Essays in history and international relations Book

The foreign policy of the United States during the Eisenhower administration was, as represented by this joint biography, run by three Dulles siblings. Foster, the elder, ran the State Department. Allen ran the C.I.A. Eleanor was Minister to Germany. Eisenhower, represented as more interested in golf than in government, was basically an expedient tool of others, the popular ticket to power for Allen and Foster, Eleanor having made, despite much resistance owing to her gender, her own way. When he went, so did they.

The Cold War wasn't begun by the Dulles'. That began with the Truman and Churchill administrations. But the Dulles brothers ran most of it until things began to warm up under Kennedy and Kruschev. They overthrew the fledgling democracies of Guatemala and Iran, bringing in pro-American dictatorships. They tried to overthrow Egypt and Cuba, the latter failure tarnishing their records in the eyes of those who judge administrations by such accomplishments.

Beyond being a tripartite biography and a history of the Cold War, this book is also, like the author's study of the DuPonts, a representation of America's ruling class. The Presbyterian Dulles family had already given the USA two cabinet members and it was on the basis of such connections and the money that came with such that they entered the doors of government and rose to power.

Of the three, Eleanor was the most attractive, the most humane. Owing to the sexism of the era, she rose on her own merit, which was considerable. Her brothers, sharing the prejudices of the time, may indeed have hurt her career more than they helped it. She was the most academically accomplished of the three, the writer of the most technical books. Foster wrote too, but they were mostly political opinion pieces, and Allen, with the help of a ghost writer, did produce some material towards the end of his life. Eleanor's works in economics, however, were products of serious research, so good as to garner the praise of Keynes, the greatest establishment economist of the era.

Allen, the playboy spymaster, and his neurotic Jungfrau of a wife are the most entertaining to read about, though the entertainment is often rather dark as it involves clandestine murders on the one hand and infidelities on the other.

Foster, the senior Dulles, coming across as dreadfully serious and plodding, was the most important of the three, both historically and personally. The others, like Eisenhower himself, deferred to him. Unlike his younger brother, his marriage was a stable one, though none of the siblings succeeded as parents.

A welcome appendix contains the correspondence of the author with Kim Philby, the Soviet mole in British intelligence, who puts the whole spying business in some perspective: spies sometimes having more in common with one another than they do with their own governments.

Although I know this period of history, the period leading up to my time as it were, pretty well, having a good general outline of events and their chronology, I still learned a lot I hadn't known from this book--details maybe, but some quite important. This is, after all, an insider account and the author did quite a bit of original research.