John Foster Dulles Quotes

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year

A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.

It is one of the most dangerous, in fact potentially suicidal, things a great nation can do in world affairs: to cut off its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice and a misguided dispensation of good and evil. Foster

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

I made a fool of myself over John Foster Dulles. I made an ass of myself over John Foster Dulles. Something wasn’t right. They weren’t laughing. I pushed on. The first time I saw him ’twas at the UN. I never had been one to swoon over men, But I swooned and the drums started pounding and then … I MADE A FOOL OF MYSELF OVER JOHHHNNN FOSTER DULLES…. Nothing. Nada. They were just sitting there, staring at me. It wasn’t that they were unruly or not interested. It would’ve been better if they had been, but no, they were paying attention, they just weren’t laughing. I felt like I was performing in front of an oil painting. And this was only the opening number. I had twenty minutes to go. My body was heavy with dread.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the United States faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage: they were able to "appeal directly to the masses" and "get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich." That causes problems. The United States somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

Oscar-winning triumph. The New York Times called it “a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gun-fighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code.” It was that and more. The hero acts precisely as many Americans believe their country acts in the world. He is an enforcer of morality and a scourge of oppressors; he comes from far away but knows instinctively what must be done; he brings peace by slaying wrongdoers; he risks his life to help others; and for all this he wishes no reward other than the quiet satisfaction of having done what was right. Shane reinforced a cultural consensus

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.

Former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.” Lesson

In particular, the CIA was the brainchild of men like Allen Dulles.19 Along with his brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles was a longtime employee of Sullivan and Cromwell, the storied Wall Street law firm whose clients included the world’s largest multinational corporations.

Unterdessen übte sein Bruder John Foster Dulles – Eisenhowers offizieller Außenminister – mit seinen häufigen Predigten über die Niedertracht der Kommunisten und seinen ständigen Drohungen mit atomarer Auslöschung sein Amt mit der unheildräuenden Düsterkeit eines vom Weltgericht besessenen Pfarrers aus.

John Foster Dulles brauchte den Kommunismus so sehr wie die Puritaner die Sünde,

1959 erlag John Foster Dulles rasch einem Magenkrebs.

John Foster Dulles stieg zum politischen Chefberater Amerikas auf, ein Mann mit der Bestimmung, leise mit Königen, Premierministern und Despoten zu konferieren. Er sah sich selbst gern als Schachmeister der freien Welt.4

Indem er Leuten wie John Foster Dulles Männer wie William Douglas auf den Hals hetzte, brachte Präsident Roosevelt die Plutokratie zur Raserei.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked.

Americans, even fairly knowledgeable ones, are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism. Muckraking investigative journalists, now and then exceptions to this rule, lack the patience of the scholar, are completely dependent on their sources, and do not usually understand the minds of politicians in high places. Thus I. F. Stone hinted that Dulles might have been involved in a conspiracy with MacArthur and Chiang to provoke war in Korea, and a gaggle of critics descend on this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It is, indeed unlikely that Dulles was anything more than Acheon’s messenger in June 1950. But he and Acheson were structurally reconstituting a political economy that was a deadly threat to Korean revolutionaries. And conspiracies do exist, even if Foster Dulles was an implausible participant (his countenance was almost as unlikely as Sir John Pratt’s).

a cartoon showing John Foster Dulles on the toilet, with the caption: “The only man in Washington who knows what he is doing.

Exceptionalism”—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.

In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—because they were Americans.

was brought into the firm, but his network of global contacts quickly paid off. Within the firm he became known as “the little minister.” Although he often worked in Europe, he also became the firm’s key man for deals in Latin America. During his first year as an associate, with help from former colleagues

General Federico Tinoco,

Politik Amerika bersifat global. Suatu negara harus berada pada pihak yang satu atau berada di pihak yang lain. Sikap yang netral itu tidak bermoral - john Foster Dulles

It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles “the only bull who brings his own china shop with him,” and who coined the progression, “dull, duller, Dulles.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With his long, dour face topped by his ever-present banker’s homburg, the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and happiness.

The Dulles brothers were not intimidated by mere presidents. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain the rampant greed and speculation that had brought the country to economic ruin, John Foster Dulles simply gathered his corporate clients in his Wall Street law office and urged them to defy the president. “Do not comply,” he told them. “Resist the law with all your might, and soon everything will be all right.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin,

When these same globalists became fearful of worldwide communism (they needed separate national or economic blocs to play off against each other for the tensions necessary for maximum profit and control), they supported National Socialism in Germany. German army intelligence agent Adolf Hitler was funded to provide a bulwark against the Communist tide by enlarging his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), in turn sowing the seeds of World War II. Three prominent Americans who were instrumental in funding the Nazis were National City Bank (now Citicorp) chairman John J. McCloy; Schroeder Bank attorneys Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles; and Prescott Bush, a director of Union Banking Corporation and the Hamburg America shipping line.

It is interesting to note that, following World War II, McCloy became the high commissioner of occupied Germany; John Foster Dulles became President Eisenhower’s secretary of state; Allen Dulles became the longest-serving CIA director; and Bush, as a senator from Connecticut, was instrumental in forming the CIA. It might also be noted that both McCloy and Allen Dulles sat on the largely discredited Warren Commission assigned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Dulles got what he wanted in the negotiations: Wolff and his men in Italy agreed to lay down their arms to the Allied troops. It was, at least on its face, a military and intelligence coup that proved a capstone in Dulles’s ascendant career, helping land him the job of CIA director eight years later, under President Eisenhower, side by side with his brother, John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state. Viewed with any perspective, however, the early surrender did not hold up as the momentous occasion that Dulles had envisioned it. Coming just six days before the full surrender of Germany, its military impact was blunted. Lives were saved in Italy, to be sure, but most of them were likely Germans and Italians, not Americans.

previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably put it, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” One of the few American officials who had promoted intelligence

followed Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society, The Federalist Papers on government, and a merger of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles on national security.

The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

A more venomous opponent, Christopher Hitchens, made the charge, all too familiar on the left, that Kissinger was a war criminal—what else could he be if his lethal policies had no other aim but his personal advancement? Hitchens drew up a “Bill of Indictment” that charged Kissinger with crimes in such places as Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor. International relations, Hitchens wrote, were treated “as something contingent to his own needs.” One Kissinger defender, his authorized biographer Niall Ferguson, has argued that every postwar administration before Nixon’s—Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, and Johnson’s—“could just as easily be accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity.” He pointed out that Eisenhower’s policies in Guatemala had led to the deaths of about 200,000 people. Causing or condoning death, even of innocents, was the price of being a superpower with a global role. Yet perhaps with the exception of Truman (because of his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan), no one was put in the leftist dock as a war criminal so often or to the same degree as Kissinger, not John Foster Dulles, not Dean Rusk. Why, Ferguson wondered, did Kissinger’s accusers subject him to a “double standard”? The left, however, didn’t see a double standard. Kissinger, alone among postwar policymakers, was charged with making decisions out of personal interest, not national or global concerns. According to his critics, he “believed in nothing,” though it would be more accurate to say that what he believed in was weighing means against ends, a kind of situational, pragmatic ethics that rejected the left’s moralistic strictures. What he didn’t believe in were absolutes. “There is no easy and surely no final answer,” he said. To be sure, valid objections could be raised against specific Kissinger policies, even in his own terms of weighing means against ends—the invasion of Cambodia, for example, or the tilt toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis—and there is certainly truth to Seymour Hersh’s assertion that “Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions.” Callousness has always been the besetting sin of Realpolitik, and it is not difficult to find examples of almost brutal coldness in Kissinger’s record. “It’s none of our business how they treat their own people,” he said of Moscow’s policy toward Soviet Jews. “I’m Jewish myself, but who are we to complain?” Actual human beings could get lost as power was being balanced.

a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.

Fue su época de gloria. Mezclando las amenazas con una capacidad inaudita para la intriga y un olfato generalmente certero, un espíritu práctico así como un coraje temerario, se las arregló para armar una junta militar, apoyada por la corona y equipada con armas y dinero de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña, que derrotó a las guerrillas e instaló un régimen autoritario y represivo en el país. Se ganó entonces el apelativo del Carnicero de Grecia. John Foster Dulles y su hermano Allen, el jefe de la CIA, pensaron que semejante diplomático era el hombre adecuado para representar en Guatemala al país que había decidido acabar por las buenas o las malas con el gobierno de Jacobo Árbenz. Y, en efecto, apenas llegado a Guatemala con su infalible sombrerito borsalino engalanado con una pluma, sin preocuparse de verificar sobre el terreno si las acusaciones de ser el de Árbenz un régimen capturado por el comunismo eran exageradas e irreales —como se atrevió a sugerirle su segundo en la legación—, empezó a trabajar con ímpetu en la demolición de ese gobierno.

Six years later, when he ran to secure the presidential nomination for the Republican Party, he joined forces with John Foster Dulles, the brother of Allen Dulles – best known for his role as the first civilian head of the CIA in the early years of the Cold War. Dulles, a member of the “internationalist” camp of American politics that typified the attitudes of the elite “Eastern Establishment,” impressed upon Dewey the importance of overcoming the isolationist factions of the Republican Party.6,7 What Dulles got in exchange for his steering of Dewey in pursuit of political power was his own rise through the ranks of the party, ultimately culminating in his service as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.