John Foster Dulles

John Foster Dulles

John Foster Dulles (born February 25, 1888 in Washington, DC , † May 24, 1959 ) was an American politician who served as Secretary of State of the United States from 1953 to 1959 under US President Dwight D. Eisenhower . He was known for his uncompromising attitude towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War and viewed communism as a "moral evil".

education

Dulles was born to a Presbyterian minister, Allen Macy Dulles, and his wife Edith Foster. His grandfather, John W. Foster, was also the US Secretary of State . He and his family spent the first three months in Washington with his uncle before they moved to Watertown , near New York . He was the oldest of six children; he still had three sisters and two brothers. One of his brothers was Allen Welsh Dulles , who later became head of the CIA under Eisenhower . His sister Eleanor Lansing Dulles also gained some notoriety. His cousin was the historian Foster Rhea Dulles , who later wrote about him as well. Even as a child, he had a habit of dominating a group through his presence. John Dulles was an active boy who spent his time camping, fishing, and most importantly, swimming. He was raised religiously. He was pretty knowledgeable about the Bible and took religion very seriously. Dulles was a Presbyterian .

His mother prepared him for a future in civil service from a young age. He attended a private school in Watertown because his parents felt that public school was not taught well enough. In 1903 he went to Europe with his parents and sister Margaret for a year , mainly for language reasons.

Princeton and its education

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At the age of 16, following a family tradition, he went to Princeton to study . He was the youngest in his year and later says he went there too young. Academically, he concentrated very much on the study, especially on the field of philosophy . In 1908 he received the Chancellor Green Fellowship in Mental Science for the essay "The Theory of Judgment", which enabled him to spend a year at the Sorbonne in Paris . Dulles was a student of Woodrow Wilson who was president there while he was a student . Wilson made a deep impression on him, especially from a social point of view. He later said the biggest thing he'd done at Princeton was take Wilson's class.

His grandfather John W. Foster , Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Benjamin Harrison , took him in 1907 as his secretary for the second Hague Peace Conference with. After graduating with an extremely good degree, the best of his year, the whole family went to Paris (departure in August 1908, several months through Europe). Dulles took courses in law at the Sorbonne, but also lectures in philosophy under Henri Bergson . This was followed by six weeks alone in Madrid , where he was with a purely Spanish-speaking family.

In the fall of 1909 he went back to Washington to live with his grandparents to study at the Washington Law School . Here he made first contacts with employees of the government and the Washington society. He completed a three-year law degree from George Washington University in just two years , with the highest score ever in the history of the university.

In the spring of 1911 he was preparing for the bar exam ( New York Bar Exam ). He became engaged to Janet Avery , whom he had met in Paris two years earlier , on the day of the exam . He was deeply in love with her and stayed that way until the end of his life.

Getting started as a lawyer

Despite his above-average performance, he initially found no employment; George Washington graduates were less in demand than Harvard graduates. His grandfather, who was still working in his old job, got him to talk to an old friend. So he got a job for the standard wage of 50 dollars a month at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell (S & C), at the time one of the most important law firms in the USA, representing various entrepreneurs and the government across the American continent ( Central America and the Caribbean ).

In 1912 he married Janet Avery. During his honeymoon, he suffered from malaria , which he acquired from one of his overseas missions for S&C. The treatment resulted in further deterioration in vision (the whole family suffered from poor vision) and damage to the optic nerve, resulting in fluttering eyes . His first son John was born in 1913, daughter Lilias in 1914 and Avery in 1918. The latter became a Catholic priest , Jesuit and later cardinal and died in New York City in 2008.

The First World War

In the First World War he was retired as unfit due to his poor eyesight. He was then on the War Trade Board ( Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics , "Central Office for Planning and Statistics"). He worked in Washington and New York and took care of the supply routes of the ships, and that these did not fall into the hands of the Germans. He was so successful at it that his superiors noticed and impressed them.

When he heard that Wilson wanted to lead the peace negotiations, he asked his uncle Robert Lansing , Secretary of State under Wilson, to find him a post there. Robert no longer had a good relationship with the President; nevertheless they took him with them. He owed this to his work on the War Industrial Board (subdivision of the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics ), whose head was Bernard Baruch , who took him with him as his assistant. Baruch was appointed chief representative of the United States Reparations Commission, but left much of the discussion to his assistant.

It was Dulles who legally formulated the German war guilt (sole guilt) in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty , which was the main reason for the first German delegation under Count Brockdorff-Rantzau to refuse to sign. Dulles advocated moderate conditions, more or less in vain. Here he learned u. a. Jean Monnet (1888–1979) and the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) know. Later, he was still friends with Monnet. (Monnet formulated a plan from 1946 to 1950, which was adopted as the Schuman Plan in 1950 and led to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, Montanunion).)

In the later years he did not lose sight of the negotiations about the reparation payments . At first he still believed that Germany could recover even under the burden of reparations, in contrast to Keynes. He and Sullivan & Cromwell were later involved in the Dawes and Young plans .

His time as a lawyer

In the fall of 1919 Dulles returned to his old firm and was very successful as a lawyer. Through his work during the First World War, he had established contacts in many areas of the economy and government as well as in other countries.

Some of his main customers were companies such as International Nickel Company and Overseas Security Cooperation , but also banks such as JP Morgan . He advised them on credit transactions and was also in charge of some of them. In 1926 he became a senior partner.

John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen represented US as well as German and European companies as part of their work at the commercial law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. These included Chase Bank, Ford , ITT , SKF , the IG Farben group and the Belgian National Bank . They represented companies not only legally, but also as hidden placeholders for company shares and as political lobbyists . As a CIA director or US Secretary of State, they did not break off their previous activities.

Since his time in the Paris Peace Delegation, he was a Wilsonian and a proponent of disarmament and an international court of justice . Like many others, he initially did not assess the global economic crisis as such ("hope and prosperity around the corner" belief).

In 1931 he was unable to influence the European Stabilization Meeting politically. Since he could not be active on the state level, he participated on the private level. Between July 1931 and May 1932, the New York House of Lee founded a syndicate that made almost USD 500 million available to the German government under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning at short notice . Dulles was the company's legal advisor.

He was later accused of this involvement in international business, especially in the 1944 election campaign. He personally fought for Franco , saved Hitler and his circles from financial failure, etc. But also around 1947, during negotiations in Moscow , the issue was legal counsel for the IG Farben , had once taken to Dulles. It was said that he had nothing against German National Socialism . It is true that Dulles and S&C represented German companies before the Nazis came to power . It is also true that after Hitler came to power, all offices were closed because the exercise of rights was no longer possible. Even if he initially assessed German National Socialism in a differentiated manner - he saw it as the answer to the ignorance of the great powers - Dulles was not his supporter.

In 1939 he published the philosophical book War, Peace and Change . Dulles didn't think America should go to war. His thesis was that all of this was the result of the botched peace after World War I, and that now came the bill for Anglo-French arrogance.

Church work

He put forward these theses primarily at the world councils of churches and at similar church conferences. From 1936, for example, he became more and more involved in the church and in church-related organizations. Friendships with churchmen developed. In 1940 he became head of the Commission for the Study of the Basis of a Just and Lasting Peace , also known as the Dulles Commission because of his influence . The aim was to make America think about international connections and the creation of a new and just world order, as well as that of an international control system. Here Wilsonianism had a positive impact again .

At the founding meeting of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, he and the Czechoslovak theologian Josef L. Hromádka had a sharp confrontation over the assessment of the two camps in the Cold War . Heinz Joachim Held , who was also involved in the meeting, recalled: "The Christian politician from the United States made no secret of his cutting rejection of the thoroughly materialistic and atheistic Soviet system. He represented in an almost dogmatic way a Protestant-religiously motivated anti-communism , who invoked the values ​​of western civil religion. "

Political work

Dulle's work in foreign policy began in 1937 through his contacts with Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the 1944 Republican presidential candidate. He supported him as early as the 1940 nomination, but Dewey did not become a presidential candidate. Dewey was not an isolationist but promised to stay out of the war. Dulles was his foreign policy advisor during the campaign. He hoped to get a high position in politics through Dewey, but Dewey lost the election to Franklin D. Roosevelt , who was brilliant in the war . During the Second World War , Dulles also worked for the Bank for International Settlements .

John Foster Dulles' signature under the Austrian State Treaty of 1955

In 1946 he advised Arthur H. Vandenberg at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco , where he worked on the preamble to the UN Charter . Dulles later became a member of the General Assembly in the 1947-1949 Conferences. In 1947 he attended the Moscow Conference . He supported the Marshall Plan and was shocked when Joseph Stalin forbade his satellite states to adopt it. In 1948 he was against the Bernadotte Plan (partition of the new Israel), after all , in his opinion , Israel had won and so the right to land ownership. Dulles quickly became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after World War II after encountering Soviet stubbornness and inflexibility at various international meetings. He didn't want to be anti-Soviet, but the Russians made him so (according to his sister).

He was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Rockefeller Foundation .

senator

After Dewey's election failure in November 1948, he asked Dulles in the summer of 1949 whether he would not succeed Robert F. Wagner in the Senate . Dulles accepted, left Sullivan & Cromwell on July 8, and became US Senator for New York . Just three days later he spoke out in favor of NATO , which the isolationists in the Republican Party like Senator Robert A. Taft did not like at all. During the reelection campaign he was accused of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism . He did not win re-election the following year, the election victory was missed by 200,000 votes against Herbert H. Lehman . He was now 62 years old. For the first time he had become acquainted with the realpolitik of the election campaign.

Work for the democrats

From April 1950 to spring 1952 he worked on behalf of the US State Department ( Luke Battle brought him in), u. a. with peace negotiations in Japan . The negotiations, which Dean Acheson had led for three years, were entrusted to him by Harry S. Truman and finally signed on September 4, 1951 in San Francisco , ratified in 1952 in the Senate. As with the founding of NATO, Dulles has now worked for the Democrats .

In 1950 he published the book War or Peace .

He was a proponent of the Korean War , but when the war goals were not achieved and the Truman government began to lose its reputation, he decided to "step down". In the spring of 1952 he resigned from his post. In his press release he said that he was only there for the Japanese peace, and that that was now over, he had nothing to do with the rest.

Dulles and Eisenhower

Dulles and Eisenhower 1956

Dulles accepted an invitation to give a speech on May 5, 1952 at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris . Because there he could meet Dwight D. Eisenhower , the Republican presidential candidate. Both quickly developed mutual respect. Eisenhower admired Dulles' historical knowledge, which he could call up at any time. Dulles had learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. It was precisely because of his uncle's experience with Wilson that it was clear to him that he had power through the president, which is why he assured him full support and agreed with him at every opportunity.

He was aware of the power of the press and always tried to be on good terms with it.

In order to secure the support of the Republicans, he wrote the foreign policy program, which was published in Life magazine under the title "A policy of boldness". In this he criticized Harry Truman's foreign policy in Korea and other overseas affairs, saying that the signs were there for a change. Dulles turned sharply against the policy of containment ( containment ) of President Truman and advocated a more aggressive variant of the "liberation" ( liberation ) of the satellite states of the Soviet Union.

On November 20, 1952, Eisenhower asked him if he wanted to take over the post of Foreign Minister; he said yes. In January 1953 he took over the office. He achieved support for the French in their Indochina war against the Việt Minh . The US now paid 78% of the cost of French warfare.

At a meeting on the Quai d'Orsay on the eve of the Indochina Conference in Geneva, Dulles took his French counterpart, Georges Bidault, aside and asked him privately: "What if we give you two atomic bombs?"

At the 1954 Geneva Conference , he refused to shake hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai .

During his tenure, he developed NATO and its South Asian counterpart, SEATO , into massive deterrent mechanisms against the threat of Soviet aggression. Dulles is considered to be one of the fathers of the American concept of deterrence , which saw the mutual assurance of total destruction as a guarantee of peace (" balance of terror "). The threat of a nuclear strike, which was reflected in the NATO strategy of massive retaliation , has been criticized by European allies since the late 1950s and replaced by the strategy of flexible response in the 1960s .

In 1955 he signed the Austrian State Treaty in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna .

In 1956 Dulles refused American support for the British - French - Israeli occupation of the Egyptian Suez Canal ( Suez Crisis ). Two years later, he ended support for Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser .

Sickness and death

Dulles suffered from colon cancer . In 1958 he was wrongly diagnosed with diverticulitis . In February 1959 he was operated on in the Walter Reed Military Hospital . After his health deteriorated and bone metastases were diagnosed, he resigned on April 15, 1959.

Shortly before his death, he received the Medal of Freedom . He died on May 24, 1959 at the age of 71 in Walter Reed Military Hospital and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

personality

Dulles is portrayed in different ways: enigmatic, nice, but also clinically cold if you had to. He was sensitive to verbal nuances, but himself often used flat and very generalizing language. The New York Times then characterized him as the strongest man in the strongest nation, as technically competent, with international prestige and influential at home.

See also

• Washington Dulles International Airport
• John Foster Dulles Avenue

literature

• Louis L. Gerson: John Foster Dulles. Cooper Square, New York 1967.
• Michael A. Guhin: John Foster Dulles. A Statesman and his times. Columbia Univ. Press, New York 1972, ISBN 0-231-03664-7 .
• Stephen Kinzer: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, And Their Secret World War. Saint Martin's Griffin, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-250-05312-1 .
• Leonard Mosley: Dulles. A biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and their family network. Dial Press, New York 1978, ISBN 0-8037-1744-X , Hodder and Stoughton, London 1978, ISBN 0-340-22454-1
• Ronald W. Pruessen: John Foster Dulles. The Road to Power. Free Press, New York 1982, ISBN 0-02-925460-4

Web links

Commons : John Foster Dulles  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about John Foster Dulles in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about John Foster Dulles  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about John Foster Dulles in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• John Foster Dulles in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Materials for the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom at www.medaloffreedom.com
• John Foster Dulles in the archive of the Austrian Media Library
• John Foster Dulles in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christina Klein: Cold War Orientalism , p. 105 .
2. ↑ The unrest of Versailles . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 2009 ( online ).
3. ↑ Werner Rügemer : The Consultants , Bielefeld 2004.
4. ^ Heinz Joachim Held: Ecumenism in the Cold War. A personal attempt to remember and contribute to transparency , in: The World Council of Churches in the Conflicts of the Cold War. Contexts - Compromises - Concretions, ed. Heinz-Jürgen Oppin (Ökumenische Rundschau, Supplement 80) Frankfurt / M .: Otto Lembeck 2000, p. 41
5. ^ Switzerland: Hitler's zealous fence. In: Der Spiegel from March 17, 1997 ( DER SPIEGEL 12/1997 online ) (accessed September 12, 2012).
6. ^ John Lewis Gaddis: Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National , p. 384 (FN 30).
7. ^ TV interview in Hearts and Minds , 1974, minute 4.00.
8. ^ Barron H. Lerner: When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006. pp. 81ff. ISBN 0-8018-8462-4 .