The Peacemaker

(See Cover)

A tall, sunburned man in a straw hat climbed out of a small plane at the Syracuse airport last week, and with a trim, grey-haired woman hurrying along beside him, made for the airport waiting room. No one recognized Mr. & Mrs. John Foster Dulles as they crossed the crowded lobby, sat down at the lunch counter and ordered ice-cream sodas.

The Republican adviser to the State Department fixed his vanilla soda with his habitually solemn stare. A year ago, in a spell of concentrated writing, he had delivered himself of this exhortation: "It is time to think in terms of taking the offensive in the world struggle for freedom, and of rolling back the engulfing tide of despotism . . . In 1942 . . . we were not thinking about how to save our necks, but how to save freedom. We need more of that spirit today . . . In the vast areas of Asia and the Pacific, we have no adequate policy, largely because China, always until now our friendly partner, has been taken over by the allies of Soviet Communism. That calls for new thinking . . . Our particular opportunity . . . is Japan."

Ointment, Not Lash. Now, in the space of one year, he himself had translated the Dulles words into the Dulles deed: the Japanese Treaty (TIME, Jan. 22 et seq.). It was not yet an accomplished fact; the treaty still teetered in the balance of events. On Sept. 4, some 50 nations (he hoped) would meet in San Francisco to sign it; the U.S. Senate and the other governments would have to confirm it. "The treaty," Dulles has anxiously observed, "is in jeopardy every day of its life."

Nevertheless, as it stood, it was one of the most remarkable propositions in the history of wars; no victorious nation had ever presented to a beaten enemy such magnanimous terms after so savage a fight. Instead of a lash, it poured out ointment. It forgave Pearl Harbor. The idea was as revolutionary as Christianity itself. A "particular opportunity" had been grasped and, as a result (Dulles hoped), an astute offensive had been launched in Asia.

He had brought it off almost singlehanded. In the past year, he had flown more than 125,000 miles, carrying his documents and his arguments to six capitals, pleading, arguing, bargaining when it was necessary. There was not another country in the world that wanted this kind of peace. But they came along because the U.S. was in a position to write it. It was an imposed morality.

The Dulleses, fresh from a brief holiday on an island in Lake Ontario, finished their sodas and boarded another plane. Buried in his newspaper and his preoccupations, Dulles flew on to Washington.

Once during World War II, an outraged associate of Dulles' described the behavior of the Japanese as "unforgivable." "Christ teaches us," replied Dulles, "that nothing is unforgivable." The unaffected remark laid bare one part of his character. It is a complex character behind its grey, pedagogic exterior. The exterior, like the simple housing around a complicated turbine (said an awed friend), covers "the greatest piece of mental machinery I have ever known." God and the turbine produced the Japanese Treaty. A preacher and a diplomat produced John Foster Dulles.

Pastor Dulles' Eldest. Around the turn of the century, people living along Lake Ontario's Henderson Harbor would sometimes see a stirring sight: Pastor Allen Macy Dulles, wife and five children, having been to church, lustily singing such Protestant hymns as "Work, for the Night

Is Coming" as they marched back to their summer cottage. It was a Dulles custom.

John Foster Dulles, the pastor's eldest son, was born in 1888, in the Washington residence of grandfather John Watson Foster, who fought in the Civil War, served as U.S. minister to Mexico, U.S. minister to Russia, and, when John Foster was four years old, became Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State. He was to leave a deep impression on his grandson--recounting his adventures and opening up a world of great events, as man & boy sat hour after hour fishing in Lake Ontario. In 1895, grandfather Foster helped negotiate the end of the Sino-Japanese War, with the Treaty of Shimonoseki.*

Bending Twig. John Foster grew up under the hand of old-fashioned authority. He got caned and had his ears cuffed for throwing spitballs in school. Father, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Watertown, N.Y., was benevolently stern. Mother was Edith Foster, a woman of energy and propriety who once became so appalled at the bad manners of the students of Auburn (N.Y.) Theological Seminary that she wrote a manual on proper decorum, covering such subjects as How to Say Hello, How to Say Goodbye, How to Manage a Cup of Tea. Young Foster, as the family called him, read Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost, became a serious stripling who could blandly paraphrase William James to a sobbing nine-year-old sister ("If you cry you will feel bad, and if you feel bad you will cry"). He could swim the 2 1/2 miles across Henderson Bay, and when the family acquired a small sailboat, he became an expert boat handler, weather forecaster, navigator of the coves of eastern Lake Ontario.

Father & mother wanted him to go into the ministry.

But grandfather had other ideas. When John Foster graduated from high school, Diplomat Foster sent his grandson to Switzerland for six months to study French. In 1904--the year when Pastor Dulles gave up his church to take the chair of Apologetics at the Auburn Theological Seminary--John Foster began his college career in Princeton. The twig was not yet fully bent, but grandfather was bending it.

Secretary at The Hague. According to his own recollection, Dulles lived "a curious sort of life at Princeton," playing a lot of whist, poker and chess. One of his professors, anxious to know whether his course was too difficult, asked Foster how much time he had to spend studying for it. "I exaggerated a bit," Dulles recalls, "and told him one hour a week. I had a knack for exams. I could read the course book the night before and remember it well enough to pass."

The summer of his junior year he sailed off importantly with grandfather Foster to attend the Second Hague Conference. Grandfather, good friend of the Chinese, had agreed to serve for them as a plenipotentiary, and 19-year-old Foster became secretary of the Chinese delegation, wearing a cutaway and going to receptions and paying almost no attention to a hometown girl in hair ribbons whom he happened to meet on a trip to Paris.

Back in Princeton, he graduated a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. Grandfather had won the argument as to how the turbine was to be used; it was to be used in the law. Foster took a year at the Sorbonne and went to Washington.

"She Keeps Me Company." It was the safe, sane & solid Republican era of William Howard Taft--made to order for a bright, retentive young man with good connections. He was a friend of the President's oldest son, Robert; he saw a good deal of a Watertown lawyer named Robert Lansing, who had married his aunt and later was to become Secretary of State under Wilson. In two years, the turbine purred through a three-year law course at George Washington University (top of the class), purred on and mastered New York State's bar exam.

With the help of a letter from grandfather, John Foster got a job with the august New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. A year later, having pushed his salary up from $50 to $100 a month, he married Janet Pomeroy Avery, the girl he had met in Paris.

The bridegroom had contracted malaria on a business trip to British Guiana, but no man to be deterred, he dosed himself with quinine (which was permanently to affect his optic nerves), took along a trained nurse and went on his honeymoon anyhow. He has since commented on what has turned out to be a devoted partnership. "My wife has been with me in everything I have done. I'd be very unhappy without her. She keeps me company." Right from the beginning, Lawyer Dulles, who still remembers his early days of 10-c- breakfasts at the Automat, was a busy man.

His three children--John, Lillias and Avery--saw comparatively little of him; he left early in the morning for the Wall Street offices of Sullivan & Cromwell and got home late. He did devote Sundays to his family. Then, dressed in a top hat--poverty was not long with them--he paraded them to the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church near their four-story brownstone house on gist Street. Lillias remembers one Sunday when Lawyer Dulles delighted his brood and shocked his wife by putting on an act on the street balancing his top hat on his cane.

Dulles' children have grown up and gone their independent ways--John is a mining engineer, Lillias is married, Avery abandoned Presbyterianism to enter the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order, which upset Dulles deeply, but has raised no hostility between father & son.

Man on Top of the World. John Foster Dulles' career went steadily upwards. In World War I, the injury to his eyes kept him out of combat service with the Army. But Robert Lansing got him a captaincy in Intelligence; his job was liaison officer between the Army and the War Trade Board, handling the legal details of such matters as the seizure of neutral ships. In 1919, he was sent to the Versailles Conference as a member of the Interim Reparations Commission.

He came away with an impression which was to affect his thinking the rest of his life. A Republican, he was nevertheless a great believer in his old college president, Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson's Fourteen Points. "I saw him go to the conference with great ideals, and I saw them gradually evaporate under the pressure of people who wanted to be vindictive." In Clemenceau's and Lloyd George's demands for reparations and vengeance, Dulles thought that he saw the seeds of another war.

He returned to Sullivan & Cromwell--to handle the legal work of vast postwar U.S. investments abroad, to help disentangle the enormous aftermath of Ivar Kreuger's suicide and the crash of Kreuger & Toll (from which he managed to extricate 70-c- on the dollar for American bondholders). He was in a position to offer a rising young lawyer, Thomas Dewey, a highly desirable job, which Dewey turned down to run for district attorney.

As World War II began to grow out of the debacle of peacemaking after World War I, John Foster Dulles stood materially entrenched as one of the highest-paid lawyers in the country, senior partner and head of one of the world's biggest international law firms (in which his brother Allen is one of 21 partners), and a director in 15 corporations. Still in his 50s, he had everything he wanted for his pleasure: a 40-ft. yawl to indulge his old yen for sailing; a large, unpretentious summer house at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.; his own private island in Lake Ontario, where he and Mrs. Dulles could flee for seclusion and live in a log cabin while Dulles fished, swam, watched and listed birds. He lived well, expensively but not ostentatiously, with a well-stocked cellar of his favorite Montrachet wine, enjoying large, cheerful family dinners. He wore single-breasted, custom-made Brooks Brothers suits. He had servants to minister to him and cars to pick him up, and an elevator and six telephones in his quietly appointed gist Street house. Another man might have settled for all that. But grandfather Foster's turbine needed something more. Dulles had found it in a mission.

Diplomacy with Morality. In 1937, Dulles went to Paris to act as chairman of a League of Nations group which was discussing the topic, "Peaceful Change." He left the conference with a feeling of "thorough disgust" at its arid, negative and nationalistic tone. Then he went to a church meeting in England, the Oxford Conference on Church and State. The contrast was sharp: the diplomats were defeatists; the churchmen, thanks to their religious belief, were hopeful and positive. He came away with a resurgence of faith in the lessons taught him years before by that devout Presbyterian, Pastor Dulles.

Three years later, with war thundering across the world once again, Lawyer Dulles carried his convictions to the Federal Council of Churches. He had the council appoint a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace and, as its head, launched his crusade. It was a time when Franklin Roosevelt, thinking of an ultimate peace but remembering Wilson and scenting the political risks, shied away from talking about any international organization for peace. Roosevelt expressed the prevailing sentiment when he demanded "unconditional surrender." German militarism had risen from the ashes of World War I; it must not rise again. Japan had struck without warning; Pearl Harbor must be avenged.

But Dulles remembered the frustrated Wilson and the vindictiveness that followed World War I. Later, at a time when statesmen were beginning to discuss a world organization in worldly terms, Dulles' committee proclaimed: there is a moral order which is revealed in Jesus Christ; the U.S. must lead the other nations into a political mechanism which will uphold that morality. Vengeance must be laid aside. The committee produced a program ("The Six Pillars of Peace") which not only put the Federal Council of Churches squarely back of a United Nations, but laid down broad principles for a new order of things--the need for laws to end economic anarchy, for a way to bring about change by peaceful means instead of by guns, for an end to exploitation of colonials, for a limit to arms, for religious and intellectual liberties.

Dulles carried his crusade to political back rooms. He preached his philosophy to Arthur Vandenberg, whom he had first met in 1943 at the Mackinac Conference, where Republicans as a group first turned away from isolationism. In 1945, Vandenberg persuaded Roosevelt to send the Protestant Church's most articulate foreign-policy spokesman to San Francisco as a delegate to the founding session of United Nations. There Dulles preached not only a lawyer's pragmatic diplomacy (he devised the formula for safeguarding Latin America's regional interests) but diplomacy with morality.

No. 1 Target. Dulles was a shrewd observer of events. In 1946, in his choppy, graceless style, he wrote one of the first analyses of the true motives of atheistic Russian Communism. It made him a top priority target of Russia's propaganda guns. Over & over again, he was attacked by Vishinsky as a "falsifier of facts . . . a warmonger." He became a full-time member of the Democratic Administration's diplomatic team. As adviser to Byrnes, Marshall, Acheson, he trotted doggedly from one interminable Foreign Ministers' meeting to another; as delegate to the General Assembly, he sat through endless conferences. Everywhere he saw the same intransigent countenance of the enemy, the men who despised moral law--the enemy who all too often had seized and held the initiative.

In 1949, Governor Tom Dewey appointed him as Senator from New York to take the ailing Robert Wagner's seat until a special election in the fall. Dulles resigned from Sullivan & Cromwell, campaigned for the unexpired term.

Setback. Politicians who got close to him during that spell were somewhat astonished at what they saw. Dulles turned out to be a man who preferred bourbon, who had an unexpected, thunderous guffaw, and who relished campaigning. His easy manner belied the crack inevitably attached to his name: "dull, duller, Dulles." He refused to talk down. He went from town to town, a slouched figure in an upturned soft hat, looking more like a threadbare professor than a Wall Street lawyer. But he lost to one of New York's great votegetters, four-term Governor Herbert Lehman. Not only was he beaten, he was put in the Administration's doghouse, and faded back into private life.

Temporarily out of things, grandfather Foster's turbine actually was just at the beginning of something new. In March 1950, at the insistence of Arthur Vandenberg, Dulles was restored to a position in the State Department. Dean Acheson assigned him to the job of formulating the treaty for Japan, a chore which had been on the back burner for almost three years. The Pentagon was not sure that it ever wanted to see Japan turned loose--at least not yet.

The man with a mission went to work. To his conviction that a peace should be signed, and that it should be a Christian peace, he added a number of fortifying practical factors: a Carthaginian peace would breed misery and poverty, which in turn would breed Communism. If Japan should fall that way, the result would be disastrous for the West. Japan's industrial potential, integrated with the resources of Manchuria, might be enough to enable the Communists to sustain a long world war, even win one.

The Liberator. Dulles ground out his points and began his negotiations. He conferred with the British and Chinese ambassadors in Washington, even talked, fruitlessly, with Russia's Malik in New York. Russia sharply protested when in October he sent out a seven-point memorandum to the twelve member nations of the Far Eastern Council. But Dulles had seized the initiative; the U.S. was suddenly taking the offensive for peace, not merely trotting around putting out brush fires which Russia had lit.

He got a first-draft treaty down to eight pages. This was the general proposition he laid out: Japan was to renounce all claims to her old island empire, but Japan was to be eligible for the U.N., was to be let out of paying reparations, was to be allowed to work and recover her strength. Japan was to be allowed a limited sunrise.

Instead of calling the neighbors into another conference, which almost certainly would have been blank and endless with Russia sitting in, Dulles took his proposition to the neighbors' front doors. He had already made one flying trip to

Tokyo to confer with MacArthur, who had long urged a generous peace for Japan. With a handful of advisers and the energetic Mrs. Dulles, he flew back to Tokyo.

As he had never stirred Americans, he stirred Asians. At Haneda Airport, he was mobbed by Japanese photographers; shaving in his bathroom at the Fujiya Hotel, he glanced out to see a photographer training a long-distance lens on him. He was the man who had come to liberate Japan. But bitterness also followed him. In the Philippines, he was lampooned on the radio and burned in effigy. He flew to Australia, New Zealand, Paris and London.

At one point, he turned around to rush back to Tokyo. MacArthur had been fired; the Japanese were dismayed. He stayed long enough to reassure them that so far as the treaty was concerned, Ridgway would follow the MacArthur line.

The Six-Day Russians. He argued his case with a lawyer's competence. For every objection he had an answer. To quiet Pentagon fears, the Japanese would agree in advance (but not in the treaty) to invite the U.S. to station troops on her territory. To Russia's charge that Japanese militarism was being restored, he answered curtly that that was a matter of concern to no one more than the U.S.,' "which bore the burden of Japan's war of aggression for nearly four years, as against six days of Soviet Union belligerency." The right of the U.S. to call the tune was a point recognized in other capitals. It was a peace of magnanimity based on power.

He answered the Philippines' demand for $8 billion in reparations by pointing out that such reparations in the end would have to come from the U.S., which has already given the Philippines $530 million for war recovery. He quieted Australian and New Zealand fears of Japan by presenting them with a tripartite pact in which the U.S. guaranteed to come to their aid against any future aggression. He listened to British arguments that Japan's recovery would injure Britain's textile trade, shipbuilding business. His answer in effect was that the nations have no right to legislate against a neighbor's industriousness. The British stubbornly objected to letting the Nationalist government in Formosa sign the treaty for China. Dulles contrived a lawyer's compromise: Japan should herself decide whether she would sign the treaty with Chiang or Mao.

Protestations still rumbled around the world. India objected. She was not sure yet whether she would send delegates to the signing. Those were the indecisions on which the success of his treaty teetered. It was Asia, more than any other part of the globe, which had to be convinced of the sincerity of the U.S. proposition.

Last week, back in his State Department office, Dulles carried on his crusade. He fixed an interviewer with his solemn stare. "Some days," he said, "it looks as though I'm just living over again the spring of 1919. The same hatreds and jealousies are all operating. I don't know whether this peace will work or not. I do know the other type is certain to fail. If you have a 100% chance of failure, I think it is wise to take a 50% chance of success." Against the 50% chance of failure, Lawyer Dulles stacked the lessons taught him by history and the lessons he had learned in church.

* By which China recognized the independence of Korea, ceded Formosa, the Pescadores Islands and the Liaotung Peninsula (in Manchuria) to Japan, and agreed to pay Japan a heavy cash indemnity.

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