John Foster Dulles - Political Career

Political Career

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson appointed Dulles as legal counsel to the United States delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference where he served under his uncle, Robert Lansing, then Secretary of State. Dulles made an early impression as a junior diplomat by clearly and forcefully arguing against imposing crushing reparations on Germany. Afterwards, he served as a member of the War Reparations Committee at the request of President Wilson. Dulles, a deeply religious man, attended numerous international conferences of churchmen during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924, he was the defense counsel in the church trial of Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who had been charged with heresy by opponents in the denomination (the event which sparked the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy), a case settled when Fosdick, a liberal Baptist, resigned his pulpit in the Presbyterian Church, which he had never joined. Dulles also became a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, an international law firm.

Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichskanzler in 1933, Dulles oversaw the direction of investment worth more than $1 billion in businesses in Nazi Germany. According to Stephen Kinzer's 2006 book Overthrow, Dulles' firm benefited directly from doing business with the Nazi regime. In addition, throughout 1934 Dulles was a very public supporter of Hitler. However, the junior partners, led by his brother Allen, were appalled by the firm's Nazi connections and threatened to revolt if Dulles did not end them. In 1935, Dulles closed Sullivan & Cromwell's Berlin office; later he would cite the closing date as 1934, no doubt in an effort to clear his reputation by shortening his involvement with Nazi Germany.

Dulles was a close associate of Thomas E. Dewey, who became the presidential candidate of the Republican Party in the 1944 election and 1948. During the elections Dulles served as Dewey's chief foreign policy adviser. In 1944, as Dewey's adviser, Dulles took an active role in establishing the Republican plank calling for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.

In 1945, Dulles participated in the San Francisco Conference and worked as adviser to Arthur H. Vandenberg and helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter. He subsequently attended the United Nations General Assembly as a United States delegate in 1946, 1947 and 1950.

Although Dulles has a lasting reputation as a hawk and nuclear weapons proponent, he was strongly opposed to the US atomic attacks on Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the bombings he drafted a public statement that called for international control of nuclear energy under United Nations auspices. Dulles wrote, "If we, as a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way, men elsewhere will accept that verdict. Atomic weapons will be looked upon as a normal part of the arsenal of war and the stage will be set for the sudden and final destruction of mankind." Dulles never lost his anxiety about the destructive power of nuclear weapons. However, his views on international control and on employing the threat of atomic attack changed in the face of the Berlin blockade, the Soviet detonation of an A-bomb, and the advent of the Korean war, which convinced him that the communist bloc was pursuing expansionist policies.

Dulles was appointed by Dewey to the United States Senate as a Republican from New York on July 7, 1949, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Democrat Robert F. Wagner. Dulles served from July 7, 1949, to November 8, 1949, when a successor, Herbert Lehman, was elected, having beaten Dulles in a special election to fill the senate vacancy.

In 1950, Dulles published War or Peace, a critical analysis of the American policy of containment, which at the time was favored by many of the foreign policy elites in Washington. Dulles criticized the foreign policy of Harry S. Truman. He argued that containment should be replaced by a policy of "liberation". When Dwight Eisenhower became President in January, 1953, he appointed Dulles as his Secretary of State. As Secretary of State, Dulles still carried out the “containment” policy of neutralizing the Taiwan Strait during the Korean War, which had been established by President Truman in the Treaty of Peace with Japan of 1951. He also supervised the completion of the Japanese Peace Treaty, in which full independence was restored to Japan under United States terms.