DAUNTLESS DULLES
Williams, David C.
Dauntless Dulles John Foster Dulles: a biography, by John Robinson Beal. Harper. 331 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by David C. Williams OUR Secretary of State has once more been holding hands with a...
...Among those who find no place beside the dauntless Dulles is—surprisingly—Richard Nixon...
...Seldom has art so improved upon nature as in this apparently artless narrative...
...Every squall, every hidden rock is foreseen (or, if not, the captain can always pop into his cabin and suitably alter the log book so that future historians will recognize that it was foreseen...
...For instance, Beal speaks of McCarthy's influence as having "atrophied in the face of responsible handling of executive authority...
...Young Beal sits at his feet...
...The glimpse Beal gives us into Dulles' private world is as interesting for what it leaves out as for what it includes...
...It is instructive to compare the order which Dulles imposes upon events with the chaos of good intentions which emerges from Robert J. Donovan's earlier "inside" story of the Administration, Eisenhower: The Inside Story...
...Donovan, on the contrary, sees no "carefully planned, deliberate strategy" in the Administration's handling of the Senator...
...Donovan records the fact that "a dif"ference of opinion persists within the government as to the value of the order...
...Thanks to the human interest John Robinson Beal weaves into his John Foster Dulles: A Bography, one can readily reconstruct the scene...
...Dulles has poured himself "a rye on the rocks, topped with a little water, which he stirs with his index finger and then licks the finger...
...Unlike Donovan, Beal apparently did not sense "the lack of zeal among the American people for intervention," nor does he note the characteristic prudence of the President as reflected in "all of the several conditions he prescribed" [for American action in Indo-China] which, as Donovan candidly admits, "were most unlikely to be fulfilled...
...Beal sees the "unleashing" of Chiang Kai-shek as a master-stroke of policy...
...Again, in the case of Indo-China, Beal portrays Dulles as the master of events, frustrated only by the timid British...
...The four walls of the room vanish, and the Secretary is seen at the helm, navigating the ship of state with as sure a touch as he steers his own boat about his own Duck Island...
...Can it be that Dulles does not fancy Nixon's chances for 1960 as highly as most Washington observers do...
...Of course, since the founding of our republic, a high proportion of our leading politicians have been lawyers—but, lacking Dulles' brilliance, they have not perceived that this gave them the privilege of contradicting themselves at will...
...The brink, incidentally, appears to be a very lonely place...
...There is nothing about disarmament, nothing about technical and economic cooperation, nothing about the steps toward the international use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes—all subjects from which, apparendy, the Secretary disengaged himself in order to concentrate on his chosen art of "brinkmanship...
...If not, we would be confronted with the one instance in Dulles' long career in which he has not attempted to ingratiate himself with those in power, or rising to it...
...Reviewed by David C. Williams OUR Secretary of State has once more been holding hands with a henchman of Henry Luce...
...His single appearance comes on page 256, in connection with his attempt to define neutralism...
...If so, this would appear strange, for Beal time and again remarks upon the failure of Dulles' critics to make allowance for his legal training, and thus see that there was nothing extraordinary, for instance, in Dulles' writing a platform for the Republican Convention in 1952 which roundly condemned the very policies with which he had, as a high official of the State Department under Secretary Acheson, been intimately associated...
...By way of contrast, Dulles already has contradicted Beal twice—denying the existence of any American commitment to Chiang Kai-shek to defend Quemoy and Matsu and denying likewise that the withdrawal of the offer of American aid for the Aswan Dam was "a truly major gambit in the cold war," aimed at forcing a Middle East showdown with the Soviet Union...
...Some still regard it as a bit of psychological tomfoolery that did -more harm than good...
...There is no echo of the divisions within the Administration which Donovan recounts under a chapter heading, "Dilemma Over Indo-China...
...Not a word of Donovan's friendly but not sycophantic account of the Administration has even been disavowed by any of its leading officials...
...Perhaps Beal did not sufficiently realize that, even over a friendly rock-and-rye, his idol was speaking as a lawyer making out a case for a client—in this case his favorite client, himself...
...The sum of [Eisenhower's] influence, therefore, tended away from rather than toward military intervention of any kind...
Vol. 21 • June 1957 • No. 6
