Reluctant Decision

If Harry Truman was really looking for a working definition of "statism" (see The Presidency), New York's Senator John Foster Dulles was happy to oblige. "Statism," said Dulles, "represents man's conceit that he can build better than God. God created men & women with great moral possibilities . . . But sometimes those in power lose faith in their fellow men . . . They take more & more of the fruits of human labor, so that they may, as they think, do more & more for human welfare . . . That process . . . makes human beings into mere cogs in a man-made machine."

With that offhand blow at the statist tendencies of the Fair Deal, Dulles announced last week that he would run for election to the Senate seat that he now holds by appointment. It was a reluctant decision. When Dulles sat down in retiring Democrat Robert Wagner's vacant seat ten weeks ago, it was with the understanding that he would stay on only until a special election in November. He wanted to get back to his Wall Street law practice and to the field of international relations, possibly as U.S. delegate to the U.N. Besides, although he had twice served as Candidate Tom Dewey's foreign affairs advisor, politics had never been more than a sideline with Dulles.

The son of a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York and the grandson of Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State (who took him to The Hague Peace Conference in 1907), John Foster Dulles had long found his deepest interests in the church and the law. He attended the Paris peace talks of 1919, then settled back to a lifetime career in Manhattan's international law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He also became a driving force in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. But when the Republicans urged him to make the race against the Democrats' 71-year-old ex-Governor Herbert H. Lehman, Dulles finally agreed. Said Dulles: "My own conscience wouldn't have it otherwise."

Dulles knew he was facing an uphill fight, even though Candidate Lehman had gotten himself in the doghouse with New York's Catholics by taking Eleanor Roosevelt's part in her controversy over school aid with Cardinal Spellman (TIME, Aug. 1). But if Harry Truman enters the New York campaign himself, as he had implied he would, Candidate Dulles will get his chance to argue the definition of statism again--at close range and with more specific application to the works of Harry Truman's Fair Deal.

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