The Brothers Dulles: A Memory Bedimmed

Nothing in this story is my own, save only the style of writing. I write this only to spread word of the man who wrote this story: Stephen Kinzer, former journalist and author.

Laurelled as a corporate lawyer — the highest paid in the United States, to boot — and partner in the renowned law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, John Foster Dulles rose to be U.S. Secretary of State in 1953. Even as Winston Churchill himself counselled acquiescence at the fact of Ho Chi Minh’s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, Dulles differed, so hardline a warrior of the Cold War was he.

On 24 May 1959, Dulles, who had all too recently resigned his office owing to his illness, died; and the number of people attending his funeral was comparable to that seen fourteen years earlier at the funeral of President Franklin D Roosevelt.

Three years later, in November 1962, an international airport was to be inaugurated in Washington D.C. by President John F Kennedy. Work thereon had begun when Eisenhower was president, who had approved that it be named after John Foster Dulles. Kennedy seemed imbued with reluctance. He disapproved of the canons of Cold War thinking and favoured detente. Importunity mounted from Foster’s younger brother Allen Dulles, and a few others in government; and sagely advice in the same strain flowed forth from Eisenhower himself. At length Kennedy yielded, and during the inauguration, he praised that resolute Cold Warrior after whom it was named. Amidmost the airport there stood a serene reflecting pool, being overlooked by a bust of John Foster Dulles.

Decades of sustained American effort bore fruit in the 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed. But in that time, the Cold War had outgrown the memory of John Foster Dulles. In the same decade, when the airport was renovated, the bust and the pool were quietly removed, and none seemed to notice. The bust was bundled off to a closed and curtained conference room next to Baggage Claim Carousel 3, there to be forgotten, unsighted for long years by the public eye. None seems to know who ordered the move and why.

A similar fate would befall the memory of the younger brother aforementioned, Allen Dulles. He was no ordinary man himself; to date, he remains the longest serving director of the CIA (from 1953 to 1961). It has been bruited that he commanded the allegiance of men even beyond demission — or rather thinly veiled removal — from office after the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. Dulles had been a spymaster both during World War I and World War II; and in the tense peace atween, as well as intermittently otherwise, he attended to affairs of Sullivan & Cromwell. A failed plot to assassinate Hitler has been reliably traced to Allen Dulles.

Never in U.S. history, nor in the years thereafter, were brothers simultaneously the heads of the overt and the covert arms of American foreign policy. In their view of the world they were identical. There were good regimes, at the head of which was the United States; and there were bad regimes, over which presided the Soviet Union. They had been chosen for their respective roles by Eisenhower; but woe betide those who wait for their boss to be inaugurated. Apace proceeded the plans for the downfall of Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran and Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala with British agents visiting Washington D.C. In eighteen months, the Dulles brothers succeeded in toppling both.

They owed their beliefs perhaps to their elite upbringing; their maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster (1836–1917), had the lived the life of a classic pioneer in the Age of Manifest Destiny: expanding westward, civilizing the savages, building a business, building influence in politics (he had campaigned for Abraham Lincoln), and eventually being appointed U.S. Secretary of State in the 1890s. He it was in this office when the United States for the first time overthrew a foreign government; that of Hawaii. Their uncle, Robert Lansing, was also Secretary of State during World War I. Imbibing the pioneer ethos from their grandfather and a missionary Calvinism from their father, they carried into office a Manichaean view of the world.

But though identical in these beliefs, they were poles apart as personalities. John Foster Dulles was dour, pontifical, self-righteous, and socially inept. Allen Dulles was a sparkling deipnosophist; he could regale guests with anecdotes at the lavish dinner parties he would often throw. He could charm in mere minutes. And whereas Foster was committed to his wife, Allen had affairs in the dozens (his sister Eleanor says ‘a hundred’), ranging from Clare Booth Luce to Queen Frederika of Greece. He would boast of his exploits in letters to his demure wife, admitting in one of them, without the required ruth, that he did not deserve her.

This book by Stephen Kinzer makes a fascinating read.