Dulles

Description

Biographies of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles, children of Allen Macy Dulles and Edith Foster. Foster, Allen, and Eleanor Dulles were three extraordinarily strong individuals, yet, as Leonard Mosley shows so brilliantly, they were linked by a complex "family network," forged in an outwardly conventional childhood. This book's insight into their private lives--including their decidedly unusual years of growing up--reveals the remarkable interplay between private and public faces, ripping aside the accepted facades of statesman, spy, and sister. Foster was born older than his years, and automatically assumed the leadership position in the triad. His certainty about the rightness of his opinions and conduct was reinforced by his sense that he was carrying out God's work in this unhappy world. This in part explains his swift rise to the top of a major Wall Street law firm and his role as one of the cardinals of Republican foreign policy.^ History (and their uncle, "Bert" Lansing, Wilson's Secretary of State) put them on the scene at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, America's debut as a great power. Eleanor quickly established her expertise in international economics and German and Austrian affairs. Allen was inducted into the intelligence priesthood as a junior diplomat in Switzerland during World War I, faltering only when he refused to see one V.I. Lenin after office hours, thus leaving Lenin to catch a train for his rendezvous with history. One of the ties that bound them was a shared assumption that they would play key parts in shaping America's history--as indeed they did. What they could not control were the emotional currents that sometimes pushed them apart, that brought flares of competitiveness between them and painful complexities to their respective private lives.^ Allen, gliding on his bon vivant charm, left his low-salaried State Department position and came into Foster's law firm, but he was merely marking time. Eleanor kept to her scholarly career and contracted a doomed marriage. As the clouds of war grew in the late thirties, history again sharpened the definition of their roles. Allen and Foster temporarily fell out because of their opposed attitudes toward the rise of the Nazis. Allen eventually triumphed as a key OSS operative in the familiar territory of Switzerland. Foster served in a variety of "advisory" roles under both Roosevelt and Truman, who were to find him, as many others did, an implacable enemy and a dangerous friend. Eleanor was to have a major role in reconstructing the ruins of European society. There were disappointments mixed with victory. Foster remained grimly faithful to the forlorn hopes of Tom Dewey. Allen seemed temporarily lost in the hasty dismantling of the American intelligence apparatus.^ Then Eisenhower answered the Republic's call; Foster made himself the unchallenged master of America's overt foreign policy and his brother Allen naturally took over the direction of covert policy, heading the CIA during the bitterest years of the Cold War. But Eleanor's career in the State Department became a casualty of the very success of her brothers. The years and headlines stream by--the creation of the UN, Korea, Suez, the "brink," the U-2 disaster, and the beginnings of the "great adventure" in Asia. But the fascination of the "family network," here revealed for the first time, was hidden behind the newsprint and legends. Why was the family's great influence, apparently set on a dynastic course--like the Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Rockefeller clans--limited to three members of one generation? Foster died in office, leaving behind a son who went into the service of God rather than country.^ Allen saw his legendary career destroyed at the Bay of Pigs and his son bitterly alienated from him. Eleanor alone remains, a witness to the great events and private sorrows of three lives that somehow sum up what has been called "the American Century." As Leonard Mosley demonstrates, in fascinating detail, the ebb and flow of American fortunes and the outer and inner realities of these three unique people are intertwined to form a major strand in the tumultuous and unwritten history of America in our time.--Dust jacket.

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