JOHN FOSTER DULLES: A Record Clear and Strong For All To See

SHARP at 9 a.m., Jan. 22, 1953, John Foster Dulles showed up for work in his fifth-floor office at the State Department, a tall, austere-looking man, eyes wary, mouth turned down at the corners, shoulders hunched, necktie slightly off-center. He sat down behind a big desk across from a big grandfather clock, surveyed a couple of portraits that he had ordered hung—one of his sideburned grandfather John Watson Foster, U.S. Secretary of State 1892-93 (under President Benjamin Harrison), the other of his uncle Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State 1915-20 (Woodrow Wilson). On a small table within reach of his swivel chair, he laid out three books that through decades of international law and diplomacy he had rarely been without. The books: Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, The Federalist papers, the Bible.

“Soviet Communism.” the new Secretary of State had written of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, “starts with an atheistic, godless premise. Everything else flows from that premise. If there is no God, there is no moral or natural law . . . Since there is no moral law, there is no such thing as abstract right or justice. Laws are the means, the decrees, by which the dictatorship of the proletariat enforces its will ‘for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies’ . . . There is a duty to extend this system to all the world.”

“Our founders,” the new Secretary had said of the other two books, “represented many creeds, but most of them took a spiritual view of the nature of man. They believed that this nation had a mission to help men everywhere to get the great opportunity to be and to do what God designed . . . Freedom cannot be contained—it is all-pervading . . . It is the despots who should feel haunted. They, not we, should fear the future.”

In the six years that followed, it was the contribution of John Foster Dulles to his countrymen and to freedom that he best defined and actively waged the cold war in those terms. “The arena is vast,” he wrote in his book, War or Peace. “It embraces the whole world, and all political, military, economic and spiritual forces within it.” And as he handled the unending procession of Communist-made crises—Korea, Indo-China, Formosa Strait, Iran, Guatemala, Jordan, Lebanon, Quemoy, Berlin—he threw into the cold struggle all of freedom’s political, military, economic, spiritual strength. Specifically, he:

¶ Developed the NATO collective-defense system from a Europe-first “position of strength” into a world network of alliances, offered U.S. friends U.S. military and economic help against aggression and subversion if they wanted it, gave millions of free men a new sureness, a new basis for hope;

¶ Maneuvered U.S. land-sea-air power across thousands of miles, stopped the Communists at the pressure points, slowed down the rate of Communist military adventurers when he warned the Communists that the U.S. would not necessarily meet the enemy on the enemy’s chosen battlefields, but would “retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing”;

¶ Threw the whole weight and wealth of U.S. influence behind the big European surge toward private enterprise and middle-class prosperity that mocked the basic Communist doctrine of class struggle, worked continually to bring to Western Europe some form of political-economic unity;

¶ Proclaimed a peaceful Western offensive in the doctrine of liberation—a doctrine, as he wrote in 1952, by which he did not envisage bloody uprisings but hoped to keep alive the nationalist hopes of captive peoples, to the point where the Russians would have to yield increasing amounts of independence to dampen restlessness (setbacks for the doctrine: the 1956 bloodletting in Hungary);

¶ Attempted “new approaches” to the surging neutralist nations of Asia, Africa, Latin America, but failed—over the short run—to convince them that there could be no neutralism in a universal struggle, was less effective in handling crises in which Communism was not directly involved, e.g., his blow-hot, blow-cold performance on U.S. help for Egypt’s Aswan Dam.

As he followed his guidelines, Dulles was a superb tactician. Traveling an astonishing 559,988 miles in six years, he worked tirelessly to keep diverse peoples and leaders united in common purpose and also to educate himself; he negotiated skillfully at scores of world conferences. When he moved out ahead of public opinion, as he did in trying to push the European Defense Community and to save Quemoy and Matsu, he could yield with a lawyer’s tactical skill, always returning to his theme when the times had caught up with him.

But above all, Dulles was the clear, stern conscience of freedom. Said Dulles: “Our nation must stand as a solid rock in a storm-tossed world . . . Rededication to the faith of our fathers is . . . what is needed to make apparent the futility of any world program based on the suppression of freedom.”

Brinks of War

From this sure base Dulles faced up to his times with an unusual diplomatic consistency. His first battleground: the Far East. His first decision: the scores of struggles under way along Red China’s borders and from Korea to Malaya should be rated and met as one. His first move: the U.S. ordered the Seventh Fleet, then under orders by President Truman to neutralize the Formosa Strait, to desist from protecting Red China against any Nationalist China attack. At once his critics derided President Eisenhower for “unleashing Chiang,” but Dulles had the argument of later events on his side. Red China shifted thousands of troops from the North China-Korea theater to the newly threatened coast.

Dulles moved on from there to settle the intolerable situation in Korea, in which the Kaesong-Panmunjom truce talks had dragged on for 18 months while U.S. and U.N. forces suffered thousands of casualties a week. He informed Red China, through India’s neutralist Prime Minister Nehru, that it would have to conclude the Panmunjom talks or risk an all-out U.S. drive to win the war. Red China signed. Dulles was improvising, experimenting, learning as he went along. His next move: Indo-China. First, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Radford recommended U.S. naval air strikes to help the beleaguered French, but Dulles was against it, and the President vetoed this plan; subsequently, the French handed over North Viet Nam (pop. 14 million) to Communism. But after that, the U.S. haltingly, then decisively, threw U.S. support to a shaky new Nationalist government in South Viet Nam, helped negotiate and set up a brand new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (“Pactomania,” said the critics) that has faced up to Communism in Southeast Asia ever since.

When, in early 1955, the Communists launched concerted attacks against Chinese Nationalist positions up and down the Formosa Strait, Dulles took it as a crucial probe of U.S. intentions. His response was immediate and unmistakable. The President sought and got a congressional resolution of support for U.S. defense of Formosa and the Pescadores; the President followed that up with a personal letter to Nationalist China’s Chiang promising support at islands Quemoy and Matsu. Result: the Communists backed off, and the whole Red China offensive, rolling ever since Mao Tse-tung came out of the Yenan caves, was bogged down.

Showdown: 1956

In Central Europe the cold war entered another phase. On Communism’s side of the Iron Curtain Stalin had died, plunging the Kremlin into years of medieval intrigue while Nikita Khrushchev emerged as new dictator. On the allies’ side, the phenomenon was the emergence of Western Europe, through Marshall Plan recovery and its own industry, as a hopeful, prospering showcase of what free men could do. At Budapest, in October and November 1956, Hungarian freedom fighters, workers, students, soldiers proved the Communist puppet government to be a hollow sham, reveled in five days of freedom, looked to the U.S. and the U.N. for help. The U.S. had no plan of action, and the revolt was smashed, but with it were smashed Communist pretensions of benevolent big brotherhood and Moscow’s hopes for reliance on satellite armies.

One complicating factor in Hungary—which doubtless made Moscow bold—was that simultaneously the West was involved in the tragic affair of Suez. The buildup to Suez: 1) Dulles angered Egypt’s Dictator Nasser when he pulled back U.S. aid from the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Nasser’s acceptance of Red arms; 2) Nasser seized the Suez Canal; 3) Dulles tried with U.S. allies, with the U.N., to work out a solution and failed. But when Britain, France and Israel launched a sudden attack against Egypt without notice to the U.S., Dulles took the toughest stand for principle of his career. Said he, extemporaneously, in one of his finest speeches at the U.N.:

“If we were to agree that the existence of injustice in the world . . . means that the principle of renunciation of force is no longer respected, then we would have, I fear, torn the [U.N.] Charter into shreds, and the world would again be a world of anarchy . . . It is still possible for the united will of this organization . . . perhaps to make it apparent to the world . . . that there is here the beginning of a world of order.”

Through 1957, while the U.S. was in an economic recession, while the U.S.S.R. fired the first ICBM and put up the first space satellite, Dulles was the free world’s Unpopular Man. “Damned Dulles,” swore an Indian lawyer. “He is responsible for the tensions of the world. He is not allowing the Americans to come to terms with the Russians.” “Theologian!” cried a French Cabinet minister. “Eisenhower is the mystic. Dulles is the theologian.” His critics increasingly rallied behind a “new approach” to world Communism based upon 1) recognition of Red China, and 2) disengagement in Germany to make what they called “a thaw in the cold war.” Critics’ choice: a “parley at the summit,” presumably similar to the one in which the Russians had promised to work toward reunification of Germany by “free elections” back in July 1955.

But through 1958, as is history, the tough old Secretary, who in 1956 suffered his first bout with cancer, fought up from his low point, won a limited deterrent victory in Lebanon (Eisenhower Doctrine), a strong deterrent victory at Quemoy. Even as Quemoy was being fought out, the Communists opened up a propaganda offensive in Berlin. Dulles’ response: 1) the U.S. would stand fast in the city; 2) the U.S. would, because some of its allies wanted to, be willing to negotiate on an all-German settlement but would yield on no basic points; and 3) any agreement with the Communists must be self-enforcing.

“There is a lesson,” said he. “We have an armistice agreement with the Communists in Korea. But . . . the Communist side violates every provision of that agreement except the one provision that we enforce; namely, that they shall not advance militarily.” A thaw in the cold war? Said Foster Dulles, and Tibet and Iraq were proving him a sure prophet as usual: “Well, Mr. Khrushchev is in a much better position to judge than I am. He lives in the north country where the icy blasts come from.”

Zest for Peace

When he stepped down last week, Secretary Dulles knew that his success, for all his efforts, had been limited. The limits: 1) the cold war’s boundaries in 1959 were much as they had been in 1953—the rollback had been in men’s minds, not real estate; 2) the Communists were still driving hard in the Middle East, threatened to make Iraq their first potential conquest since North Viet Nam; 3) the Communists were showing by their scientific achievements that there were many more fronts to the cold war; 4) the West’s resolution, amid all the talk about “flexibility,” “disengagement,” showed some signs of tiring. But these limits of success as Dulles saw them were only more arguments for more sacrifice, for more devotion to duty to meet a challenge that was sustained.

And as he thus imprinted his wisdom, determination, shrewdness and dedication on freedom’s cause, the Secretary left behind him his last word that successors would walk away from at their—and freedom’s—peril:

“To deny external successes to international Communism is not merely a negative, defensive policy. It accelerates the evolution within the Sino-Soviet bloc of governmental policies which will increasingly seek the welfare of their own peoples rather than exploit these peoples in the interest of world conquest. Freedom must be a positive force that will penetrate . . . Freedom is still a magnet that attracts. If the non-Communist nations hold fast . . . above all, if they demonstrate the good fruits of freedom, then we can know that freedom will prevail.”

John Foster Dulles, great Secretary of State, once added a personal postscript: “This quest for peace can be an enthralling adventure. Everyone has a part to play. We have the opportunity to prevent the suicide of humanity.”