversaw the renegotiation of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a revision he had long resisted. The new treaty was eventually ratified in 1960, the year after his death. The renegotiation became one of the last major diplomatic projects he guided before cancer forced him out of office.
In March 1953, Dulles supported Eisenhower's decision to direct the CIA, then headed by his brother Allen, to draft plans to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The result was Operation Ajax, which restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power.
Guatemala followed the same pattern. Dulles had previously represented the United Fruit Company as a lawyer. Thomas Dudley Cabot, former CEO of United Fruit, held the position of Director of International Security Affairs in the State Department during the coup planning. Cabot's brother John Moore Cabot served as secretary of Inter-American Affairs through much of the 1953-1954 planning period. Dulles participated in the instigation of the military coup against the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, citing fears of communist influence.
Vietnam presented a more tangled situation. Dulles predicted a French victory against the Viet Minh, stating plainly that he did not expect a communist victory in Indochina. At the height of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, he helped plan Operation Vulture, a proposed B-29 bombing campaign to relieve French forces. Eisenhower made American participation contingent on British support, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden refused. French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault later said Dulles had offered atomic bombs to end the siege.
At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Dulles forbade contact with the Chinese delegation and refused to shake hands with lead Chinese negotiator Zhou Enlai. He opposed the conference's plan to partition Vietnam and hold elections for a unified government. He then left the conference entirely to avoid association with the negotiations, a departure that contributed to the conference's failure to settle the conflict.
Colon cancer first appeared in November 1956 when it caused a bowel perforation requiring surgery. Dulles was hospitalized again at the end of 1958 with abdominal pain, initially diagnosed as diverticulitis. In January 1959 he returned to work, but further surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in February confirmed the cancer's recurrence. After recovering in Florida, he came back to Washington for radiation therapy. When bone metastasis became evident, he resigned on the 15th of April, 1959.
Funeral services at Washington National Cathedral on the 27th of May, 1959 preceded his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom and the Sylvanus Thayer Award that same year. West Berlin named a central road the John-Foster-Dulles-Allee at a ceremony attended by his successor Christian Herter.
The airport in Dulles, Virginia bears his name, as do schools in Sugar Land, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Chicago, Illinois. New York named the Dulles State Office Building in Watertown, his childhood home, in his honor. The U.S. Post Office Department issued a commemorative stamp in 1960. Princeton's Firestone Library dedicated a section to him, the John Foster Dulles Library of Diplomatic History, built in 1962 to house his personal documents alongside American diplomatic records.
Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1954. Entertainer Carol Burnett rose to prominence in 1957 with a novelty song titled "I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles." When asked about it on Meet the Press, Dulles replied with evident good humor: "I never discuss matters of the heart in public."
A quote commonly attributed to him, "The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests," was actually spoken by French President Charles de Gaulle. The misattribution may trace to Dulles's 1958 visit to Mexico, where anti-American protesters carried signs bearing de Gaulle's words.
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Common questions
Who was John Foster Dulles and what did he do?
John Foster Dulles was an American lawyer, politician, and diplomat who served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 until his resignation on the 15th of April, 1959. He was a leading architect of Cold War strategy, designing the doctrines of massive retaliation and brinkmanship, founding the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and helping instigate coups in Iran and Guatemala.
What is brinkmanship and how did John Foster Dulles define it?
Brinkmanship is the Cold War strategy of pushing a dangerous confrontation to the edge of war to force an adversary to back down. Dulles defined it in Life magazine as "the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art."
What role did John Foster Dulles play in the 1953 Iranian coup?
In March 1953, Dulles supported Eisenhower's decision to direct the CIA, then headed by his brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The resulting Operation Ajax restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power.
How long did John Foster Dulles serve as a U.S. Senator?
Dulles served in the U.S. Senate for approximately four months, from the 7th of July to the 8th of November, 1949. Governor Thomas Dewey appointed him to replace Democrat Robert F. Wagner, but Dulles lost the subsequent special election to Herbert H. Lehman.
What is the connection between John Foster Dulles and Dulles International Airport?
Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia was named in honor of John Foster Dulles following his death in 1959. Schools in Sugar Land, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Chicago, Illinois also bear his name, as does the Dulles State Office Building in Watertown, New York.
How did John Foster Dulles die and when?
Dulles died of colon cancer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the 24th of May, 1959, at the age of 71. He had first been operated on for the cancer in November 1956, resigned from office on the 15th of April, 1959 after bone metastasis became evident, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
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