Fifties (64 page)

When Foster was five, his mother wrote, “Mentally he is remarkable for his age. His logical acumen betokens a career as a thinker ... he reasons with a clearness far beyond his age.” As a boy Foster was precocious, unsentimental, and priggish. Seeing his younger sister, Eleanor, crying because she couldn’t buy a hatband she wanted, he told her, “You are not crying because you’re sad, you’re sad because you’re crying.” Years later, as a father, he hated
it when his own children cried. To cry was to be emotional; to be emotional was to be weak; to be weak was to be unworthy. That stoicism ran through the family, which did not tolerate weakness or imperfection. Allen Dulles, Foster’s brother, was born with a club foot. In the beginning it was a family secret. He was quietly taken to a doctor in Syracuse, where he was operated on.

Awkward and arrogant with his peers, Foster spent much of his childhood among the adults. A prodigious reader, he graduated from high school at fifteen and went to Princeton at sixteen. There he disdained popularity, refusing to join an eating club, the symbol of social success at Princeton. He could have been popular at Princeton, he liked to say, but it would have taken up too much of his time. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and second in the class of 1908. For a time he pondered what his future should be—the ministry or law and politics. It was as if he were caught between the world of his mother and that of his father. In the end, he decided to combine the two: he would be not merely a lawyer but “a Christian lawyer.”

At George Washington Law School (which he finished in two years rather than the usual three), he met and decided to marry Janet Avery, a young woman from Auburn, New York, near Syracuse. At first, her parents were less than thrilled with the match. The Dulleses were poor by their standards. But Miss Avery was completely in love with Foster; her assessment of his exceptional abilities equaled his own. Years later, when she was asked to describe him, warts and all, she answered, “What warts? Foster was perfect.” Her life was completely about serving him so, naturally, he adored her. When his sister, Eleanor, an intellectually gifted and ambitious young woman, told him that she wanted to go to college, he was appalled. He did not think women should go to college. “It made them bossy, gadabout, assertive,” he later told others, “like Eleanor.”

George Washington Law School was not prestigious enough, so after graduation his grandfather had to pull a few strings to get him a job at Sullivan and Cromwell, the great establishment law firm of its era; its primary function was to remove all possible legal barriers for the nation’s most powerful corporate titans so they could operate with as few restrictions as possible. Its lawyers were eventually handsomely rewarded, but not at the beginning of their careers. Foster Dulles started at fifty dollars a month. He was successful from the start: Endlessly hardworking and tightly focused, he did not bring to his work any moral ambivalence. “He knew,” his sister later wrote of him, “that if he wasn’t right in his opinion on life, he was as right as most people he knew. He had few doubts. He was sure of himself in everything he did.”

The connections were always there. At the end of World War One, Bernard Baruch took his old friend John Foster’s grandson along with him to Europe as an aide. It was Foster Dulles’s introduction to international politics. He did well, making his reputation as a rising young internationalist, and making connections to Jean Monnet and John Maynard Keynes. Back in New York, he rose quickly at Sullivan and Cromwell. He mastered early a trick of the successful lawyer: to speak last, after others were tired, and to sum up their arguments while tilting the presentation in his own direction. In 1925–26, Sullivan’s two top people at Sullivan died suddenly and the firm turned to Foster Dulles, then only thirty-eight, to head it. Soon he was a formidable figure in New York’s cultural life, even though he was never fully comfortable with the city’s elite. He remained “a man of Watertown rather than of New York,” his sister thought.

For a man who burned by then to be a major foreign policy figure, he was curiously insensitive to the rise of Hitler, perhaps because Sullivan and Cromwell had many close ties with the leaders of German industry. Others warned him that the times were changing, that something terrible was happening in Germany, and that Sullivan and Cromwell’s connections there were giving it a reputation for anti-Semitism. He thought that preposterous. “How could anyone think that we’re anti-Jewish? Do you realize that Sullivan and Cromwell is the first big law firm to have a Jewish partner?” he asked friends.

His brother, Allen, posted in Europe between the wars, was appalled by his older brother’s indifference to the deteriorating international situation. Foster Dulles even wrote a small book that seemed to Allen to rationalize the rise of Hitler. At home Foster worked covertly to ensure a free flow of nickel to Germany, a critical ingredient in its re-armament. But gradually, as war came, he moved to the center and served Roosevelt (“the architect of victory,” Dulles later called the President sarcastically) during the war on several missions.

He was phenomenally successful as a corporate lawyer even during the worst of the Depression. In the mid-thirties his annual salary was $377,000. As the war wound down, he was already looking forward to a government post. His worldview was steadily emerging, and it was similar to that of the other great Calvinist of the era, Henry Luce—it was the voice of Christian capitalism, American internationalism, and fierce anti-Communism. He thought Republicans more trustworthy than Democrats—they, after all, made more money and therefore were more successful in the real world; the Democrats had to
be watched closely for they tended, for reasons of demographics, to pander to lesser groups. In addition, they had been in power too long and had been insufficiently aggressive in combating Soviet adventurism.

By the fall of 1953, the Eisenhower administration was formulating what it would later call “the New Look,” a reformulation of American foreign policy and military posture. It reflected the President’s belief that the true strength of America came from a healthy economy and that a heavy defense budget would diminish that strength. Cutting defense spending inevitably meant a greater dependence on atomic weapons. Ike had arrived in office with the Korean War inflating the military budget to $42 billion. As they stepped down, Acheson, Lovett, and Harriman had recommended an additional $7 to $9 billion for air defense against the Soviets. One of the first things George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, did—with the help of Taft—was to help pare the defense budget down to $34.5 billion.

Humphrey, with Ike’s backing, wanted to give the country a tax break in February 1955, by cutting an additional $4.5 billion from defense and more from other departments. Instead, in October 1953, Charlie Wilson, the secretary of defense, and Admiral Arthur Radford, the new head of the Joint Chiefs, produced a Pentagon budget of $35 billion, a small increase, to be sure. Both Eisenhower and Humphrey, who had hoped for a defense budget of $30 billion, were disappointed. Radford shrewdly suggested that the desired cuts might be possible if the JCS could narrow its options, plan for fewer contingencies, and assume that in almost any conflict nuclear weapons would quickly be used. A few weeks later Eisenhower approved a new National Security Council (NSC) paper that, in effect, assumed nuclear weapons would be used in limited-war situations—as they had not been used in Korea. Humphrey seemed to speak for Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism at an October 30, 1953, NSC meeting: “There would be no defense,” he said, but only “disaster in a military program that scorned the resources and the problems of our economy—erecting majestic defenses and battlements for the protection of a country that was bankrupt.”

The adjunct to the New Look, first identified by Dulles in January 1954, was the doctrine of “massive retaliation.” (What Dulles actually said was that local defense measures would now be replaced throughout the world “by the further deterrence of massive retaliatory power.”) That meant we would react instantaneously, to even the smallest provocation, with nuclear weapons; therefore, an enemy
would most assuredly not dare provoke us. The policy seemed to guarantee that all future wars would be short and inexpensive. But such military critics as Matt Ridgway were hardly impressed. He saw the world as far more disorderly, with all kinds of threats and enemies, requiring flexibility in the ways we might respond. Nor did he see nuclear weapons as a practical option in the many messy situations that were already developing around the world.

The great powers were already locked in what was a de facto atomic stalemate, Ridgway and others argued. But what about insurgencies and brushfire wars that did not necessarily fit into the superpower nuclear equation? Was the New Look a viable strategy there, or was it primarily a bluff? Dulles’s speech about massive retaliation was not a great success abroad. Our allies were terrified by it. We seemed to them to threaten turning small wars into much larger ones. Soon there were a variety of attempts by the administration to explain Dulles’s speech, so many in fact that Walter Lippmann wrote, “Official explanations of the new look have become so voluminous that it is almost a career in itself to keep up with them.”

There was one additional critical change in the American military establishment that had occurred the previous summer, and it reflected no small accommodation to the Republican right: Admiral Arthur Radford had replaced Omar Bradley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Bradley was, ostensibly, a mild-mannered man who seemed more a schoolteacher than a warrior (but who sacked more battalion commanders than any general in modern American history). One of the great generals of World War Two, he was closely associated in the public mind with Eisenhower, but he was also, as far as the Republican right was concerned, a man of Europe and containment. Worse for them, he had dissented from MacArthur more than anyone else. The final straw, though, turned out to be his refusal to support Eisenhower as he cut back traditional military forces and bet everything on a nuclear response.

In early May 1953, Ike appointed new Chiefs and he had worked them out in conjunction with Taft, who had approved them all; Arthur Radford, the embodiment of what the Republican right wanted, became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. There was, it would turn out, a world of difference between the old-fashioned Bradley and the modern, eager young Arthur Radford.

Radford was a product of the modern Navy, a man of both Annapolis and of aircraft carriers, whose career had raced ahead, propelled by the force of modern technology. He had been very successful as the head of air operations for Task Force 58 in the naval
action in the Marshall and Gilbert islands. That success in using naval air power against Japan had given him a limitless vision of what that strategy could do, particularly if nuclear weapons were harnessed to it. He was unusually interested in Southeast Asia and had decided it was the coming battleground between the West and Communism; he considered himself something of an expert on the region.

If the critics of the Truman-Acheson years had seemed to envision a simpler world, in which nothing limited American power and the atomic weapon offered an easy answer to every military dilemma, they now had, in Admiral Radford, a Chairman of the JCS who shared their views. Both assumed that the Communist world was a monolith, and easily bluffed by nuclear threats. The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes. So it happened to Eisenhower, Dulles, and Admiral Radford in the spring of 1954, in the most unlikely of places: Indochina, where the French were still fighting an exhausting colonial war. In the spring of 1954, it seemed they were about to suffer a decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu, a cluster of small Montagnard villages in the Thai mountains along the Laotian border.

The French Expeditionary force of some 500,000 men—some French, some Vietnamese, some North Africans, and some Europeans in the French Foreign Legion—was being swallowed up in the rice paddies and jungles. Their opponents, the Vietminh—the Communist-nationalist insurgents—were gaining confidence and fighting with greater audacity. That inevitably posed something of a problem for the new Republican administration. French Indochina—later to be known as Vietnam—was not yet an American war, but it was in many ways increasingly an American-sponsored war; even before the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, Truman, anxious to take a stronger stand against Asian Communism, had started helping finance the French war. By the end of 1953 we had spent over $1 billion in aid and escalated our rhetoric to classify the struggle between the Vietminh and the French not as a colonial war, but as part of the larger struggle of the Western democracies against Communism; by 1953 we had more interest in continuing the Indochina war than the French did.

More, in the view of American policymakers, the source of all evil was not even the Vietminh but an aggressive, militaristic, imperialist, Communist China. By 1954 it was increasingly obvious that French and American interests in Indochina, which had been seemingly compatible for the preceding four years, were now about to
diverge; the Americans now had more interest in continuing the Indochina war than did the French, who increasingly wanted out. In late May 1953, the French had sent General Henri Navarre, one of their top staff officers, to take command there. Navarre’s orders were to bring home some kind of settlement. But Navarre was by no means ready to admit defeat. Using the kind of words that would come back to haunt Americans in Vietnam,
Time
magazine quoted an aide to Navarre as saying, “A year ago none of us could see victory. There wasn’t a prayer. Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of a tunnel.”

The reality was that the French had systematically underestimated the capacity of the Vietminh to wage a guerrilla war. In fact, the Vietminh had never set out to defeat the French in any given battle, or on a rigid timetable; instead, they decided to exhaust them and force them to win pyrrhic victories. Time was on their side, they believed, and they were succeeding handsomely. Lacking the airplanes, tanks, and artillery of the French, the Vietminh had learned to conserve their forces, to strike only when they had numerical superiority, and when the French were vulnerable, preferably in well-prepared ambushes and at night. In these strategies they had followed the joint dictates of Ho Chi Minh and his immensely skilled military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap.