John Foster Dulles

Biography

John Foster Dulles was born in Washington, D.C., in 1888, a grandson of Secretary of State John W. Foster and nephew of Robert Lansing. He graduated from Princeton in 1908, studied law at George Washington University and joined the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where he became a partner specialising in international law and finance. During the First World War he served on the War Trade Board, and in 1919 he was legal counsel to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference; in the 1920s he helped design the Dawes Plan and arrange loans to Germany.

A devout Presbyterian, Dulles defended Harry Emerson Fosdick in a 1924 church trial and from 1940 chaired the Federal Council of Churches commission on a just and durable peace. He advised Republican nominee Thomas Dewey on foreign policy in 1944 and 1948, was an adviser at the 1945 San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, and served briefly as an appointed U.S. senator from New York in 1949. Under Truman he negotiated the 1951 peace treaty with Japan and the related security pacts.

As Eisenhower's secretary of state from 1953 he pursued a hard line against communism, associated with massive retaliation and brinkmanship. He built alliances including the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, backed the CIA-led coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, opposed the partition agreed at the 1954 Geneva Conference, and opposed the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956. Suffering from cancer, he resigned in April 1959 and died the following month.