Allen Welsh Dulles - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was one of five children born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster). He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather was John W. Foster, who was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. His uncle (by marriage), Robert Lansing, was also a U.S. Secretary of State. His nephew, Avery Dulles, was a Roman Catholic cardinal, Jesuit priest, and noted theologian who taught at Fordham University.

Dulles graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, and entered the diplomatic service in 1916. When Dulles was serving in Switzerland, he was responsible for reviewing and rejecting Vladimir Lenin's application for a visa to the United States. In 1920 he married Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor; their only son, Allen Macy Dulles Jr., was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War when a mortar fragment penetrated his brain. According to his sister, Eleanor, Dulles had "at least a hundred" extramarital affairs, including some during his tenure with the CIA.

In 1921 while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, Dulles exposed the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery, providing the story to The Times of London. The article was reprinted in The New York Times. In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's foundation in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944.