John Foster Dulles

John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. His close relationship with the president gave him unusual influence over a strategy that combined alliances, economic assistance, military deterrence, and opposition to communist expansion. ²

John Foster Dulles explained Washington's exclusion of South Korea from the Japanese peace treaty to Ambassador Yu Chan Yang on July 9, 1951. Handing Yang a draft, he said the signatories would be states that had been at war with Japan and had signed the wartime United Nations Declaration. Yang protested. Dulles also resisted Korean demands for fishing restrictions, arguing that negotiating them would delay the treaty and that separate agreements could address them. ¹

Dulles had encountered peace negotiations long before this Washington meeting. Born in Washington in 1888 and educated at Princeton, he served with the American economic and reparations delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. A lawyer, he briefly served in the Senate after an appointment in 1949 but failed to retain the seat. ²

As President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state from 1953, Dulles pursued security agreements intended to contain communism. His department confronted the Indochina and Suez crises while his brother Allen directed the CIA. Ill health forced his resignation in April 1959; he died the following month. ²

Dulles sought international security agreements while the administration reduced its reliance on large conventional forces. The crises of 1956 exposed the limits of Western coordination: the Hungarian uprising was crushed by Soviet intervention, while the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt divided the Western powers. After Suez, the Eisenhower Doctrine offered assistance to Middle Eastern governments resisting what Washington regarded as communist aggression. ^{2, 5}

Formal diplomacy operated alongside covert intervention. During Dulles’s tenure, with his brother Allen directing the CIA, the Eisenhower administration used covert operations that helped overthrow Mohammad Mosadeq’s government in Iran in 1953 and the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954. These operations made regime change part of American Cold War policy and extended its consequences well beyond the negotiation of public alliances. ^{2, 3, 4}