The Strategist in the Gray Flannel Suit: John Foster Dulles and the Cold War Consensus
Foreign Affairs · Beverly Gage ·
Beverly Gage, a prominent historian who specializes in twentieth-century U.S. politics and foreign policy, reviews the book “John Foster Dulles: Apostle of American Empire” by Bevan Sewell. Gage discusses the former U.S. secretary of state’s intellectual formation and his role in crafting the postwar order.
John Foster Dulles was the most and least compelling of men. As secretary of state under U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959, Dulles presided over some of the most controversial and dramatic episodes in American foreign policy in the early years of the Cold War: the clandestine U.S.-backed coups in Guatemala and Iran; the American break with France, Israel, and the United Kingdom during the Suez crisis; the frenzied effort to capitalize on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech revealing Stalin’s crimes; the turn to covert action as an essential tool of U.S. foreign policy. Dulles believed in going toe to toe with the Soviet Union, even at the cost of a potential World War III. He argued—outrageously—for the offensive use of nuclear weapons and insisted that Soviet communism should be vanquished rather than merely contained. His signature policy, the threat of “massive retaliation” in response to Soviet expansion, sent shudders coursing through the United States and the world.
And yet he was also the ultimate Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, with none of the dash and color and charm of his younger brother Allen, who headed the CIA during those same years. As the historian Bevan Sewell notes in his new book, contemporaries of the elder Dulles thought of him as simultaneously an ideologue and a grind. As usual, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it best, describing the great diplomat as “dull, duller, Dulles.” Even Dulles himself admitted that he could be a chore. “I know that in some ways I am a cold fish,” he once acknowledged to his bodyguard, “and that, I’m afraid, is that.”
Sewell aims to present a more appealing Dulles: less ideologue than pragmatist, interested in peace as well as war. From his early years as junior legal counsel at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I through a dreamy period in the 1930s and 1940s, Dulles spent much of his time “offering what, for a Wall Street lawyer, were radical solutions to the crises” of the era, Sewell writes. Dulles was an unabashed capitalist who recognized socialism’s charismatic appeal. He was an Anglo-American partisan who understood that other countries, including those outside Europe, would want more room to maneuver. He called for “a policy of boldness” in U.S. foreign policy but worried above all about the stability of the global order.
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