FOREIGN RELATIONS: Broad-Picture Man

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At the third level, day-te-day operations, Dulles, so far, is less successful. The time lag is probably inevitable. He has to establish and strengthen policy before he can get a grip on operations. In the process, some disruption and demoralization at the operating level of the State Department was bound to occur. The experts in details find that their judgments are modified by Dulles' view of the broad picture. Some of them resent it. Acheson had far better morale among his operators —but the U.S. paid the price in a less coherent and less successful policy.

This inevitable conflict has been unnecessarily aggravated by other factors. Some Foreign Service officers charge that Dulles did not trust them and would not raise a hand to protect them against low blows from Joe McCarthy (although Dulles did fight manfully and successfully for Ambassador to Russia Charles Bohlen). In West Germany, High Commissioner James Bryant Conant's staff only recently began to recover from the fears born last May when Conant's able Propaganda Boss Theodore Kaghan was summarily fired after Cohn & Schine. McCarthy's junketeering gumshoes, sicked their boss onto him.

Heavily contributing to low morale in the Foreign Service, and elsewhere in the State Department, is the fact that Dulles' departmental security officer. Scott McLeod, seems little more than Joe McCarthy's Charlie McCarthy.

In addition, the Eisenhower economy program has hit the State Department hard. Waves of bumping and riffing (see INTERNATIONAL) run through the embassies, demoralizing staffs with job insecurity. Dulles plans no further wholesale shifts and cuts. The Department and the Foreign Service may soon settle down and adjust to new, firmer policy control.

The Simulated Stamp. In his search for successful policy, John Foster Dulles puts in a 6½-day week. (Sunday mornings are reserved for attendance at Washington's National Presbyterian Church.) He avoids the big staff meetings and long, detailed briefing sessions of the Acheson era, letting his Under Secretary. Walter Bedell Smith, run the Department's housekeeping—which Smith does with one of the clearest heads in Washington.

Much of what "free time" Dulles has is devoted to official dinners, but he always arranges his schedule so that he can get home beforehand for a bourbon-on-the-rocks and a chat with his retiring, charming wife. Periodically, he renews his energies by a brief stay with Mrs. Dulles at his isolated summer home on Duck Island in Lake Ontario. There he gets in some fishing, sailing and birdwatching, happily washes the dishes and polishes copper pots for Mrs. Dulles. In Washington he shakes off the day's cares with a warm bath and a half-hour's reading (detective novels or the Bible) before he drops off to sleep.

Despite his harried existence and critical howls that he is hurtling the world toward disaster, Dulles remains buoyant and quietly confident about the future. "You can't do these things overnight," he points out. "But I believe that the power of America is still a potentially great force in the world if you can only get it working the right way, and I think we're beginning to get it to work."