THE NATION: Man of the Year

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The agreement was prodded, adjusted and pushed through by Loy Henderson, then U.S. Ambassador to Iran, and Special U.S. Emissary Herbert Hoover Jr., now Under Secretary of State.

¶ After long and careful negotiation by U.S. diplomats, Turkey and Pakistan signed a military collaboration treaty. This was a key step toward Dulles' goal of a "Northern Tier" defense against Soviet expansion.

In Europe and in the Americas, too, there were some clear-cut gains. Items:

¶ At Caracas, in March, Secretary Dulles personally pushed through an inter-American resolution calling for joint action against Communist aggression or subversion. Said Dulles: "It may serve the needs of our time as effectively as the Monroe Doctrine served the needs of our nation during the last century." Only three months after Caracas, Jacobo Arbenz' Communist-dominated government of Guatemala, the only Red bastion in the western hemisphere, was overthrown by the anti-Communist forces of Castillo Armas.

¶ The status of Trieste was settled after nine years of Communist-comforting tension between Italy and Yugoslavia. When U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce impressed Washington with the urgency of a settlement, U.S. and British diplomacy went to work. The Italians and the Yugoslavs were persuaded to sign a settlement dividing the territory, with the Italians getting the Italian city.

Holes Plugged. Dulles' job includes defense as well as advance. He played goalkeeper in the free world's two major setbacks of 1954: the death of the European Defense Community (to which he had said there was "no alternative") and the defeat in Indo-China. Both setbacks stemmed from a single mistake made a decade ago, and never corrected in spite of mounting evidence. The mistake: that the victory of France's allies over Germany somehow meant that France had recovered from the basic political weakness that caused its collapse in 1940. The postwar phrase—the Big Four—was a misnomer; France is not a great power, but a great civilization, politically paralyzed. EDC asked France to show a self-confidence it did not possess. Indo-China asked France to show a will to win it did not possess. A new Premier, Pierre Mendès-France, made France's allies face the old fact of France's weakness.

At the end of 1953, John Foster Dulles had said, quite pointedly, that the U.S. would be forced to make an "agonizing reappraisal" of its relations with France, of its policy toward Europe if EDC failed of ratification. (That expression and Dulles' "massive retaliation" became the cold-war phrases of 1954.) A smaller man than Dulles might have insisted on a reappraisal immediately after Mendès-France presided over the French assassination of EDC. But Dulles swallowed his pride and helped the West lay the foundation for a substitute.