Dulles, John Foster

Dulles, John Foster (1888–1959), secretary of state, 1953–1959.The grandson of Benjamin Harrison's secretary of state John W. Foster, John Foster Dulles attended Princeton University and George Washington University Law School. A long‐time lawyer with the blue‐ribbon law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, he was also legal counsel at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, negotiator for the United Nations Charter and the Japanese peace treaty of 1951, and a prominent Presbyterian layman. As secretary of state, he was widely viewed as the dominant force in shaping U.S. foreign policy—an assessment that frequently came with a critical bite given the era's Cold War tensions. Although the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration did end the Korean War and inch toward détente with the Soviet Union, it remained deeply hostile to the People's Republic of China (contributing to two crises involving islands off the Chinese mainland), took the first direct U.S. steps into the Vietnam quagmire, and conducted problematic covert operations in eastern Europe, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cuba led by the Central Intelligence Agency under Dulles's brother Allen (1893–1969).

Assessments of Dulles's significance have changed as declassified archival records made clear that Eisenhower exercised more behind‐the‐scenes policy‐making authority than many had thought at the time. In addition, Dulles's views are now seen as more complex than once imagined. His fervent public antagonism to “godless” communism was only one wellspring of a sophisticated worldview. In private deliberations, Dulles revealed a typically American blend of realpolitik and liberal, essentially Wilsonian reform impulses. His enthusiasm for European integration, for example, emerged in part from attentiveness to the kind of economic interests he had protected as a corporate lawyer. But it also reflected his conviction that Europe must unite if another war were to be avoided—a conviction shared by close friends like Jean Monnet, a founding father of the European Common Market. Similarly mixed calculations shaped Dulles's approach to the Middle East. His response to the 1956 Suez Crisis, for example, combined a concern for Western oil interests with the judgment that a Eurocentric colonial mentality would no longer serve this purpose.
See also Anticommunism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Fifties, The; Foreign Relations; Nuclear Strategy; Versailles, Treaty of; Vietnam War.

Bibliography

Ronald W. Pruessen , The Road to Power: John Foster Dulles, 1888–1953, 1982.
Frederick W. Marks , Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles, 1993.

Ronald Pruessen