Stephen Kinzer, Author, "The Brothers"

the c-span networks bring you long-form public affairs programming from the nation's capital and are a public service of your television provider c-span created by cable this week on Q&A author and former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer discusses his new book titled the brothers john foster dulles allan dulles and their secret world war stephen kinzer in your book the brothers john foster dulles and allan dulles you tell a story up front about Dulles Airport in Washington and the Statue and the naming what is that John Foster Dulles had recently died when that super airport out in Chantilly Virginia was being built and President Eisenhower immediately announced that the airport would be named Dulles Airport for a while when Kennedy took over he didn't want to name it after a crusty old cold warrior but there was pushback from others and finally the decision was made to name it after Dulles you can still see the film clip of Kennedy opening the airport with Eisenhower there and Allen Dulles there and he pulls back a curtain and behind the curtain is this giant bust of John Foster Dulles and that bust stands in the middle of this big airport so I went to see it while I was writing this book and I couldn't find it I started asking the security guards where's the big bust of Dulles nobody had ever even heard of it it was a long process and finally thanks to the Washington Airports Authority I was able to discover that the bust had been taken away from its place in the middle of the airport and it's now in a closed conference room opposite baggage claim number three and I find this a wonderful metaphor for how the Dulles brothers who at one time exercised earth-shattering power and were able to make and break governments have now been effectively forgotten and airbrushed out of our entire history who were or who was Allen Dulles and who was John Foster Dulles these two brothers were about the most extraordinary pair of siblings to emerge in American history at least up to that point they grew up in an atmosphere of a religious piety they grew up in a parsonage were deeply influenced by the ideals of missionary Calvinism the idea that the world is divided between good and evil and that Christians have to go out into the world and transform the evil into good it's a very short step from that religious view to take it into politics and believe that politically the world is divided between good regimes and evil regimes and that it's the duty of the good regimes that's us to go out in the world and to destroy the evil ones so that's an important part of the Dulles brothers formation and the other big influence on them I think was the decades that they spent as corporate lawyers working for this very important law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in New York that was not a law firm that you went to if you needed a contract drawn up or if you needed to be represented in a courtroom Sullivan and Cromwell had a specialty and that was pressuring small and weak countries to accept the demands of big American corporations and that was what Allen Dulles and Foster Dulles devoted their lives to doing so in their own minds the interests of the United States and the interests of big American multinational corporations became the same thing so they came into office one as Secretary of State and the younger brother as director of the CIA with these two influences this religious view of the world being divided between good and evil and many years of working for corporations that shape their view of how American foreign policy should work when was John Foster Dulles Secretary of State both of them came to power at the same time they were sworn in immediately after President Eisenhower took office in 1953 it was the only time in American history that siblings have controlled the overt and the covert sides of foreign policy you have a second part of your book about six monsters and I've got the pictures here and I'm going to point out the first one is mosaic if I could get a brief synopsis from you about who they are we can get into the substance of this in 1821 John Quincy Adams made a famous speech on the 4th of July and he said America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy but the Dulles brothers did they were carrying out a secret world war even at a time in the 1950s when we thought we were at peace and they went after six monsters six figures that they found evil in the world one right after the other the first in 1953 was Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran who they overthrew in August of that year the next year 1954 they overthrew president Arbenz in Guatemala the next year they launched an operation against Ho Chi Minh that failed miserably and actually was the operation that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War then they went after Sukarno the president of Indonesia and fomented a civil war there they went after patrice lumumba the elected prime minister of the congo right after independence in 1960 and their last monster was Fidel Castro who also survived their attempts to depose him where were they born the Dulles brothers were born and grew up in Watertown New York actually Foster Dulles was born in washing and briefly because the mother came here to live with her father for a few months her father had been secretary of state owned a big house near Dupont Circle but Watertown New York on the shores of Lake Ontario was kind of a playground for the New York rich the father was actually not a plutocrat he was a clergyman but the family was extraordinary so these two brothers as young kids grew up in a religious environment they said their prayers every day in the morning they would take a cold shower only kind their father would allow say their prayers sing a few hymns and then they were free to run down to the shores of Lake Ontario where their two distinguished and doting relatives were waiting to take them out fishing and those two relatives were both secretaries of state their grandfather John Watson Foster had been secretary of state in the 1890s and he was actually the first secretary of state to preside over the overthrow of a in government that was the government of Hawaii so actually the Dulles family got into the regime-change business even before the Dulles brothers were born and their uncle Robert Lansing was Secretary of State during World War one so they grew up in this very elite environment as young boys they were brought to Washington to stay at grandfather fosters mansion and they were having dinner with Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Carnegie and Bernard Baruch and William Howard Taft as children they were able to absorb not just the ideas of the American elite but their their style the perception the way this elite looked at the world this is why I see them as kind of vessels of American history imagine their grandfather John Watson foster campaigned for Abraham Lincoln and they in office projected American power all over the world during the nuclear age why did you get interested in them and when I wrote a book years ago called bitter fruit about how the United States overthrew the arbenz government in Guatemala the Dulles brothers played key roles in that overthrown years later I wrote another book called all the Shahs men about how the United States overthrew the government of Iran the Dulles brothers were also players in a very important way in that operation I became more and more interested as I began to realize how central the Dulles brothers are not were in the 1950s probably every literate human being in the world knew the name Dulles but now when we look around the world we really are still seeing the results of the Dulles brothers policies look at the tragedy that unfolded in Guatemala with 200,000 dead in a civil war and Guatemala sliding toward failed narco state status look at what we've seen in Iran 50 60 years of tyranny first under a Shah then under religious fundamentalists all of that started with the Dulles brothers look what's happened in the Congo you have had literally millions killed there in the last decade or two it was the Dulles brothers who first intervened to promote the overthrow execution of the first elected leader of the Congo the Vietnam War was principally the product of John Foster Dulles determination not to go along with the French and British and say well Ho Chi Minh won the war there's nothing we can do but he decided to go and fight so when you look around the world you see today the results of the Dulles brothers interventions we've now forgotten them and I'm trying to bring them back to life and show how not only they were central to shaping the world we now know but how they reflect many deep impulses in the American psyche and the American body politic we have some video from 1952 to be able to see what John Foster Dulles looked and sounded like are we stronger this year as against Russia than we were last year I think probably not it's pretty hard to judge those things but my estimate would be that the tide is still running against us everywhere I look around the world the question is what maybe we're going to lose next you know and we seem to be on the defensive and that they're on the offensive the question is and what are we going to lose each year more than what are we going to gain you can look around the whole circle of the world and you find one spot after another after another after another where the question is are we going to lose this better the free world is it going to be Iran or is it going to be Egypt or is going to be Indochina or is it going to be Korea or what's it going to be you go back to his beginning and you talked about at elite schools and all that where did he go early in his life to school his mother didn't think public schools were good enough for him so they engaged a number of private tutors and then he went on to Princeton and was quite an outstanding student there his brother also went to Princeton but they although developed a totally United view of the world they always saw the world in the exact same way politically and ideologically they were perfect twins but in their personalities they were totally different foster dulles as you can see for that from their clip was very dour very unfriendly very off-putting I read in one book even his friends didn't like him Allen Dulles was exactly the opposite he was a sparkling conversation Asst me interrupt just to show you some video of Allen Dulles so people and by the way they're not twins what was the difference in their ages exactly they were five years apart that they were twins politically and ideologically but not GI not biologic who was older Foster Dulles was the older let's look at Allen Dulles for a moment so we can continue there are times when the United States government feels that the developments in another government such as in the Vietnam situation is of a nature to imperil these the safety in the security in the peace of the world and ask the Central Intelligence Agency to be its agent in that particular situation and know Tom as the CIA engaged in any political activity or any intelligence activity it was not approved at the highest level he was interviewed by John Chancellor NBC and from a program called the science of spying a documentary what was Allen Dulles like compared to his brother he was a sparkling conversation astad endless stock of stories loved great wine he was a inveterate adulterer he probably had a hundred Affairs from Clare Boothe Luce to the queen of Greece and he was very seductive also for Americans I think in Washington he seemed like such a nice guy that you've got the feeling that maybe he couldn't be doing anything so bad he was not only the head of the invisible government he was the ambassador of the invisible government to the visible government now he was absolutely correct when he said that CIA operations were all approved at the highest levels meaning by President Eisenhower but there's another piece of this when you saw john foster dulles in that clip lamenting about the world being slipping away from the united states and falling away from freedom the fact is right while he was making that clip in 1953 Stalin had just died and the new leader leaders in the Kremlin wanted to have a summit of their new leaders with the Western Allies and Winston Churchill thought this was a great idea the Prime Minister of France wanted to do it try to negotiate with the Soviets and see if we could manage our competition Foster Dulles was absolutely opposed he was against all contact with any government that we didn't like so when he describes the world as being in complete confrontation he omits the fact that he was one of the principal figures who intensified and maintained that confrontation the women in their lives you do cite when they met there the women that they married and how quickly they make decisions rather quickly explain for both of them actually their wives reflected the differences between them the woman that John Foster Dulles married had dated Allen Dulles a couple of times but Allen Dulles found her very staid and boring so he quickly moved on but stayed and boring was just what Foster Dulles liked so she Janet Avery the woman that John Foster Dulles married was with him his whole life I'm sure both of them were completely faithful and janet was really his only friend he would spend his evenings at home and they would play bridge or he would read a detective novel while she knitted that was the extent of their wildness but Allen Dulles married a very interesting woman she had a lot of emotional and psychological problems some of them no doubt the result of a very unfeeling and unpleasant husband since the husband made no secret of his adulteries but she became very interested in causes like prison reform and I think she began feeling uncomfortable in the real nation ship they never actually divorced all they talked about it a number of times but by the time Allen Dulles was head of the CIA they were effectively living separate lives why would Allen Dulles write his wife and tell her about his affairs I sometimes wonder about that was it just that he was unfeeling and didn't realize how hurtful that would be or was he actually trying to insult and humiliate her it's remarkable when you see what a wonderfully outgoing person he was and how everybody loved him and then compare this with how harshly unfeelingly he treated his wife maybe it reflects something that's true in many of us we're all for loving people in general but it's a little more difficult when we have to love individuals what where did you find the lot of the affairs that you write about where where was the information this information is scattered in a lot of places and one of the things that drove me in writing this book is that nobody has in the century ever focused on the Dulles brothers I immersed myself in particular in the Princeton University Archives where both Dulles brothers have deposited their papers there's a lot of rich stuff in there including oral histories that refer to many of these affairs and also other curious aspects that have never been published before about the Dulles brothers so I've tried to present a picture of them not just as political leaders but as people who were they I'm a great believer in telling stories and I want people to finish a chapter and want to turn the page to find out what happens next this is not like an academic study and there have been good academic studies of the Dulles brothers in office but that's not what this is there is a person that a lot of Americans might know now who was named after Janet Avery he turned out to be a cardinal in the Catholic Church I want to show some video of him and then explain the relationship between John Foster Dulles a strict Presbyterian Calvinist and a Cardinal who was his own son that the government has an interest in seeing that the moral tone of society is kept in order just to for the sake of the observance of law and the making of law it's very important people have the right more on religious values and so I hope that many will feel that is an important thing even though they can't directly legislate morality or law or morality religion they nevertheless concur can support it in various ways by their own example and the tone of their lives what was Cardinal Dulles his relationship with his father actually I found out something about that that I don't think has ever been published buried in an oral history that had been embargoed for some years in the Princeton Dulles archive in that oral history it's an interview with one of the law partners at Sullivan & Cromwell one of Foster Dulles partners and he says one day Foster Dulles called me frantically and said this is the worst day of my life you've got to come in right now into my office so I went to his office he I saw him very upset and he handed me a letter and he asked me to read it and the letter was to his son Avery who had just decided to become a Catholic now for someone like John Foster Dulles it would have been better if his son had become a Hindu a Catholic was just absolutely intolerable and in this letter Foster Dulles writes to his son never speak to me again never call me again you are not my son you are not alive to me anymore I have nothing to do with you and this partner recalls that he said I spent four hours with Dulles that afternoon and finally persuaded him not to send the letter nonetheless their relationship was quite strained until late in life and I don't think that Foster Dulles could ever come to grips with the fact that he had a Catholic in his family my memory is that Avery Dulles died at in the 90s and yes he looked up quite an advanced age how did he become a cardinal he was a very conservative Logan and his conservatism and his conservative writings attracted the attention of Pope John Paul the second and without going through the normal rise in the hierarchy that Cardinals normally go through Avery Dulles was named by Pope John Paul the second directly as a car what did it mean to be a Presbyterian in the Dallas's early days I think what it meant was to see the world as made up of good and evil in other cultures and other traditions we sometimes think that all people and all governments are made up of good and evil impulses and these impulses come out in different proportions depending on circumstances but Calvinism doesn't teach you that and foster dulles not only grew up in a religious environment but missionaries who were coming back from Syria from China and other parts of the undeveloped world were regular guests in their homes so he grew up hearing these stories about the need to go out and convert the heathens and the savages and the unbelievers and I think he took that Christian ethos and applied it to politics by the way there's never any mention that I can remember in here of him being anti anything else where did he get his why was the anti-catholic I think it's a part of traditional conservative Calvinism that the Catholic Church went off in a terrible direction became evil and the Protestantism or Calvinism was the true church therefore Catholics were seen as agents of the devil it's hard to imagine but there was intense at the anti-catholic feeling in this country for many years and Foster Dulles was certainly an exemplar of that John Foster Dulles died when and of what and the same thing for Allen Dulles and how long was Allen Dulles the head of the CIA Foster Dulles died in office or actually he had resigned just a couple of weeks before as he was quite ill he died in 1959 and Americans mourned his passing they had always thought of him as the tough guy who snarled at them and he was never popular or beloved but when he died there was an outpouring of grief the funeral was carried live on nationwide television he faded from national memory but at least he died before his reputation began to decline the same did not happen to Allen Dulles Allen was still alive when John F Kennedy was elected president one of Kennedy's very first announcements after the election just two days after he was elected was that he was going to keep Allen Dulles on as head of the CIA and the first operation that Allen Dulles directed for President Kennedy was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that was such a disaster that President Kennedy asked his aides in fury how could I have been so stupid shortly thereafter he fired Allen Dulles so Allen Dulles did live to see his reputation decline and died later in the 1960s well go back to the original story about naming the airport which is 26 miles outside of Washington Dulles International versus Chantilly International which the Kennedys suppose they wanted to name it well when did Jack Kennedy President Kennedy change his mind about that name and how did they get it back on track then you're absolutely right it was Eisenhower's idea that the airport should be named after Dulles but Dulles was a crusty old cold warrior and Kennedy represented a new era so when he came and he didn't like the idea of naming the airport after Dulles they were going to name it Chantilly there was even some talk of naming it after George Marshall but Allen Dulles and others around him launched a pressure campaign against President Kennedy and against the head of the Federal Aviation Administration Najib hollaby and Kennedy finally gave in and decided he didn't need to pick a fight on this one I think even Eisenhower was indirectly pushing Kennedy to name it after Dulles so we got this airport and you know I used to think it was an awful thing looking back and considering the legacy of the Dulles brothers that this Airport what carries that name but now I feel differently because if that Airport didn't have that name nobody would even know who the Dulles brothers were and I can tell you that while I was writing this book sometimes people would ask me what's your new book about and I'd say I'm writing a book about Dulles and they said the airport how long did you write for the New York Times I was 23 years with the New York Times and that's an indirect reason why I got interested in these operations when I was working for the New York Times covering big events in the Middle East and in Europe and in Latin America I was always frustrated at writing only about what happened today what I was really interested in is what happened yesterday how did we get here why is this happening when I get to countries like Guatemala Iran I always ask myself why is this country like this why is a country poor and miserable why is a country rich and powerful over and over I was able to trace the answers in countries that have fallen into chaos like the Congo and Iran and Guatemala back to the Dulles brothers so i'm following history back and trying to find out why the world today is the way it is and a lot of the answers to that question have to do with the Dulles brothers when you were at the New York Times how many different places did you live I had three foreign assignments my first one was in Central America I covered all the Wars of El Salvador and Guatemala and the Contra war in Nicaragua that was where I lived after Nicaragua I was sent off to Berlin right at the time the wall was falling European unification was starting and the wars in Yugoslavia also became a big part of my job and then I became the first New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul which was a great assignment partly because it allowed me to start getting into Iran and beginning to understand a country that we have a lot of difficulty understanding because our emotions are so intense when I got to Iran I remember asking people why is the country with this history and this culture so unhappy and miserable and isolated and poor and people told me actually we had a democracy here once but the Dulles brothers came over here and destroyed it I didn't know anything about that I don't think most Americans did or do and so this book is trying you know among other things to explain to Americans not only why some countries in the world have fallen into this chaos after American intervention but who organized that intervention and what were the forces that propelled those internet I want to come back to Iran just a second but you left in here times what year and what are you doing now besides writing books I left the New York Times in 2006 after 23 years and I'm now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University which I'm much enjoying and what other institutions were have you've taught this is my third University when I was living in Chicago I taught at Northwestern and then I went on to Boston University my alma mater and I'm now thrilled being a Brown here's Allen Dallas talking about Mossadegh and will ask you more about that after we watched a little bit us the government of Moses egg if you recall history was overthrown by the accident the shop now that we encouraged the Shah to take that action I will not deny actually the Shah had tried to fire premier Mohammad Mosaddegh and had failed with the help of CIA and British operatives though he was finally ousted Mosaddegh x' crimes had been his nationalization of the great pool of Persian oil and his flirtation with the Russians when it was all over the West had held on to the oil and Mosaddegh had only his famous tears what's the backstory on this the backstory is really fascinating and it's one of the stories I tell in the book as private lawyers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles represented many of America's biggest corporations what they promised those clients is we will protect you nothing will ever happen to your foreign operations as long as you have us as your lawyers but two things happen in 1951 that showed they couldn't keep their promise number 1 Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry and that had formerly belonged to a company called the anglo-iranian oil company and the financial agent for that oil company was something called the Schroder Bank which was represented by Sullivan & Cromwell and in fact Allen Dulles was on the board of directors of the Schroder Bank so he had to go to the Schroder Bank people and say I failed you hired me to protect your interest in Iran and I couldn't do it because of muscle deck almost immediately thereafter in Guatemala the Congress passed a land reform act that required United Fruit Company to sell its unused land to the government so it could be parceled out and given to peasants so the Dulles brothers had to go to United Fruit Company and say we failed we couldn't protect you and they didn't like to fail so they developed a deep grudge against Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala they couldn't do anything about it because they were only private lawyers but they carried that grudge with them into office and their very first project now as soon as they took office in 1953 was to plot against Mossadegh and the moment they had overthrown him they turned and overthrew our beds so they carried this grudge and it was a grudge based essentially on the fact that these two leaders Mossadegh in Iran Arbenz in Guatemala had deeply wounded companies that the Dulles brothers had promised to protect that was a crime that they never forgave then beyond that there were four other monsters that you talked about and how did they get involved in that and what drove them to the Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and Lumumba and all and they were in office when they did this and what was their motive you're quite right they carried these two grudges with them into office most addiction Arbenz but the others were grudges or enmities that they developed while in office the Vietnam story is fascinating and really tragic John Foster Dulles was the American delegate to a big conference in Geneva in 1954 to discuss the future of Vietnam that was right at the time when the French had suffered their big defeat at Dien Bien Phu and had very reluctantly concluded we lost the war we can't defeat Ho Chi Minh and spraycan our heart but we have to throw in the towel and Winston Churchill agreed with them he had a great line to Foster Dulles he said the loss of the fortress must be faced in other words we don't like it but Ho Chi Minh is very popular and nobody can defeat him but Foster Dulles refused to believe that he said well of course you all Europeans don't know how to defeat someone like Ho Chi Minh but we can do it if he had made a different decision on his way home from the Geneva Conference that one person on that one day the United States would never have become involved in the Vietnam War that is really one of the great legacies of Foster Dulles personally having failed to topple Ho Chi Minh they then went on to another leader in the neighborhood that was sukarno in Indonesia his great crime was to embrace an ideology that the Dulles brothers detested almost as much as they tested Bolshevism and that was neutralism they were trying to undermine the entire foundation of the Cold War by saying countries don't have to choose between Moscow and Washington we're not involved in this conflict that drove Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles crazy their idea was as foster dulles like to put it our policy is global and he called neutralism immoral so he insisted that people like Sukarno it show that they were pro-american otherwise he would assume they were anti-american and the Dulles brothers fomented a major civil war in Indonesia in the mid 1950s it failed however it created tensions that exploded during the 1960s and led to a horrific massacre in which about a million Indonesians were killed another neutralist who emerge in the world during this period was Patrice Lumumba in the Congo this was a brand-new country just given independence by Belgium they elected this very interesting but also quite militantly neutralist figure Patrice Lumumba and a very young man exactly it was a very undeveloped political culture this was a time when there were there were no Congolese lawyers no Congolese doctors no Congolese who had any experience in government so you have to understand that how underdeveloped Belgium had left the Congo but the Belgians and the Americans were terrified of Lumumba because he was so popular not just in the Congo but throughout the third world and they organised a plot in which Lumumba was overthrown and assassinated even before he had completed six months in office and their final target was Fidel Castro allan dulles organized the Bay of Pigs invasion and in my chapter about this I take that from somewhat different perspective I noticed as I was reading through a lot of these private documents something that I don't think has come out in other histories of the Bay of Pigs and it's this allan dulles never attended any of the meetings that planned the Bay of Pigs invasion he didn't know what was happening he left it to subordinates and he wasn't even in Washington on the day of the invasion I believe he was already suffering from the beginnings of dementia a few years later he was found wandering around in Georgetown not knowing how to find his way home and I think the Bay of Pigs a disaster is in part the result of allen dulles is complete disconnection and his the beginning of his fade why did President Eisenhower go to these two men in the first place what was what did they done that was attractive to him Foster Dulles had been the chief foreign policy adviser to Eisenhower during the presidential campaign so it was the logical choice Allen Dulles was a little different he was renowned as a terrible administrator and there was some fear not enough unfortunately of having two brothers in those important positions after his inauguration and after looking at various other candidates Eisenhower finally did appoint Allen Dulles now in the years that have followed Eisenhower's leaving office there's been a lot of debate about the role of the Dulles brothers compared to Eisenhower so did the Dulles brothers manipulate Eisenhower did they feed him false information did they act behind his back or did he approve everything they did we now know that that latter one was true Eisenhower knew everything they were doing and he approved everything including the assassination of two foreign leaders he personally approved the assassination of Lumumba and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro how do you know we find this in the documents he doesn't actually use the word murder and assassinate but if you go through the book I have quoted the actual meetings minutes of which have much later been Declassified and recollections of people who are in those meetings and you'll see the circumlocution but very clear orders from Eisenhower now some people have raised this question why would Eisenhower have been so much in favor of covert operations we don't know for sure because he never spoke about it that was an age when you believe secrets should be taken to the grave but I think there were two reasons why Eisenhower so strongly supported these covert regime change operations one is that although nobody knew it at the time covert operations were very important in winning World War two we broke the German codes we had all kinds of army units with tanks that were actually blown up balloons to deceive the Germans so Eisenhower of course as commander of the Allied forces would have known about all these operations and I'm sure that he came away from the World War 2 experience with a deep appreciation for what covert operations could do and the other reason is that I think he would have seen covert operations as a peace project you don't have to wage war and kill tens of thousands you can do this covertly with only the death of dozens or hundreds you mentioned that Allen Dulles had an affair with Clare Boothe Luce yes she did yes they did how do you know that we know it from a series of sources including Allen's mistress and as a matter of fact Allen's mistress was at that time having an affair with Henry Luce so it was kind of a very closed small circle and I think this was pretty clearly understood and I'll tell you a funny thing that I found in my research and it's just a speculation on my part of course Henry Luce and Allen Dulles were quite friendly not only were they sleeping with each other's partners but they knew each other socially and were politically very much in line one of Allen Dulles as paramours was the queen of Greece one day Henry Luce who was the publisher of Time magazine put the Queen of Greece on the cover of Time magazine and there's a little quote at the bottom and it says my strength is the love of the people I wonder was he sending a kind of a quiet little jokey message to Allen Bellis well you mentioned more than once Henry Lewis and Time magazine and the covers and with the Allen Dulles and the John Foster Dulles covers and also some of these folks that you write about as the monsters explain the role of Time magazine play it's hard to believe now that's one person or one Empire could have such reach because our media landscape is so fractured but between Time magazine and Life magazine and march of time newsreels and radio broadcasts Henry Luce probably reached half or more of the literate population of the United States and Henry Luce was very much like the Dulles brothers so he also was a strict presbytery in he had been born in China son of missionaries he came from missionary line just like the Dulles brothers did so they work very closely together one supporting the other and for example one great story has to do with the time that Patrice Lumumba was supposed to be on the cover of Time magazine and he actually made the portrait but at the very last moment the American government under a particularly the CIA became terrified they didn't want more publicity they didn't want this handsome figure on the cover of Time magazine so they managed to call Henry Luce at the very last moment as the magazine was actually going to press and finally loose agreed to take Lumumba off but they didn't have time to make a new portrait so they took an old picture of Dai commercial the UN Secretary General and they pasted it against the background of tropical trees and African landscape that had been intended for Lumumba so you can now buy the portrait of Lumumba on the cover of time that never got to the cover of time but can you also see the Dahmer show cover and see the the background yes absolutely and it's quite in Congress because DAG hammarskjöld should have been portrayed against a very different background so you've got the background of Lumumba but the picture of this Scandinavian diplomat you point out in your book that Ho Chi Minh was in New York and worked in New York as a pastry chef for a while here's some video of him and then I want you to put him in context ho Chi Minh is of the blood sweat and tears school you don't fight the revolution for 30 years getting clobbered everywhere they return until finally you come out on top we're all being off the blood sweat and tears school dangers to second think or the second guess email like Oh Chi Minh yeah they're much more complicated than that but I'm very much afraid of their fortunately were to make up his mind that this is the war to see through that he might just be a man to see you through to the agent president is still a ferocious nationalist and a shrewd - revolutionary this month the United States made abundantly clear its willingness to negotiate for peace it's now up to the old man in Manila the first voice she heard by the way is Bernard fall fence historian and author and the second was Walter Cronkite hochi man what impact did the Dulles brothers have on the Vietnam War and how'd it work well you're right that ho chi minh did turn up as a pastry chef actually at the Parker House Hotel in Boston and he traveled a lot in the world so during World War two Ho Chi Minh was leading a resistance force against the Japanese invaders and we supported him the United States dropped weapons to him and even dropped cigarette cases doing which was what he asked for and we sent an OSS mission to help him and train him and work with his men when the war ended the head of this mission had a private dinner with Ho Chi Minh as he was leaving and he said to Ho Chi Minh I have to ask you one question are you a communist and Ho Chi Minh replied yes but I hope that doesn't mean we can't still be friends - the Dulles brothers it did mean that the fact is Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and a communist but the Dulles brothers only saw the communist part not only did they feel impelled to wage war against him but they really thought they could win they had this exaggerated view of American power that whenever we start something we can win and it was that arrogance that brought the United States into the war in Vietnam what was the source of their antic communism I think it came from their long formation as members of the American elite and then of course decades working to support the power of American corporations in the world communist ideology was always aimed at restricting the ability of international corporations to work freely in many other countries but there's something beyond just ideology that I think must have driven them it's this idea that there's always a horrible force out there and that's why I start my book with a quote from Captain Ahab Moby Dick he says that inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate and be the white whale agent or be the white whale principle I will wreak my hate upon him you also write in your book about Diego Rivera's famous painting glorious victory in which you can see john foster dulles his brother right behind him with a satchel full of money and general eisenhower down here and a bomb why did you pick this and write about it I consider this to be one of the most brilliant works of political art of the 20th century and while I was writing this book since the Dulles brothers are right in the middle of the picture I decided I gotta go see that picture I've studied it of course in reproductions over many years but I had to go see it but I couldn't find it it should have been in Mexico we checked with every Diego Rivera group finally I tracked it down it's in a museum in Moscow I was willing to go to Moscow and I wrote to the museum director and I got back a note saying I'm sorry to tell you that this picture was not on display it's too big it's 16 feet long it's on a roll in the basement if you come to Moscow I will take you to the basement and show you the roll but I can't open it because we don't have any space so this led me to the following conclusion that picture is not serving any purpose in the basement of a museum in Moscow nor is the nor are the Russians the real audience for it I have a suggestion for what we should do with that picture let us see if we can't take it or borrow it from the Russians and we should put that up as the centerpiece of Dulles Airport and find the old bust of Dulles and put it in front of that and that painting would I think then stimulate not just memories above Dulles but questions about who he was what he did and who we are that allowed him to do these things you wrote at the end and a chapter called the face of God Foster and Alan were chief promoters of that fear they did as much as anyone to shape them America's confrontation with the Soviet Union their actions helped set off some of the world's most profound long-term crisis why did they why did why were they such heroes back then and then why have they faded them because the long-term effects of their operations were not clear then it seemed like everything they had done succeeded they got rid of Mossadegh in Iran they got rid of Arbenz in Guatemala we never knew that Iran was going to spin down into this horrible crisis or what was going to happen in the Congo after they assassinated Lumumba so at the time they seemed very successful and very heroic but in history from historical perspective I think you can see they made a couple of huge misjudgments number one after Stalin died they completely refused to respond to peace feelers from the Kremlin they never tried to see if the new leadership would like to develop a new relationship with the Americans number two they completely misunderstood third world nationalism which emerged after World War two they saw it as just a Kremlin organized plot that's not what it was and their final huge misjudgment was that they had no idea of what we today call blowback they never thought that their operations would have horrible effects decades and generations later you say talking about Foster Dulles he conveyed a harsh snarling image that alienated millions and contributed to generations of anti-americanism why didn't why didn't generalizing her have that same impact eisenhower smiled a lot John Foster Dulles never smiled one example is that in many of these developing countries like say Indonesia Afghanistan the leaders invited both Soviet officials and American officials to visit they want an Eisenhower to come but Eisenhower wouldn't go because Foster Dulles told him countries that are not a hundred percent on our side don't deserve a presidential visit so you'd have these smiling figures from the cry showing up in these countries and promoting a positive image of Soviet Communism and meanwhile there was no counterbalance except for this snarling anger that came from Washington and I think that did undermine the ability of the United States to project our positive values where did you find this little tidbit foster spoke regularly to the American people often from a collapsible podium he carried on his plane so he could make quote departure statements unquote and arrival statements and he periodically appealed to Europeans but his communications efforts stopped there actually that also comes from a previously embargoed oral history that's at the Princeton Dulles archive one of the aides to Foster Dulles was interviewed and in there he says part of my job was to carry the collapsible lectern and a little seal in the front that said Secretary of State and it was through those arrival and departure statements that most Americans came to know who John Foster Dulles was how many people had been into these Princeton archives before you got there anybody a few some of the material hadn't been liberated yet or Declassified but also there's so many pieces in there that not everybody would recognize I give you one example that I found that nobody has seen before and that really struck me in these archives they're not just papers there's boxes with all kinds of stuff so I found a couple of envelopes full of snapshots just family pictures black-and-white pictures and I looked through them and I was quite surprised to see a picture of Allen Dulles his wife standing in front of a Mayan Stella that I could identify as being in a place called Bonn an era where the United Fruit Company had its big plantation in Guatemala then I saw other snapshots of clover Dulles the wife of Allen going off into little villages in Guatemala and shopping at markets she obviously became fascinated with Guatemalan culture and then to my amazement I found photos of Allen Dulles second house in Long Island from the outside it looks like all the other houses but when you see the pictures inside in the living room you'll see the entire room is covered with Guatemalan fabrics and there are Guatemalan artifacts everywhere what it means is that Guatemala was a daily physical presence in the life of Allen Dulles while he was sitting around planning to destroy the democratic government there you gotta end it I don't know whether its psyche it's like gayatri's psychology but I want to read this sentence neurophysiologists evolutionary biologists and social and cognitive psychologists have made remarkable discoveries about the working of the brain that are highly relevant to Cold War history they've developed concepts like groupthink and confirmation bias what they're telling us now is that there's something in our brain that makes us interpret everything that we see in ways that fit into our pre accepted pre-existing conceptions so for example we believed that neutralist governments were all tools of the Kremlin there was no evidence for this but I found this document by the Brazilian ambassador here in Washington he met with Foster Dulles and he said I wrote back to his foreign ministry I asked Dulles how do you know that the land reform program in Guatemala was ordered by the Kremlin and Foster Dulles replied it is true that we have no evidence but we are proceeding on the assumption that it must be so so the idea that Guatemalans would decide to adopt a policy in Guatemala that only had to do with Guatemala and nothing to do with the Cold War was inconceivable to the Dulles brothers they thought everything in the world was part of the Cold War so when they saw something like a nationalization of oil in Iran or acts aimed at restricting United Fruit Company in Guatemala there mind was programmed to believe that these must have been Kremlin plots and so the ignored evidence to the contrary and embraced whatever shred they could find that seemed to confirm their bias what do you think of the Dulles --is we're back today though when it comes to communism that they were so vigorously opposed to that there's not much of it left in the world I think they'd be quite shocked at the way they thought about race though I think they never believed that there would have been a negotiated solution and that you could just wait out the Communists and ultimately communism would fall under its own weight that was the argument for example that George Kennan was making and George cannon clashed violently with Foster Dulles foster fired him from the State Department because the State Department was not big enough for someone like George Kennan and someone like Foster Dulles Kenan was saying let's take this doctrine of containment and let's wait the Soviets out ultimately their system will fall Foster Dulles hated the idea of containment he said we need a policy of rollback we are going to push the Communists back but of course he never really did that here's a communist in our hemisphere who is still alive today and this is from 1959 Fidel Castro why would that attitude have there been so many executions across Cuba without open free trials well not so many committed I don't know exactly about value two or three thousand of criminal because I think that just is the first seem necessary for the happiness of the country interviewed by Stewart no one's of CBS back in 1959 what impacted Allen Dulles have on that situation there the idea that a radical leader could emerge so close to the American shores was terrifying for the American government the idea that they could simply say well Castro is doing what he wants he's very popular and there's no need for us to be hostile to him this was of course before he had embraced the Soviets was impossible it was unthinkable to them and not only did they believe it was impossible for the United States to coexist with Castro but they honestly believed that with a couple of thousand men they could spark a national uprising against Castro the idea that Castro could be critical of the United States and still hugely popular among his own people was inconceivable to them John Foster Dulles died of cancer how old was you do you remember uh he wasn't that old he was in his late 60s and he spent about six months declining very rapidly and what about Alan Delos what did he ended up dying of and I know you said he had Alzheimer's al Allen Dulles stud ultimately of heart failure but he had a whole series of ailments he became quite heavy couldn't move very well and he in his obituaries you see a lot more mixed reviews because by the time he died in the late 60s of course many of the CIA plots had already started to come out and the negative sides of his record were becoming clearer when Foster Dulles died in the 50s that hadn't happened yet so everybody was mourning him you talk about something that you had to write this a long time ago that it's very much in the news in the last month exceptionalism and you define it as the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more See's farther and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations was to them the Dulles is not a platitude but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics I find it quite remarkable to read this book in the context of what we're living right in these days it was the Dulles brothers idea you never negotiate with your enemies you never talk and ultimately you're going to win and that's actually the policy of the United States has followed for almost all the period of the last 60 years but just within the last few weeks we are seeing quite some break in this first of all the President of the United States wanted permission to launch a bombing attack against Syria but many Americans and many members of Congress were against it and then he picked up the telephone and called the president of Iran a country with which we've had great hostility for many years so this leads me to ask myself I think it's too early to give an answer did the Dulles era just end this month have we had 60 years of this Dulles militancy and is it now finally changing I'm waiting to see if this is a permanent change or just a little pendulum swing are there any Dallas's still alive there are then not the next generation but the generation after that there there still are several out there but they've all decided to stay out of public life and I'm wondering if I'll hear from any of them after the publication of this book and what are your plans for another book I'm always interested in why we are like this that's my big theme why does the United States behave the way that it does in the world now this book is a biography it's a biography of the Dulles brothers but it's more than that I'm using the framework of biography to ask this larger question why do we behave the way we do in the world and whatever my next book is it will be another way to ask and try to answer that question our guest has been Stephen Kinzer he spent 20 plus years with the New York Times as a reporter and now teaches at Brown University the book is called the brothers John Foster Dulles Allan Dulles and their secret world war I thank you very much thank you for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at Q&A org Q&A programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 38,557

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Keywords: C-SPAN, cspan, Q&A, journalist and author Stephen Kinzer, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, CIA, foreign policy

Id: Mxw0B8wgoQU

Length: 59min 12sec (3552 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2013