The boys who brought us the Cold War

Below is the review of The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.  It ran in the March, 2016 issue.

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War

By Stephen Kinzer

St. Martin's Griffin; Reprint edition, 2014

Paperback, 416 pages

Book review by Richard Morchoe

Stephen Kinzer begins his book, the The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, with the funeral of John Foster Dulles. Having died in office, the author avers that “a bereft nation mourned more intensely than it had sense the death of Franklin Roosevelt fourteen years before.”

Kinzer was right. I was nine years old and remember it on television, ending with the widow being presented the flag. It was the most moving civic ceremony I had witnessed up until that time. The funeral of President Kennedy would be more memorable, but that could not be otherwise.

My mother explained to me who the man was and what it was that made him so important. He had been a great man and had well served the nation's foreign policy. No controversy there.

As time went on, more would be revealed to me about world politics and our nations interactions with states that were not part of what we called the “Free World.” Mostly we were competing with them in a “Cold War.” We did not fight directly, but there was an ongoing struggle.

Less than two years after Dulles' death, our policy went a bit off the rails. An armed group landed on Cuba with the intent of overthrowing the regime. The little invasion was a horrible botch and the men, who were considered “Freedom Fighters,” captured. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been responsible for the planning and execution of the debacle and its leader lost his job. That man was the Late Secretary of State's brother, Allen Dulles.

Not long after that, our war would be a lot less cold in Viet Nam and we would leave with nothing to show for it.

We were shy of major effort after South East Asia until Bush père fought Gulf War I and the Soviet Union imploded. After that and 911, we thought we could run the table. In this the last year of the Obama continuation of the younger Bush's foreign policy, it's not working.

This is why reading a book by veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer is not a bad idea. I became aware of the man while reading a column of his from the December 15, 2015 Boston Globe. The article was a well reasoned analysis of a”conservative” foreign policy that George McGovern could have lived with. With the rise of Sanders and Trump, a public might be open to it as well.

His tome about the Dulles team does a wonderful job of describing their domination of intel and foreign policy during the Eisenhower administration.

The brothers were descended from Scotch-Irish calvinists and that ancestry would not be without influence in how they viewed the world. Each would express it differently. Though not a family of plutocrats on the level of a Morgan or Rockefeller, they were well connected and influential people who went to the right schools and knew and were related to the right people.

John Foster was the older of the two and was always referred to as Foster. He was steady and paid attention to detail. That made him an excellent functionary and he would become the head of what was arguably the nation's most influential law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell.

Allen, had more of a fun personality and probably thought himself as a bit of a swashbuckler. He was never going to be the office drudge, but he would make his mark as well.

Foster, through a family connection would serve as US legal counsel at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. He would also act ably on the War Reparations Committee and as ably expanded his contacts that would be of use when he returned to Sullivan & Cromwell.

Allen pursued a diplomatic career. In 1917, upon being assigned to Bern, Switzerland at the beginning of American involvement in war, he was called on to take charge of intelligence. It was a task he took to with gusto.

The brothers would continue on a trajectory of power and influence. Allen would have essentially the same role in World War II, but on a grander scale. Though always active, Foster was not a direct participant in the war. He did end as a major foreign policy figure in the Republican party.

In the Eisenhower administration, they would rise to the top of their respective fields. Allen would become the head of the CIA and Foster would helm State. The 50s looked to become their decade.

They had a couple of major successes. The CIA would remove the secular prime minister in Iran to further national interest, or at least Big Oil's. In Guatemala, the elected president was toppled as a suspected communist not necessarily to the detriment of the US held United Fruit Company.

Then there were the non-successes, most glaringly the abovementioned Bay of Pigs invasion that ended in complete failure for the agency and triumph for Castro. This happened after Foster's passing, but on Allen's watch and made his directorship untenable. The 50s were over and so was the Dulles era.

The legacy of the successes did not even last. That Iranian coup left a bad taste and when the Ayatollahs arrived, we were out and so was secularism.

Foster and Allen were intelligent men who had studied with great minds but at the end of the day, the record is tarnished. They were sure they were in a death struggle with the forces of evil and that if the war of good and evil were not won, all would be lost.

After a short respite with the end of the Soviet Union, that low temp war is back and threatening to warm up in Syria. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were part of engineering a coup to remove an elected government in Ukraine. Not much has been learned.

A lot of folks at Foggy Bottom need to read Mr. Kinzer's book.