Reassessing John Foster Dulles ’08

In many political science textbooks, John Foster Dulles ’08 is described as the definitive example of a personality infused into politics. The way these books tell it, Dulles, the son of a stern Presbyterian minister, saw the world in terms of black and white, good versus evil. In his view, these books say, the United States was the moral actor in the world during the 1950s, combatting the threatening, evil force of communism, which was embodied by the Soviet Union. By these accounts, Dulles’s beliefs molded his outlook as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower and led Dulles to pursue rigid, dogmatic policies toward the Soviets and their allies.

This simplistic view of Dulles was accepted by scholars and politicians alike throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But during the early 1980s, a number of books appeared that revised the previously held impressions of the Eisenhower years. The recent declassification of government documents and information has led to a “boomlet of Dulles revisionism,” according to Richard Immerman, a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

This renewed interest in the personality and politics of the former Secretary of State coalesced in Princeton in February, when the Wilson School held a conference to celebrate the centennial of Dulles’s birth. The conference’s organizers sought to expand the “boomlet” into a full-fledged academic reappraisal of Dulles’s life and work, and they invited many former government officials, diplomats, and journalists who had served during the Eisenhower administration, as well as more than sixty scholars who study the Cold War. The speakers came in an attempt to shed new light on an enigmatic figure who loomed larger than almost any other personality during the Cold War.

After exhaustively examining the words and actions of the late Secretary of State for three days, the conferees emerged with a complex and even contradictory view of Dulles. In addition, new information surface concerning Project Solarium, a top-secret program initiated by Dulles that was one of the most innovative approaches to policy making ever undertaken by the State Department. Project Solarium was unusual in that it was a full-scale evaluation of United States foreign policy that was undertaken at the beginning of a new administration. The project’s findings formed the core of the foreign policy pursued by Eisenhower during his term in office. Named for the White House sun room in which Dulles first suggested such an evaluation. Project Solarium led to the continuation and extension of the policy of containment. On the last day of the Dulles conference, details of Solarium were recounted by three prominent participants in it: George Kennan ’25, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and the State Department’s policy planning director under President Truman, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, a former member of President Eisenhower’s staff, and Robert Bowie, Dulles’s director of policy planning.

In the summer of 1953, on the grounds of the National War College, three task groups met at the direction of President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles to reassess the nation’s security policy, military power, and alliance structure. Task Force A, headed by Kennan, examined the continuation of the policy of containment, the Truman Administration’s policy of strengthening alliances abroad and remaining ready to form others in order to prevent Soviet expansion. The second alternative, studied by Task Force B, was a policy under which Eisenhower would, in effect, draw a line around the West and warn the Soviet Union that the United States would retaliate with nuclear weapons if that line were crossed. Task Force C looked into the policy of “Rollback,” or “Liberation,” a policy of seeking to free those nations that were part of the Soviet bloc.

The second project involved between fifty and a hundred ranking officials in the State Department, the White House, and the military, and it required tight security because of the classified information the participants were considering, Kennan said. Each task force had seven members; the remaining officials provided data and participated in the discussion of the findings.

“I was not happy about this assignment, because I did not like the idea of a prescribed thesis,” said Kennan, a career foreign service officer until Dulles fired him when Truman left office in January 1953. He said, however, that he enjoyed presenting his ask force’s findings and having Dulles at his feet. “I could take, and he had to listen,” Kennan said with a smile. “It was a few months after he had fired me, so it gave me a great deal of satisfaction.” After completing his work and participating in the discussions that followed, Kennan returned to private life, thinking that the results of the project would only “sink into the sands of the bureaucracy.” He said that he had not thought about the project until recently, when he began to receive inquiries from scholars.

Similarly, Goodpaster said that he forgot about his work with Task Force C, the group looking into the Rollback strategy, once Project Solarium came to a close. According to Goodpaster, President Eisenhower did not seriously consider pursuing Rollback, a policy that would have required a sizable U.S. military buildup. Instead, Goodpaster said, Eisenhower and Dulles wanted to know the shortcomings of such a policy, which had been a focal issue during the 1952 election. “[Eisenhower] told me that he wanted the Rollback option thoroughly evaluated and that he wanted someone with common sense on Task Force C,” Goodpaster said. Among other assignments, the group was to determine the “date of maximum danger” of the Soviet threat – the approximate time by which the Soviet Union would have sufficient nuclear power to either pose a great threat to America’s allies or to inflict devastating damage on the United States itself. Task Force C also devised various covert plans of military action that could help achieve Rollback’s goals, but the details of those plans and other parts of the group’s report remain classified.

The proposal of Task Force B, headed by Major General J. McCormack, did not command much support among those attending the discussion sessions of Project Solarium, according to Kennan and Goodpaster. As the discussions wore on, support for revising the policy of containment began to build. The project ended with the implementation of the New Look policy, a modification of containment that ignored the rhetoric of Rollback and the use of U.S. force, Goodpaster said. “I think Foster Dulles was satisfied with what we came up with,” he said.

Bowie said that Dulles initiated the project in order to obtain a genuine reexamination of current U.S. policy, to educated officials involved in State Department planning, and to bury the idea of the Rollback policy. “He wanted to make it [Rollback] a thing of the past,” Bowie said. After the Solarium project ended, Dulles, Bowie, and other planners in the State Department went about formulating and implementing the New Look policy. Dulles realized that “American dominance in nuclear weapons was not going to hold,” Bowie said. The State Department planners took Task Force A’s report, added some of the military structure from the other groups’ reports, and came up with a conclusion on which to base their policy, he said.

Kennan and Goodpaster agreed that the Solarium Project was an effective way for Dulles and Eisenhower to reassess U.S. policy at the beginning of the new administration. “We were indeed entering a time of increased danger,” Goodpaster said. There was a need to evaluate whether the United States should continue the policy set forth by a Democratic administration, Kennan said.

In addition to the revelations about Project Solarium, new information about the work of Secretary Dulles was presented at the conference, and that information points to a more sophisticated image of Dulles than scholars have previously supposed. Citing recently declassified government documents, various speakers claimed that there is evidence to suggest that Dulles was not as dogmatic, rigid, or closeminded about foreign policy options as he appears to have been in standard diplomatic histories.

In contrast with his popular image as the epitome of the cold warrior, Dulles put forth the idea of a complete ban on nuclear weapons in 1954, according to John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Ohio University. If the ban proved unworkable, Dulles was ready to call for the internationalization of nuclear weapons, a policy that Gaddis said reveals a Jon Foster Dulles who did not base his ideals of American strength solely on the nation’s nuclear capabilities.

Words such as “massive retaliation” and “brinkmanship” captured the attention of the American public and the press in the 1950s. Symbolizing the tense times of the Cold War, these words were first introduced by John Foster Dulles. Friends and associates of Dulles say that he objected to the press’s reducing his speeches to a few catch words, but Dulles remains inextricably tied to the words and phrases of Cold War rhetoric. Bowie said that Dulles was simplistic and dramatic in his speeches before Congress because he was trying to persuade the Republican leadership in Congress to agree with him. “He had a conviction that he had to bring along public support,” Bowie said.

Many of the conference participants, including Gaddis and other scholars, said that there was both an “inner” and an “Outer” John Foster Dulles. The Outer Dulles stood rigid and dogmatic in public, but the Inner Dulles yearned for peace and worked to secure a safe world. The new scholarship portrays Dulles as a more complex personality than had originally been thought, yet the questions of his open-mindedness about communism and its perceived threat to the nation still remain.

“I want to urge caution [regarding] the increasingly popular notion of an Inner and Outer Dulles,” said Mark Toulouse, of Texas Christian University. “History could create a mythical Dulles.” Dulles thought of the world in moral terms, believing that nations were responsible to moral laws, Toulouse said. Recently released documents do reveal a more complex Dulles, but Robert McMahon, of the University of Virginia, said that little evidence exists to show that Dulles understood the Third World as anything but an arena for Soviet expansion. In such areas as Latin America and East Asia, there is documentation to support the thesis that Dulles was dogmatic, viewing policy as a weapon in the struggle to keep nations from falling under Soviet control. Stephen Rabe, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, said that the question of the Inner and Outer Dulles should be explored but also attacked by scholars. “How were the Russians and Chinese supposed to know the Inner Dulles?” he asked his colleagues at a roundtable discussion of the conference’s findings. “How were the Hungarians supposed to know that his speeches were for the yahoo wing of the Republican Party?”

A synthesis of the new information about Dulles is still elusive, said Immerman, who will spend an additional year at Princeton on a MacArthur Fellowship in order to edit the book that will result from the conference. The book will contain the papers presented by the historians at the conference. Short follow-up discussions about Dulles will be held within the next year, he said. According to Immerman, the conference raised several questions that are certain to be incorporated into future research and discussions of Cold War history. An Austrian scholar raised the question of whether Dulles approved of nations claiming neutrality, a concept he publicly criticized. Another historian asked why the United States had a nuclear arsenal “that exceeded our intentions” in the 1950s. Other scholars challenged their colleagues to investigate what the states and unstated interests and objectives of the United States during the Cold War were. “[The Eisenhower Administration] has been studied for thirty years, and only now are we realizing how little we know,” Immerman said.

This was originally published in the March 9, 1988 issue of PAW.