Dan Churchwell: Well good afternoon,
and welcome to the Acton Institute.
We're delighted you're here!
To introduce, I'm here to introduce our
speaker for our February Acton Lecture
Series.
My name is Dan Churchwell and I'm the
director of program outreach here at the
Institute.
And it's with great pleasure I have
to introduce a friend at this one.
John Wilsey and I have known each other
for about three and a half years now.
We've traveled the country.
He is an affiliate scholar with Acton,
which means a lot of our events, he comes
and speaks on many different topics in the
realm of history, church history, American
history.
Let me read the formal part.
John Wilsey is an affiliate scholar
here at the Acton Institute.
He is an associate professor of
church history at the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Louisville.
Did I say it right?
Thank you.
He's the author of multiple books,
including the American Exceptionalism and
Civil Religion: Reassessing the
History of an Idea with IVP Academic.
He also edited Alex- Alexis de
Tocqueville's famous work, which recently
appeared under the title Democracy in
America: A New Abridgment for Students.
And he speaks widely on
Alexis de Tocqueville.
And he was also in the year 2000 - 2017
and 18 a William Simon visiting fellow of
religion and public life at the James
Madison Center at Princeton University.
He has currently finished his
research on John Foster Dulles.
The current biography is now with the
press and should be released in a few
months.
So that's one thing off of his plate.
But it's a delight; I've traveled, like
I said, all over the country with him.
He has a wide base of knowledge, and we
also love the great state of Montana,
hiked many of the same places together.
So without further ado, please welcome Dr.
John Wilsey.
John Wilsey: Well, thank you very much,
Dan, for that wonderful introduction.
And Dan and I have have indeed
traveled the country together.
One place that we went to very memorably
was in Alaska, which was one of my
favorite trips that we took.
But thank you so much for inviting me.
Thanks so much for,
this, this great event.
I appreciate the invitation so much from
the Acton Institute and this is such a
fascinating topic and a fascinating guy.
Let's see if I can get this
sludge show going here.
There we go.
There's the title page
there on John Foster Dulles.
I couldn't tell you much about the weather
on March 19th, 2018 except that it was
cold.
I'd spent most of the day in the Seeley G.
Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton
University going through folder after
folder containing documents and pictures
pertinent to Dulles' life in the late
twenties and thirties.
About 20 minutes before closing time, I
decided to open one more folder and then
pack up and head home.
The folder contained some
photographs from 1933.
It was a thin folder; just a few pictures
to look at, I thought, and then I could
stretch my legs and give
my bleary eyes a rest.
The photograph contained in
that folder gave me a start.
It showed a large reception
room filled with people.
The people in the photo were
dressed in formal attire.
They were smiling, enjoying conversation,
making their rounds to friends and
associates around the room.
Here, a young woman is wearing a hat.
She's smiling warmly.
Perhaps she's meeting someone for
the first time, introducing herself.
And there, a man looks to be making his
way through the press of people, perhaps
trying to catch someone on the way out
with a greeting or to get some quick
clarification on a question.
Everyone in the photo looks
to be enjoying themselves.
It's a party.
A notation on the back of the
photograph simply says, JFD 1933.
And right in the center of the photograph
among all the partygoers in the room is
the unmistakable face of the then
German chancellor Adolf Hitler.
In the photo, Hitler is dressed in a
white tie and tails, as you can see.
If you look carefully at his lapel pin
depicting the Nazi party insignia is
proudly displayed there
and his, on his coat.
And there he is talking to John Foster
Dulles with his back turns, turned toward
the camera.
The broad smile on Hitler's face as he
talked with Foster demonstrates that he
was relishing the moment.
This is one of those times in the archive
that sends the blood running so quickly
through your body that you can
hear your own heart beating.
Up to this point, I had no idea
that Foster had ever met Hitler.
I had not seen any other
biographers mention it.
His brother, Allen, had met Hitler.
One biographer described how Alan had met
Hitler on an official visit to discuss
Germany's massive, outstanding World
War I debt reparations,at Nazi party
headquarters in the early thirties.
Alan cracked a joke with the Furher
about the British and the French.
And at first Hitler didn't get it, but
then when someone explained the joke to
him, he broke out into loud guffaws.
Alan said later that, quote, "Hitler
had a laugh louder than Foster's.
I always thought my brother brayed like a
donkey when he laughed, but now I know he
sounds like a turtle dove
compared with Hitler."
The mystery of Foster's meeting with
Hitler in 1933 was deepened by the fact
that the photograph has no
notation except for "JFD 1933."
But a few days later, I came across
an unreleased statement from Foster.
It was dated many years
later - January 21st, 1952.
It said, quote: "I was in Germany in 1933
as representative of American bondholders
to induce the German government to
resume payment on us dollar bonds.
I never had any discussion with anyone
anywhere with reference to supporting
Hitler, who's coming into power
in Germany I deeply deplored."
The
statement was helpful in providing some
needed context for the photograph, but in
many ways it raised more
questions than it answered.
Why was Foster in Berlin in 1933?
What was he doing meeting with Hitler?
Was he a Nazi sympathizer?
Was he an anti-Semite?
Was this the only meeting that Foster
had with Hitler or were there others?
Why did Foster not release
this statement to the public?
Where was the nature of, what was the
nature of his ties to Nazi Germany?
What does this meeting, shrouded in
obscurity, say about Foster's religious,
political, social, and
personal convictions?
And then there is the cynical question
I tried in vain to suppress, but it
persisted in crowding up all this space
in my mind: was Foster hiding something?
As I continued to collect resources, I
learned more about Dulles' 1933 visit to
Berlin.
I discovered that he was accused by some
fairly prominent figures many years later
of divided loyalties in his
dealings with Germany in the 30s.
And it occurred to me that the work
of writing a biography, and in this
particular case, a religious biography,
is fraught with the biographers peril of
having very, very much power over the
subject, a power accompanied by the risk
of failure to appreciate the
responsibility of wielding that power.
Now the subject of the biography is John
Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of
State who towered over American foreign
policy like a Colossus from 1953 to 1959.
He was born in 1888; he died in 1959.
As a Christian historian, I'm bound to
sort of approach the craft of writing his-
history with the teachings of Christ in
the forefront of my mind, especially the
teachings in the New Testament
about the fruit of the spirit.
So I'm cognizant of the fact that we have
a perspective on the scope of Foster's
life that he didn't ever have and his
friends didn't have, and his family didn't
have it.
Nobody had.
Even his enemies, you know, who, who
dug dirt on him, didn't have the kind of
perspective on the scope and sweep of
Foster's life that, that you and I have.
When he died in 1959, he was
buried at Arlington Cemetery.
It was followed - it was, the, the funeral
was followed by a state funeral, which was
the largest state funeral in the history
of the capital of our nation up until John
F Kennedy's funeral in 1963.
When I consider the photo from 1933
showing Hitler having a laugh alongside
Foster and all the questions that it
raises, I remember that I possess the
power of knowledge.
I know the details of what to
them is the uncertain future.
I know what Hitler will go on
to perpetrate against humanity.
I also know how Foster will react to
Hitler's actions in future years, how
World War II will shape Foster's most
profound convictions - things he could
never have known then.
And finally, I've access to knowledge
about the consequences of decisions that
Foster made as a central
figure in the 20th century.
Many of those consequences continue
to have their effects today.
And we are all compelled to live with
those consequences, whether we like it or
not.
Foster could never dreamed of having
such knowledge and perspective.
In short, when it comes to a life like
Foster's, in some sense, you know, we know
the end from the beginning.
We don't know everything.
We're still just people.
Our knowledge is limited.
But we have vast access to stores
of evidence from his entire life.
As we look back on Foster's life as he
lived it from 1888 to 1959, we have a
perspective that of course he could never
have, and thus we have a decided advantage
over Foster.
And this advantage translates into another
kind of power, the power to render moral
judgment on him.
Historian Beth Barton Schweiger reminds
us to use this power responsibly.
We do not shrink back from critical
moral evaluation of a life like Foster's.
But we do remember that-
to do so circumspectly.
Just because our historical subject is
dead does not mean he loses his humanity.
And just because he's dead does not mean
that his living students are omniscient,
or immune to their own moral
failings and limitations.
So who was he?
There's an irony to this question.
To a certain extent, this
question should be unnecessary.
The name John Foster Dulles during
the 1950s was a household name.
That wasn't that many years ago.
Many folks of a certain age can
call him to mind quite readily.
But still it seems that today, many
remember the name of Dulles only in
association with an airport
being named after him.
When Foster died on May 24th,
1959, the whole world mourned him.
His state funeral, as I said, was the
largest state funeral in Washington's
history since Franklin Roosevelt's in
1945, and surpassed only by Kennedy's a
few years later.
Dwight Eisenhower, his president, wrote
that he was a, quote, "champion of
freedom."
He said he was a foe only to tyranny, and
one of the truly great men of our time.
"No one," said, said Eisenhower, "has the
technical competence of Foster Dulles in
the diplomatic field."
Eisenhower said this about his
secretary of state in 1956.
Most Americans of the
Eisenhower era agreed.
In the spring of 1953 only 4% of Americans
disapproved of Foster's handling of his
job in 1962 a few years after Foster's
death, President Kennedy dedicated the
newly completed commercial jet airport on
10,000 acres of land outside of Washington
as Dulles International Airport.
Kennedy praised Foster and the entire
Dulles family in his speech for their
tradition of committed service to the
United States at the highest levels.
But over time, since that
time, Foster's star has fallen.
At the airport dedication ceremony that
Kennedy presided over, an unveiling of a,
uh, uh, of an imposing bronze bust
of Foster was, was introduced.
After about three decades, though, the
bust was removed, and stored away to
prepare for extensive renovations,
and it was never replaced.
Its removal was to the chagrin
and irritation of, well, nobody.
One of Foster's recent biographers,
Stephen Kinzer, found the missing bust
stashed away, in an obscure conference
room, as he said, "looking big eyed and
oddly diffident, anything but heroic."
By the early seventies, many of Foster's
biographers began to cast him as an
overbearing Presbyterian, an arrogant and
obstinate simpleton, a man with a binary
view of the world, uncritically regarding
Americans is the good guys, and the
communists as the bad guys.
In 1981 the editors of American Heritage
ignored Foster when they compiled their
list of the 10 best secretaries
of state in American history.
And by 1987, Foster was ranked as one of
the five worst secretaries of state in
American history.
Foster's star has fallen to the extent
that today he has come to serve as a
scapegoat for American foreign policy
failures of the fifties and sixties and
seventies.
Kinzer, for example, is a biographer with
no use for subtlety in his contempt for
John Foster Dulles.
In a 2014 interview he- on his dual
biography of Foster and Allen, Kinzer
hissed that Foster was,
quote, "very offputting.
He was arrogant,
self-righteous, and prudish.
Even his friends didn't like him."
Kinzer drops the entire burden of
responsibility for the Vietnam debacle
squarely in Foster's lap.
"John Foster Dulles," Kinzer said, "was
more responsible for the U S involvement
in Vietnam than any single individual."
To drive the point home, he said "we
could have avoided the entire American
involvement in Vietnam absent Foster's
decisions at the Geneva conference in
1954."
That's saying a lot.
Speaking of that, on May 7th, 1954, Ho Chi
Min and his Viet Minh forces overran the
French Citadel of Điện Biên Phủ in
Northern Vietnam, as the French took their
last stand in a long and costly conflict
to maintain control over their colonial
possessions in Indochina.
Ho's victory meant that he would
have serious credibility representing
Vietnamese communists at the Geneva
conference, meeting during the late
spring.
With impeccable timing, his forces
defeated the French shortly after the
conference had gotten underway.
All but one of the involved powers - the
United States - agreed that given the
combination of Ho's popularity among the
Vietnamese people and raw staying power,
resisting him would be all but futile.
Ho would be negotiating with the
anticommunist Vietnamese representatives
as well as those from Cambodia, Laos,
Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union,
and the United States.
Foster led the American
delegation at Geneva.
His primary attention was on establishing
a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula
after the conclusion of the armistice
that ended the Korean war in 1953.
He maintained that he would have nothing
to do with any compromise at all with the
communists on the future of Vietnam.
Foster was unabashedly contemptuous of the
Chinese communists and was convinced that
Ho Chi Min was a Chinese puppet.
And he was confident that America could,
could, could, could succeed in building up
an anticommunist bulwark in Indochina
where the French had failed.
At a London press conference held prior to
the conference on April 13th, 1954, Foster
had the following
exchange with a reporter.
The reporter asked, "what would you regard
as a reasonable, satisfactory settlement
of the Indochina situation?"
Foster replied, "the removal by the
Chinese communists of their apparent
desire to extend the political system
of communism to Southeast Asia."
The question, follow up: "that means a
complete withdrawal of communists from
Indochina?"
Foster said, "that is what I would
regard as a satisfactory solution."
Follow up question: "is there any
compromise that might be offered if that
is not entirely satisfactory
to the communists?"
Foster's response: "I
had not thought of any."
Foster's intransigence
continued into the conference.
When a reporter asked him two weeks
later in Geneva if he planned to have any
private conversations with the Chinese
foreign minister Zhou Enlai, Foster's dry
response was: "not unless
our automobiles collide."
Foster was committed, first and foremost,
to American national security against what
he saw as an aggressive, expansionist,
totalitarian, communist regime, and he
made no apologies for his inflexibility.
In later years, Foster's style was
considered to be pig-headed, dangerous,
and the result of religious fanaticism.
Foster was a man of many ironies.
He was a private man, preferring the
company of his wife, Janet, and his poodle
Peppy, over anyone else.
He kept his inner life
largely hidden from outsiders.
And moreover, the world that he shaped
and was shaped by was deeply complex.
The historians who know him best
consistently describe him as an elusive
figure, a very difficult man to pin down.
Simplistic pronouncements distort our
understanding of both the man and his
times.
Foster was one of the longest serving
secretaries of state in the history of the
department, serving from January of 1953
until his death, or just before, a month
before his death, in April of 1959.
His experience in international
politics began remarkably early.
He was 19 years old and finishing his
junior year at Princeton university when
his grandfather, John W.
Foster, invited him to attend the
second Hague Convention in 1907.
Grandfather Foster was serving as
representative of the Chinese government,
and young Foster went along with his
grandfather as his private secretary.
He served on many subsequent diplomatic
missions, representing the United States
to Panama in 1917, to the Versailles
conference in 1919-20, to London and
Moscow in the immediate years after World
War II, and the first sessions of the
United nations general assembly.
His most notable foreign policy
achievement prior to his tenure as
secretary of state was his negotiating the
treaty of peace with Japan, between the
years 1950 and 51.
It was a triumph.
His leadership was so effective that
president Truman offered him the post of
ambassador to Japan.
But preferring not to be, as he said, "at
the end of the transmission line, if the
powerhouse itself was not functioning, but
rather at the powerhouse," Foster turned
him down, and became Eisenhower's
choice to head the department of state.
Foster's diplomatic experience was direct-
was directly related to an aspiration he
had as a young man to be what he called
"a Christian lawyer" in the mold of his
grandfather, John W.
Foster.
John W.
Foster served as secretary of state under
Benjamin Harrison from 1892 to 1893.
One evening in the summer of 1908, shortly
after graduating as valedictorian from
Princeton, Foster was having a
conversation with his parents about his
career plans.
He had seriously considered
becoming a minister like his father.
But in the end, he decided against it.
"I hope you will not be disappointed in me
if I do not become a minister", he said.
"But I've thought about it a great
deal, and I think I could make a greater
contribution as a Christian lawyer and
a Christian layman than I would as a
Christian minister."
Foster blended his vocation as Christian
lawyer with that of diplomat in order to
serve his country, but also to serve
his church as he understood it.
In 1937 he attended the Oxford
Ecumenical Church Conference.
Prior to attending that conference, Foster
despaired of the church ever having any
real effect on world problems.
But the meeting inspired Foster.
He became convinced that Christianity was
the fount from which the solutions to all
of humanity's problems just bubbled forth.
As a 54 year old looking back on his
thirties, the fruitful years of his career
as an international lawyer, he wrote
a short piece called, I Was a Nominal
Christian.
He said, "I became only a very nominally,
very nominally a Christian during the
succeeding years."
But then after the Oxford conference,
Foster realized that the spirit of
Christianity, as he said, he said "that
which I learned as a boy was really that
of which the world now stood in very great
need, not merely to save souls, but to
solve the practical problems
of international affairs."
So when I write this, when I wrote
this biography, it considered Foster's
religious commitments, and how he
articulated them during his life as a
churchman, as a lawyer, and
then later as a diplomat.
He regarded his religion as the animating
force of his life, particularly during his
public career.
He was brought up in a devout Presbyterian
home, son of a, of a pastor, Alan Macy
Dulles, the pastor of the Ffirst
Presbyterian Church at Watertown, New
York.
Both his mother and father instilled
in Foster an abiding confidence in the
ethical teachings of Christianity.
Foster's religious commitments ebbed and
flowed during the course of his life; he
was not always devoted to the faith that
he learned from his childhood to the end
of his life.
But his Presbyterian upbringing
established attitudinal patterns.
His faith commitment lay - his faith
commitment lay somewhat dormant in his
early adulthood, but it awakened into a
sharply articulated and developed form in
his middle to late career.
This is a picture of the first
Presbyterian church in Watertown, New
York, still standing, and this is how
it looked when Foster was a boy and his
father was the pastor for 17 years.
Foster's religion can be succinctly
described as liberal Protestant.
Although to be fair, he held several
conservative attitudes and practices as
well.
Most importantly, Foster put the
practical always above the abstract.
For him, the dynamic change in history
always prevails over the static.
Change, not continuity, was
the normative feature of time.
And moral forces - what he called moral
law, what he called natural law, in sort
of a liberal Protestant way of thinking,
the power of right over wrong - these
forces were invincible.
The churches were indispensable
also to maintaining world peace.
Peace, like war, must be actively
waged to be secured and advanced.
He believed that America was chosen by
God to actively champion and defend human
freedom, and protect peoples who were
vulnerable to tyranny, mainly communist
tyranny.
God's providence was prominent
in Foster's thinking.
He understood America's mission in terms
of Christ's teaching of the parable of the
faithful servant, that to whom
much is given, much is required.
And he believed that God had given him the
special purpose of calling Americans to
the national divine mission.
He thought theology had its place in the
pulpit, but the essence of Christianity
according to Dulles, was operational, not
dogmatic; ethical, but not theological.
In short, Foster's Christianity was
fortified with American values and a hands
on religion, a religion stressing the
importance of duty, one that solves
everyday problems, and one that gives
human dignity and freedom, the highest
prominence.
There's another element that formed his
religious and intellectual worldview, and
that was nature.
From a very early age, Foster
developed a love of the outdoors.
His grandfather, his uncle, Robert
Lansing, who served Woodrow Wilson as his
secretary of state, both owned houses
adjacent to one another at Henderson
Harbor on the Ontario shore in upstate New
York, just 20 miles or so from Watertown.
And these houses form something
like a family compound.
And from his earliest years, Foster joined
the family as they spent their summers,
from May or June, all the way through
September, living at the compound, fishing
and sailing and camping and reading
and all kinds of outdoor activities.
Early in his life, Foster
cultivated the skill of sailing.
As a boy, he had a small
craft he named Number Five.
As an adult, he enjoyed taking long
cruises on his 40 foot yawl, the Menemsha.
He took his children sailing; taught
his, both of his sons to sail.
They cruised as far West as Lake Superior,
as far East as Long Island Sound.
Avery Dulles, Foster's son, who grew
up to become a very prominent Catholic
theologian, in particular loved to
sail, and was a very quick study.
Avery recalled how his father had taught
him to navigate by dead reckoning, and
that he had once navigated successfully
across the Bay of Fundy, with his father,
in a thick fog.
A number of biographers cast Foster as
something of a cold and distant father.
One biographer, Townsend Hoopes, who wrote
a book called The Devil and John Foster
Dulles - it tells you something about
his perspective - wrote that Dulles- that
Foster's three children, quote, "were
classic cases of parental neglect."
But what cold and distant father teaches
his son to navigate a sailing vessel
across the Bay of Fundy by dead reckoning?
Avery said later, it was one of my great
triumphs - he was only 12 years old - as
he described navigating against the
powerful current and a fog so thick that
visibility was down to just a few feet
with his father Foster at his side.
In addition to sailing, Foster owned an
Island in Lake Ontario called Main Duck
Island.
He and his wife, Janet would spend weeks
at a time on, on Main Duck in a cabin that
he had built by local Indians with no
plumbing, no electricity, no direct
contact with the outside world.
He loved the outdoors.
He consistently saw nature as a classroom
for learning how to navigate difficult
problems in diplomacy.
His the idea of moral forces
he extended to natural forces.
So sailing through a storm in the middle
of the Great Lakes, he saw as being a
metaphor of some sort to the
challenges of international diplomacy.
He also cultivated connections with the
local folks, Canadian fisherman on the
lake, often buying their fish from
them, giving them access to the waters
surrounding his Island.
One fishermen by the name of Herbert
Cooper was a fisherman and a teacher, is,
he's still alive.
But he was a teacher for many decades, and
a fishermen from Prince County - Prince
Edward County in Ontario.
He recalls how Foster maintained good
relationships with all the Ontario
fishermen earned their
respect and their admiration.
Herb Cooper was a guest of Foster and
Janet on their Island when he was 18.
They had dinner together, and Mrs.
Dulles would not let him join Foster in a
ound of Old Overholt, which was Foster's
favorite rye whiskey.
She said to Herb, "you're too young."
And she gave him a cup of hot tea instead.
So these date- details describing Foster's
family relationships, his religious
upbringing, his love of the outdoors,
these are all essential to understanding
the man, not just as a diplomat
or a churchman or lawyer.
He was famous for his love of a good joke.
His laugh was legendary
as it was contagious.
Associates and friends describe him as
laughing all the time, throwing his head
back and roaring a laugh that
reverberated throughout the room.
Those that worked for him had a particular
affection for him because he treated them
with respect and with
dignity and with affection.
His secretary, when he was secretary
of state, Phyllis Bernau Macomber, she
described everyone in
his office as a family.
They worked to exhaustion, traveled with
him all over the world, and saw him at his
best, and at his worst.
Macomber was so devoted to him that she
waited by his bedside in the last weeks of
his life as he was dying of colon cancer.
One evening as he laid in his hospital
bed, just before his death, he invited her
to move on, to leave the staff if she
saw him as something of a falling star.
She said, "I said, no,
I was going to stay.
That was it.
I wouldn't think of doing otherwise."
Foster's humanity is most clearly evident
to those closest to him, and especially
those who worked under him.
But at the same time, Foster
could be calculating and cunning.
As indicated above, Foster had close
business ties to German industry and
finance in the 30s which brought
him into contact with Hitler.
Since Foster was not a public figure
during the 30s, his activities escaped
wide notice.
But in 1944, when it was evident that
a, if Thomas Dewey were to win the
presidential election of 1944, that he
would pick Foster to be his secretary of
state, this brought Foster
into the public eye.
A muck raking journalist
by the name of, uh - oops.
That was, that's uh, uh, Phyllis Macomber.
That was his secretary.
That was a slide I should've
showed you a second ago.
There we go.
A muckraking journalist named Drew Pearson
wrote a number of pieces calling Foster's
activities into question, most notably his
relationships with cartels and banks that
did business with Nazi Germany.
"Right up to the outbreak of the war in
1939", Pearson wrote, "John Dulles took
the attitude that Germany was a
misunderstood nation, which had often
shown great investment promise, and
now should be treated with sympathy and
understanding until she
got back on her feet."
Foster did in fact defend Hitler as late
as 1937 against those who considered him a
warmonger and a lunatic.
In a letter to the editor of the Forum
magazine at the time, Foster Wrote:
"One may disagree, as I do, with many
of Hitler's practices and policies.
But such disagreement should not lead
one into the error of disparaging his
abilities.
One who from humble beginnings, and
despite the handicap of an alien
nationality, has attained the unquestioned
leadership of a great nation, cannot have
been utterly lacking in
talent and energy and ideas."
It's also true that Foster was reluctant
to close his law firm's Berlin office
after Hitler had come to power in 1933.
Foster was the only voice among the firm's
partners that advocated for keeping the
Berlin office open.
He was worried about the financial
loss that result from such an action.
He said, "what will our
American clients think?
Those whose interests
we represent in Germany?
If we desert them, it will do great harm
to our prestige in the United States."
Only after the colleagues at the firm
threatened to quit and form a competitor
firm did Foster finally relent.
And in a meeting called to consider moving
out of Germany, faced with rebellion from
the other partners, Foster finally said,
"who is in favor of closing down an
operation in Germany?"
Every single hand was raised.
Foster said, "then it is decided.
The vote is unanimous."
Still, when he was subjected to criticism
in the 40s during the beginning stages of
his public career, Foster consistently
boasted that he had led his firm to leave
Germany once Hitler had
established himself in power.
He wrote in 1946: "my firm's attitude
toward Hitler can be judged from the fact
that promptly after Hitler's rise to
power, my firm decided as a matter of
principle, to act- not
to act for any Germans.
That was in 1935, several years before
our government broke with Hitler."
Twisting the narrative to favor his own
role did not seem too problematic for him.
Foster could claim with credibility to
have no direct association with Hitler's
government, but it was also true that he
maintained ties to powerful men- mineral
and chemical cartels that
did business with Germany.
Foster was a director of the Consolidated
Silesian Steel Company, which owned stock
in the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel
Company, which fueled the German war
machine.
Foster always vehemently denied that
he was in any way a supporter of Nazi
Germany.
He consistently distanced himself from
any ties to Germany during the 30s.
And when he was scrutinized, not only by
the media, but other figures ranging from
United States Senator Claude Pepper
of Florida, to everyday church people,
pastors around the nation, the question of
his attitude towards the Nazis was brought
up again and again.
As Dulles' biographer, Ronald Pruessen
reminds us, these matters are fraught
with, with their own
complications and complexities.
While Foster's denials of direct
association with German businesses that
strengthened Hitler were technically true,
he still maintained indirect ties with
those interests all the way up
until the outbreak of the war.
Ronald Preussen wrote: "A far more
accurate gauge of the sentiment of
American businessmen toward Germany in
the 30s is a measurement of their actions
rather than their words."
And this is certainly true
of John Foster Dulles.
If we can say anything certain about
Foster as we evaluate his life, we can say
that he was a person who had
many paradoxes and ironies.
Personally, he was known for being
principled, but he was eminently
pragmatic.
He was devoted to his children, but he was
often distant and hard on them when they
disappointed him, he could be a father
figure to his siblings, and at times a
sibling figure to his children.
He was witty and gregarious,
but he was also withdrawn.
He boasted that he knew the Bible better
than anybody in the State Department, but
he rarely read the Old Testament.
He was proud and vain, but he also
welcomed opposing ideas and was always
open to criticism.
He was adventurous, but
he was not athletic.
He loved to expose himself to danger,
but his idea of a good time was an evening
of backgammon with his wife, and a good
mystery novel.
He inspired lifelong loyalty, devotion,
and affection from his friends who did
like him, but his Princeton classmates
had no real recollection of him when asked
about him decades later.
He was scholarly, and erudite in legal
and diplomatic matters, but, but rather
incurious when it came to
private reading and study.
He could be urbane and sophisticated, but
he also loved simple things, like getting
a free haircut when he was a US Senator.
He enjoyed wealth and power, but he never
lost touch with his provincial, upstate
New York roots.
He loved competition, but rarely competed
in sailing or tennis, which were his
favorite sports.
He was devoted to his wife, but encouraged
his sister not to marry her partner
because he was Jewish.
He readily broke from the ministerial
tradition of his family, but he personally
struggled when his own children charted
their own paths away from other Dulles
traditions.
He was rigid and stubborn.
But he often changed his mind on
issues of religion and diplomacy.
He was sensitive and gentle with his
staff, but he drove them hard, and he
inspired awe and fear among them.
He was an introvert, but he
loved the campaign trail.
He loved press conferences.
He was a tireless worker, but he was home
every night for dinner and games with his
wife and children.
He was serious and grim, but he had a
hilarious laugh and a quick sense of
humor.
In his public life, he was a man of overt
religiosity, but not what you would call a
prayer warrior.
He preached a developed argument for
natural law, but he was not a theologian.
He was a committed internationalist, but
he believed in American indispensability.
He was suspicious of alliance systems, but
constructed them all around the world to
isolate the communists.
He admired the dynamism of communism;
he recognized it as a religion in and of
itself, but he condemned it as godless,
and he committed himself to its
eradication.
He was disparaging of those whom he saw
as a reacting emotionally to the Nazis and
the 30s, but he himself was uncritically
and unstintingly opposed to the communists
after 1945.
He favored international control of atomic
weapons prior to becoming secretary of
state, but as secretary of state, he
advocated for a strategy he called
"massive retaliation," and dared America's
enemies to go to the brink of nuclear war.
He gave us a lasting and just peace with
Japan, but he had little imagination to
fashion a similar piece with
the Chinese or the Soviets.
He was a political operative,
but not a politician.
At various points during his career, he
was accused of being both a warmonger and
a pacifist.
He lacked public charisma.
He was bland behind a podium, but he
had a magnetic presence in the room.
He was tall.
He was muscular.
People were attracted to him.
Women were frequently drawn to him - but
he was famously ardent and devoted in his
love and attention to his wife.
Louis Jefferson, Foster's bodyguard while
he was secretary of state, reflected on
how Americans viewed him.
Nearly 30 years after his death.
"History has put a cold face on
John Foster Dulles," he said.
"The image we are given is
more often than not inhuman.
Yet Foster Dulles was, if
nothing else, a very human man."
There's no better way to describe
Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state.
Part of the reason that the popular image
of the dour Puritan endures is simply that
Foster projected that
very image to the world.
He was serious; he was thoughtful -
someone who drew a hard line separating
the personal from the professional, the
trivial from the substantial, recreation
from industry, and the
joviality from solemnity.
But his religious upbringing, his
religious ideas, motives, imagination,
rhetoric, and practices, for what they
were worth, offer us a window into the
man.
John Foster Dulles' humanity, animated
by his religion, is the subject of what I
wrote in my biography, and
the subject of this talk.
And understanding Foster in this way, you
and I can come closer to grasping our own
humanity.
And in communing with the dead, perhaps we
can come to a further understanding of our
own stance before our Creator.
Thank you very much.
Moderator: Thank you, Dr.
Wilsey.
Uh, now we have some time for some
questions, so if you could just face your
hand and wait for the
microphone, we will get to you.
Questioner: Thank you, Professor Wilsey.
A wonderful and insightful presentation.
Well, as you know, we have a hometown
hero here, Arthur Vandenberg.
What's the relationship
between Foster and Arthur?
John Wilsey: Yeah,
that's a great question.
So,Senator Vandenberg was something
of a mentor to Foster Dulles.
In, in 1949, Dulles was tapped by Governor
Thomas Dewey to fill out an unfinished
Senate seat that was vacated by someone
who had gotten sick, and, and this was in
the summer of 1949 and there would be a
special election held in November for, you
know, to finish out the term.
And so, so Foster came into the Senate
in the summer of 1949, and you know, he
didn't have a lot of connections.
Well, he had a lot of connections - he
had a lot of personal connections, but he
didn't really, I guess I should say he
didn't really intend on staying in the
Senate.
Um, but, but he, he had a very close
relationship with Senator Vandenberg when
he was in the Senate himself.
And he was, he came around and he said,
I think I'll, I think I'll run for the
special election.
I think I'd like to, I'd
like to be a Senator.
Right?
And it was largely because of
his relationship with Vandenberg.
He lost in 1949.
But, but Vandenberg and he continued their
relationship, Prior to this, prior to
this, Vandenberg had helped him get
involved in the formation of the, of the
United Nations.
He invited him to go along with him to
San Francisco in 1946 for the very first
meetings that, that
formed the United nations.
They, they had a very close relationship.
They had a very, involved correspondence
that the files in the archive of the
letters between Dulles and
Vandenberg are very thick.
They were, they were very close friends.
They both had a love of nature.
They both had loved the outdoors.
They, they saw eye to eye on politics.
And Dulles is - when Vanderburg died,
in 1950 or 51, which one was it?
50?
I think it's 50 or 51,
it was a loss for Dulles.
He lost a friend and, um, he lost
an important, a mentor in his life.
I think you can also see the loss of
Vanderburgh in his life when he was
secretary of state.
So, yeah.
I mean, he has that really important can
Michigan connection and they were very
good friends.
Yeah.
Questioner: In your research, did you find
any evidence of Dulles studying or even
reading Abraham Kuyper?
I sense a similar characteristic.
John Wilsey: That's a great question.
I don't see really any evidence that he
read Kuyper or any theologian at all.
Not just a cursory read.
He, he wasn't interested in reading
philosophy; he wasn't interested in
reading theology at all.
And when I say that, I mean, it's, it's,
that's illustrated in his relationship to
his son Avery, who became a theologian,
and his son, John, who became a historian.
When they decided to go into theology
and history, Foster was angry with them.
You're wasting your
life, you know, he said.
You need to be doing something practical!
So, so Dulles really wasn't very
interested in these things, so, so I found
no evidence, you know, that
he, that he read Kuyper.
Although I think you're right, I think
that he would resonate with a lot of
Kuyper's ideas.
Yeah.
Questioner: I'm curious what his reaction
was when his son became a Catholic priest.
The other thing that's interesting, theres
an Acton connection, because Avery Dulles
was a mentor to Father Sirico.
John Wilsey: Absolutely, yeah.
And, and Father Sirico's - when I first
met Father Sirico, and he told me the
story of his relationship with, with,
Cardinal Dulles, and it was really, really
fascinating.
So, yeah, that's a,
that's a great question.
I developed this pretty,
pretty extensively in my book.
So, so Avery, when he went to, he went to
Harvard in the early forties, and by the
time he was a student at Harvard,
Avery was sort of a party animal.
And he talks about this in his
reflections on his conversion.
You might've read this.
But he was, um, he was tutored by a
professor at Harvard who was there on a,
on a limited appointment, who was, you
know, a deep Catholic theologian, a very
conservative Catholic theologian.
Avery writes about this; describes
him in medieval terms, right?
And he really admired this man, and that
sort of laid the groundwork for later.
So in his junior year, Avery writes about
being in the library on a, on a cold
February day.
It was raining outside, it was gross.
And he was reading Augustine.
And he's decided to get up and to take
a little walk, you know, and to get some
fresh air.
And he walked around and he, for the, he
said, for the first time in my life, I
noticed the beauty and the intricacy
of God's world around him, right?
And he reflected back on what he had
learned in his sophomore year from this
mentor that he'd had, and he
started visiting churches again.
He hadn't been to church
since he was a child.
He went to the Presbyterian churches cause
he was raised in a Presbyterian home, and
they were all, they were
all really liberal, right?
And he said that, I didn't recognize
the God they were talking - I don't...
Who is this person they're talking
about when they talk about God?
I didn't, when I read the Bible, it's
totally different from the person they
were preaching about.
So he decided to go to the
Catholic church, right?
And in the Catholic church,
he found the Lord, right?
He found the same God
in scripture, he said.
When he converted to Catholicism.
Avery, you know, is a very gracious man.
He didn't ever have anything negative to
say about any of his family's reactions to
it.
But, but Foster really struggled with it.
Foster, Foster actually took his best
friend at the time aside, his name was
Arthur Dean.
And Arthur Dean was a, was a, a fellow
partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, a New
York law firm where he
was the managing partner.
He said to Arthur Dean, I want you
to drop everything you're doing.
You need to come to my house right now.
The worst thing in my life has happened.
Yeah.
So Arthur and his wife both come and they
are, they're both talking to Janet and to
Foster about it.
Foster had, according to Arthur, Foster
had written a letter to Avery disowning
him,
and he asked Arthur to read the letter
and to tell him what he should do.
Should I send it?
And Arthur said, you don't
want to send that letter.
You know, a man's faith is a man's faith.
And you don't want to coerce your
son, you- this is not worth it.
And Foster took his advice,
didn't send the letter.
You know, the letter is gone.
I don't know.
I don't know where it is.
He probably destroyed it.
And both Janet and Foster, who had at
first struggled with the decision of him
to convert Catholicism, you know, they,
they, it didn't take them long to, to come
around.
And Avery and Foster carry on a very, very
interesting correspondence, especially
during
Avery's early years as a priest.
You know, he's, he's ordained in the
50s, and this is the same time that, that
Foster is a secretary of state.
They carry on a very interesting
correspondence where Avery will, will
write prayers that he is saying on behalf
of his father, and his father will respond
by thanking him.
And he says things like, it gives me a lot
of peace knowing that you're praying these
prayers for me.
And so they were, they- I think that Avery
and Dulles- and Foster were the closest of
the three children.
And I think that the conversion, while
it was at first difficult, enhanced their
relationship in later years, and
that's reflected in the correspondence.
So thank you for that.
It's a great question.
Questioner: Foster - how did he see the
United States of America at the time as
becoming involved as a world leader, and
also did he believe in the United Nations?
John Wilsey: Wow.
That's a whole other
lecture in and of itself.
So I'll boil it down, I'll boil it down.
In the 1930s and in World War II, through
about 1946, definitely 1947, Foster is an
internationalist, he is very anti war.
He's not a pacifist, but he is
a product of Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson is one of his
most powerful influences, right?
Woodrow Wilson's idealism, Woodrow
Wilson's internationalism, really rubbed
off on Foster.
He was just a young man in 1919
when he went, went to Versailles.
So on the reparations commission from
1919 to 1920, Woodrow Wilson took a very
special interest in, in, in Foster as
a young man, asked him to stay on for
several more months in, when his role, his
reparations commission- had a lot of faith
and confidence in him.
And, and Foster looked
up to Wilson very much.
And, and that admiration lasts a
definitely all the way into his
negotiating the treaty of peace
with Japan in 1950 and '51.
So he's an internationalist and the mold
of, of Wilson, definitely through '46 and
'47, but in '46 and '47, with the
beginning of the Cold War, and through the
end of his life as secretary of state,
he still somewhat of an internationalist,
sort of.
The way he views international
cooperation, though, is in the context of
the free world joining together in
alliance systems and partnerships for
collective security against the
Soviets and the communist Chinese.
And so some historians have looked at
this and said he has a radical change.
He goes from being a, an internationalist
to being this hardcore religious
nationalist, right?
And I disagree with that.
I developed this disagreement in my book.
Foster, it's as though - so for us, as we
look back, especially for me, I mean, I'm,
I'm 51 years old, so I didn't live through
World War II, I was just a baby during
Vietnam.
So, you know, as his - as we look back
on the period of the 1930s and '40s, it's
easy -  and '50s, it's easy for us
to say, okay, we have World War I.
We got the depression,
we've got World War II.
World War II is over in September of
1945; the cold war starts with, you know,
there's a whole bunch of things you could
mark the beginning of the cold war: George
Kennan's, long telegram, long telegram;
you could say the Berlin Airlift.
You know, the, all, all of these little
markers for the beginning of the Cold War,
sometime in between '46 and '48, you know.
And the Cold War is different
than the, than World War II.
This is the way, this is our perspective.
This is sort of the way
we're all taught about it.
This is the way we kind of think about it.
But Dulles lived through it all.
In 1946 he wrote a very lengthy essay for
Time Magazine, called "Thoughts on Soviet
Foreign Policy."
And he says in that long article, he
says, we cannot let our guard down.
It's tempting because we
fought this great war.
All our, you know, all of our resources
gone to the war for the last several
years.
We really want to be done with war, but
we can't afford to let our guard down with
this rising Soviet threat.
And the point of all this is to say,
Dulles never really stops fighting war
between 1945 and 1950; he simply changes
in his mind who the adversary is.
Whereas the adversary had been Nazi
Germany, now that that now the adversary
is Soviet communism.
But he never stops fighting and,
and Americans really didn't stop.
They didn't really leave that
mindset of being a nation at war.
It was just a different manifestation
of it, of course, right?
So I don't think that there's a, there -
I think there are changes in the way that
he, you know, applies
natural law, for example.
In his internationalist days, he applied
international law to, well, you know,
universally to humankind.
But in the 50s, particularly from '50,
'51, when he's negotiating the treaty of
peace with Japan, because the communists
reject natural law, they stand outside of
natural law, they're condemned by it.
The free world embraces it.
So natural law, the moral law really only
applies to us and it's opposed to them.
And ultimately what will defeat Soviet
communism are moral weapons, not physical
weapons, which is an idea that Reagan
picked up on in his presidency.
He talked about that all the time.
So it's a very interesting, you know, sort
of transition that he goes through, but
it's a, it's a transition that that
is reflected in the times, right?
Everybody was going through the same
transition, transitioning from seeing the
Nazis and seeing expansionist Japan
as the enemy - rightly so - to seeing
expansionist Soviet totalitarian
communism as the enemy, right?
Uh, the war just continues.
And you see that dynamic in his life
and in the life of Americans in general.
Moderator: We have time
for one more question.
Questioner: As a bibliographer, can you
comment on the current trend of kind of
trashing historical figures by viewing
them through the lens of political
correctness?
John Wilsey: Hmm.
Yeah.
Like so, the only reason I bring Stephen
Kinzer in by name is 'cause he's in print.
And, when you go in print, you just have
to sort of expect that your name is going
to be used.
And he's all over.
He was all over the country when his book
called The Brothers, um, how, Alan and
John Foster Dulles - Allen and John Foster
Dulles and Their Secret World War was the
subtitle.
He went all over the country
and spoke and everything.
So all of his ideas are on record.
And I think that Kinzer is a, is an
example of someone who, who, has a very
presentist historical framework.
When you read his book, for example, it's
like, communism wasn't that bad, you know?
We could've live with it.
We could have coexisted.
And certainly people in the 70s, Nixon's
policy of detante was sort of predicated
on coexistence.
So, but, but it goes beyond
just coexistence, you know.
It really wasn't as bad as like
the cold warriors said it was.
And that's, that's, that's
a presentist framework.
It's looking at, you know, taking our sort
of, you know, 21st century mindset and
attitude and, and foisting them
on these people in the past.
And, you know, Dulles, he's sort of an
easy target, because yeah, he, he was
staid, you know.
He was sort of, you know, I mean, for
you, he might be described in 2020 as,
something like a, uh, you know, a, a,
humorless, old white man, you know?
And he was that.
But just as we are products of our
time, he was a product of his time.
He was an adult in the room.
Nobody knew foreign policy better than he
did, just as Eisenhower said when he was
secretary of state.
Nobody had a better handle on
international relations than, than, than
Dulles did.
He was the exact right man for the job
at the time he was there, because his
knowledge was so deep, he'd
had so much experience.
He lived and breathed diplomacy.
He was an - all this to say he was a
serious adult in the room as a policy
maker.
And we could definitely use a little bit
of that today, not just in politics, but
in American culture.
It'd be nice to have
some adults in the room.
Yeah.
Well thank you very much.
Thank you to the Acton Institute.
This has been great.
Thank you, Dr.
Wilsey.
