Fifties (63 page)

For a brief time it appeared that Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, the army chief of staff and transition leader, might succeed Arbenz. He promised Peurifoy that he would outlaw the Communist party and exile all its leaders, but after Diaz gave his first speech, the Americans decided that he was insufficiently anti-Communist and anti-Arbenz. John Doherty, one of the CIA men, was deputized to tell Diaz he was stepping down. Doherty lectured Diaz on the evils of Arbenz’s rule. Diaz began to argue back, but it had been a long day already and the other Agency man, Enno Hobbing, was tired and in no mood to prolong the discussion: “Colonel,” he told Diaz. “You’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.” When Diaz protested to Peurifoy, Peurifoy handed him a list of Communists he wanted shot in the next twenty-four hours. “It would be better in that case that you actually sit on the presidential chair and that the Stars and Stripes fly over the Palace,” Diaz later claimed he had told Peurifoy.

In the United States there was little sense of outrage over the coup. Few Americans, after all, knew what really had happened. The CIA laundered the operation, in the early days at least, with considerable success. The coup was widely seen as the work of pro-Western anti-Communists against agents of the Kremlin, witting or unwitting. Dwight Eisenhower liked to refer to the Guatemalan coup as
the model of its kind. Foster Dulles was so pleased that he ordered Carl McCardle, his press officer, to line up all the networks and radio stations so he could broadcast to the entire nation. He told McCardle it was “the chance to talk about the biggest success in the last five years against Communism.” He told the people of the United States that the coup represented “a new and glorious chapter for all the people of the Americas.” He expressed his gratitude to all “the loyal citizens of Guatemala who, in the face of terrorism and violence and against what seemed insuperable odds, had the courage and the will to eliminate the traitorous tools of foreign despots.” Dulles later asked C. D. Jackson, the administration’s psychological warfare expert, to arrange for some writer to do a major historical novel based on events in Guatemala, along the lines “of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Ida Tarbell.” He would, he said, make everything available to such a writer, except, of course, the CIA’s role in the affair.

A year after the coup, Foster Dulles asked Park Armstrong, the assistant secretary of state, whether his shop had ever found anything connecting Arbenz with Moscow. There was nothing conclusive, Armstrong had answered.

In New York, Arthur Hays Sulzberger was not happy about the way his paper had been used and the fact that he had kept one of his best people away from a legitimate story. He wrote Allen Dulles that he had kept Gruson out of Guatemala, “because of my respect for your judgment and Foster’s.” But he was not going to let the issue stop there. He wanted more information. There had been, he pointed out, two incidents in the past when members of the
Times
staff had been accused of disloyalty, and in one case the charge had not been true and in the other it had concerned a much earlier and long severed association. Therefore, he felt it was very important to settle the issues of Sydney Gruson’s loyalty and his reputation.

Dulles weaseled. He did not like the idea, he wrote Sulzberger, that “a man having his (Gruson’s) particular nationality, background, and connections should be representing you at a particular place and a particular juncture.” Beyond that, he had nothing more to offer. As Sulzberger realized he had been used, Harrison Salisbury noted, his correspondence with the head of the CIA grew chillier. His last note to Dulles on the subject said: “My judgment, formed on the basis of our experience with the man and on Cy’s report [the report of his nephew, Cyrus Sulzberger, who believed Gruson the ablest foreign correspondent on the staff] to me of what he learned, is that
he is a good newspaperman who happened upon some stories which the people reporting to you did not like because they did not want them published.” It was an important moment, a warning to the paper’s top executives about the potential difference between the agenda of the secret government and that of serious journalists.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I
N YEARS TO COME
, students of American foreign policy would have considerable difficulty deciding which secretary of state had been more militantly anti-Communist—Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles. But in the era of Dulles’s reign at the State Department, anyone could have told who was more self-righteous and who more prone to bombastic rhetoric about the justness of the American cause. As Reinhold Niebuhr said of him, “Mr. Dulles’s moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear.... Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”

It was the unfortunate responsibility of John Foster Dulles to bridge the gap between the excesses of the recent Republican campaign speeches, particularly those that catered to the sensibilities of the Republican right, and the limits of American power abroad. In addition, he had to soothe the ruffled feathers of those traditional
Republican conservatives, the bedrock loyalists who had supported Taft and who still felt guilty about rejecting their own for an outsider who seemed dangerously internationalist, perhaps even liberal. A lesser man might have shied away from so daunting a task, but not Foster Dulles.

Dulles had emerged by the end of the war as the principal foreign policy spokesman for the Republican party, the shadow secretary of state. He had been close to Tom Dewey in 1948, and Dewey’s defeat that year had come as a considerable shock to him. Dulles had, after all, spent the entire preceding year being described by all as the next secretary of state. Dulles happened to be in Paris on Election Day in 1948, and he had promised to do an interview with David Schoenbrun of CBS on the day after the election. It was projected as an interview with the new secretary of state-designate. When Dewey lost, Schoenbrun asked if Dulles would still appear on the show. Yes, said Dulles—and he added in a rare burst of humor—if Schoenbrun would introduce him as “a former future secretary of state.”

His roots in the party went deep. He had skillfully managed to steer a middle course in the bitter feud between Dewey and Taft, no small achievement in itself, and he had close relationships with many of the Midwestern conservatives. After that, if a Republican was ever elected President, Dulles seemed to come with the territory as secretary of state; in fact, he had been apprenticing for some thirty years. He might be the prototype of a powerful Eastern establishment lawyer, but he had always been able to convince the conservatives of his own intense partisanship. After Eisenhower’s election there were reports that at the last minute, Eisenhower had considered John J. McCloy, an Eastern establishment insider, for the job, but he decided against it, fearing the reaction of the Taft wing, which still needed to be appeased.

The contrast between Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s style could not have been greater: Eisenhower was cautious, pragmatic, modest, and given to understatement; Dulles, bombastic, arrogant, and self-important. He tended to underestimate even the intelligence of the President he served, and there was no doubt among his aides that on occasion he believed his principal job was to save the President from his more trusting self, that is, the side that might be exploited by the Soviets, on occasion. He complained to close aides of Ike’s lack of a sense of crisis. Still, he honored Eisenhower for the wise choice of himself: “With my understanding of the intricate relationships between the peoples of the world and your sensitiveness to the political
considerations involved, we will make the most successful team in history,” he told Eisenhower early on.

In public at least, Dulles did not seem a man much given to nuance. Instead, he thundered out his own certitudes, oblivious to others, in a voice that seemed to threaten anyone who did not accept his idea that American goodness included the use of nuclear weapons. As Townsend Hoopes, Dulles’s critical biographer, noted, “There are times when style makes all the difference. Stentorian warnings appeared to be a compulsive element of the Dulles theory of deterrence. Eisenhower, on the other hand, tended to view the nuclear force as a quietly unassailable backdrop, whose relation to policy should be more subtly communicated.” Dulles’s version of American foreign policy was an ongoing sermon, which exhausted friend and foe alike. “Mr. Dulles makes a speech every day, holds a press conference every other day and preaches on Sunday,” Winston Churchill once noted. “All of this tends to rob his utterances of real significance.” Even in a town known for its stuffiness, sanctimony, deviousness, and partisanship, Foster Dulles stood out.

The strength of the relationship between the President and Dulles surprised people who knew how different the two men were. Emmet John Hughes, a senior
Life
writer who worked closely with both, observed Ike’s face as Dulles droned on and on at one of their early meetings and thought that Eisenhower could barely conceal his boredom. That, Hughes thought with glee, is a relationship that won’t last long. But much to Hughes’ surprise, the partnership worked quite well and the two became close professionally, if not personally. Perhaps Eisenhower regarded Dulles as a buffer between him and the Republican right; perhaps he valued Dulles for taking the heat off of him, thereby creating the illusion of the good Ike and the bad Foster for the media and the Democrats. After all, there was an inherent political contradiction at work, for underneath all the rhetoric Ike was, in essence, merely continuing the same Democratic policies of containment that the Republicans had been so bitterly attacking.

Dulles in particular specialized in assailing the weakness of containment under Truman and Acheson. Such talk was all very well, and certainly almost everyone wanted a world without Communists. But the Red Army in Eastern Europe
did
look formidable, and using American forces in Asia might get us into a quagmire. In early 1952, Emmet Hughes was assigned to do an article with Dulles that would outline the dramatic differences between the aggressive new foreign policy of the Republicans as opposed to the quite soft
defensive policies of the Democrats. There was, Hughes noted, much talk about liberation of Europe, all of it curiously vague. “What are you proposing that we
do
?” Hughes kept asking Dulles. Hughes noted drily in his memoir that it was “extraordinarily difficult to persuade him to give clarity and substance to his critiques of ‘containment’ or to his exhortations on ‘liberation.’” The writer came away, as many had before him, with the belief that Dulles was both the most righteous and the most relentlessly devious man he had ever met in his life.

That very vagueness about liberation got Dulles into trouble even during the 1952 campaign, when he debated Averell Harriman on a television program hosted by the young Walter Cronkite. Dulles began by talking about switching American foreign policy under Ike “from a purely defensive policy to a psychological offensive, a liberation policy which will try and give hope and a resistance mood within the Soviet empire ...” “Those are very fine words,” Harriman answered, “but I don’t understand the meaning of them.” At that point Dulles mentioned that he had written “quite a little piece” on the subject for
Life
(the very piece Emmet Hughes had worked on). “I read it twice,” Harriman said, “but I couldn’t understand what you meant.” “You should have read it a third time,” Dulles said. “I did,” Harriman said. “I still didn’t understand it.” At that point Cronkite noted, “Mr. Harriman, being impartial, we don’t know whether Mr. Dulles can’t write or you can’t read.”

The British had disliked him from his first minor missions to England during World War Two. In July 1942, he went to lunch with Anthony Eden. Alexander Cadogan, an assistant to Eden, noted later that Dulles was “the wooliest type of pontificating American ... Heaven help us!” Hearing that Eisenhower was thinking of choosing him as secretary of state, the British passed a number of private messages to the President-elect, asking him not to. Ike later said he answered those notes by saying, “No, look, I know something about this man and he’s a little abrupt and some people think he’s intellectually arrogant and that sort of thing. It’s not true. He’s a very modest man and very reasonable and he wants to use logic and reason and good sense and not force ...” The British remained unconvinced; with their own power shrinking, Dulles seemed to them the worst possible manifestation of the new American hegemony. He tended to divide the world along relatively predictable but rather rigid criteria: the free world was, of course, better than the Communist; the white world was more reliable and valuable than the nonwhite; the Christian better than the heathen.

Even Europe was not without its flaws for Dulles. He tended to admire the Germans as solid, hardworking, religious, and good anti-Communists. “Those people have cut the throat of the world twice in a generation,” he told a House committee, “but they’re a vital piece of real estate.” Of the French he was wary: “France was the one place where they have all those mistresses and sell dirty postcards, but it’s a damned important piece of real estate because it’s got all those canals and highways leading to Germany.” The Italians, of course, were even worse than the French, “an asset to their enemies in every war.” He was the purest of chauvinists.

He grew up in spare surroundings. The son of a clergyman, he bathed in cold water for much of his boyhood. His father, the Rev. Allen Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian minister, first in Watertown, New York, and then in Auburn, New York. The Rev. Dulles was surprisingly liberal for his time, taking the side of the modernists in the then-burning question of whether to accommodate the manifestations of modern science as they encroached on the literal teachings of the Bible. On two occasions he was almost expelled from the ministry, first for questioning the virgin birth and later for permitting a divorced woman to marry in his church.

The Rev. Dulles was a gentle, contemplative man. The drive and ambition came from his wife, Edith Foster Dulles, whose father, John Watson Foster, was secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison. In her mind, even though her husband made only $3,500 a year as a small-town minister, they were still
people,
and she was confident that her own children would bear out their distinguished lineage. When Edith was pregnant with Foster, her first son, she moved temporarily from their modest home in New York State to her father’s far grander home in Washington. Her father, upon leaving State, had joined the boards of several powerful corporations and built himself a summer lodge on Lake Ontario, to which he often invited such close friends and associates as Andrew Carnegie, William Howard Taft, John W. Davis, and Bernard Baruch. Edith Dulles made sure that young Foster was there to help out and go along on the fishing trips.