1954
John Foster Dulles
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 3, 1955
In an icy conference room in West Berlin one day last February, Vyacheslav
Mikhailovich Molotov sang an old, sour song. After nine years of delay and
diatribe, the Soviet Union still refused to sign a peace treaty ending the
occupation of Austria. As Molotov droned on, a tall man slouched low in a
chair, whittling on a pencil, calmly watching the shavings drop to the floor.
When the Russian had finished, John Foster Dulles blew the dust from his
pocketknife, snapped it shut and shoved it into his pocket. Then the U.S.
Secretary of State leaned forward.
"For about 2,000 years now," said Dulles, "there has been a figure in
mythology which symbolizes tragic futility. That was Sisyphus, who, according
to the Greek story, was given the task of rolling a great stone up to the top
of a hill. Each time when, after great struggle and sweating, the stone was
just at the brow of the hill, some evil force manifested itself and pushed the
stone down. So poor Sisyphus had to start his task over again. I suspect that
for the next 2,000 years the story of Sisyphus will be forgotten, when
generation after generation is told the tragic story of the Austrian state
treaty. We have repeatedly been almost at the point of concluding an Austrian
treaty, and always some evil force manifests itself and pushes the treaty back
again."
Then John Foster Dulles looked squarely at the man he had labeled the
instrument of an evil force and said: "I think that the Soviet Foreign Minister
will understand that it is at least excusable if we think, and if much of the
world will think, that what is actually under way here is another illustration
of the unwillingness of the Soviet Union actually to restore genuine freedom
and independence in any area where it has once gotten its grip."
War Against Gullibility. The Berlin Conference might have marked the
beginning of calamity for John Foster Dulles—and for the people and the cause
he represented. Instead, it was at Berlin that Dulles started on the way to
become 1954's Man of the Year. It was the first time in nearly five years that
the foreign ministers of the Big Four had conferred. Much of the world was
being lulled by new and gentle tones from Moscow. Did Malenkov's Russia really
want peace? In trying to get an answer that all the world would understand,
Secretary of State Dulles at Berlin pressed Molotov with greater skill and
force than any U.S. diplomat had ever shown in dealing with the Communists.
With one sharp stroke after another, he stripped the Communists naked of the
pretense that they really wanted peace at anything less than their own
outrageous price. If millions remained deluded by the "soft" Malenkov line,
that was not the fault of Dulles, who rescued other millions from gullibility.
Everywhere, and especially in Europe, gullibility was nurtured by the fear
that no power could stop the Communists, that the only alternatives were an
appeasing coexistence or an atomic world war in which the dreadful best outcome
would be liberation after U.S. "massive retaliation" against Red aggression.
Neither at Berlin last February nor throughout the year did Dulles try to veil
the free world's grim dependence on massive atomic retaliation. But he knew
this to be a position of desperation, one that could not be held indefinitely
unless the non-Communist world regained freedom of action, unless it found
other than ultimate and apocalyptic ways to gather and use its strength.
In pursuit of such ways, Dulles spent 1954 in a ceaseless round of travel,
logging 101,521 miles on journeys to Berlin, London, Paris, Caracas, Bonn,
Geneva, Milan, Manila and Tokyo. In one fortnight last September, he munched
mangoes with Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay in Manila, conferred with
Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa, visited Premier Yoshida in Tokyo, reported to
President Eisenhower in Denver, consulted with Winston Churchill in London and
talked with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn. En route, he read a detective story in
mid-Pacific, slept soundly across the Atlantic, and carried on U.S. State
Department business as he crossed one international border after another.
On his trips to reinforce the free world outposts, Dulles sometimes merely
shored up a wall that the Reds had breached, but on other sorties he served his
primary mission: to develop the cohesion and strength that would make Communist
aggression less likely and would, therefore, make the free world less directly
dependent on massive retaliation, the defense it feared.
A Giant Stride. As the year ended, Dulles, back from his eighth
transatlantic trip in twelve months, was able to report to the U.S. that plans
for Europe's defense had entered a new phase. Tactical atomic weapons (e.g.,
atomic howitzers and small rockets) now make it possible to halt a Red army
ground attack: "The aggressor would be thrown back at the threshold" of Western
Europe. The 14 NATO nations that discussed this with Dulles are agreed on how
this threshold defense shall be coordinated. Said Dulles: "Thus we see the
means of achieving what the people of Western Europe have long sought—that is,
a form of security which, while having as its first objective the preservation
of peace, would also be adequate for defense and which would not put Western
Europe in a position of having to be liberated."
John Foster Dulles played the key role in the NATO Council's agreement on
how to coordinate this giant stride. When Dulles got to Paris for the council
meeting last fortnight, he found that both Anthony Eden and Pierre
Mendes-France had prepared strict plans calling for consultation by the allies
before nuclear weapons could be used. After dinner with Eden, Dulles pulled out
his omnipresent yellow scratch-pad, scribbled out his own resolution. Next day
both Eden and Mendes-France dropped their proposals, and the council adopted
the Dulles plan within 30 minutes. It provided for consultation prior to use of
nuclear weapons by NATO forces, but it did not set rigid rules or tie the hand
of such non-NATO forces as the U.S. Strategic Air Command.
A Year of Shadowed Joy. In Dulles' patient year of work and travel, every
task and every mile was made harder by the mood of 1954, a year in which
temptations to complacency and reasons for anxiety both mounted. For
complacency, 1954 was superficially like the peaceful and prosperous '20s.
Between Sept. 18, 1931, when the Japanese moved into Manchuria, and Aug. 10,
1954, when the Indo-China fighting stopped, there was no day of worldwide
peace. Between Oct. 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed, and 1954, there
had been some years of boom, but it took 1954's mild, controlled U.S. recession
to bring home the solidity of the economic advance. The rest of the world had
long feared the magnified effect of even a mild U.S. recession. But in 1954
business forged ahead in Britain, West Germany and many another country,
despite the brief U.S. downswing. As U.S. indexes turned upward at year's end,
the 25-year-old belief that the world was tied to a boom-or-bust economy began
to bust.
The result, as 1954 ended, was a feeling of firm confidence in the U.S.
economy and in dynamic capitalism as an economic way of life. Secretary of the
Treasury George Humphrey, a hard man with a dollar's worth of optimism, summed
up this economic feeling in a financial man's superlative. Said he: "I'm a bull
on the world."
The main differences between the peace and prosperity of 1954 and of the
'20s were: I) 1954's peace and prosperity had, in reality, far better
prospects; 2) the 1920s' feeling of confidence, which proved illusory, was much
higher. Americans of 1954 knew that the technical peace was not real, that they
had to keep almost 3,000,000 men under arms, maintain a peacetime conscription
and spend an average of $855 a family for defense. The year that saw the
hydrogen explosion at Bikini—the biggest explosion in man's explosive
history—was not one to foster illusions about an indefinite peace.
Yards Gained. The U.S. needed all its strength and confidence to handle
1954's struggle with Communism, which has been the overriding issue of every
year since 1945. Dulles both drew upon and nourished U.S. confidence in its
national strength. Far from offending allies, the emphasis on U.S. interests
had a wholesome effect of stimulating the national prides of other Western
nations in a war that made them more self-reliant and more reliable partners in
the struggle against the common enemy.
Dulles is the man of 1954 because, in the decisive areas of international
politics he played the year's most effective role. He made mistakes, and he
suffered heavy losses. But he was nimble in disentangling himself from his
errors. The heavier losses of 1954 were prepared by serious mistakes made years
ago; Dulles limited the damage.
Regionally, 1954's greatest area of success for American diplomacy and the
man who runs it was the Middle East. There, a number of old problems were
solved by new approaches. Items:
— After decades of dispute, the status of the Suez Canal area was settled more
firmly than ever before. On the surface this was an affair between the British
who agreed to withdraw their troops, are Egypt's Man of the Year, Premier
Gamal-Abdel Nasser. In fact, the settlement was skillfully midwifed by the U.S.
State Department through Old Diplomat Jefferson Caffery, then Ambassador to
Egypt.
— After three years of shutdown and stalemate at Abadan (caused by the
stubborn egotism of 1951's Man of the Year Mohammed Mossadegh), Iran agreed to
let foreign firms (chiefly British) resume operating the Iranian oil industry,
which the Iranians were incapable of operating. The agreement was prodded,
adjusted and pushed through by Loy Henderson, the 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 the 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 posses. Indo-China asked France to show a will to
win it did not possess. A new Premier, Pierre Mendes-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 Mendes-France presided over the French assassination of EDC.
But Dulles swallowed his pride and helped the West lay the foundation for a
substitute.
The substitute, to rearm and grant sovereignty to West Germany under a
different set of agreements, was conceived by Britain's Foreign Minister
Anthony Eden one morning in his bathtub. Last October in Paris, with the help
of Dulles and of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (the Man of 1953), Eden
got his alternative plan approved at the foreign-minister level. Many military
men discovered that they liked Eden's Western European Union, with its appeal
to nationalism, better than EDC, with its emphasis on European political unity.
The Communists testified to the plan's potential: they fought as desperately
against it as they had against EDC.
The disaster in Indo-China left no doubt that three Communists were the
Men of the Year in Asia. The victory belonged to Communist China's Premier Mao
Tse-tung, his Foreign Minister Chou En-lai, and to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of
the Viet Minh. For a considerable measure of recovery from the Indo-China
disaster, the free world could thank John Foster Dulles. First Dulles hammered
out and pushed through the Manila Pact, which committed eight nations to take
joint action against subversion and aggression in Asia.
More important, perhaps, was Dulles' other Asian treaty of the year, the
mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Nationalist Chinese Leader Chiang
Kai-shek. One tribute to the treaty's impact was the angry reaction of the
Communist Chinese. The pact did not establish any new principle, but it wiped
out some doubts. Said Dulles: "It is my hope that the signing of this defense
treaty will put to rest once and for all rumors and reports that the U.S. will
in any manner agree to the abandonment of Formosa and the Pescadores to
Communist control."
Despite these attempts to shore up the anti-Communist position, the free
world came to year's end with a net loss and a troubled outlook in Asia. There
was scant hope that the Communists could be prevented from swallowing up all of
Viet Nam. There was great danger in the aura of success that surrounded the
Communists in the Far East, where the people want to know: Which side will win?
Even in Japan, where the West's good friend, Premier Yoshida, was forced to
resign, there was new talk of trade and friendship with Red China. On 1954's
Asian ledger, the big figures were all Red.
He Likes the Work. As the Man of 1954 went through his incredibly
difficult year, he was sustained by an important basic attitude: he likes the
work. President Eisenhower and most members of his Cabinet can truthfully say
that they did not dream of holding the jobs they have, and took them only out
of sense of duty. But John Foster Dulles has wanted, almost all his life, the
job he now holds. He learned his first lessons in international relations at
the knee of his maternal grandfather, John Foster, who was Secretary of State
in Benjamin Harrison's Cabinet and who helped negotiate the 1895 treaty that
ended the Sino-Japanese War. At 19, he was secretary of China's delegation at
the Second Hague Peace Conference; at 30, he served on the Reparations
Commission at Versailles. Between the wars he had a brilliant legal career. In
1941 he got the Federal Council of Churches to set up a Commission to Study the
Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, headed it, and wrote a report that applied
Christian principles to historical realities.
Called in by the Truman Administration after the end of World War II,
Dulles negotiated a peace treaty with Japan that was the soundest bit of
diplomacy that he inherited when he became Secretary of State in 1953. The rest
of his policy inheritance was jerry-built on emergency and crisis. Dulles'
first aim was to build a foreign policy for the long haul. To replace fear as
the glue of the free world's alliances, he said he wanted to develop a cement
compounded of strength, understanding and cooperation. He has explained the
difficulty of this operation: "The best insurance against war is to be ready,
able and willing to fight. Now it is extremely difficult to hold that position
without leading some of our friends and allies to think that we are truculent
and want to have a fight."
Ducking the One-Two. Because Presbyterian Dulles (a clergyman's son)
talked a great deal about moral principle, some feared that he was trying to
force his Christian morals on the rest of the world. But he has demonstrated
that a diplomat who is clear about his own principles can find them highly
useful in practical international politics.
By the end of 1954. Dulles, who had been accused of saber rattling with
such phrases as "massive retaliation," found himself the target of other
critics who accused him of speaking too softly about coexistence, particularly
after the Chinese branded 13 imprisoned Americans as spies. Dulles' restraint
in this case was deliberate, and resulted from his highly practical analysis of
why the Reds made their announcement on the 13 prisoners. He was convinced that
the Soviet and Chinese Communists were attempting to give the U.S. a diplomatic
one-two punch: soft talk from Moscow and hard action from Peking.
In Paris last fortnight, Dulles analyzed the situation for the NATO
foreign ministers' council. Said he: "At the present time, the U.S. is being
subjected to the most severe kind of provocation in Asia. This appears to be
deliberately planned in the hope of provoking the U.S. into actions which our
European friends and allies would regard as ill-advised and which would perhaps
shake our unity at a time when we hope it will be reinforced by the pending
London-Paris accords. The U.S. does not intend thus to be hastily provoked into
needless action." This highly practical talk was the more forceful because
Dulles' line had already been proved right. U.S. allies, especially Britain,
had been reassured by Dulles' verbal restraint and had not hesitated to
denounce the Reds in terms as strong as any Dulles could have used.
At that kind of diplomatic opinion-molding, John Foster Dulles is a
master. He recognizes the importance of communicating his ideas and policies to
others, and works hard at checking his circuits of communications. (In his
early months as Secretary of State, he would often ask associates, after a
Cabinet meeting or a conference, whether he had gotten his ideas across.) When
he finds he has been misunderstood, he tries again, tirelessly editing his own
public speeches, and even his own thoughts.
In recent months Dulles has gained new confidence that he has found the
right words and phrases. His reports to the people, e.g., his report on the
Paris Conference at a televised Cabinet meeting, have been remarkable for their
sweep and clarity. Dulles considers such reports a key part of his job for one
large reason: he believes that the citizens of the U.S. have the right and the
ability to understand his business.
As he goes tirelessly about that business, Dulles, at 66, displays a
tremendous capacity for concentration and work. Almost all of his waking hours
are working hours, whether he is flying across an ocean, seated in his
map-lined office or resting at home (the yellow scratch-pad is always at his
bedside). His depth of concentration sometimes unnerves staff members who have
brought him problems: they think he has forgotten that they are there. His
favorite form of relaxation literally gives his staff the shivers: he likes to
swim wherever and whenever he can, and sometimes does so, in water more
suitable for polar bears than for Secretaries of State.
One-Plan Department. When Dulles travels, his airplane becomes a mobile
State Department. He takes with him more aides than made up the entire State
Department personnel in John Quincy Adams' day. (Adam's fullest staff: eight
clerks.) On trips to Europe, the staff is headed by Assistant Secretary (for
European Affairs) Livingston T. Merchant and Counselor Douglas MacArthur II.
When Asia is the landing place, the Secretary's chief aide is Assistant
Secretary (for Far Eastern Affairs) Walter S. Robertson.
The traveling State Department leaves at home 5,761 colleagues in a
sprawling, uncertain organization that is at least two decades overdue for
genuine reorganization and reorientation. Dulles has scarcely touched that
herculean job, and he may never get around to it. But whoever does may find a
legacy from Dulles' one-plane operation. A sense of policy direction must
precede any basic change in the setup of the department; Dulles is providing
direction to which the department may be some day geared.
"Pour la Paix." Obviously, John Foster Dulles goes about his job as a
missionary at large rather than as an administrator. At first, some people at
home and abroad thought that he was only going to preach. They soon discovered
that this missionary did a lot of practicing. He not only carried the word into
the jungle, quieted the local tribes and performed marriages, but also helped
to clear the ground, dam the streams and stop epidemics of fear.
At year's end there was evidence that Missionary Dulles was making some
converts where conversion was difficult. In Paris, a French foreign office
official told a TIME correspondent: "You know, the other day a pamphlet came
across my desk. Written in French, it was entitled Pour la Paix. My first
reaction was that it was just another Communist propaganda tract. But it
wasn't. It was John Foster Dulles' recent speech in Chicago. For years now- in
Europe at least—the Communists have made `peace' their private property. Even
though people knew what the Communists meant, the idea in their hands helped
them and hurt us. It looks now as if your Mr. Dulles is going to take peace
away from the Communists and restore it to its real meaning."
During 1954, as he kept working pour la paix, Foster Dulles disregarded
the cries of those who would have had him take the high road toward war or the
low road of appeasement. He stayed, instead, on the rutted, booby-trapped road
in between, and he made some forward progress. If he has, indeed, captured the
word peace for the U.S., his patience and caution were well worth the prize.
Three Tests Ahead. To 1954's Man of the Year, to his boss, Dwight
Eisenhower, and to the people of the U.S. whose destiny they hold, 1955 will
bring three critical tests. The immediate problem is the French reaction to the
Paris agreements. Somehow, the rearmament of Germany will begin in 1955,
whatever stand France takes. The other two tests facing U.S. foreign policy in
1955 are more serious.
After two years in office, the Eisenhower Administration has failed to
plug the yawning gap in its foreign policy—the place where history, logic,
opportunity and the poverty of the world cry out for U.S. leadership on a free
worldwide front of economic advance. In the year's closing months, the
President, despite strong opposition in his own Cabinet, seemed to be moving
toward a positive policy for liberalized world trade and stimulated production.
Dulles favors such a program. But he has been too busy with the international
politics of his job to give it his own leadership: it has little chance of
success unless he fights for it—in Washington and abroad.
The second challenge of 1955 is even bigger. Almost certainly, there will
be a top-level conference between the Western powers and the Russians. Whatever
the paper headed "Agenda" may say, the main business before the meeting will be
agreement on atomic weapons. If the U.S. submits to crippling limitation on its
power of massive atomic retaliation, it must get in return an equivalent
enforceable limitation on the Communist superiority in land armaments and the
techniques of subversion.
The prospects of agreement are not bright. But they are less dark than
they were before a practical missionary of Christian politics began his
extraordinary year of work.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1954
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