Secretary of State
THE NEW ADMINISTRATION
JOHN FOSTER DULLES, 64, lawyer and diplomat.
Family & Early Years: He was born in the Washington, D.C. home of his maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, veteran diplomat who was President Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State (1892-93). Dulles' father, Presbyterian Pastor Allen Macy Dulles of Watertown, N.Y., wanted eldest son John to follow the ministry, but grandfather Foster swayed the boy to international law and diplomacy, sending him to Switzerland for six months to study French, a few years later taking him along to an international conference at The Hague. Dulles was valedictorian of the Princeton class of 1908. He spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, then received a law degree from George Washington University (top man in his class after doing a three-year course in two years).
Legal Career: Admitted to the New York bar in 1911, Dulles landed a job with Sullivan & Cromwell, august Manhattan law firm. He began at $50 a month and rose eventually to senior partner, manager of vast international legal interests. He became director in 15 corporations and one of the U.S.'s highest paid lawyers.
Public Mission: Barred from World War I combat duty (poor eyesight, damaged by an overdose of quinine after contracting malaria while on business in British Guiana), the up & coming lawyer wangled a captaincy in Army Intelligence. In 1919, he went to the Versailles Peace Conference as a reparations commissioner, was shocked when Woodrow Wilson's ideals foundered (as he says) "under the pressure of people who wanted to be vindictive." Never thereafter losing sight of the fundamental need for Christian tolerance and justice in international relations, Dulles in the '305 became the Presbyterians' No. 1 layman. He carried his convictions to the Protestants' Federal Council of Churches, was made chairman of the council's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace. At the famed Mackinac Conference of 1943, where the Republican leadership as a group turned from isolationism, Dulles first met Fellow Republican Arthur Vandenberg. On Vandenberg's recommendation, Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 sent Dulles as a delegate to the San Francisco founding session of the United Nations, where his special contribution was a formula to safeguard Latin American regional interests.
Treaty Negotiator: More & more, Dulles took part in postwar diplomacy. But he was quick to see and to warn publicly against the menace of Communism, and became a prime target of Moscow vilification ("warmonger . . . falsifier of facts"). He firmly supported the Administration's European policies (ECA, NATO). After a round of international parleys, giving Republican counsel to Democratic Secretaries of State Byrnes, Marshall and Acheson, he left bipartisan diplomacy for a fling at politics, took an appointment by Governor Thomas Dewey as interim New York Senator (June-December 1949). Running for the seat at the polls, he lost to Herbert Lehman. In 1950, the Democratic Administration drafted him again to do a job no one thought could be carried off: a Japanese peace treaty. Negotiated practically singlehanded, after an arduous six months of bargaining, the treaty stands as Dulles' and U.S. diplomacy's outstanding postwar achievement.
Ideas on Policy: Since the signing of the Japanese treaty, Dulles has called for a shift from the negative policy of containment to something more positive. The still free world, he says, must go over to the initiative in the mortal struggle with Communism. His strategic goal: "To dislocate, by peaceful measures, the internal structure of the Soviet empire." Dulles expounded his ideas in LIFE last May. Senator Robert Taft, during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, accepted the Dulles brand of internationalism, quoted from the LIFE article. As the party's No. 1 statesman, trusted by all its major factions, Dulles wrote the foreign policy plank of the convention platform, thus avoided a split in the party on the foreign policy issue.
Personality: Tall, solemn, methodical, pedagogic, Dulles has a lawyer's passion for detail, a lawyer's caution. He and his wife Janet have three children: John, a mining engineer; Lillias, now Mrs. Robert Hinshaw; Avery, who entered the Roman Catholic Church after service in the Navy in World War II and later became a Jesuit. For relaxation, Dulles has long favored sailing and fishing in Lake Ontario, where he has his own island.
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