WWJFDD?
That is, what would John Foster Dulles do? That question occurred to me as I thought about today’s #stampoftheday (number 232 if you’re counting) – a 4-cent stamp picturing Dulles that was issued on December 6, 1960.
In many ways, Dulles now is a largely forgotten figure. But in the mid-20th century, he was seminal figure, particularly from 1953 until 1959 when as US Secretary of State, “he towered over American foreign policy like a Colossus,” according to Stephen Kinzer, author of a 2015 book about Dulles and his brother Allan Dulles, who headed the CIA from 1953 until 1961.
Dulles dominance was so great that in 1962, a new airport in Washington, DC was named after him. He was also so ubiquitous that in 1957, the then-young Carol Burnett’s career received a great boost when she sang “I Made a Fool for Myself Over John Foster Dulles” on the Ed Sullivan Show.
The subject of Burnett’s love-song parody was a moralist who advocated an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world, including the use of covert means to overthrow national leaders they thought were insufficiently supportive of US interests, particularly Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Dulles worldview was informed in large measure by the fact his father was minister and he came from a long line of missionary Calvinists. As Kinzer said on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
several years ago, “the particular religious tradition they came out of – Presbyterian Calvinism – was one that did see the world [as a place where] there were good Christians and then there were heathens and savages. Christians, under this doctrine, did not have the luxury of sitting at home and hoping for the triumph of good; they had to go out into the world and make sure that good triumphed.”
In a 1953 speech on “The Power of Moral Forces,” Dulles said he believed America’s founders “created here a society of material, intellectual, and spiritual richness the like of which the world had never known.” In contrast, the Soviets were atheists who treated “human beings as primarily important from the standpoint of how much they can be made to produce for the glorification of the state.”
These views, Kinzer told Gross, meant “the Dulles brothers not only saw a danger coming from the Soviet Union, which of course was a nuclear-armed state at the height of the Cold War and for many years afterward, they also saw an equal danger coming from countries all over the world that were embracing what we now see as simple nationalism. Countries that emerged and decided that they didn’t want to side with the United States in the Cold War and didn’t want to be involved in the Cold War, seemed to the Dulles brothers to be tools of the Kremlin.”
He added, “they completely failed to understand the nature of third-world nationalism. You had hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia and even in Latin America emerging from colonialism. They were looking for a place in this tumultuous world. The Dulles brothers couldn’t see that; they assumed that all these neutralist and nationalist movements were part of the Kremlin strategy.”
“It’s quite possible, even likely,” Kinzer contended, “had the Dulles brothers not been [in Vietnam] or had acted differently, there never would’ve been an American involvement in Vietnam at the cost of a million lives and more than 50,000 Americans. Guatemala wouldn’t have suffered 200,000 dead over a period of 35 years in the civil war that broke out after they intervened in Guatemala and destroyed democracy there. Iran fell under royal dictatorship and then more than 30 years of fundamentalist religious rule as a result of the Dulles brothers’ operations. Had they not intervened in Iran we might’ve had a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East….So you look around the world and you see these horrific situations that still continue to shake the world, and you can trace so many of them back to the Dulles brothers.”
This legacy, Kinzer wrote in an op-ed earlier this year is at odds with our longstanding image of ourselves as “a shining ‘city’ upon a hill” that leads the world through farsighted benevolence and inspirational example.” However, he noted, “in recent decades, and especially since the end of the Cold War, our image as a defender of fairness and decency has palpably faded.”
And, he warned, things were getting worse because, “since the beginning of this year [our positive image] has all but evaporated. No other developed country has responded to the current crisis with such cynicism and incompetence. Not only have we proven unable to care for our own people, but we have prevented others from effectively fighting the pandemic….The world will not soon forget this…and future historians may look back at 2020 as the year when America’s global reputation fell off a cliff.”
“Can we change course?” he asked. “…Countries that survive over many centuries do so by riding the tides of history – by adjusting their political and economic systems to meet evolving challenges. There is alarmingly little prospect that the United States will be able to do that. Never since the Civil War have our politics seemed so immobile in the face of so grave a challenge. Today many Americans face suffering and death. If we do not respond to this cosmic wake-up call, our political system could face the same fate.”
So what would Dulles – a pillar of the mid-20th century Republican establishment but one for whom the ends apparently justified the means – make of our current domestic and international troubles? And what would he have been willing to say publicly about the current situation?
I’d like to think that despite his Manichean worldview, he would ultimately have stood up for key American values such as “peace with justice,” the phrase that was printed on the first day cancellations for the stamp that honored his life.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.