Freedom's Missionary

For weeks after his resignation as Secretary of State, the gaunt, tired man in the presidential suite at Washington's Walter Reed Army Hospital struggled to hold his own. John Foster Dulles read fitfully at his books--Agatha Christie and Erie Stanley Gardner, Churchill's memoirs, tire Bible. He listened to Bach on a stereophonic hi-fi that he had donated to the hospital last December. Sometimes he tried a crossword puzzle, listened to the news on TV. chatted about events with such faithful visitors as President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter, played, backgammon with his wife Janet. But as his dosage of painkilling sedation was increased, he fell more and more out of touch, slept long and deeply.

The members of his family gathered, stayed close at hand: Eleanor Lansing Dulles, his sister, the State Department's Berlin expert; Allen Welsh Dulles, his brother, head of the Central Intelligence Agency; sons John, a mining engineer, and Avery, a Jesuit priest.

This week, his family at his bedside, John Foster Dulles, 71, died from cancer and the complications of pneumonia. "Is it all over?" a member of the family asked. One of the doctors nodded. Janet Dulles moved quietly to the head of the bed and looked down at her husband's face. Nobody said a word. And in all the lands of the globe where liberty and independence are prized, the free and the thoughtful mourned the tough old warrior who had fought their fight with rare purpose, skill and dedication.

Onward, Christian Soldiers. "What we need to do," said John Foster Dulles long ago, "is to recapture to some extent the kind of crusading spirit of the early days when the missionaries, the doctors, the educators and the merchants carried the knowledge of the great American experiment to all four corners of the globe."

John Foster Dulles was a missionary for peace in the cause of freedom, in the deepest meaning of the American experiment. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1888 and grew up beside the bluffs of grey Lake Ontario at the family home in Watertown, N.Y. There his father, the Rev. Allen Macy Dulles, pastor of the Watertown Presbyterian Church, brought him up to learn long passages from the Bible by heart, to revel in family choruses of Onward, Christian Soldiers and Work, for the Night Is Coming. His boyhood heroes were Paul Revere and John Paul Jones, and his favorite authors were G. A. Henty (Among Malay Pirates; Redskins and Colonists) and Charles Carleton Coffin (The Boys of '76).

Dulles' first ambition was to be a minister. Then his maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, President Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State, inspired him to be a diplomat. While still a junior at Princeton, Dulles was taken by his grandfather to the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. At that time Grandfather Foster was representing not the U.S. but his law client, the Imperial Government of China--and Dulles' first job was as secretary to the Chinese delegation. Among his duties: riding around in a carriage paying courtesy calls, handing out Chinese visiting cards, going the social rounds in his Prince Albert.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, a philosophy major and valedictorian of the class ('08). He went on to score George Washington University's highest law marks to that date, got a bright start as a young international lawyer for New York's Sullivan & Cromwell. In June 1912 he married an upstate New York girl named Janet Avery, soon afterward interrupted his law practice to work for the World War I Trade Board (poor eyesight kept him out of the military service). After the Armistice, Foster Dulles got a gleaming diplomatic opportunity. President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who was Dulles' maternal uncle, took the young lawyer-diplomat to the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 as a senior presidential adviser on reparations. Afterward, Dulles, 31, got a letter from Woodrow Wilson expressing "the confidence we all have learned to feel in your judgment and ability."

Mask of Youth. Dulles went back to Sullivan & Cromwell, began a brilliant advance through major international assignments: he was counsel for a group of U.S. bondholders in the collapse of the Kreuger & Toll Swedish match trust, handled legal work on the $125 million J. P. Morgan & Co. loan to defeated Germany to help pay reparations. At 38 he became Sullivan & Cromwell's directing partner. It was then, according to one friend, that "young Foster adopted that dour expression, partly out of respect for the old fossils of 50 or 60 with whom he had to deal and partly to mask his own precocious youth."

As a topflight Presbyterian layman (his daughter Lillias, wife of Manhattan publicist Robert Hinshaw, is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary), Dulles began to devote more and more time to considering the relationship of church and state in foreign policy, attended conferences and talks on the topic across the U.S., in Britain, in Chiang Kai-shek's embattled China. In February 1941 Dulles was named chairman of the Federal Council of Churches' influential Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace.

Crossroads Campaign. At World War II's end, Dulles moved to the peacemaking level. Cordell Hull, President Roosevelt's Secretary of State, consulted him on "nonpartisanship." Roosevelt sent him as an adviser to the founding conference of the U.N. at San Francisco, where he and Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg worked successfully to get the word "justice" ranked with "peace" in the U.N. Charter. In the next five years President Truman sent him to nine more conferences, from London to Moscow to Japan; Dulles threw his influence behind the Marshall Plan and NATO, drafted and negotiated the Japanese Peace Treaty in a brilliant, yearlong, 125,000-mile performance in which he applied the lessons he had learned at Versailles. "If you use the lash," he said, "if you constrict Japanese economic opportunity, you will create a peace that can only lead to bitter animosity and in the end drive Japan into the orbit of Russia."

In 1949 New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey appointed Dulles to a U.S. Senate vacancy, and four months later, after a crossroads campaign to win and hold the seat, the Wall Street lawyer was roundly defeated by Democratic ex-Governor Herbert Lehman. An early supporter of Eisenhower over conservative Republican Robert Taft, he helped write the foreign-policy plank for the 1952 G.O.P. platform. President-elect Eisenhower put him at the top of the list of choices for Secretary of State, a position he would also have achieved if either Republican candidate, Dewey or Taft, had become President of the U.S.

Conscience of Freedom. To the secretaryship Foster Dulles brought all the years of family tradition, the skills of a long diplomatic apprenticeship, the craftsmanship of a topflight international lawyer--and an unswerving faith in his mission. Thus uniquely endowed, he held the free world's battle lines with his display of peace by military-diplomatic power ("Brinksmanship," cried the critics), took his stand as the clear, stern conscience of freedom (TIME, April 27).

In what is perhaps world diplomatic history's most astonishing statistic, he traveled 559,988 miles on his mission. High in the sky, far from the minutiae of State Department administration, he could sort out basic policies, could weigh the strengths, problems and needs of the nations and leaders he had just seen--many of them, such as West Germany's Konrad Adenauer and Nationalist China's Chiang Kaishek, his friends. High in the sky he could also slip into a sweater and carpet slippers, read his detective stories, sip rye on the rocks, play the inevitable backgammon with Janet, or make plans to stop off for a swim some place where there were good beaches, say Bermuda, Venezuela or Ceylon.

In Retreat. On Duck Island, his sanctuary out of reach of Washington on Lake Ontario, Foster Dulles moved with Janet into a different kind of glory, as a sort of woodsman cosmopolite, expert cook and reluctant pan washer, heating hors d'oeuvres over a Japanese habachi, basting squab chicken on a spit before the open fire, sitting outside on the rocks sipping cognac, watching and identifying birds, staring out across the grey waters he had known as a boy.

"Time is the most valuable thing in life, and I don't want to waste it," he said once. But on Nov. 2, 1956--the night after his masterful Suez speech at the U.N.--he suffered the first abdominal pains of his fateful illness. Next day Walter Reed surgeons removed a malignant lesion from the lower intestine. Last February, after a sharp attack of diverticulitis, he flew to London, Paris, Bonn to consult with the West's leaders and to inspire new unity and new firmness on Berlin; he could scarcely walk, scarcely eat. "If it isn't cancer," he told a friend before leaving, "then I feel the trip is too important to put off. If it is cancer, then additional discomfort doesn't fundamentally matter anyway."

About three months ago, after a hernia operation revealed the serious progression of his cancer, Dulles underwent 18 jolting sessions of radiation therapy and one injection of radioactive gold, then set off hopefully for a convalescence under the sun and beside the sea in Florida. But the hope was short-lived. Two weeks later, John Foster Dulles flew back to Washington and checked into Walter Reed hospital for the last time.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.