John Foster Dulles
By RICHARD
IT was often said that John Foster Dulles spent fifty-odd years of his life waiting to become Secretary of State. 'Dulles was trained for diplo- macy as Nijinsky was for the ballet,' one bio- grapher wrote. I do not believe this to be true. Though his maternal grandfather had been Secre- tary for eight months in 1892 and an uncle by marriage had held the office under Woodrow Wilson, Dulles chose corporation law rather than government, and except for brief participation in the Hague Conference in 1907 and the Paris Peace Conference, he took no part in diplomacy until he was middle-aged and rich. In the Thirties he was an isolationist; he believed then, he once wrote, that what the world needed was Christianity rather than diplomacy. He headed up a number of church groups that called for peace and good
will and accommodation. .
Shortly before the war he formed an alliance with Thomas E. Dewey, who was rising rapidly in New York and national politics. Dulles was by then head of Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the most successful of American law firms, and he contributed money and advice to Dewey's cam- paigns. He may then, in his early fifties, have seriously entertained hopes for the Secretaryship. but his tie to Dewey cut him off from Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee in 1940. and from Harold Stassen, whom many then thought might be a Republican President some day. He stayed with Dewey through 1944 and 1948 and was often sought out by the Democratic adminis- tration as a symbol of bi-partisanship. He was a member of our delegation at the founding session of the United Nations. After 1948 he was careful not to become too closely tied to either of the lead- ing Republicans, Senator Taft and General Eisen- hower, and when they were running neck and neck in the pre-convention months of 1952, he was about the only man acceptable to both camps as a formulator of Republican policy. He wrote the foreign policy sections of the 1952 Republican platform. This was not his most endearing per- formance. I recall asking him in Chicago that year how he could accuse the Democrats of allow- ing the Soviet Union to take over the Baltic States almost two years before we entered the war and at a time when he was urging us not to intervene. I got a brusque, contemptuous reply—the sense of which was that in politics one holds the opposition responsible for the things that happened during its time of responsibility. He added that a party platform was like a lawyer's brief—one made the best plea and defence the facts would allow, and if there were flaws of reason it was up to the opposition to point them out. I thought it a re- markably cynical line for a man as churchly as Dulles.
He remained to the end a man of seemingly cynical attitudes and of seemingly genuine church- liness. He talked a lot of nonsense about 'spiritual values' in world affairs, and I believe he was earnest. Yet once at a dinner with a few reporters at a time when he and the President were still occasionally at odds, he was asked whether the President's apparent obtuseness sprang from a failure to comprehend, a failure to sympathise, a failure of articulation, or plain cussedness (there were perhaps a dozen possibilities, all unflattering to the President of the United States), and Dulles coolly said he thought it was probably a combina- tion of all the factors suggested.
He was not the most engaging of men, but in his great office he mellowed and became more respon- sible. more human, and more respectful of the opinions of others. As the Presidency tends, on the whole, to make better men of those who occupy it, Dulles's (Alice, which had not ennobled many of its earlier occupants, had this effect on him. After 1955 the Secretaryship was the summit of American power; Dulles had the initiative in policy that is normally retained by the President. Mr. Eisenhower gave him his head. The Secretary did all the negotiating, all the writing of policy
Dulles was Secretary for six years. Of all Fisen" 4 hower's appointees he was the only one who lefl a mark on the institution he managed. He was o'„," of the few who brought anything like a persons style to Washington. He resigned when there va5 less criticism of him than there had ever been and when a number of former critics were conaril reluctantly to the view that, as Secretaries go. he was rather a good one. The mass of his coantrY men respected him, I think, but he was never' until his ordeal of the last few months, a figure toward whom the public felt much warmth. 14c had a forbidding manner. Every newspaper VW ture was a portrait of arrogance and remotenes`• In the last month, though, the courage that liad earlier taken the form of cocksureness--and. ill the judgment of many, recklessness--took a fori,11 which commanded admiration everywhere. 11 I/ common enough, in this country, for men to have to face death with the knowledge that report are awaiting bulletins in the corridors, but ; have had as prolonged a spell of it as Dulles few have had to do it with such a show of eivte virtue. statements and speeches for the President, and the briefing of Congressional leaders. He altogether free within the policy lines laid doi by the President, and these lines were very slack They were restraining only when Dulles seemed V go too close to the brink, and toward the end' as, for example', in last year's Quemoy-Mal4 episode—the President seemed agreeable to takial Dulles's word on how close was too close. For thl rest, the President wanted only a policy that ■,otili hold together the European alliances he had plal'ei a part in building and that would reflect, rhetori cally at least, the rather platitudinous internw tionalishi in which he believed.
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