John Foster Dulles

Two secretaries of state sat at the family table before he was old enough to argue with them. His grandfather John W. Foster had held the office under Benjamin Harrison and doted on the boys. His uncle Robert Lansing would hold it under Wilson. Their father was a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, New York, who mixed liberal theology with strict practice and had the children in church daily, and the parents distrusted public schools enough to teach the boys at home. Dulles took his degree at Princeton in 1908, debated for the Whig-Cliosophic Society, went to law school at George Washington, and joined Sullivan and Cromwell, where the family specialty in international law turned into a career in international money.

The finance came first. As a Sullivan and Cromwell partner he helped design the Dawes Plan and set up roughly a billion dollars in American loans to German states and companies, the machinery that kept reparations circulating until Germany stopped paying. During the Second World War he chaired the Federal Council of Churches commission on the peace and published Six Pillars of Peace in 1943, arguing for something close to federal world government. Truman used him to write the Japanese peace treaty. Eisenhower made him secretary of state in 1953, and he spent six years assembling alliances, SEATO among them, and supplying the words the Cold War argued in: massive retaliation, and brinkmanship, which he defined in Life as the art of reaching the verge without going over.

The lawyer whose practice ran on German business kept at it after 1933. Sullivan and Cromwell's junior partners, led by his brother Allen, forced him to cut the firm's German ties in 1935, and he and his wife went on visiting the country until 1939. Twenty years later, with Allen running the CIA, the brothers moved together against elected governments: Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. On June 9, 1955, Dulles told an audience that neutrality had grown obsolete and, outside rare cases, immoral, and said it again in Iowa the next year. It cost the United States much of the unaligned world, and it came from the man who had spent the 1940s arguing that a Christian nation owed the world restraint.

Colon cancer perforated his bowel in 1956. It returned, and he resigned on April 15, 1959, and died at Walter Reed on May 24 at 71. He is at Arlington. West Berlin named a road for him that autumn and Washington's international airport took his name, which is now how most Americans meet it. The reputation moved the other way. Declassification through the 1990s and 2000s put the Iran and Guatemala files in public view, and the standard accounts now treat the brothers as a single instrument. His son Avery converted to Catholicism, entered the Jesuits, and became the first American theologian appointed a cardinal.

John Foster Dulles's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Dawes Plan other
  He helped design it and arranged about a billion dollars of loans to Germany 1924
• Six Pillars of Peace book
  His Federal Council of Churches blueprint for a postwar order 1943
• Treaty of San Francisco other
  The Japanese peace treaty, drafted as Truman's consultant 1951
• ANZUS Treaty other
  The Pacific security pact with Australia and New Zealand 1951
• Southeast Asia Treaty Organization company
  The anti-communist alliance he was the architect of 1954

• 1908 aged ~20 Graduates from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa He had been homeschooled in a Watertown parsonage.
• June 26, 1912 aged 24 Marries Janet Pomeroy Avery They had two sons and a daughter.
• 1919 aged ~31 Serves as legal counsel at the Paris Peace Conference under his uncle
• 1924 aged ~36 Defends Harry Emerson Fosdick at his Presbyterian heresy trial
• 1935 aged ~47 The firm's junior partners force him to cut Sullivan and Cromwell's German business He and his wife kept visiting Germany until 1939.
• 1949 aged ~61 Appointed to a vacant New York Senate seat and loses the special election to Herbert Lehman
• January 1953 aged 64 Becomes Eisenhower's secretary of state His brother Allen took over the CIA the same year.
• June 9, 1955 aged 67 Calls neutrality obsolete and, but for rare cases, immoral
• May 24, 1959 aged 71 Dies of colon cancer at Walter Reed He had resigned five weeks earlier.

• Allen Dulles 1893–1969
  Longest-serving CIA director who built the agency's covert operations capacity during the early Cold War. brother
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. served
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. consultant to
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. predecessor at State
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. successor in the office