Dulles, John Foster

Dulles, John Foster (1888–1959), lawyer, senator, diplomat, and secretary of state.Deeply influenced by his grandfather and uncle, secretaries of state under Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson, Dulles devoted his life to foreign affairs. As a young lawyer, he was counsel to the Reparations Commission that helped draft the Treaty of Versailles (1919). As chairman of the Federal Council of Churches' Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, he presented to President Franklin D. Roosevelt a blueprint for the postwar order.

An internationalist, the Republican Dulles frequently served in a bipartisan capacity. From the 1945 United Nations conference, he represented Democratic President Harry S. Truman at virtually every major international meeting. Dulles was foreign policy adviser to Republican nominee Thomas Dewey (1948), but after a brief Senate stint, he negotiated for Truman the Japan Peace Treaty (1951) that ended the occupation while retaining U.S. military bases there.

In the 1952 U.S. election campaign, Dulles attacked the Truman administration for failing to exploit U.S. atomic supremacy in the Cold War, insisting that liberation should replace “containment” as America's strategy toward the Soviet bloc. In 1953, he became President Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of state.

Dulles did not dominate Eisenhower on foreign policy, as the conventional wisdom once held. The two were agreed on collective security and the need to build strength and cohesion among non‐Communist nations. Nor was Dulles a reckless saber‐rattler. He did strongly believe in what came to be called the “New Look”: the threat of U.S. “massive retaliation” as the most effective means to deter Soviet expansion and aggression. Yet he understood that the threat of nuclear weapons was not always an appropriate response, and that overseas deployment of U.S. conventional forces was both militarily and politically necessary. Indeed, by the late 1950s he was anticipating the “flexible response” strategy associated with John F. Kennedy's presidency. Moreover, although Dulles was a covert operations enthusiast like his brother, Allen Welsh Dulles, the CIA director, he opposed direct U.S. military intervention, notably during the 1954 Indochina crisis, but he supported South Vietnam and refused to sign the Geneva Agreement on Indochina (1954).

Dulles was largely responsible for negotiating U.S. security pacts with Middle Eastern countries and Southeast Asia. But he was usually reluctant to negotiate with the Soviets, and he thrived on crises—the last over Berlin in 1958–59 even as he battled with cancer. He died in May 1959.
[See also Berlin Crises.]

Bibliography

Ronald W. Pruessen , John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power, 1982.
Richard H. Immerman, ed., John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, 1990.
Richard H. Immerman , John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1998.

Richard H. Immerman