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John Foster Dulles
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John Foster Dulles (February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism around the world. He advocated support of the French in their war against the Viet Minh in Indochina and it is widely believed that he refused to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference in 1954. He also played a great part in the CIA operations to overthrow the democratic Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953 (Operation Ajax) and the democratic Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954 (Operation PBSUCCESS).
in Washington, D.C., he was one of five children and the eldest son born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster).
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John Foster Dulles (February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism around the world. He advocated support of the French in their war against the Viet Minh in Indochina and it is widely believed that he refused to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference in 1954. He also played a great part in the CIA operations to overthrow the democratic Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953 (Operation Ajax) and the democratic Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954 (Operation PBSUCCESS).
Early life
Born in Washington, D.C., he was one of five children and the eldest son born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster). His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. He attended public schools in Watertown, New York. After attending Princeton University and The George Washington University Law School he joined the New York City law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, where he specialized in international law. He tried to join the United States Army during World War I but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Instead, Dulles received an Army commission as Major on the War Industries Board.
Both his grandfather, John W. Foster, and his uncle, Robert Lansing, served as Secretary of State. He was also the older brother of Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence under Eisenhower. On June 26, 1912, he married Janet Avery, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. One of their sons, Avery Dulles (1918-2008), converted to Catholicism, entered the Jesuit order and became the first American priest to be directly appointed Cardinal. He taught and resided at Fordham University in The Bronx, New York. His other son, John W. F. Dulles (1913-2008), was a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Political career
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson appointed Dulles as legal counsel to the United States delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference where he served under his uncle, Robert Lansing, then Secretary of State. Dulles made an early impression as a junior diplomat by clearly and forcefully arguing against imposing crushing reparations on Germany. Afterwards, he served as a member of the War Reparations Committee at the request of President Wilson. Dulles, a deeply religious man, attended numerous international conferences of churchmen during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924, he was the defense counsel in the church trial of Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who had been charged with heresy by opponents in the denomination, a case settled when Fosdick, a liberal Baptist, resigned his pulpit in the Presbyterian Church, which he had never joined. Dulles also became a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, an international law firm. According to Karlheinz Deschner's book The Moloch Dulles gave assets of 1 bio. $ to the Nazi party in 1933 after Hitler's election, and according to Stephen Kinzer's 2006 book Overthrow, the firm benefited from doing business with the Nazi regime, and throughout 1934, Dulles was a very public supporter of Hitler. However, the junior partners, led by his brother Allen, were appalled by Nazi activities and threatened to revolt if Dulles did not end the firm's association with the regime. In 1935, Dulles closed Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office; later he would cite the closing date as 1934, no doubt in an effort to clear his reputation by shortening his involvement with Nazi Germany.
Dulles was a close associate of Thomas E. Dewey, who became the presidential candidate of the United States Republican Party in the 1944 election and 1948. During the elections Dulles served as Dewey's chief foreign policy adviser. In 1944 as Dewey's adviser Dulles took an active role in establishing the Republican plank calling for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.
In 1945, Dulles participated in the San Francisco Conference and worked as adviser to Arthur H. Vandenberg and helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter. He subsequently attended the United Nations General Assembly as a United States delegate in 1946, 1947 and 1950. Dulles was appointed to the United States Senate as a Republican from New York on July 7, 1949, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Democrat Robert F. Wagner. Dulles served from July 7, 1949, to November 8, 1949, when a successor, Herbert Lehman, was elected, having beaten Dulles in a special election to fill the senate vacancy.
In 1950, Dulles published War or Peace, a critical analysis of the American policy of containment, which at the time was favored by many of the foreign policy elites in Washington. Dulles criticized the foreign policy of Harry S. Truman. He argued that containment should be replaced by a policy of "liberation". When Dwight Eisenhower became President in January, 1953, he appointed Dulles as his Secretary of State. As Secretary of State, Dulles still carried out the “containment” policy of neutralizing the Taiwan Strait during the Korean War, which had been established by President Truman in the Treaty of Peace with Japan of 1951.
Secretary of State
As Secretary of State, Dulles spent considerable time building up NATO as part of his strategy of controlling Soviet expansion by threatening massive retaliation in event of a war, as well as building up friendships, including that of Louis Jefferson, who would later write a good-humored biography on Dulles. In 1950, he helped instigate the ANZUS Treaty for mutual protection with Australia and New Zealand. One of his first major policy shifts towards a more aggressive posture against communism, Dulles directed the CIA at this point now under the directorship of John Foster Dulles' brother Allen Dulles, in March 1953, to draft plans to overthrow the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran . This led directly to the Coup d'état via Operation Ajax in support of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
After the war, the United Nations conducted a lengthy inquiry regarding the status of Eritrea, with the superpowers each vying for a stake in the state's future. Britain, the last administrator at the time, put forth the suggestion to partition Eritrea between Sudan and Ethiopia, separating Christians and Muslims. The idea was instantly rejected by Eritrean political parties as well as the UN. The United States point of view was expressed by its then chief foreign policy advisor John Foster Dulles who said:
A UN plebiscite voted 46 to 10 to have Eritrea be federated with Ethiopia which was later stipulated on December 2, 1950 in resolution 390 (V). Eritrea would have its own parliament and administration and would be represented in what had been the Ethiopian parliament and would become the federal parliament. In 1961 the 30-year Eritrean Struggle for Independence began, following the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I's dissolution of the federation and shutting down of Eritrea's parliament. The Emperor declared Eritrea the fourteenth province of Ethiopia in 1962.
Dulles was also the architect of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) that was created in 1954. The treaty, signed by representatives of Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States provided for collective action against aggression. In that same year, due to his relationship with his brother Allen Dulles, the Director of CIA and a former member of the Board Of Directors of the United Fruit Company, based in Guatemala, Foster Dulles was pivotal in promoting and executing the CIA-led Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.
Dulles was one of the pioneers of massive retaliation and brinkmanship. In an article written for Life Magazine Dulles defined his policy of brinkmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." His critics blamed him for damaging relations with Communist states and contributing to the Cold War.
Dulles upset the leaders of several non-aligned countries when on June 9, 1956, he argued in one speech that "neutrality has increasingly become an obsolete and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception."
In 1956, Dulles strongly opposed the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal, Egypt (October–November 1956). However, by 1958, he was an outspoken opponent of President Gamal Abdel Nasser and stopped him from receiving weapons from the United States. This policy seemingly backfired, enabling the Soviet Union to gain influence in the Middle East.
Dulles also served as the Chairman and Co-founder of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (succeeded by the National Council of Churches), the Chairman of the Board for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952, and was a founding member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
Death and legacy
Suffering from cancer, Dulles was forced by his declining health to resign from office in April 1959.
Dulles had been taken to Walter Reed Hospital for an operation, then to Florida to recuperate. He later returned to Washington, D.C.
He died in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 1959, at the age of 71, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1959.
A central Berlin road was (re-)named "John-Foster-Dulles-Allee" in 1959 in presence of Christian Herter, Dulles' successor as Secretary of State.
The Washington Dulles International Airport (located in Dulles, Virginia) and John Foster Dulles High, Middle and Elementary School (Sugar Land, Texas) were all named in honor of Dulles. John Foster Dulles Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio is named in honor of him. Watertown, NY named the Dulles State Office Building in his honor.
In 1954, Dulles was named Man of the Year in Time Magazine.
Carol Burnett first rose to prominence in the 1950s singing a novelty song, I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles; more recently, Gil Scott Heron commented "John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now" in the song B-Movie. In the book Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Switters and Case both spit whenever they refer to John Foster Dulles.
Dulles' rollback policy was later implemented by the Reagan Administration during the 1980s and it is sometimes credited with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Communist Bloc in eastern Europe as well as the Soviet Union itself.
On December 1, 1958, Dulles and Dr. Milton Eisenhower attended Mexico's new president Adolfo Lopez Mateos' inauguration, where Dulles made the candid quote, "The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests". At the time the quote was actually interpreted positively, but has with time become infamous in some sectors due to the country's future foreign policies.
Bibliography
- Biographies
- Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles by Frederick Marks (1995) ISBN 0-275-95232-0
- John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy by Richard H. Immerman (1998) ISBN 0-8420-2601-0
- Devil and John Foster Dulles by Hoopes Townsend (1973) ISBN 0-316-37235-8. Most famous book on Dulles.
- The actor; the true story of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, 1953-1959 by Alan Stang, Western Islands (1968)
- The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor by Louis Jefferson (1986), St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-44355-2
- John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power. by Ronald W. Pruessen (1982), The Free Press ISBN 0-02-925460-4
- General History
- Kinzer, Stephen, Overthrow. Henry Holt and Company (2006). ISBN 0-8050-8240-9
See also
External links
- page at Arlington National Cemetery.*
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