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

good afternoon everyone good afternoon yeah I know I know that every every one of you was sitting next to someone who's very interesting but for a little while now we're going to get down to the real reason we're here today thank you all for coming Stephen Kinzer is no stranger to the University of Scranton four years ago his book a Thousand Hills Rwanda is rebirth and the man who dreamed it was the freshman read here at the University and he spoke at the air opening convocation that year and was an awarded an honorary degree since then we have seized the opportunity to have him speak for the Shema forum whenever possible we are honored to have him with us today to discuss his latest book literally hot off the press the brothers John Foster Dulles Allen Dulles and their secret world war Stephen is a journalistic historian or perhaps a historically focused journalist I'm not quite sure he not only has a nose for news but a unique expertise in analyzing and getting behind the news interpreting change considering actions and especially the consequences of those actions he seems to defy definition which brings me to recall a comment that an art historian at Oberlin College once made to a student when asked her to she was ill was asked asked her to define Picasso without a moment's hesitation she replied you can't pin him down he's not a dead butterfly so he is definitely not a dead butterfly Stephen is a veteran of the New York Times a veteran New York Times correspondent it was reported for more than 50 countries on five continents you see what I mean his books have a special fascination in their razor-sharp criticisms and their consummate readability I could say much more but I will just close the introduction by saying I'm proud that the Schemmel forum is on his beef I don't know what his next book will be but I hope and trust that we will be one of the first stops he makes on his tour please welcome Stephen Kinzer thanks so much Sondra it's really wonderful to be back here I feel a special connection with the University of Scranton and I'm grateful to Sondra for helping me to maintain that so it's always really a special personal honor for me to be able to to be back here and maintain this relationship I've had to spend the last few years living with some two sort of unpleasant folks john foster dulles and allan dulles when you write a book about a person that person really does kind of take over your life this has happened to me before but it's always been with people that I liked when I began working on this project about the Dulles brothers I decided that to start and to get myself in the right frame of mind I wanted to go to Dulles Airport and I wanted to find the famous bust of John Foster Dulles that stands in the middle of the airport and kind of commune with it I had seen the YouTube video of President Kennedy opening the airport there's Eisenhower and there's mrs. John Foster Dulles the widow and Allen Dulles was there and Kennedy making a nice little speech and then he pulled back the curtain and there's the big bust of Dulles to be placed in front of the large reflecting pool at at Dulles Airport so I got off the plane and I couldn't really orient myself it's a big Airport so I asked the first security guard I met so where's the Dulles bust and I got a blank stare and I said well what who's the airport named after a little bit of a shrug I said well okay let me find another security guard I found the next one he also didn't know where the bust was finally I decided to say just point me to the reflecting pool because I know it's overlooks the reflecting pool and they all said this is no reflecting pool in Dulles Airport at this time I had to get on my continuing flight so I didn't have time to investigate but I was very curious and after many emails and telephone calls I finally just covered the truth and on my next visit to Washington accompanied by an assistant who works for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority I was shown the John Foster Dulles bust which is now in a closed and curtain'd conference room next to baggage claim number three to me this really represents what has happened to the memory of the Dulles brothers these two remarkable brothers were hugely powerful during the 1950's probably every literate human being on earth knew the name Dulles these were people who with a wink and a nod to each other could throw a whole nation into chaos or overthrow a government now they've been more or less airbrushed out of history I used to think it was terrible that they had named this Airport after John Foster Dulles now I'm so glad because if it hadn't been for that I probably nobody would remember the name so I think the reason why we've done this is that the Dulles approach to the world did not work out well for us it got us into a lot of trouble over the years and over the decades some of that trouble is still very vivid in the world today rather than confront that fact and try to draw some lessons from the Dulles experience it's more convenient to allow them to fade away and not confront the realities of what happened during that period and what impact it has had in shaping today's world so my book in a sense is a blow against that historical amnesia now my book is a biography so I'm talking about the lives of these two two remarkable figures but I'm trying to do something more than just tell their life stories I'm using the framework of biography to ask this larger question why does the United States act the way that it does in the world why are we like this why is it that every time there's a crisis or an upheaval or a conference in Bolivia or Burundi or Bhutan or Bangladesh or Billy's we feel like we have to get involved and we want to know who we're going to push out and who we're going to put in and what kind of a regime we want there at the end why is it that we are not able to lean back and say well I guess Bolivia has got some problems and Bolivia is going to have to work it out this impulse to intervene this sense that we know more about what's best for the world than the world itself knows did not begin with the Dulles brothers it's has its roots far back in manifest destiny and American exceptionalism but those forces also helped shape the Dulles brothers so in my in my history as I go through their lives I pick out three forces that I think were important in shaping the Dulles brothers and they underline my thesis that actually the Dulles brothers represent us they didn't hijack American foreign policy they reflected a broad consensus and the forces that shaped them are the forces that shaped the United States and this is why I think at the end it's a mistake to blame the Dulles brothers or anyone else individually for directions that America has taken we really need to look at ourselves and ask ourselves what we believe as a nation and ask ourselves affect gets us into more trouble than then it benefits us so the first force that influenced them I think was their family background I start out in the first chapter of my book talking about the childhood of these two young boys so they grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario in a town that was kind of a playground for the New York rich although their own family did not come from the plutocracy their father was a Presbyterian clergyman so was their grandfather so we're all their uncles somewhere they both are their grandfather on the both sides they had heavy influence not only of Presbyterian Calvinism but also the missionary aspect of Calvinism which teaches you that there's good and evil in the world there's a correct belief and then there's wrong beliefs and it's the duty of those who hold the right beliefs not simply to pray and hope for the triumph of good but to go out in the world and make sure that the bad falls in the good triumphs you know if you believe this about religion it's a very short step over to believing more or less the same thing about politics that there are good regimes that embody godly principles and they're the evil base regimes that are irredeemable this is different from what people in many cultures learn in many cultures people grow up learning that each individual and each institution and each government is made up of good and evil impulses and these come out in different proportions according to different situations that Dallas brothers did not believe this they believed in absolute good and absolute evil and they set out into the world to crush that evil John Quincy Adams said in one of his famous speeches to Congress America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy but the Dulles brothers did and my book is essentially a categorization of all the monsters that they they went out after so this missionary Calvinism was a big influence on them second was their family background which tied them so much back to the 19th century the pioneer ethos their grandfather who was the dominant influence on their upbringing had been Secretary of State just a little nice aspect having your background their uncle was also secretary of state so their grandfather had lived the classic American pioneer life in the age of manifest destiny he went west he fought the savages he came the wilderness he built a business he ingratiated himself to powerful men he drifted into politics he got involved in elections and then he got himself appointed to various diplomatic posts culminating with his being named as Secretary of State in fact he's the first Secretary of State in American history to preside over the overthrow of foreign government he was in charge of the State Department when the US overthrew the government of Hawaii it was the first time we ever overthrew an established government so the regime change it was a part of the family business you might say so from John Watson foster their imminent and extravagantly bewhiskered a grandfather they assimilated these ideas about the providential mission of America and the special role of the United States to bring civilization to the uncivilized that was the second big factor that influenced them and the third one was their decades of work for this remarkable New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell this was a law firm only a name it could do things that law firms did if you need a contract or you need to be represented in a courtroom Sullivan and Cromwell can do that for you but that's not their specialty that's never been why people hired Sullivan and Cromwell it had one specific specialty and that was pressuring small countries to give in to the demands of American corporations this is why American corporations hired Sullivan and Cromwell and almost every big American multinational corporation did and the Dulles brothers spent their adult lives four decades of serving those clients so from the days around World War one up until the time they took power in 1953 they were involved in the business of trying to impose the desires of big American corporations on small countries naturally they came to identify the interests of these corporations with the interests of the United States and they took that view with them into office now John Foster Dulles became the highest-paid lawyer in the United States and Allen Dulles was quite comfortable as well they not only represented many of the biggest American multinational corporations but they held stock in a number of them it was a very successful business and Sullivan and Cromwell was rightfully reputed very well in the business world but in 1951 the Dulles brothers as lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell suffered two most unaccustomed reverses failures the first happened with their one of their big clients that was the Schroeder Bank I was a major international bank that had used Sullivan and Cromwell for years and Allen Dulles actually was on the board of directors of the Schroder Bank the Schroder Bank amongst other interests was the bank for the company that owned the oil industry in Iran the anglo-iranian oil company in 1951 Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran nationalized the Iranian oil industry that meant that Allen Dulles particularly had to go back to the Schroder Bank people and say essentially we failed you you hired us to be sure nothing bad would ever happened to you in Iran and it just did only a few months later something similar happened in Guatemala the same curse had emerged in autumn all that he were in Iran which was democracy because the government finally was representing the will of the people Congress passed a land reform law which affected the interests of another major Sullivan and Cromwell client that was the United Fruit Company in fact both Dulles brothers had worked for United Fruit and both held large blocks of stock and United Fruit the Schroeder Bank was also the Bank for United Fruit and its affiliated companies in Guatemala so essentially the Dulles brothers had to go back not only to the Schroder Bank but to United Fruit and to the company that owned all the railroads in Guatemala and the company that owned all the electric power in Guatemala all of which were their clients and say we failed you too we couldn't protect your interests in Guatemala against this democratic regime there was nothing they could do about it while they were private lawyers but in 1953 they both took office John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State Allen Dulles became director of the CIA it's the only time in history that siblings control the overt and the covert sides of American foreign policy they came into office with to grudges already they didn't like that guy in Iran most of Dec and they didn't like that guy in Guatemala our bends they didn't even wait for Eisenhower to be inaugurated before they started their plot against Mossadegh and within eight months not only was Mossadegh overthrown but democracy in Iran was crushed forever up to now and then they immediately set off against our benzyne Guatemala and within about nine months after that first coup they had carried out the overthrow of the government of Guatemala thereby plunging it into that terrible 35 year civil war in which something like 200,000 people were killed more than were killed during that period in all the rest of Latin America combined so having these great tools to great successes under their belts the Dulles brothers then went on to fight against other monsters immediately after the Arbenz and Mossadegh coos they decided the next month sir we're going to slay is going to be Ho Chi Minh in 1954 John Foster Dulles was the chief of the American delegation to a conference in Geneva that was supposed to decide the future of Vietnam the French had just lost their big battle at Dien Bien Phu and reluctantly decided to throw in the towel they decided Ho Chi Minh is too powerful he's too popular we can't defeat him and Winston Churchill also agreed his he had a great line the loss of the fortress must be faced he was agreeing with the fridge as soon as it became clear to John Foster Dulles at that conference that the result was going to be allowing Ho Chi Minh who was a communist to take over a piece of Indochina he left it's the only time in American history that a Secretary of State walked out of a major world conference in the middle and he did this determined to resist what all the other powers wanted to do he decided we will fight in Vietnam the Americans will start an operation as soon as I get back to Washington I'm going to get Alan to start that operation it means that if that one guy had not made that decision on that one day we might have been able to avoid the entire American involvement in Vietnam and you can hardly wrap your mind around how different America and the world might be under those circumstances after the long campaign ultimately failed campaign against Ho Chi Minh but Dulles brothers focused on the new big enemy in the world which they hated in some ways even more than Bolshevism and that was neutralism this was the period after World War two when many nations were emerging from colonialism of different sorts and we're looking for their place in a turbulent new world these were leaders like Nasser in Egypt and Nehru and India Sukarno and Indonesia Lumumba in the Congo a little bit later on their line to the United States was we're only interested in developing our own countries and we're not involved in the Cold War we have no position in the Moscow Washington battle Foster Dulles hated this he used the word amoral to describe neutralism he saw all those neutralist leaders essentially as tools of the Kremlin in countries where the Kremlin was not able to impose communist rule in his mind they would find some guy who would pose as a neutralist to be the bridge figure until communism could take hold so with this great misconception they set out in operations against many of these leaders they tried to overthrow Nasser they tried to overthrow sukarno they saw these neutral lists as great enemies of the United States one of the points in my book is that we have misunderstood history of the 1950s we think of it as a period of peace tense but actually this is not correct when you now look at the documents that have been Declassified and the memoirs that have been written in the histories that have been uncovered you see that the United States was at war constantly during the 1950's the Dulles brothers never stopped one operation against one leader before they started another so the the theater of operations kept changing from Iran to Guatemala to Vietnam to Indonesia to Cuba to the Congo to Egypt and even we didn't see this war because most of it was fought below the surface and the pieces of it that we did see were not clear to us because we didn't realize that we were involved we thought these were all domestic disturbances only much later have we come to realize that these were all American projects so the Dulles brothers during the late 1950s set out and intense campaigns we fomented a major civil war in Indonesia with no success although that did foment tensions that a decade later broke out into terrible violence in the mid-1960s in Indonesia and then towards the end of the 1950's the allan dulles particularly set off on the campaign against Fidel Castro and against Patrice Lumumba both of whom he was under orders to assassinate from his boss President Eisenhower now John Foster Dulles did not live to see his reputation decline he died in office or shortly after resigning after becoming ill in office fate was not so kind to Allen Dulles John F Kennedy in his first press conference only two days after winning the election in 1960 in the first sentence of his press conference announced that he was reappointing Allen Dulles to head the CIA Allen Dulles already had an operation and process that he presented to Kennedy and that was we're going to get rid of Fidel Castro with this idea of invading at the Bay of Pigs we all know how that turned out it was a terrible disaster and Allen Dulles was fired by Kennedy soon afterwards so he did live to see his reputation decline now looking back at the Dulles brothers I think we can see that they made some terrible misjudgment Cevat the world the first one was that in the period after Stalin's death they continually rejected overtures from the Kremlin that might have led to a calming or a shortening of the Cold War it was right in 1953 the same year that Stalin died that the so-called big three that was United States France and Britain had a summit conference in Bermuda they received a message from Malan qov the new Soviet leader and the message was I want to meet with you guys so let's have a summit of four France Britain US and Soviet Union and let's talk about managing our conflict the French thought this was a great idea Churchill thought it was a good idea but Foster Dulles was absolutely against it he believed that it would be a disaster for the Americans to sit at a negotiating table with the Soviets if we did that he thought the entire paradigm of conflict would dissolve this paradigm was based on the idea we are facing not rational people but fanatics people that are completely irrational and only want to kill us if we sit down with them and suggest that maybe they might have some good ideas or maybe we could work out a deal the whole premise dissolves so they were fervently against easing the Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union second big mistake is one to which I referred earlier they completely misjudged the nature of third world nationalism and they turned the United States into enemies of countries and peoples and nations and leaders who never had to be our enemies finally the Dulles brothers had no understanding of what we would now call blowback it never occurred to them that their interventions would have huge repercussions years decades even generations later even the writing business among many other cliches we have one that says every story is either happy or sad depending on where you end it the Dulles brothers like to end their stories very quickly take Iran as an example we got rid of a guy we didn't like Mossadegh we put in a guy the Shah who would do everything we wanted perfect ending if only it had just ended there when we look back now from the period from the perspective of 60 years of history that operation doesn't seem so successful at all it's the roots of all the trouble that Iran has suffered in all the trouble that the United States and Iran have had and you can go down the list of the interventions they masterminded and see the same thing Vietnam is a great example millions were killed in Vietnam the Congo in the last 20 years we have had over two million people killed in horrific violence could all of this have been prevented if we didn't overthrow the only democratic leader the Congo ever had in 1960 maybe that's a stretch but certainly we contributed to that country's spiral into its present horrors so in this case maybe I could give the Dulles brothers a little bit of an understanding because if they were here to defend themselves they might say well when we were in power in the 1950s we didn't know that our interventions could have huge consequences half a century later but you can excuse us because we had nothing to rely on we couldn't look back on covert operations of 50 years earlier because there hadn't been any covert operations in those days but we today don't have that luxury we now can see what these operations often lead to long term into the future so I'm all for America promoting American interests and acting in the interests of the United States I believe really that's the only reliable basis for international relations and foreign policies but let's stop and ask ourselves if what we're doing in the world really is in our benefit over the long run or is it just something that makes us feel good for a little while but actually in the long run weakens our national security one of the interesting things about living with these brothers over the last few years has been one quirk of their lives that I find fascinating so they saw the world exactly the same way then this was a tragedy for the United States because it meant that we never had a discussion about any of these operations in which experts would give their opinions the Dulles brothers converted the foreign policy process into a reverberating echo chamber for their own shared certainties they were ideologically and politically identical but in their personalities they were total opposites so John Foster Dulles was dour and unfriendly and arrogant and self-righteous socially awkward he had a whole series of unpleasant habits which I categorized in one of the favorite paragraphs in my book John Allen Dulles was exactly the opposite he was a sparkling charmer he'd hit three parties every night he had an endless supply of stories he loved good wine he was a tennis player he had a hundred affairs ranging from Clare Boothe Luce to the Queen of Greece he and I think this was very important because Allen Dulles was not only the head of the invisible government he was the ambassador of the invisible government to the visible government and when he was at the sparkling center of attention at Georgetown dinner parties I think many people must have gone away thinking well we don't know what the CIA is and we don't know what it does but if it's being run by such a wonderful guy how bad can it be so at the very end of my project as I was finishing my book I decided come across a work of art that features the Dulles brothers and I tell you it's not that that bust we're missing the bus for political reasons but you're not missing anything as far as artistic experience goes it's not a particularly well made bus mrs. Dulles paid for it herself I'm not sure she hired the most talented of the world sculptors but here's another piece of art that I consider an absolute masterpiece the features the Dulles brothers it's one of the greatest works of political art of the 20th century and it's a giant mural by the brilliant Mexican painter Diego Rivera it's called glorious victory that's the phrase that John Foster Dulles used to describe what happened in Guatemala so here's the story in 1954 when we overthrew the Dulles brothers essentially overthrew the government of Guatemala there were huge protests all over Latin America including in Mexico which of course borders right on Guatemala at this time Diego Rivera was at home taking care of his very ill wife Frida Kahlo who was under doctor's orders not to get up not to leave the house after the overthrow of our Benz in Guatemala she was so angry that she told her husband we have to participate in the protest march even though the doctors have told me never to get out of bed and you can actually see a photo which I found of Diego Rivera pushing Frida Kahlo in a wheelchair through the streets of Mexico City as they protest against the Dulles brothers overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala eleven days later Frida Kahlo died it was the last public appearance she ever made Diego Rivera set out to paint this masterpiece glorious victory I reproduce it in the last page of the photo insert my book but it's only in black and white and it's small so in this picture John Foster Dulles is right in the middle with a big grin on his face and he's shaking hands with his Guatemalan Lackey the guy who became the Guatemalan dictator after our coup Allan Dulles is standing right behind him with a big satchel out of which piles of dollars are flooding out onto the ground in front of them there's a bomb with a big smiling portrait of Eisenhower surrounding the bomb are dead Guatemalan children and in the background you see Guatemalan laborers bending under the weight of these heavy banana stems which they're carrying onto a freighter with an American flag on it so I had steered at this picture on the Internet I've looked at it in great detail I've made out all the characters I've become quite engaged with that picture because the Dulles brothers are right in the middle so I decided I want to go see this I want to go to Mexico I want to actually see this picture so I called the Diego Rivera foundation to find out where it is and I got a response very similar to the one I got at Dulles Airport which was just a blank what what picture where I said glorious victory Diego Rivera is this city of a Rivera foundation anyway it's a long story actually I had to hire a person in Mexico to go to the different Diego Rivera offices and find me the painting it's a very long story with which I won't bore you but the end result was we found out his pictures not in Mexico ah Diego Rivera was a communist and he had donated his painting to the people of the Soviet Union and he sent it to them however the Soviets didn't like Diego Rivera because he wasn't a real communist the way they saw communist he's gotten a Latin American communists who believed whatever he thought that day after he'd has their drink not to mention of course that Leon Trotsky was his houseguest so the picture disappeared and all during the Cold War nobody knew what had happened to it and it wasn't until the mid-1990s that a couple of Mexican art historians found him and they located it in the basement of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow well that was ok with me I decided I'm going to take the big step I will fly to Moscow for two hours just to stand in front of this picture sure enough through another series of connections I got in touch with the deputy director of the Pushkin Museum and he sent me back the following note if you come up thank you for your interest in glorious victory unfortunately we cannot show you this picture because this picture is on a roll in a basement one of our storage depots if you come to the let's go I can take you to the basement and I could show you the roll but I cannot unroll it for you because we don't have any space so it means that this picture like the dolls bust is that lost its out of view of its not being ruined but nobody is seeing it there's no way to look at it so this leads me to a modest proposal the picture isn't doing anybody any good in the basement of a museum the audience that needs to see it is really not in Russia and the audience really isn't even in Guatemala since they know what happened the audience that really needs to see that picture is us and I have the exact place for it right in the center of Dulles Airport I wouldn't insist that they sell copies of my books right there but maybe we could put the bust in front of it and we could have a few plaques that would raise some questions that would allow us to try to get over our historical amnesia see the Dulles brothers as reflections of who we are and try to draw from them lessons that can help us build a stronger and more fruitful long-term relationship between the United States and the rest of the world our kind speaker is going to take questions now but before he does I fail to mention that there is a book signing after this after we finish so questions yes ma'am that's a great way to start it's better than saying Jack can't think of anything to say you didn't you didn't interest me at all I guess what was Eisenhower doing wrong is number one what how does this affect Bush going into Iraq and the Sullivan and Cromwell still exist Sullivan and Cromwell definitely still exists there are there I I'd say they've broadened their specialties quite a bit and maybe they've subcontracted a lot of their work to the US government which now does that kind of work for our companies free of charge after all they're the ones that own the government um but yea Sullivan and krummel's still very very powerful one of the biggest law firms in America but getting information out of them is like getting information out of United Fruit if you never know what a black hole is try extracting something from Sullivan & Cromwell or United Fruit now I must say that as I've been speaking about my book the question that you asked first is a question I always get and that is what about Eisenhower what about that mr. nice guy that was just smiling all the time and playing golf and wasn't that bright this was not a correct assessment of Dwight Eisenhower he was quite a tough guy behind that smile right at the very beginning of Allen Dulles tenure as head of the CIA he told his senior aides this president has an intense interest in every aspect of covert action and that was correct ah the Dulles brothers did not be in boozell Eisenhower they did not do anything behind his back everything they did was with the full knowledge and consent of Eisenhower now why why was Eisenhower such a fervent supporter of covert action we don't know for sure because he didn't write about it since he never admitted that he did support covert action or that there was any covert action in those days you really could believe nobody would ever find out but I can think of at least two reasons why Eisenhower would have supported this project so intensely first of all although nobody knew it at the time we now know that covert action and secret operations had a big impact in World War two the breaking of the German codes the inventing of all these fake armies with blown-up balloons to look like tanks and planes those are important operations in Eisenhower of course must have been aware of all of them as the Allied commander so he probably came away from the war with a real appreciation for what covert action could do and there's another reason I think that Eisenhower would have seen covert action is a kind of a Peace Project an alternative to war it was also a budget-cutting project Eisenhower was a real budget cutter very seriously you can see this in his private conversations he had a security policy called the new-look which had two pillars a smaller army to save money and nuclear deterrent instead we now know that the new-look actually had three columns smaller army nuclear deterrent and covert action so Eisenhower was definitely on board with all of this and I think he too can be blamed first of all for complete lack of imagination in understanding the desires of the rising peoples coming out of colonialism and he also saw many of them as enemies and also Eisenhower never imagined the the long-term effects of his operations you know Allen Dulles was a great fan of James Bond he actually communicated with Ian Fleming they wrote letters to each other and he later wrote that this is why Ian Fleming put in the later books a CIA guy he's always in a subservient role but one of the characters in the later Bond novels is a guy named Felix who works for the CIA I think that this was very dangerous for Alan to a certain degree he conflated James Bond fantasies with reality he even had the technical services division of the CIA try to invent some of them gizmos that Ian Fleming it made up and of course they all came back as these are all made up this is a novel it doesn't work in real life in the James Bond novels there's always one person who was out saves the world and crushes some evil by a covert action and most important nothing bad ever happens because the story ends early I think that's another reason why Eisenhower was part of this great consensus and certainly has to be placed as part of the foreign policy triumvirate along with the two Dulles brothers Bush just very briefly I would say the idea that the United States needs to be involved in every conflict and needs to throw out the bad guys and putting the good guys which was definitely a Dulles idea has persisted and I think you can see this all the way through Paul knit see down to his progeny of Cheney and Rumsfeld but you know two things just happened in the last month or so that I found quite extraordinary number one President Obama proposed the bombing of Syria but because of opposition in Congress and among the public we didn't do it it's the only time in my lifetime I can ever remember the president suggesting bombing another country and America's not liking the idea then shortly thereafter the President of the United States spoke on the phone with the president of Iran as another violation of our absolute commandment of the Dulles brothers you never speak to your enemies don't negotiate and that's the way that in the end you get what you want so it put these together and it makes me wonder did the Dulles era just end like last month I'm not so sure it let's face it we've got a couple of big punches in the face in Afghanistan and Iraq maybe we're a little groggy as soon as we get the smelling salts are going to be back in the room and the ring punching again but I'm not so sure maybe given what's happening in the US and it's our most recent maybe some of Americans are starting to rethink this yes sir the Dulles brothers as I said grew up steeped in this in this Calvinist tradition imagine the shock that it must have been for John Foster Dulles to receive a note from his son one day and his son announces on becoming a Catholic I tell you if he had become a Hindu it would have been better from the eyes of view of the Dulles family I found a document which I don't think has ever been printed before in an old archive I used this in my book I'd say about oral history by a guy who was a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell one of foster dulles his partners he says is a long oral history with lots of stuff in it but I found this one passage he said one day Foster Dulles called me and said this is the worst day of my life you've got to come into my office right away I went in and I found him uncustomary excited and sweating and very agitated and he threw across the desk a letter that he wanted me to read and it was a letter to his son Avery and the letter said never speak to me again never contact me you are not my son I never want to hear your name again and this partner said I spent four hours with Foster and finally managed to persuade him not to send a letter nonetheless I think it's an expression of what a huge shock it was they did sort of reconcile towards the end of Foster Dulles his life but a family treason certainly of a kind that the Foster Dulles could never comprehend or fully forgive yes the John Foster Dulles I'm very unlikely source Nikita Khrushchev who said I don't know these memoirs are simply tells but he said Dulles always knew just how far to push us and not that's true that was a quote from Khrushchev when Khrushchev was informed that Dulles was dying so he made this nice comment saying he pushed us but we never got to the edge of war brinksmanship was of course one of the concepts for which Foster Dulles was famous let's go right to the edge of war of course it's terrifying the American allies who didn't even want to go close to the edge of war so yeah I think Christian was being a little bit generous he in some ways I think smiled and may have benefited from some of the Dulles mistakes I mean as soon as the United States for example decided we don't want to support Nasser anymore in Egypt because NASA is neutralist we're withdrawing our offer to give a loan to pay for the Aswan Dam the Soviets immediately decide oh we'll pay so because of that Foster Dulles achieved the one thing in the Middle East that he hoped to avoid which was bring Soviet power right into the Middle East and this did not happen because of Soviet invasion or Soviet subversion of a political system but at the open invitation of a popular leader who had been alienated by the United States so Khrushchev may have had some reason to be to be grateful to the Dulles brothers I just had since you were talking about quotes and one of my favorite quotes that I found from about Foster Dulles from Harold Macmillan the British prime minister he said about Foster Dulles his speech was slow but it easily kept pace with his thoughts yes sir about the dollars in Vietnam I don't want to go over this all but certainly it was Dulles --is refusal to accept the consensus at Geneva in 1954 that ho Chi Minh could not be defeated that was the beginning of the American involvement there in terms of an active US operation in Vietnam he understood that ho Chi Minh was a nationalist in a communist but he forgot the nationalist part and I think he also the Dulles brothers had this view which i think is still very strong in America and that is that some situation might look very challenging very difficult the British and the French might have decided it's impossible but we're America we can accomplish things that are impossible for everyone else this is the can-do mentality which is a beautiful thing it's what has made America what it is and it's led us to overcome challenges that are posed by other people by nature by technology but there are some challenges particularly those posed by deep-seated cultures that even the United States cannot overcome and I think this idea that of this can-do idea which tells you if you want something badly enough and you just work hard enough you're going to get it it's positive but it also has a dark side yes it's actually sounds a lot better in public when you say American exceptionalism I can tell you that when I start I teach a class at Brown on the history of American intervention and I start by in the first day I'm laying out the rules for the class like you can't come late and yeah you know you can't use your cell phone and there's no eating in class while I'm doing this I'm munching on my sandwich weapons and there's no eating so stop disrespecting yeah yeah and I go on like I said the kids are all a little bit puzzled and then I say you see I'm the United States I make the rules but I don't have to obey them how do you feel about that so I think this is something that Americans often don't think about how does our view of our own exceptionalism look to everybody else was by our definition unexceptional yes sir I'm sure you're familiar with Winston Churchill's estimation of John Foster Dulles what's the famous book he's the only bull I know who carries his own china shop around with him that's correct I've had several people say you mentioned the two brothers but you didn't mention the third brother Avery no this is not correct he was the son of John Foster Dulles who had this epiphany walking along the Charles River that he should be a Catholic he not only became a Jesuit but he became a cardinal he became a favorite of john paul ii at the end of his life he was avery cardinal Dulles yes Pitt you know I feel that George ball was uh not as ready to accept the established consensus as the only option particularly in the early 60s as the American involvement in Vietnam was growing I think ball began to emerge as somebody who could question the consensus he was very different from for example from Dean Rusk I remember reading a terrible accountant I think it was Clark Clifford's memoir which was ghost written by dick Holbrooke that there was one meeting a cabinet meeting in which the suggestion was made that maybe it was time to start negotiating with the North Vietnamese and stop bombing them and Dean Rusk said after this is a terrible idea because you don't know if right now while we're speaking the North Vietnamese leaders could be meeting and they could be deciding right at this instant to give up so so don't stop now when you have this mentality of course you go on forever so I saw George ball is a different kind of a person a person who believed that the way we've been looking at this all this time might not be the only way to look at it and that was not a way that the Dulles brothers ever looked at anything yes sir I don't think we know the things he said in a flat note and I think rough things if he said no going to war today um certainly but well we actually have one of America's leading experts on the whole DM bien phu expedition right here at this table in the orange sweater so i don't want to dare to get into that because i know i'm going to be contradicted by someone who's far more knowledgeable but you're right i think eisenhower was a bit reluctant particularly to get involved in shooting Wars land wars but as i said he would not have put this in the category with covert action he would have seen covert action as the way to prevent yourself from getting into big Wars because in the short run it really was much less bloody and much cheaper and let's say said as Americans were short-run oriented when you start to tell Americans about each looking at their foreign policy in the future of their country over the long run I think that's one of those terms that just makes us switch off because our the curb of our history has been very short a little bit misleading and that's why countries that have been around a long time sometimes laugh at the self designated exceptionalism according to which we operate in the world hmm I remember reading in a biography of Eisenhower one time by somebody who was allowed to be with him and seeing the cabinet meetings and things like that who said that he watched Eisenhower one time when Dulles was making a presentation and he said it was clear that Dulles bored Eisenhower that was his remark and did that have anything to do with and later on towards the end of his two terms Eisenhower did turn to negotiations and the Open Skies proposal and that kind of thing yeah I think it is true that there were moments when Eisenhower felt that Dulles was going too far even during the 1952 presidential campaign when Dulles was writing all of Eisenhower's speeches on foreign policy you can actually see the draft where Eisenhower has made little additions like he puts in the addition by peaceful means which is something that the Dulles brothers didn't like to insert in there yeah I think that uh also Dulles yield it often to advice that came directly from Eisenhower he did yield to advice from Dulles on several occasions for example we now know that Eisenhower came into office without a feeling one way or the other about Mossadegh in Iran later on as I said he was very eager to launch certain covert operations and even to assassinate foreign leaders but as far as Iran was concerned he didn't have a prejudice or a belief one way or the other but we now know from a new biography of Eisenhower that over drinks every every afternoon at five or six o'clock Foster Dulles would come to the White House and they would spend an hour talking about the world over these sessions it was Dulles who brought Eisenhower into his enthusiasm for the plot against Mossadegh and in fact I'll tell you one little story as I follow the passage of these plots through the Declassified document trail this is an interesting moment in the story of Mossadegh so as the u.s. is plotting the overthrow of this democratically elected leader in in Iran only once is a question raised only one time that a person in the Eisenhower administration try to ask in a little more detail about this and the person who asked was Eisenhower we were at a National Security Council meeting and Eisenhower said something like I'm glad we're getting rid of that Communists in Iran but I hadn't realized that Mossadegh was a communist as a matter of fact Mossadegh was a feudal landlord who was an elder aristocrat and detested all socialist and Marxist ideas but john foster dulles had a great answer he said mr. president you're right mostly dick is not a communist but Mossadegh is old he's not well he could die he could get overthrown there could be instability in Iran it's right on the border with the Soviet Union they have lots of oil it's too dangerous to leave them in power essentially they portrayed Mossadegh as a kind of a Iranian Kerensky who would be too weak to resist other forces and when Eisenhower heard this is it okay I agree let's go ahead and do it all right I think we've probably reached the end of the question period I'm going to go out and sign some look at one more in the back and then we're going to sign some books in Balkan affairs I'm going to tell you one interesting story that I put in my book about the Balkans so while John Foster Dulles was eagerly crushing neutralist leaders in the world like Soekarno for example in Indonesia um he found one self-proclaimed neutralist who he really liked and that was Tito in Yugoslavia here he is clicking glasses and making agreements and agreeing to 90 million dollars a year in aid to an avowed Marxist Leninist who has come to power through violence and is maintaining himself in power through ought to autocratic governments a far more repressive leader than the guy we overthrow an Iran or in Guatemala so why was it that Dulles was able to see something in Tito that he couldn't see in these other leaders part of it of course I thought Heath must have thought that Tito was bleeding the Soviets in embarrassing the Soviets but I think there's something else the foreign policy establishment of which the Dulles brothers were a leading part grew up focused almost entirely on Europe when they learned about the history of diplomacy really it met the history of European diplomacy Europe was all they knew about and all they cared about in fact there's a famous line from Henry Kissinger I know nothing about nor am i interested in the world south of the Pyrenees so the Dulles brothers would have fully understood and all their friends would have been able to go into great detail about the relationships among Italy and Austria and what it would mean for Switzerland if France made a certain decision they were steeped in all of this and they understood the subtleties of European politics they felt that this was that there was a point a value in trying to invest in Tito but they didn't know anything about the rest of the world and they were unable to see Africa Asia and Latin America with the subtlety that they were able to use in in seeing Europe and the Balkans okay thanks very much Sundra you I can't thank you enough but for the rest of you go out and buy your books and Steven will sign

Channel: The University of Scranton

Views: 64,261

Rating: 4.7139072 out of 5

Keywords: University of Scranton, Schemel Forum, Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, Vietnam, CIA, Communism, U of S, Scranton

Id: I6aV-fUnb1M

Length: 56min 58sec (3418 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2013