The Dulles Legacy

...Experts may quarrel with it...

...In The Devil and John Foster Dulles, Townsend Hoopes has produced a penetrating, intriguing study of a Secretary of State who carried the concept of containment to an impassioned extreme that isolated not only Communism, but separated the United States from reality throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s...

...American foreign policy has come full circle between the two strategies...

...Murrey Marder has covered the State Department for The Washington Post since the Dulles era...

...manipulating allies, excommunicating neutrals...

...And long after Dulles, neither could the Kennedy Administration—notably in Vietnam where its own one-track vision led it over the brink at which Eisenhower had halted Dulles...

...But the shooting down of the American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union outraged the Russians and wrecked the Paris summit meeting, first of the projected series...

...This study is, as its title indicates, markedly critical, without being mean-spirited...

...at sixty-five he carried political bruises and polarized, exploitive views of what was publicly palatable in the climate of emotional anti-Communism that followed the Korean war, the "loss of China," the Alger Hiss case, and the search for scapegoats...

...Atlantic-Little, Brown...

...Dulles carthe devil and john foster dulles, by Townsend Hoopes...

...Eisenhower could not shift course with Dulles, who was geared "for interminable struggle with the devil," nor without him...

...Instead, it was the certitude, the claimed rectitude, the clever simplifications of Dulles, that resounded through an era of puzzlement and fear...

...His exculpation, in this volume, of the Truman-Acheson postwar architecture already has drawn fire from opposing camps of American historians, for both maintain that Dulles essentially built upon what was in place before...

...Dulles became his own expert on Communism, convinced by quick study, as Hoopes put it, that he "had cracked the Kremlin's operational code...

...contriving extension of Presidential authority to extend the reach of the United States anywhere he could envision a remote opening for Communist penetration...

...A generation obsessed with "the machinations of Imperialistic Communism"—as President Eisenhower echoed the Dullesian language in accepting with profound dismay in April, 1959, the resignation of the dying Secretary —was convinced there was no alternative to the routes set out by Dulles...

...He circled the globe, with the State Department "in his hat," the furiously busy diplomatic plumber of his day, patching the leaks in the wall of containment, building it higher, thicker...

...Dulles walled off "Godless Communism" with inquisitorial zeal, brimstone rhetoric, and brinkmanship, and waited for it to be exorcised...

...Dulles was determined never to be outflanked on the right on the Communist issue...

...Yet it was not the added alliances, nor "massive retaliation" threats, nor brinkmanship, nor the hollow pledge of "liberation" that gave Dulles such lasting impact on American concepts and values...

...His transition from enlightened moralist to crafty zealot was a compound of early success in a Wall Street law firm, eminence as a lay churchman with the heritage of a Presbyterian minister-father, political ambition—and the discovery of the Russians...

...It is President Eisenhower who emerges as the would-be hero of this book, but essentially for checkmating the more bellicose policies that Dulles supported, such as American military intervention to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 in the final, collapsing days of the French Indochina War...

...Dulles was virtually born to be Secretary of State—the grandson of one Secretary, the nephew of another...

...splicing extensions on its extremities, the jerry-built SEATO and CENTO...

...Later, at Versailles, Dulles as a young aide grieved with President Wilson, his former ethics professor, over the peace with vengeance inflicted on Germany...

...What was lost in the process was the post-World War II American dream of an American world order, plus much blood and treasure, and most painful of all, the nation's confident belief that its goals were true, its course steady, its capacity infinite...

...ried that memory into the "treaty of reconciliation" he negotiated with Japan in 1951, a magnanimous peace, his most noble accomplishment...

...In 1948 he was Thomas E. Dewey's heir-presumptive to the Secretaryship of State, and Truman's unexpected victory over Dewey rankled both...

...policy in Indochina...

...562 pp...

...At nineteen, while still a student at Princeton, he was at the Second Hague Peace Conference...

...none can ignore it...

...At the same time it is profound, scholarly, exhaustively researched, and gracefully written...

...Hoopes served loyally in the Defense Department in the Truman Administration and then in the Johnson Administration as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of the Air Force until he was jolted out of his Establishment faith late in the Vietnam war...

...When Dulles finally achieved the post of Secretary, under President Eisenhower in 1953, he had waited too long for his lifelong expectation...

...He never was...

...The Eisenhower initiatives in policymaking, in Hoopes' judgment, often were "intuitively wise, but vague and unsustained...

...Hoopes ruefully concludes that the Eisenhower Administration of 1959-60, after Dulles, lacked the coherence or imagination to effect a genuine change of direction...

...Hoopes lauds the Eisenhower attempt, after Dulles's death, to reopen "the lines of communication" with the Soviet Union by inviting Premier Niki-ta Khrushchev to the United States to dispel the Soviet squeeze on West Berlin, and to launch "a series of summits" with the Soviet leaders...

...His search for the roots of the larger, fundamental misconception drew him back to the Dulles era...

...In The Limits of Intervention (1969), Hoopes plumbed the despair of U.S...

...For six years," Hoopes writes, "his simple sermons and bluntly righteous approach to the organization of defenses in Western Europe, the liberation of Eastern Europe, Russian influence in the Middle East, Peking's claim to Taiwan, and Communism's threat to Southeast Asia strongly shaped American attitudes and cast a long shadow upon the decade of the 1960s...

...Kissinger, high priest of the diametrically opposed doctrine, sups with the devil with a short spoon...

...After World War II, Dulles became a Republican adviser to Democratic Secretaries of State, a symbol of bipartisan unity...

...Hoopes's theme is that Dulles grotesquely inflated the original design so much that it exploded after him...