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##### May 25, 1959 OBITUARY ## Dulles Formulated and Conducted U.S. Foreign Policy for More Than Six Years ##### By THE NEW YORK TIMES For six years John Foster Dulles dominated both the making and the conduct of United States foreign policy. In the realm of foreign affairs he was President Eisenhower's chief adviser, his chief representative on Capitol Hill and his chief agent and negotiator at home and abroad. Mr. Dulles was a highly controversial Secretary of State. Those who followed his career were rarely dispassionate; they divided, usually, between ardent admirers and those who disliked or distrusted him. Certain things, however, were incontestable. First was the extent of his role. He was undoubtedly the strongest personality of the Eisenhower Cabinet, and as such he constantly played a leading role in Washington and often in the councils of the Western alliance. Secondly, whatever his qualities as a policy-maker, he had few peers as an advocate. No one could equal him as a persuader in the White House councils. In facing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he sometimes encountered criticism and skepticism, but he inevitably had his way. Thirdly, he had extraordinary vitality. He maintained personal contacts and sought to exercise American leadership by constant travel in all parts of the world. As Secretary he flew a total of 479,286 miles outside the United States. Successful Lawyer And a Moralist Mr. Dulles was a man of complex character, full of paradoxes. A shrewd and successful corporation lawyer, he was also a moralist and political philosopher. He could marshal his ideas swiftly, fluently and extemporaneously; he coined many phrases, but he was not noted as an originator of new ideas. He was gregarious, but he worked alone, to the despair of his State Department staff. Gracious in private, he was often awkward in public, yet he held news conferences more regularly than any other member of President Eisenhower's Cabinet. Handsome as a young man, Mr. Dulles in later years assumed the characteristics of a stern church elder. When in repose the corners of his mouth drooped in an expression of extreme gravity that some observers have related to his strict Presbyterian upbringing. But this expression was relieved by frequent broad smiles. His physique, as displayed on the occasions when he took time for a swim, was impressive. He was muscular, lean, with powerful shoulders, the result of much swimming, boating and fishing during boyhood. This physical equipment made it possible for him to put in eleven-hour working days in Washington and then go on to his evening's social obligations. It also enabled him, when traveling, to transform his airplane into an office, so that after a grueling flight he was ready for the conference table. Cabin in Ontario Was His Retreat Part of Mr. Dulles' secret was his ability to relax. During negotiations he would be seen slumped in his chair, doodling or sharpening pencils, seemingly without a care in the world. Mr. Dulles also knew the virtue of "getting away," for five-day breaks at his log cabin retreat on Duck Island in Lake Ontario. In 1941 he bought this tiny island, where the only other inhabitants were a lighthouse warden and radio operator. He and his wife Janet discovered and fell in love with it during their many summer sailing expeditions in the Great Lakes. They liked to withdraw to the privacy of their island and rough it, hauling water, chopping wood, fishing and cooking. Mr. Dulles took pride in his cooking, especially fish. In Washington the Dulleses lived comfortably in a spacious stone house on a wooded hillside ten minutes from the State Department offices. This was their choice. Prosperous years as a corporation lawyer--the best paid in the history of New York City, according to some accounts-- had left him financially independent. The Dulles family never suffered particularly for lack of money. John Watson Foster, Mr. Dulles' grandfather, saw to that. Born in a log cabin in Indiana, he became a brigadier general in the Civil War, United States Minister to Mexico and Russia and Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison. He amassed his fortune as a successful lawyer. This grandfather, in whose Washington home he was born on Feb. 25, 1888, and who started him on his legal and diplomatic career, was the greatest formative influence in Mr. Dulles' life. Grandfather Foster, however, was only a part of an active and rich family life that produced two other notable personalities--one is Mr. Dulles' younger brother, Allen W., director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The other, his younger sister, Eleanor, joined the State Department before her brother got there and is at present the officer in charge of Berlin in the Office of German Affairs. The Dulles family says it can trace its ancestry to Charlemagne. That it does not take this too seriously, however, is indicated by the fact that Mrs. Dulles named her French poodle "Pepi" after Pepin Le Bref, Charlemagne's father. Mr. Dulles' father was the Rev. Allen Macy Dulles, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church at Watertown, N. Y. A liberal clergyman, he questioned whether belief in the Virgin Birth was essential to being a Christian, and he married divorced persons. Of his children he required rigorous and intensive religious life involving attendance at church three or four times a week and memorization of long passages from the Bible. Enjoyed Swimming, Fishing and Sailing Much of this stayed with Mr. Dulles throughout his life. He was always ready with a quotation from two books, and kept them within reach at home and at the office: the Bible and the Federalist. They represented, respectively, the religious influence of his father and the political influence of his grandfather. Over the dinner table the Dulles children heard talk of morality and diplomacy. Sometimes "Uncle Bert"--Robert Lansing, later Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson--was there. Grandfather Foster would argue the case for the Boers and Uncle Bert the case for the British in the Boer War. The family was fond of boating. When Foster was 13, after a bad case of typhoid fever, his grandfather presented him a twelve-foot St. Lawrence cat boat. From then on sailing, fishing and swimming were his greatest pleasures. For the rest of his life, in all kinds of weather, he took every opportunity to cruise Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence, the coasts of Nova Scotia, Maine and Long Island. The Rev. Mr. Dulles had a private income to supplement his pastor's stipend, so the family could afford some summers in Europe. These were spent at Left Bank hotels in Paris and bicycling through the Lowlands and Germany. John Foster Dulles learned good French, some German and passable Spanish. After grammar school and high school at Watertown, Foster went to Princeton University. At that time he expected to follow his father into the ministry and concentrated on the study of philosophy. But an invitation to accompany Grandfather Foster, in the summer of 1907, to the second Hague Peace Conference, began to turn his interests toward diplomacy. Foster was then 19. His grandfather, who acted as delegate for the Imperial Government of China, got him a job as a secretary to the Chinese delegation on the strength of his knowledge of French. Foster was graduated from Princeton in 1908 as valedictorian of his class, with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a $600 scholarship for a year's study at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the end of that year he had made up his mind to study law rather than theology. To be able to live with his grandfather, he decided to study at George Washington University in Washington. Through his grandfather he was drawn into a gay social life, but managed at the same time to absorb three years of law studies in two years with the highest grades ever achieved at the university. Received Law Degree 25 Years Late Because he had been in attendance only two years instead of three, the university declined to give him a degree. (It did so twenty-five years later.) But the young Mr. Dulles passed the New York State bar examinations and moved on to New York City in search of a job. To his chagrin, he discovered that the big law firms on whose doors he knocked were not interested in graduates from George Washington University, much less one who had not even received a degree. Harvard and Columbia Law School, it seemed, were the "right" places to study law. It took a letter from Grandfather Foster to William Nelson Cromwell, senior partner of the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, to win the young man a chance to start--at $50 a month. On June 26, 1912, he and Janet Avery, of Auburn, N.Y., were married at Auburn. He then had a salary of $100 a month, but Grandfather Foster made it possible for the newlyweds to live fairly comfortably. The income of Foster Dulles, the young lawyer, grew steadily as he distinguished himself in assignment after assignment, usually in the international field. Rejected for military service during World war I because of poor eyesight, Mr. Dulles got an Army commission as captain in the War Industries Board. This, in turn, led to his being sent to the Versailles Peace Conference to deal with reparations questions. At the age of 31 Mr. Dulles made a preliminary mark as a junior diplomat by clearly and forcefully arguing against imposing crushing reparations on Germany. President Wilson wrote a personal letter asking him to stay on in Europe after the conference to handle reparations questions. The fact that he was one of five men--another was Thomas W. Lamont, a partner in J. P. Morgan--who served as the President's economic advisers at Versailles gave John Foster Dulles' career another lift. He became a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell with a substantially enhanced income. One international assignment followed another--to Norway, Denmark, Poland, Uruguay, Chile and other lands. Usually Mrs. Dulles accompanied him on his trips abroad. In 1937 Mr. Dulles tried to hire as a trial lawyer for his firm a young man named Thomas E. Dewey who was winning a reputation as prosecutor of underworld characters. Mr. Dewey agreed, but changed his mind and ran instead for election as district attorney. Thus began a long political association between Mr. Dulles and Mr. Dewey. In 1939 Mr. Dulles joined George Z. Medalie, a Republican lawyer, and Roger W. Straus, chairman of American Smelting and Refining Company, in planning Mr. Dewey's strategy in seeking the Presidential nomination. Mr. Dewy lost to Wendell L. Willkie in 1940, but in 1944 he won the nomination and John Foster Dulles stepped in as his foreign policy adviser. In this capacity Mr. Dulles was maneuvered into a conference with Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, on the formation of the United Nations. This led to a bipartisan approach to the United Nations issue and to the appointment of Mr. Dulles as a senior United States adviser at the San Francisco conference of the United Nations in 1945. Mr. Dulles' stature in international affairs was established by his work at the San Francisco conference. Mr. Dewey again sought the Presidency in 1948 and Mr. Dulles was again his advisor on foreign affairs. It was generally believed that Mr. Dulles would have been Secretary of State if Mr. Dewey had won, but Harry S. Truman was the surprise victor. Mr. Dulles was a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris in November, 1948, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall was forced to return to the United States for surgery. President Truman named Mr. Dulles acting chairman of the delegation. He was with Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the Big Four foreign ministers' conference in Paris in 1949. On July 7 of that year Governor Dewey named him to the United States Senate in an interim appointment to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Senator Robert F. Wagner. Campaigning on a platform critical of the Fair Deal of President Truman, Mr. Dulles sought election to the Senate in a special election in November, 1949. His opponent was former Gov. Herbert H. Lehman. Mr. Dulles was defeated by 196,293 votes--2,573,934 to 2,377,641. In April, 1951, when President Truman removed General of the Army Douglas MacArthur from his Far East commands during the Korean fighting, Mr. Truman sent Mr. Dulles to Tokyo to assure the Japanese Government that General MacArthur's departure signified no important change in United States policy in the Far East. That there should be no misunderstanding on this point was of special importance to Mr. Dulles, who was engaged on his last and biggest job for President Truman--concluding a peace treaty with Japan. This was a task that Mr. Dulles had sought. He had urged Secretary Acheson that the only way to get the long-delayed treaty was to pick one trusted man and give him a year, full-time, to work it out. Mr. Dulles got the job. Treaty With Japan Was His Handiwork During the next twelve months, he flew 125,000 miles between Washington and Tokyo and from capital to capital, resolving differences, lining up support for a "peace of reconciliation" with Japan. On Sept. 8, 1951, just a year after Mr. Dulles got his assignment, the treaty was signed at San Francisco. Surveying Mr. Dulles' handiwork, State Department officials admiringly paid tribute to a "master craftsman." During the Presidential campaign of 1952 Mr. Dulles forgot bipartisanship. The vitriolic assault on Democratic foreign policy he wrote for the Republican party platform caused critics to tax him for the first time--but not the last--with acting more like a corporation lawyer serving his client than a statesman. After the election, Mr. Dulles was one of the first men President Eisenhower named to his Cabinet. The job of Secretary of State was one that he apparently had been after for a long time. Certainly he had had it in mind when he involved himself in the Presidential campaigns of 1940, 1944 and 1948. But when he had it in his grasp he was said to have had doubts. He realized that what he wanted was the foreign-policy function, and that as Secretary of State he would be burdened with many other tasks as well. He is said to have remarked that what he would really have liked was a quiet office in the White House as foreign-policy consultant, far from the cumbersome machinery of the State Department. Yet there was never any question about Mr. Dulles' conviction that he, with experience in foreign affairs dating to the Hague Conference of 1907, with a rich family background of diplomacy, was the man best qualified to call the turns of United States foreign policy. He had it all in his head. He did not need the ambassadorial analyses and the studies of the policy planning staff and the host of departmental experts. He had a big yellow pad at his bedside and he jotted down thoughts as they occurred to him. Thus were born the phrases around which United States foreign policy revolved for nearly seven years. For example, during his campaign speeches in 1952, Mr. Dulles maintained that the Democratic party's policy of "containment" must be replaced by a policy of "liberation." What United States foreign policy needed, he said, was more "heart." President Eisenhower put these thoughts into practice by withdrawing the Seventh Fleet from the Formosa Strait, thereby "unleashing" President Chiang Kai-shek of Nationalist China for action against the mainland. For a time undercover operations in the Far East and in Eastern Europe were somewhat stimulated. But when the tests came, in the anti-Communist Berlin riots in 1953, the French call for help at Dienbienphu in 1954, the Chinese Communist threat to Quemoy in 1954-55, the Hungarian rising against the Russians in 1956, the United States did not act. As things worked out, there was a wide margin between Mr. Dulles' bold words and the United States Government's actions. Although Mr. Dulles never specifically confirmed it, there is good reason to believe that during the month of July, 1954, he and Admiral Arthur H. Radford twice tried to get the British to agree to a United States air strike, with planes based on carriers and in the Philippines, against the Communist forces attacking Dienbienphu, a key French stronghold in the north of Indochina. But the British would not go along, as Mr. Dulles might have expected. The plan was abandoned, and Dienbienphu was lost. SEATO Filled Gap In Asian Defense In public Mr. Dulles spoke only of the need for "united action" by the Western Allies and their friends in Asia to oppose the Communists. And this in the end led to the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization at Manila on Sept. 8, 1954. Embracing Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines in addition to the United States, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand, SEATO went far toward closing the gaps in the world-wide network of military alliances, gaps that were a constant subject of concern to Mr. Dulles. The philosophy behind Mr. Dulles' maneuverings concerning Dienbienphu and other crises was spelled out in an article that he apparently inspired in Life magazine on Jan. 16, 1956. It contained the definition of what some have called "brinkmanship": "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." And he explained that his skill in doing just that had ended the Korean war (with an implied threat to drop atomic bombs on Manchuria), had restrained the Communist Chinese from sending their forces into Indochina (with a show of force by two aircraft carriers and an invitation to Allied nations to form a "united front") and had headed off Communist invasion of Quemoy (with the bipartisan Formosa resolution authorizing armed United States intervention). An important part of Mr. Dulles' "brinkmanship" was "massive retaliation," the boldest of all his phrases. He said in a speech on Jan. 12, 1954, that the President and National Security Council had decided "to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing." The storm aroused by these words obliged Mr. Dulles to explain later that of course the punishment must always suit the crime, that he was not talking about indiscriminate bombing of Moscow. There were some other phrases that symbolized his tenure. Addressing State Department employes on his first day in office, Mr. Dulles called for "positive loyalty." He also said on another occasion: "I'm not going to be caught with another Alger Hiss on my hands." As result of this attitude he tolerated for several years the operations of Walter Scott McLeod, a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later a member of the staff of Styles Bridges, Republican Senator from New Hampshire. Mr. Dulles' administrative Under Secretary hired Mr. McLeod as security chief. When the cases of Jon Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies, State Department career men, came up for review, Mr. Dulles found nothing in their records showing lack of loyalty. But he retired them anyway, on the ground that they had become burdensome and that a Secretary of State could not afford to carry excess baggage. Under this doctrine no Foreign Service officer could be sure that, if he were falsely accused of disloyalty, he would be backed up by his boss. 'Reappraisal' Talk Distressed French Still another phrase was born on Dec. 14, 1953, when Mr. Dulles said in Paris that if the French Assembly did not approve the European Defense Community treaty "that would compel an agonizing reappraisal" of basic United States foreign policy. The surprising thing about this statement was that after spending so many months in France Mr. Dulles did not realize that among sensitive Frenchmen his words would boomerang, and almost guaranteed the defeat of the defense community. Mr. Dulles flew to Caracas, Venezuela on March 28, 1954, for a Pan American conference. He was largely responsible for the adoption of an anti-Communist resolution by which American Republics pledged "countermeasures" to prevent Communist control of any American state. Getting the resolution adopted was a victory of a kind for Mr. Dulles, but many of the Latin Americans resented the pressure brought by the United States on behalf of the resolution. The phrase "open skies"--mutual freedom to engage in aerial inspection--was not coined by Mr. Dulles. However, Mr. Dulles picked up the "open skies" proposal that President Eisenhower made to the Russians at the summit conference of 1955 and used it to underline the essentiality of mutual inspection during long and inconclusive negotiations on all aspects of disarmament. Always the talks broke down on the inspection issue. At Iowa State College on June 9, 1955 Mr. Dulles said "neutrality has increasingly become an obsolete and except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception." India and many other nations with neutralist tendencies in the Afro-Asian world took this as a gratuitous affront. Later Mr. Dulles conceded that neutrals of the immoral kind were "very few" in number. And toward the end of his period in office he acquired a growing appreciation of the value of genuine neutrality. Indians were also offended by an illusion to "Portuguese provinces in the Far east," meaning Goa, a Portuguese-owned territory on the coast of India. Mr. Dulles permitted the phrase to appear in a joint statement with Portugal's Minister of Foreign Affairs on Dec. 2, 1955. Mr. Dulles considered himself an expert on the Soviet Union. More often than on other topics he would make declarations about the Soviet without consulting his State Department aides. Particularly striking, and particularly criticized, were his assertions of Soviet weakness. On Feb. 24, 1956, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "at this moment in Moscow they are having to revise their whole program. They have failed." Mr. Dulles felt at home talking about Europe and the Soviet Union, but he was much less at ease when dealing with the Middle East. It is possible, nonetheless, that the concept of a "northern tier of defense" against the Soviet Union in the Middle East may have been his most original single contribution to foreign policy. Originally intended as an association of the nations in the area, which the great powers would back but not join, the concept was radically changed by the British, who encouraged and joined the "Baghdad Pact." Still another foreign-policy concept, the Eisenhower Doctrine, proclaimed by both houses of Congress on March 9, 1957, was really the Dulles Doctrine. Mr. Dulles conceived and defended this resolution before Congress, asserting that the President was prepared to use armed force to support any Middle Eastern country that asked for help against Communist aggression. Conceived Doctrine For the Mideast Mr. Dulles did not succeed in preserving the momentary goodwill of the Arabs that had been generated by United States opposition to British-French-Israeli operations against Egypt in the fall of 1956. By the spring of 1958 the United States found itself sharply opposed to President Gamal Abdel Nasser's penetration of Lebanon. Once again Mr. Dulles had a phrase for it: "indirect aggression." When revolution flared in Iraq in 1958 Mr. Dulles countered "indirect aggression" by the United Arab Republic with landings by United States forces in Lebanon. Mr. Dulles will be remembered for his part in leading the Republican party out of its long tradition of isolationism into a new era of internationalism. Often criticized during his tenure for seeming inflexibility in his dealings with the Soviet Union, there was growing appreciation during his last months in office that his line was basically sound. He achieved his objectives best in Europe, in spite of the rebuff he suffered on the issue of the European Defense Community. With Mr. Dulles' encouragement West Germany regained sovereignty as a member of the North Atlantic alliance while at the same time progressively closing economic ranks with France. In the Far East he stood inflexibly attached to alliance with Nationalist China and opposed to recognition of Communist China. With United States help, President Chiang Kai-shek was able to hold the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in spite of heavy Communist bombardment. Chiang Reinforced Offshore Islands Disregarding Mr. Dulles' advice, Chiang retained the heavy manpower commitment to these islands through which, in another crisis, the United States could be drawn into war. In the Middle East he lost heavily. By not making it possible for Egypt to acquire arms in the United States he opened the way for a Soviet-Egyptian arms deal that carried Soviet influence into the heart of the Middle East. By dramatically withdrawing United States support for the Aswan high dam in Egypt he provoked President Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal Company, which led to an abortive British-French invasion of the Canal Zone and further deterioration of Western prestige. By sending troops into Lebanon on the heels of the Iraqi revolution, he convinced the Iraqi revolutionaries that the United States might oppose them by force. They turned to the Soviet Union for help. Mr. Dulles' personal skill as a negotiator made him look almost indispensable. Time after time he mixed the diplomatic glue with which differences among the allies were papered over. Mr. Dulles believed that to spend too much time in Washington would be to neglect his higher duties as leader in the Western alliance. Nevertheless his absences led to neglect of his administrative tasks and made it impossible for him to make full use of the State Department and the Foreign Service as diplomatic tools. After the crisis on the European Defense Community the French called him brutal. After the Suez crisis the British accused him of double-dealing. After his remarks on Goa and neutrality the Indians tended to write him off. But when Mr. Dulles had to withdraw from the international scene one word was heard over and over among the diplomats of Europe and Asia: "Indispensable." When President Eisenhower announced Mr. Dulles' resignation he had tears in his eyes. The moment was so moving that no one could bring himself to ask a question. With mixed pity and consternation some remembered a remark attributed to the President several years ago: "If anything happened to Foster, where could I find a man able to replace him?"
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