The Strategist in the Gray Flannel Suit

John Foster Dulles was the most and least compelling of men. As secretary of state under U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959, Dulles presided over some of the most controversial and dramatic episodes in American foreign policy in the early years of the Cold War: the clandestine U.S.-backed coups in Guatemala and Iran; the American break with France, Israel, and the United Kingdom during the Suez crisis; the frenzied effort to capitalize on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech revealing Stalin’s crimes; the turn to covert action as an essential tool of U.S. foreign policy. Dulles believed in going toe to toe with the Soviet Union, even at the cost of a potential World War III. He argued—outrageously—for the offensive use of nuclear weapons and insisted that Soviet communism should be vanquished rather than merely contained. His signature policy, the threat of “massive retaliation” in response to Soviet expansion, sent shudders coursing through the United States and the world.

And yet he was also the ultimate Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, with none of the dash and color and charm of his younger brother Allen, who headed the CIA during those same years. As the historian Bevan Sewell notes in his new book, contemporaries of the elder Dulles thought of him as simultaneously an ideologue and a grind. As usual, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it best, describing the great diplomat as “dull, duller, Dulles.” Even Dulles himself admitted that he could be a chore. “I know that in some ways I am a cold fish,” he once acknowledged to his bodyguard, “and that, I’m afraid, is that.”

Sewell aims to present a more appealing Dulles: less ideologue than pragmatist, interested in peace as well as war. From his early years as junior legal counsel at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I through a dreamy period in the 1930s and 1940s, Dulles spent much of his time “offering what, for a Wall Street lawyer, were radical solutions to the crises” of the era, Sewell writes. Dulles was an unabashed capitalist who recognized socialism’s charismatic appeal. He was an Anglo-American partisan who understood that other countries, including those outside Europe, would want more room to maneuver. He called for “a policy of boldness” in U.S. foreign policy but worried above all about the stability of the global order.

“Portraying John Foster Dulles as a man wholeheartedly committed to the search for a sustainable peace is unsurprisingly jarring,” Sewell admits. He makes his case for this kinder, gentler Dulles not by exploring the man’s life and character but by studying his writings, speeches, memos, and letters. If it can be considered a biography at all, Sewell’s book is strictly an intellectual biography, exploring the ideas Dulles embraced and articulated within his lifetime. Major personal events such as his marriage, the birth of his children, and his slow death from stomach cancer happen mostly offstage. So do key political developments. Readers not already in the know may not quite realize that his brother ran the CIA or that ferocious forms of McCarthyism shaped his State Department.

The book’s preference for thought over action allows for a rich description of the universe of ideas available to a man like Dulles amid the cataclysms of the Great Depression and World War II. Dulles was no great intellectual, but he grappled seriously with the question of how to create “a functioning and sustainable global system” out of the wreckage of two world wars. When he became secretary of state, however, Dulles—like so many officeholders before and after him—learned that governing was harder than thinking about governing and that events had a way of disrupting the best-laid plans. As Sewell writes, the demands of the job “dramatically limited his capacity for reading and study, his ability to ponder new ideas, and his latitude to consider more radical or innovative solutions.”

By that time, with the Cold War well underway, Dulles had come to believe that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States and that the Soviets would need to be put in their place. From this emergency mindset, he began to champion policies that his younger self would have condemned as irresponsible warmongering. Parts of the Dulles who dreamed of a peaceful and stable world order in the 1930s and 1940s remained, but it was a less flexible, more audacious version of the man who was steering the United States through the 1950s—and whose policies helped build the postwar world.

STATESMAN IN TRAINING

Despite its much-vaunted individualism and egalitarianism, American politics has produced no shortage of dynasties. In the nineteenth century, there were the Adamses and the Harrisons. In the twentieth and twenty-first came the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, and Clintons. The Dulles family belongs to this dynastic tradition, although its members did not successfully run for office. As President John F. Kennedy noted in 1962, at the dedication of Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., John Foster Dulles came from “an extraordinary family” with a long record of “service to their country.” In today’s blunt lingo, Dulles was a “nepo baby,” born and raised to run the American empire.

His maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, served as President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state in the 1890s, when the United States was actively claiming new territory overseas. The young Dulles spent countless hours at his grandfather’s side, being schooled in the ways of Washington. When he was just 19 years old, his grandfather took him to The Hague, where he was permitted to listen in on discussions about the Spanish-American, Boer, and Russo-Japanese wars. By then, his inherited “imperial mindset” was firmly in place.

Dulles’s uncle Robert Lansing also served as secretary of state, under President Woodrow Wilson. Dulles had briefly studied under Wilson at Princeton, enrolling in the future president’s American government class. From there, the young graduate went on to a year at the Sorbonne and then to law school at George Washington University. The white-shoe law firms disdained a legal education outside the Ivy League, but his grandfather pulled strings to get him a job at the whitest-shoed of them all, the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.

Dulles was born and raised to run the American empire.

That was in 1911. Four years later, Lansing would be secretary of state. Four years after that, once World War I had ended, Dulles would accompany his uncle to Versailles to attend the Paris Peace Conference. For nearly everyone of Dulles’s generation, the conflict was a formative experience, shaping their thinking about matters of war and peace. Owing to poor eyesight, Dulles missed out on military combat, but he nonetheless came to understand the war as the great tragedy of the modern era, something that should never be repeated. At Versailles, Dulles questioned the wisdom of harsh German reparations and backed Wilson’s plans to form a League of Nations. Mostly, though, he watched and listened.

He returned home with an extraordinary record of diplomatic experience for a man still in his early 30s. Dulles settled back in at Sullivan & Cromwell, where he became one of the country’s most sought-after corporate lawyers, and wrote his first major article on U.S. foreign policy, published in 1922 in the very first issue of Foreign Affairs. In that essay, Dulles warned that a lack of flexibility regarding Allied debt repayments and German reparations would undermine the postwar economic recovery, and he called on the United States to reach a settlement with debtor countries. The article reflected two key ideas that would shape Dulles’s thought and action for decades to come. The first was a deep concern with global order and the creation of a stable peace, driven by the urgent awareness that both could collapse at any time. The second was a fealty to pragmatism, in which figuring out what actually worked often took precedence over absolutes of right and wrong. Sewell presents this pragmatic bent as a refutation of the oft-heard claim that Dulles was above all rigid, moralistic, and ideological.

Other historians, including the Dulles scholars Ronald Pruessen and Richard Immerman, have made similar arguments before. Where Sewell breaks new ground is in his analysis of Dulles’s attitudes toward change in human history, which were heavily influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, one of his professors at the Sorbonne. Most studies of Dulles mention his year at the Sorbonne only in passing. Sewell takes the intellectual content of that experience seriously, showing how Bergson’s ideas about the inevitability of change “became intrinsic to Dulles’s conception of human nature and international order.” As Dulles interpreted it, Bergson’s work suggested that any attempt to fix in place a particular set of power relations was bound to fail, with warfare the likely result. This mindset, Sewell contends, led Dulles to be skeptical of German reparations, which he felt suppressed Germans’ natural desire for power and influence, and later of a permanent security council at the United Nations, which attempted to trap in amber the transient power relations of the world circa 1945.

Conveniently, Bergson’s ideas about flux and mobility were compatible with Dulles’s work as a corporate lawyer. During the 1920s, Dulles made his name—and his fortune—as the go-to man at Sullivan & Cromwell for companies operating internationally, whether United Fruit in Central America or the big Wall Street banks flexing their muscle around the world. Capitalism, for Dulles, was an obvious good, just the sort of dynamic, adaptable, transnational system that humanity needed to fulfill its deepest aims and desires. Even capitalism, however, needed effective legal and geopolitical structures, and he spent the decade negotiating international financial agreements that he hoped would be both stable and profitable. In the process, he helped bind American business and government together.

REALITY CHECK

Sewell spends six of eight chapters on Dulles’s life and thought before his appointment as secretary of state. The choice makes for an odd balance in the book, which devotes far more time to the ecumenical movement of the 1930s than, say, the Dulles brothers’ scheming to overthrow governments in Guatemala and Iran. The choice of where to dig in and where to skim the surface is determined, in part, by a desire to explore the lesser-known phases of Dulles’s evolution. “He was secretary of state only for the final six years of his life, after all,” Sewell writes, “and had a long and important career in international engagement prior to 1953.” True enough—but it’s also true that readers wouldn’t care much about Dulles’s college thesis or Christian faith if not for his time at the State Department.

As for the question of how much Dulles’s early ideas influenced what he did in office, the answer seems to be both a lot and a little. “The basic ideas were present, to be sure,” Sewell writes, “but they lacked the imagination visible in the 1930s and 1940s.” This should perhaps come as no surprise, since it is far easier to imagine a world of peace and prosperity than to make one. Dulles still dreamed of a system in which capitalist trade and international institutions replaced war as the mechanisms by which countries would sort out their differences. Mostly, though, he thought the United States needed to crush Soviet communism.

The result is a secretary of state distinctly at odds with the pragmatic, ecumenical, internationalist figure who inhabits the rest of the book. As a younger man, Dulles hoped that Christian faith would bring world peace; as secretary of state, he used it primarily as a cudgel against Soviet atheism. During the 1930s, he critiqued nationalism as the force tearing the world apart; in the 1950s, he championed American nationalism as the only option left. He once argued in favor of a flexible world order, one that could accommodate the changing needs of up-and-coming states. In office, by contrast, he sought to undermine and destroy Third World leaders and movements. Most important, he purported to be a man of peace but, in both his rhetoric and strategy, constantly flirted with global thermonuclear war.

U.S. leaders sometimes romanticize the midcentury moment.

The burgeoning Cold War drove much of this transition. Sewell describes Dulles as a latecomer to appreciating the Soviet threat, always inclined to detest socialism and totalitarianism but not much interested in the details at first. That changed definitively in 1952, with the publication in Life of “A Policy of Boldness,” his blueprint for a more aggressive, liberationist American Cold War strategy. As Sewell points out, Dulles’s advocacy of offensive nuclear warfare, even in regional conflicts, became the thing everyone talked about—and understandably so. Dulles argued that a “massive” U.S. response even to minor communist incursions would show the world who was boss. He used a peacemaking logic: the specter of American retaliation would be so horrible that nobody would dare risk it. But the policy did not win many adherents, even in the White House, given that the risks of nuclear brinkmanship did not run in only one direction.

Dulles’s thoughts about how to win the Cold War were more subtle. He saw the conflict above all as a struggle over competing visions of the good life and ideal society. The United States, he argued, needed to get behind an “ideological offensive,” not just a nuclear one. This view departed from the transnational institution building he had embraced as a younger man. Yet it also reflected some of the wisdom gained from his early experiences, which showed him that psychology, ambition, and imagination—not just hard-nosed self-interest—played a vital role in world affairs.

In entering this “battle for hearts and minds,” as Sewell puts it, Dulles ended up sounding an awful lot like the New Deal liberals he once despised. “We live today in an era when the raising of living standards and the enhancement of the dignity of man are essential to the harmony of nations and to enduring peace,” Dulles proclaimed in 1958. He believed in foreign aid as a diplomatic tool. He saw the Cold War as a potential source of spiritual and social revival. “Our major job is to make our own society such that no people will want to pull it down, such that people everywhere will want to copy it,” Dulles argued. FDR could hardly have said it better.

Seen from today, such proclamations reinforce the notion that there was, indeed, a midcentury consensus, in which Republicans and Democrats shared certain basic ideas about how the United States was supposed to behave. But the consensus frame can minimize the outrageousness of what America’s leadership suddenly agreed on in the 1950s as the proper course of business. The era was one of radical shifts in conventional wisdom, including the Allen Dulles–led CIA’s embrace of clandestine coups and assassinations, which would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. As Eisenhower noted in his 1961 farewell address, Americans had also come to accept the construction of a vast federal security state to protect them from Soviet communism. This “military-industrial complex,” in Eisenhower’s words, forever changed the country’s politics and government.

DREAMS DEFERRED

The world today is the one that Dulles helped create; both the United Nations and the CIA remain operational, at least for now. And yet his life story is not quite a triumphal narrative. Although Dulles may have imagined a world of peaceful international cooperation, in office he advocated a Manichean, good-versus-evil approach that made war more likely, not less. And although he argued early on for the necessity of flexibility and change in geopolitics, his time in government made him rigid, overconfident, and self-righteous.

His personality quirks and penchant for fiery rhetoric aside, none of this made him especially exceptional in 1950s Washington. Nor did his jettisoning the dreams of his youth when faced with the immediate pressures of high office. U.S. leaders today sometimes romanticize the midcentury moment as a time of bipartisan unity and national pride, but the era’s Cold War consensus also bred hubris and a willingness to entertain policies of vast destruction. For most Americans, Dulles is now little more than a name on an airport. Yet for those who still aspire to make the United States work toward Dulles’s goal of a “just and durable peace,” the story of his high hopes and great disappointments, his vision and his blind spots, is best understood as a cautionary tale.