A contemporary American Secretary of State must perform two basic and difficult tasks: he must defend and promote the interests of the United States abroad, and he must establish and defend his position at home. Whereas the former task is inherent in the office, the latter is a result of five interconnected constitutional and political factors inherent in the American system of government. The position of the Secretary of State must be secured, first of all, against competition from four quarters: the President, Congress, other agencies of the executive branch, and other members of the Department of State. The fifth factor is public opinion, and it, of course, affects the Secretary's relation to the other four.

The President bears, according to the constitutional scheme, the chief responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy. This he is supposed to discharge with the help of the Secretary of State as his principal adviser and administrative officer. Yet, in actuality, the distribution of responsibility between the President and the Secretary of State has run the gamut from Presidential predominance—the President determining foreign policy without the advice and administrative support of the Secretary of State—to the predominance of the Secretary of State—the latter determining and administering foreign policy and the President merely ratifying his decisions.

The competition between the executive branch and Congress for control of American foreign policy began in Washington's administration and is the result of a constitutional distribution of functions which, in the words of Professor Corwin, "is an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy." It is also the result of the dynamics of the American political system, which deprives the Secretary of State of most of the political weapons of rewards and reprisals with which the President and other members of the Cabinet can stave off congressional opposition and secure congressional support.

The need for the Secretary of State to maintain the prerogatives of his office against competition from other executive departments arises from the dispersal of responsibility for the conduct of American foreign policy among a multitude of executive departments. In 1949, the Hoover Commission, which investigated the organization of the executive branch, found that about forty-five executive agencies, aside from the Department of State, were dealing with one or another phase of foreign policy. The Secretary of State must maintain, against the parochial interests of all these agencies, the over-all direction of foreign policy.

The Secretary of State must also establish and maintain his authority within his own Department. He must keep in check the members of his staff who owe their position to political influence or who otherwise enjoy political support for independent policies.

Finally, the accomplishment of these four competitive tasks depends in great measure upon the ability of the Secretary of State to marshal public opinion at large to the support of his person and his policies. Without the support of public opinion, the Secretary of State is bound to be utterly vulnerable to competition from any of the quarters mentioned, especially, however, from Congress, which in most circumstances is likely to enjoy the public support that the Secretary of State is lacking. On the other hand, with that support secured, the Secretary of State is in a strong position vis-à-vis his competitors, especially those who, like himself, draw much of their strength from public opinion.

Thus the American Secretary of State must perform a domestic political task of great complexity and delicacy as a precondition for the performance of his primary task in the field of foreign policy. Nor are these two tasks separate in execution. Quite to the contrary, each impinges upon the other. The kind of foreign policy the Secretary of State pursues exerts an influence, favorable or unfavorable, upon his domestic position. The kind of domestic position he is able to make for himself predetermines in good measure the limits within which he is able to move on the international stage. The attempt to reconcile the demands of foreign policy and those of domestic politics, without sacrificing the indispensable substance of either, involves more complications and calls for greater finesse than any of the tasks previously mentioned. It is here that the Secretary of State faces the supreme test of his ability to do justice to the requirements of his office.

II

How has John Foster Dulles performed those tasks which impose themselves with existential force upon whoever occupies the office? What conception of the office did he bring to these tasks, and in what concrete terms did he execute them? The answers to these questions must be sought in three factors that exerted a fundamental influence on Dulles: his sense of mission, the state of mind of the Republican party, and the example of his predecessor, Dean Acheson.

Dulles's appointment to the position of Secretary of State must appear to the observer as the natural culmination of a development foreshadowed by his family background and prepared for step by step by his diplomatic career. Both his maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, after whom he had been named, and his uncle, Robert Lansing, had been Secretaries of State. Dulles had started his diplomatic career virtually at the earliest possible moment: in 1907, when he was nineteen and a junior in college, he acted as his grandfather's secretary at the Second Peace Conference at The Hague. He served in 1917 as a member of the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress and as a special agent of the Department of State in Central America. In 1918-1919 he was counsel to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and in 1919 he became a member of the Reparation Commission and of the Su preme Economic Council. He was a member of the American delegation to the San Francisco Conference of 1945 and to the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1950. He served as adviser to the Secretary of State at meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers in 1945, 1947, and 1949 and as consultant to the Secretary of State in 1950. In 1950-1951, as special representative of the President with the rank of ambassador, he negotiated the peace treaty with Japan and the security treaties with Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Japan. When Thomas E. Dewey ran for the Presidency in 1944 and 1948, Dulles was generally regarded as his choice for Secretary of State.

To Dulles himself, this record seemed to reveal a providential design which had singled him out to be Secretary of State, which had endowed him with the qualities required for that position, and which would not let him fail. In a speech to the staff of the Department of State on the assumption of his office, Dulles pointed to the fact that his grandfather had been Secretary of State, that his uncle had been Secretary of State, and that he was now Secretary of State. His conviction that there was something virtually inevitable and foreordained in his holding this exalted position accounts at least in part for Dulles's confidence in his ability to shoulder alone the momentous responsibilities of his office and to face alone the dreadful uncertainties of foreign policy. The self-confidence which all statesmen need, faced as they are with these responsibilities and uncertainties, and which others have found in superstitions, such as astrology or other forms of soothsaying, exhaustive information and advice, or a simple faith in divine guidance, Dulles found in his sense of predestination, derived from his family background and his career and supported by a strong, self-reliant personality.

Dulles was destined to become Secretary of State as a member of a party whose support for an active but restrained foreign policy—moving somewhere between isolationism and imperialism—was still precarious at the beginning of the fifties. The Republican party had entered World War II committed to isolationism and had emerged from it with a split personality. Senator Vandenberg, strongly influenced and supported by Dulles and a minority of his party, initiated bipartisanship in foreign policy. Thus one wing of the Republican party came to approve the fundamental changes by which American foreign policy was transformed in the forties, whereas another wing, more vociferous and more influential with public opinion at large and represented by men like Senators William E. Jenner and Joseph McCarthy, remained in uncompromising opposition. Between these two groups stood a vacillating center which hankered back to isolationism but would almost, though not quite, admit that isolationism was beyond the reach of a rational foreign policy. Senator Taft was the most eminent spokesman of this group.

Dulles had to come to terms with the problem of gaining the support of his own party for his person and policies. Two roads were open to him. He could attempt to impress the internationalist wing and the wavering center with the rationality and even the inevitability of the foreign policy to which he was committed, letting the intransigent right wing wither on the vine, or else he could try to gain the support of the right wing by giving the appearance of being really one of them and of actually pursuing their policies. Dulles chose the latter course, primarily under the impact of what had happened to his predecessor.

The third fundamental experience which molded Dulles's conception of his office, and the policies realizing it, was the opportunity of witnessing, and contributing to, the fate that befell Dean Acheson. Here was a Secretary of State who was intellectually at least as well equipped for the office as any of his predecessors since John Quincy Adams, whose dedication to the common good was exemplary, and whose achievements in fashioning a new foreign policy for the United States commensurate with its interests were outstanding. In short, in terms of the requirements of foreign policy, here was one of the best Secretaries of State the United States had ever had. Yet here was also, in terms of the requirements of domestic politics, one of the least successful Secretaries of State. For large sectors of American public opinion Acheson's State Department became synonymous with softness toward communism—if not toleration of, or even connivance in, treason. When Acheson's loyalty was attacked and his resignation asked for in Congress, not a member dared to come to his defense. Only the President's support kept him in office.

Witnessing the terrifying spectacle of a good and able man—as great a Secretary of State in terms of foreign policy as Dulles could ever hope to be—being haunted as a threat to the Republic and shunned as an outcast, Dulles resolved that what happened to Acheson would not happen to him. In consequence, to secure his domestic position became his overriding concern. To that end, he set out to achieve three objectives: to create for the American public the image of himself as a stanch and dynamic fighter against communism and thus as a Secretary of State without any of the faults attributed to his predecessor; to prevent at all costs the development of an opposition in Congress to his person and policies; and to establish and maintain a relationship with the President which would assure his control of foreign policy.

III

The creation of the image of a foreign policy radically different from that for which the preceding administration had been responsible proceeded essentially through six spectacular pronouncements: "liberation," the unleashing of Chiang Kai-shek, "agonizing reappraisal," the "new look," intervention in Indochina, and "brinkmanship."

During the election campaign of 1952 and during the first months of his tenure of office, Dulles and other spokesmen for the new administration announced that the old policy of containment, which Dulles had called in the Republican platform of 1952 "negative, futile and immoral," was to be replaced by a policy of liberation. Yet, as the London Economist put it as early as August 30, 1952, "Unhappily 'liberation' applied to Eastern Europe—and Asia—means either the risk of war or it means nothing.… 'Liberation' entails no risk of war only when it means nothing." The Eisenhower administration, however, shied away from the risk of war at least as much as had its predecessor. And when the East German revolt of June, 1953. and the Hungarian revolution of October, 1956, put the policy of liberation to the test of actual performance, it became obvious that liberation was indistinguishable from containment.

In his State of the Union message of February 2, 1953, following Dulles's public and private advice, President Eisenhower declared: "In June, 1950, following the aggressive attack on the Republic of Korea, the United States Seventh Fleet was instructed both to prevent attack upon Formosa and also to insure that Formosa should not be used as a base of operations against the Chinese Communist mainland." In view of the Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict, the President declared that he was "issuing instructions that the Seventh Fleet no longer be employed to shield Communist China." This announcement implied a fundamental change in the Far Eastern policies of the United States from the preservation of the status quo to the active attempt to restore Chiang Kai-shek's rule on the Asiatic mainland. In actuality, no such change occurred. Quite to the contrary, the Eisenhower administration seems to have been at least as anxious as its predecessor to limit the military activities of Chiang Kai-shek to strictly defensive measures. By making this limitation part of the agreements negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek at the end of 1954, the Eisenhower administration went even beyond the unilateral declaration of policy contained in President Truman's instruction to the Seventh Fleet of June, 1950.

On December 14, 1953, Dulles declared at the meeting of the North Atlantic Council: "If, however, the European Defense Community should not become effective, if France and Germany remain apart, so that they would again be potential enemies, then indeed there would be grave doubt whether Continental Europe could be made a place of safety. That would compel an agonizing reappraisal of the basic United States policy." This statement implied that in certain contingencies the United States might lose its interest in the military defense of Europe and leave it to its fate. This threat called forth much comment but little anxiety in Europe and elsewhere. As an incentive for France to ratify the European Defense Community, it was ineffective. For in order to take this threat seriously, one would have had to assume that the United States had committed itself to the defense of Western Europe, not because it deemed its own security dependent upon it, but because it happened to approve of the policies of certain European nations. Few observers, and no responsible statesmen, were willing to make such an assumption.

The most far-reaching and most widely commented-upon announcement of this kind, however, was Dulles's speech of January 12, 1954, proclaiming a "new look" in American foreign policy as the result of "some basic policy decisions" which the President and the National Security Council had taken. This new policy was anchored to the concept of "massive retaliation." Lester Pearson, then Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, thought as late as March 15, 1954, that this speech "may turn out to be one of the most important of our times." The present writer, on March 29, 1954, published an article in the New Republic interpreting and evaluating this speech as if it meant what it said. Yet Walter Lippmann could say on March 18 that "the official explanations of the new look have become so voluminous that it is almost a career in itself to keep up with them." Characterizing Dulles's speech as "a case of excessive salesmanship," Lippmann concluded: "There is no doubt that the words of the text convey the impression that something momentous and novel has been decided. But everything that has been said since then by the Chiefs of Staff, notably by Admiral Carney, and no less so by Mr. Dulles himself, make it plain that there has been no radical change in out strategic policy."

On the same day, the Manchester Guardian summed it all up by saying: "The 'new look' in American military strategy is mainly old merchandise in a new package. There is really nothing new in relying on 'massive mobile retaliatory power' as the principal safeguard of peace—nothing new, that is, except the sales campaign by which the Administration is trying to persuade the American people that some small changes make the strategy of 1954 fundamentally sounder man me strategy of 1953." On March 19, me Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was the scene of the following dialogue between Senator Mike Mansfield and Dulles, who for all practical purposes buried me "new look" under the cover of military secrecy:

Senator Mansfield: Do you consider this new policy a new policy?

Secretary Dulles: It certainly has new aspects.

Senator Mansfield: What are they?

Secretary Dulles: Well, I am sorry I cannot go into that here. All I can say to you, and you will have to take it on faith, is that a series of new decisions have been taken by the National Security Council and many have been involved, close, and difficult decisions, but there is today on the record a series of decisions which are largely derived from this basic philosophy which were not there a year and a half ago.

Although the "new look" was the most sweeping of these announcements, the official declarations concerning the Indochina War were politically and militarily the most serious; for they dealt, not with general principles of United States policy, but with a concrete situation which required action here and now. On March 25, 1954, the President declared at his news conference that the defense of Indochina was of "transcendent importance." On March 29, the Secretary of State announced: "Under the conditions of today, the imposition on Southeast Asia of the political system of Communist Russia and its Chinese Communist ally, by whatever means, would be a grave threat to the whole free community. The United States feels that mat possibility should not be passively accepted, but should be met by united action. This might have serious risks, but these risks are far less than would face us a few years from now if we dare not be resolute today." The President and the Secretary of State referred to Indochina as the cork in the bottle of Southeast Asia and as the first in a row of dominoes whose fall would necessarily cause the downfall of the others. Yet no action of any kind reflected even faintly the conception of policy which these words seemed to convey. It was, in the words of the Economist of August 21, 1954, this "spectacle of vociferous in-action" which led to the "worst diplomatic disaster in recent American history."

The most sensational and also the most patently implausible of these pronouncements concerned "brinkmanship." In an article in Life magazine of January 16, 1956, Dulles was reported as having declared, in the course of an interview, that his policy of firmness and daring, fully supported by the President, saved the peace and protected the interests of the United States on three occasions: in Korea, Indochina, and the Formosa Straits. "Of course," Dulles was quoted as having said, "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 cannot master it, you inevitably get into war.… We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action." The article praises this technique as "the greatest display of personal diplomacy since the great days of the Franklin-Adams-Jefferson triumvirate in the Europe of the 1780's."

Although this is obviously not the place to test these claims in detail against the available historic evidence, it must be pointed out that, in regard to Indochina, Dulles was prevented from going to war by the unwillingness of the President and of Great Britain to do so. Whether the government of the United States had really resolved to use atomic weapons against Manchuria in June, 1953, if the Communists renewed the war in Korea and whether the Communists were deterred by that knowledge are at present matters of speculation. It is also a moot question whether the congressional resolution of January, 1955, authorizing the President to defend the offshore islands in the Formosa Straits under certain conditions was interpreted by both the administration and the Chinese government as a threat implying the certainty of atomic war. Yet what in actuality was either speculative or simply untrue was presented, in the Life article, as a set of historic facts supporting a most favorable evaluation of Dulles's policies.

Dulles's six major pronouncements served the purpose of creating the image of a new, forceful, aggressive foreign policy in order to gain the support of public opinion for both the person of the Secretary of State and the foreign policies he pursued, policies which were not essentially different from those of his predecessor and were certainly not different in the respects in which they were claimed to be. These endeavors culminated in the first Cabinet meeting ever televised, in which Dulles reported on the London Conference which met from September 28 to October 3, 1954. Arthur Krock recalled in the New York Times of May 6, 1960, that "the television show … was billed as a 'Cabinet meeting' … and turned out to be more of a sham performance than any rigged quiz program." In the Manchester Guardian Weekly of October 23, 1954, Alistair Cooke gave a striking account of that performance:

The whole show had a relaxed, closed-door air, almost like a Cabinet meeting. In the lead part … Mr. Dulles gave a naturalistic performance of great ease and articulateness. Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge made the most of a single-sentence tribute to the President for his peaceful atomic energy proposals. Cast as the unsleeping watchdog of the people's purse, Mr. Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey expressed with moving verisimilitude his concern that the Paris Agreement should not cost the American taxpayer one extra nickel. Mrs. Hobby conveyed an intelligent anxiety over the Saar.

Only Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson, an artless man from the West, had to be prodded into his line by Mr. Dulles, who suggested after an anxious pause that some of them might now be wondering "how the Soviet Union is taking this." Mr. Benson was indeed wondering just that, and made an alert retrieve. It was the only missed cue in an otherwise flawless performance, surely an enviable record for any amateur dramatic company.

IV

The position of the Secretary of State vis-á-vis Congress was secured by two basic tactics. Dulles disarmed the potential congressional opposition, consisting of the right wing of the Republican party, by pursuing its policies and by allowing it to exert a governing influence, at least temporarily, over certain personal and substantive matters which remained but nominally under the control of the Secretary of State.

Dulles's execution of the personnel policies of the congressional right wing was predicated on the assumption, with which the Republican party had attacked the preceding administration, that the Department of State at the very least was not a reliable guardian of the interests of the United States vis-á-vis other nations and, more particularly, Communist ones. In carrying out these policies, Dulles proceeded in two stages: the first was a purge and the second the application of stringent security regulations. By the end of 1953, most members of the Foreign Service who had held high positions in the Department of State had been dismissed, had voluntarily resigned, or had been transferred to politically nonsensitive positions.

Executive Order No. 10450 of April 27, 1953, as applied to the Department of State, in effect institutionalized the purge by establishing extremely stringent security regulations for employment, promotion, and surveillance. The case of John Paton Davies, Jr., a prominent member of the Foreign Service, who underwent nine security investigations before he was dismissed, is but an extreme example of what was then a fairly typical situation. His case is typical also in that it reveals clearly the political purpose of the purges which, in so far as the Secretary of State was concerned, were undertaken primarily in order to satisfy the potential opposition in Congress. Davies, who had been stationed in China after World War II and who afterward joined the Policy Planning Staff, was a favorite target of that opposition. There can be no doubt, even though the documentary evidence to prove it is not yet available, that Davies was deliberately sacrificed, regardless of the merits of his case, and was subjected to as many security investigations as were necessary to prove him a security risk. It is revealing in this connection that, after the last investigating board had rendered the desired unfavorable verdict and Davies had been dismissed, he received a telephone call from the Secretary of State congratulating him upon his attitude before the board and authorizing him to use Dulles's name as a reference in his search for a new position.

Executive Order No. 10450, which provided the legal basis for these proceedings, was a general order, issued under the authority of the President for all executive departments. Yet since this order left wide discretion to the heads of the departments, the Secretary of State was responsible for the way it was implemented in his own Department. Not only did he establish, and suffer to be established, a rigid system of security regulations, but he also added to this system measures of his own. Department Circular No. 95 of April 15, 1954, for instance, imposed upon all officials of the Department of State the duty to be informers:

I am aware that no agency of the government can improve, or even maintain its level of effectiveness unless it is receiving a stream of new ideas and constructive criticisms. I hope that the inspection operation will be the focal reception point of that stream. I have told Mr. McLeod that in his capacity as administrator of the inspection operation he should be available at any time to receive personally from any of our people the benefit of their thinking on improving operations and procedures or on other problems, official and personal.

In brief, I regard the internal inspection operation of the Department as one of its most important concerns. Its success will depend upon the cooperation and aid received generally from employees of the Department.

Dulles's efforts to disarm the potential opposition by pursuing its policies were assured success by the ability of that opposition to place its representatives in key positions within the Department of State. The right-wing bloc thus came to dominate the Bureau of Security, whose leading officials controlled, directly or indirectly, security, consular affairs, personnel, and inspection of United States missions abroad. The bureau adopted the political philosophy and the policies of the congressmen to whom its principal members owed both their positions and their primary loyalties. It reported to them and executed their orders. To an extent which changed with the ebbs and tides of political fortune, it was these congressmen, and not the President or the Secretary of State, who determined the operations of the Department of State and its affiliated agencies.

The most spectacular instance of this extraconstitutional influence that has come to light is provided by the International Information Administration. The report published by Martin Merson, the chief consultant to the Director of that agency, leaves no doubt that, at least from February through July, 1953, Senator McCarthy and his friends in Congress had taken over the functions which, according to the Constitution, the President and the Secretary of State are supposed to perform. These members of Congress determined, in large measure, both the substantive and the personnel policies of the International Information Administration. It was to them that the top officials of the agency reported, it was their approval which they had to seek, and it was their orders which they were supposed to execute. And when they finally incurred the displeasure of their congressional masters, they had to resign.

In the New York Times of January 17, 1954, five of the most distinguished older diplomats of the United States, four of whom have been Ambassadors and an equal number Under or Assistant Secretaries of State, summarized the "sinister results" of these policies:

The conclusion has become inescapable, for instance, that a Foreign Service officer who reports on persons and events to the very best of his ability and who makes recommendations which at the time he conscientiously believes to be in the interest of the United States may subsequently find his loyalty and integrity challenged and may even be forced out of the service and discredited forever as a private citizen. A premium therefore has been put upon reporting and upon recommendations which are ambiguously stated or so cautiously set forth as to be deceiving.

When any such tendency begins its insidious work it is not long before accuracy and initiative have been sacrificed to acceptability and conformity. The ultimate result is a threat to national security. In this connection the history of the Nazi and Fascist foreign services before the Second World War is pertinent.

The forces which are working for conformity from the outside are being reinforced by the present administrative set-up within the Department of State which subordinates normal personnel administration to considerations of security.

It is obvious, of course, that candidates for the Foreign Service should be carefully investigated before appointment and that their work should at all times be under the exacting scrutiny of their professional superiors. But when initial investigation attaches undue importance to such factors as even a temporary departure from conservative political and economic views, casual association with persons holding views not currently in fashion or subscription to a periodical labeled as "liberal"; when subsequent investigation is carried to the point of delaying a promotion list for a year and routine transfers from one post to another; when investigations of individual officers must be kept up-to-date to within ninety days; when an easy path has been opened to even the anonymous informer; and when the results of these investigations are evaluated not by persons experienced in the Foreign Service or even acquainted at firsthand with conditions abroad, but by persons of quite different experience, it is relevant to inquire whether we are not laying the foundations of a Foreign Service competent to serve a totalitarian government rather than the government of the United States as we have heretofore known it.

Fear is playing an important part in American life at the present time. As a result the self-confidence, the confidence in others, the sense of fair play and the instinct to protect the rights of the nonconformist are—temporarily, it is to be hoped—in abeyance. But it would be tragic if this fear, expressing itself in an exaggerated emphasis on security, should lead us to cripple the Foreign Service, our first line of national defense, at the very time when its effectiveness is essential to our filling the place which history has assigned to us.

As far as personnel policy in the State Department and Foreign Service was concerned, the potential opposition was conciliated simply by the dual device of pursuing its policies and handing over to it in good measure the control of those policies. With regard to substantive policies, three different devices were used to propitiate the opposition. First, the great pronouncements, which, as we have seen, were intended to impress public opinion at large with the novelty, dynamism, and aggressiveness of Dulles's foreign policy, served the same purpose for congressional opinion. Although the foreign policies which had been established by the preceding administration and which had proved their worth by their success were essentially continued, the Secretary's pronouncements created the impression of a succession of drastic innovations. Second, the Department shunned actual initiative and innovation where they were called for by new conditions, for a new departure in foreign policy might antagonize the potential opposition and was bound to create the domestic political complications that Dulles was resolved to forestall. Thus the twofold need of giving the appearance of innovation and avoiding it in practice resulted in a consistent contrast between what American foreign policy was declared to be and what it actually was.

In regard to the Far East, however, Dulles did permit a certain degree of innovation. His third major conciliatory tactic was to adjust the substance of foreign policy to the preferences of the potential opposition for the cause of Chiang Kai-shek, both by identifying himself, at least to some extent, with those preferences and by handing over the control of foreign policy in that area to men committed to pursue those preferences vigorously. There can be no doubt that the majority of the leading officials who advised Eisenhower on foreign affairs during his first years in office were opposed to his policies in the Far East. That majority was composed of two groups: by far the larger of these groups wanted to advance toward a more aggressive position, even at the risk of a limited war with Communist China; the smaller group would have liked to retreat into less exposed positions. The actual policy of the United States was to maintain an intermediate position between those two extremes, which followed the line of least resistance by trying neither to advance nor to retreat but to maintain the status quo.

Yet a rational examination of the forces opposing each other in the Far East and their probable dynamics could only lead to the conclusion that a commitment to the status quo was not likely to be tenable in the long run. Both the United States and Communist China would have to go forward or backward; they were not likely to remain indefinitely where they were. Why, then, was the policy of the United States based upon an assumption that could not be supported by rational argument? The answer is to be found in the surrender to the concepts, if not the policies, of an opposition whose reasoning, contradictory in itself, could not provide the basis for a rational policy but whose voice, by default of the executive branch, was powerful enough to mold public opinion.

Public opinion with regard to Communist China was dominated by two strong contradictory desires: to make good somehow the defeat which the United States had suffered through the defection of China to the Communist camp and to do so without getting involved in a major war on the continent of Asia. The opposition presented a program designed to meet these two emotional demands. It promised the overthrow of the Communist regime of China and the restoration of Chiang Kai-shek's rule through aerial bombardment and a naval blockade, using Formosa as a springboard. Yet a careful reading of the minutes of the joint congressional committee investigating, in 1951, the dismissal of General MacArthur can leave no doubt in the mind of the unbiased reader about the military and political emptiness of this program. For the opposition could not devise any policy, short of allout war, that would assure the destruction of the Communist regime of China. In short, the program of the opposition served as an effective instrument to achieve an illusory reconciliation of policy with popular demands, but since the two could not be reconciled in practice, it offered no basis for a rational policy.

Nevertheless, the Eisenhower administration, frightened like its predecessor by the specter of public opinion, at least appeared to have accepted the objectives and expectations of the opposition and thus allowed its own policies to be judged by the standards of the opposition. By these standards, its policies could not help being found wanting. For, on the one hand, the administration was responsible enough not to embark upon military adventures; on the other, it committed itself at least to the defense of Formosa, whose indispensability for the defense of the United States was accepted as a dogma by government and opposition alike. In consequence, the executive branch found itself continuously on the defensive, apologizing, as it were, for not living up to its own standards and feeling compelled from time to time to substitute for policy a momentous announcement or a grandiose gesture suggesting the imminence of forceful action. The executive branch had thus become the prisoner of the opposition. Too responsible to do what the opposition wanted it to do but prevented by its fear of public opinion from devising and executing a positive policy of its own, the President and Secretary were reduced to having no policy at all, while trying to make it appear as though they were following, however cautiously, in the footsteps of the opposition.

V

Dulles's task of making his position and policies secure with public opinion and Congress was greatly complicated by his uncertainty about the extent to which public opinion and Congress were willing to endorse him as Secretary of State and to support his policies. It was this uncertainty, amounting in Dulles's mind to extreme doubt, which resulted not only in his opening the gates of the State Department to the potential opposition and allowing it to influence substantive policies but also in his making pronouncements on foreign policy that con trasted with the policies he actually pursued.

Dulles's task of making his position and policies secure with the President encountered no such complications and hence necessitated no such complex measures for its achievement. President Eisenhower very soon trusted Dulles so completely and admired his ability as Secretary of State so unreservedly that he gave him, for all practical purposes, a free hand to conduct the foreign policy of the United States as he saw fit. Although Dulles was continuously and deeply concerned with the support he could expect from Congress and public opinion, he did not need to worry about the President's support.

Echoing Thomas E. Dewey's statement that Dulles was "no ordinary mortal" in his ability to understand and conduct foreign policy, President Eisenhower paid frequent tribute to Dulles as the greatest Secretary of State he had known. On the occasion of Dulles's fiftieth anniversary as a diplomat, on June 15, 1957, President Eisenhower wrote him a personal letter, saying: "Your accomplishments will establish you as one of the greatest of our Secretaries of State." And when Dulles's tenure as Secretary of State was at an end, President Eisenhower said in his press conference of April 18, 1959: "I personally believe he has filled his office with greater distinction than any other man our country has Known—a man of tremendous character and courage, intelligence and wisdom." The President acted in accordance with his estimate of Dulles's ability, for he almost always followed his Secretary's advice in things great and small. The only important instance on record of Dulles's having been overruled by Eisenhower occurred in 1954 when the President refused to accept Dulles's advice to intervene with military means in the Indochina War.

Although Dulles did not need to exert much effort to create his extraordinary relationship with the President, he was from the very outset careful lest it be disturbed by third parties. And, as in his relations with public opinion and Congress, it was his knowledge of what had happened to other Secretaries of State in this respect that determined his attitude. According to a report by James Reston in the New York Times of February 2, 1958, Dulles remarked privately at the beginning of his tenure of office "that he would oppose any system of divided authority between the White House staff and the State Department for the conduct of foreign policy." He called attention to the examples of his own uncle, Robert Lansing, who had been hampered by the influence Colonel House had exerted upon Woodrow Wilson, and of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., many of whose Secretarial functions had been performed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's assistant, Harry Hopkins. Dulles concluded, therefore, that "he could not take lightly any attempt to establish in the White House a competing center of foreign policy information and negotiation."

Thus Dulles opposed successfully a plan, devised by the White House staff, to reorganize the office of the President by creating three Vice Presidents, one of whom would have been in charge of foreign policy. He did not oppose, in 1956, the appointment of General Bedell Smith, who had served as his Under Secretary, as special adviser to the President in the field of foreign policy; this appointment fell afoul of the opposition of Herbert Hoover, Jr., then Under Secretary of State. But the men who were actually appointed to similar positions, however limited in scope—C. D. Jackson, Nelson A. Rockefeller, William Jackson, and Harold Stassen—met with Dulles's opposition and sooner or later had to yield to it by resigning. Of these conflicts, the most dramatic was the controversy with Stassen, the President's adviser for disarmament. Stassen, who had strong ideas of his own on the conduct of disarmament negotiations, challenged openly the authority of the Secretary of State, and the latter did not hesitate to take up the challenge. To this conflict over policy was added a clash of personalities. The result was a complete triumph for Dulles. In February, 1958, Stassen was forced to resign, the possibility of his further employment by the Eisenhower administration having come to an abrupt end.

VI

The position of Dulles vis-à-vis other executive departments and the Department of State itself was made secure both by his unique relationship to the President and by his extraordinary forensic ability and force of personality. When Dulles spoke in the councils of the government, he spoke not only as the President's principal adviser on foreign affairs, as would any Secretary of State, but also and patently as the President's alter ego. When Dulles spoke, it was for all practical purposes the President of the United States who spoke. The voice of so trusted and admired a servant was not challenged lightly. This relationship between the President and his Secretary of State made it impossible from the outset for any executive department to bypass the Secretary of State by gaining the ear of the President and to pursue a foreign policy of its own in competition with that of the Secretary of State. Yet that same relationship allowed the Secretary of State to bypass other executive departments, either singly or assembled in the National Security Council, and to obtain without bureaucratic complications the President's approval for what he had decided.

The voice of the Secretary of State, however, carried an authority derived not only from his identification with the President but also from the qualities of Dulles's personality and mind. In force of personality, only the Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, was his equal in the councils of government; in knowledge of foreign affairs and skill of argumentation, Dulles was clearly superior to all the President's other advisers. Thus, in the National Security Council, the Cabinet, and the informal discussions on foreign policy, Dulles generally carried the day. He was in uncontested control of American foreign policy. In its conduct he had no rival above him, that is, in the President; beside him, mat is, in other executive departments; or below him, that is, in the Department of State itself.

Rivalry from within the Department was precluded by two facets of Dulles's modus operandi. It has been frequently asserted that Dulles carried American foreign policy under his hat. Although this is an exaggeration, it contains an element of truth. It is true that Dulles used to confer with a small number of aides and that these conferences, especially during President Eisenhower's first term, were frequently characterized by a vigorous give-and-take. But they apparently served less to provide the Secretary with information and advice than to give him an opportunity of trying his ideas out in informal debate. The Department of State at large was not affected by these debates in its day-by-day operations and was hardly aware of them. Nor was the Secretary of State, in either his thinking or his decisions, much affected by what the Department of State knew and did. Dulles devised the foreign policies of the United States by drawing upon his own knowledge, experience, and insight, and the Department of State merely implemented these policies.

Dulles assumed personal responsibility, not only for for mulating American foreign policy, but also, in good measure, for carrying it out, at least on the higher levels of execution. The public image of Dulles as a constant traveler comes indeed close to reality. During his tenure of office, he traveled 559,988 miles, of which 479,286 were outside the United States. He visited 47 nations—France, 19 times; Great Britain, 11 times; Italy, 4 times; and West Germany, 6 times. By personally performing many of the major political functions which had traditionally been performed by high-ranking diplomats, Dulles greatly reduced opportunities for the latter to take political initiative of any kind. By divorcing his operations to a considerable degree from those of the Department of State and at the same time taking over the higher political functions of the Foreign Service, Dulles for all practical purposes disarmed the Department of State as a rival in the management of foreign affairs. It must also be kept in mind that the purge of 1953 and the regime of surveillance accompanying and following it had made it inadvisable for a member of the Department of State to develop a foreign policy of his own.

Thus the Life article quoted above had a point when it commented:

Dulles … altered drastically the basic concept of the job of Secretary of State. …

President Truman's Secretaries of State worked essentially in the pattern of the administrative executive. They counted time away from Washington as serious neglect of the Department. Dulles took the opposite view. He regarded too much time spent in Washington as neglect of the U.S. task of free world leadership.

Reverting to an older tradition, he undertook personal direction of the country's foreign affairs, assigning himself the role of No. 1 diplomat of the U.S. The day-to-day routine of departmental administration he has delegated to his undersecretaries. …

However, operational efficiency was bound to suffer from Dulles's methods of securing his position from the rivalry of subordinates and of other executive departments. The price of his success was lack of political coordination for all concerned. In some cases the Secretary made decisions without regard to political and military information available in the Department of State and other executive agencies; in other cases he neglected to prepare the Department of State and the related agencies for the policies to be adopted. For instance, the concept of massive retaliation, taken at its face value, was obsolete from the military point of view when Dulles presented it as the "new look" of American foreign policy in 1954. On the other hand, the decision to intervene in Lebanon in 1958 took many high officials of the State Department by the same surprise that it did the general public.

VII

Comparing Dulles's conception of me office of Secretary of State with the results of his administration of the office, one cannot doubt that he was eminently successful. Everywhere he seemed to achieve his purposes. When he took office, he resolved that what had happened to Dean Acheson would not happen to him; that he would make himself master of American foreign policy, without competition from any of the quarters from which such competition had traditionally come; that he would give the appearance of being the initiator of new, dynamic, and successful foreign policies. Dulles accomplished what he had set out to do. Yet it is characteristic of the dilemma which of necessity faces a modern Secretary of State that Dulles had to pay a price for his triumph in making his position and policies secure on the domestic political scene, just as Acheson had to pay a price for shielding his foreign policies from the intrusion of domestic politics. Although what happened to Acheson did not happen to Dulles, something else did. The price Dulles had to pay for his domestic success consisted in the stagnation of American foreign policy and the diminution in prestige that both his person and his office suffered abroad.

Although Dulles consistently strove to make it appear that his foreign policies were different from, and superior to, the foreign policies of his predecessors, it is a historic fact that he essentially continued those very policies. Refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the status quo in Europe and defense of the status quo in Europe and elsewhere through containment, as well as foreign aid, were the cornerstones both of his and his predecessors' foreign policies. Dulles introduced only two major variations: he endeavored to extend the policy of military containment, originally applied to Europe, systematically to the Middle East and Asia through a network of al liances, and he postulated the inadmissibility of vio lence as an instrument of national policy, putting that principle into effect by opposing the 1956 invasion of Egypt by France, Great Britain, and Israel.

Regardless of the intrinsic merits of these policies, it is hardly open to doubt that they were not sufficient to meet the new issues arising from the growing military, economic, and political power of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Africa from colonial rule, the unrest in Latin America, and the endemic crisis of the Atlantic alliance. A case can of course be made in support of the thesis that Dulles, acting essentially as the resourceful advocate of his client, the United States, was contitutionally incapable of transcending his responsibility to defend the position in which he found his client, that is, the status quo, and of creating new situations by virtue of new policies more in tune with the interests of the United States in a new environment. However, even if Dulles had had the attributes of the creative statesman, he would have been greatly handicapped in his creative task by his overriding concern with his domestic position. To stand as still as possible while appearing to move was the safest course to take in view of this concern, and so was the limitation of any actual movement to the military sphere. A fresh political initiative, a really creative political effort, would in all likelihood have raised a domestic political issue, dividing Congress and public opinion at large into supporters and opponents, and it was such a division which Dulles was resolved to forestall.

The support which Dulles enjoyed at home was not matched by a similar response from abroad. Neither his person nor his policies were popular with foreign statesmen and foreign peoples. To a degree, unpopularity is the price that powerful nations and forceful personalities pay for their power and force, and to that extent it cannot be helped. In Dulles's case, however, the negative foreign reaction was in good measure the direct result of the preoccupation with domestic support that dictated both the conception and the administration of his office. Foreign public opinion and foreign statesmen were more sharply aware than American public opinion could be of the contrast between what American foreign policy was declared to be and what it actually was. Once this contrast had developed into a consistent pattern, Dulles's public and private pronouncements were bound to be carefully scrutinized abroad for their real meaning. Since foreign statesmen could not be sure that Dulles's policies would conform to his pronouncements, they lost confidence in his person and his policies.

Dulles's modus operandi also contributed to the distrust he ultimately encountered abroad. By concentrating not only the direction but, to a large extent, also the implementation of foreign policy in his own hands, he escaped the handicap of involvement with the bureaucracy of the State Department, but he thus created another hazard. By taking over the functions ambassadors have traditionally performed, Dulles deprived himself of that protection with which ambassadors are intended to shield their chiefs from too frequent contacts with their opposite numbers. Such contacts breed not only familiarity but also distrust; for it is in the nature of diplomacy to try, sometimes by devious means, to use other statesmen for its own purposes. The statesman who has been so used for some length of time is likely to get tired of, and lose confidence in, the man who has so used him, and then it is time to replace that man. For that reason ambassadors frequently become expendable after a few years of service in a particular capital and are transferred elsewhere. The foreign minister who assumes the task of his ambassadors simultaneously in many capitals cannot easily be replaced when, for the same reason, his usefulness has been impaired. Thus he carries on with his prestige damaged and his trustworthiness compromised.

Dulles compounded the liability inherent in his modus operandi by his use of the advocate's technique. The advocate, trying to advance his client's case as far as possible, can afford to disregard the interests and reactions of other parties who have advocates of their own, both relying upon the judge to sift the truth from ex parte statements, hyperbole, and deception. What the advocate can afford, the foreign minister cannot. For the foreign minister is not only the advocate of his nation, but, in a manner of speaking, also the advocate of the other side and the judge who recognizes and respects the interests of the other side and at least tentatively decides how the two interests ought to be reconciled. The foreign minister who limits himself to being the advocate of his nation will be acclaimed at home as the stanch defender of the national interest, but he will be handicapped in his conduct of foreign policy because he will be distrusted personally and will be incapable of performing the supreme task of diplomacy: to create out of disparate and contradictory national interests a higher harmony. [A close associate of Dulles has graphically described in private conversation one facet of Dulles's technique and its results. He compared Dulles dealing with two foreign ministers with a man who had to explain the same landscape to two associates. Knowing that foreign minister A was interested in mountains, he would tell him only about the mountains. Knowing that foreign minister B was interested in valleys, he would tell him only about the valleys. When the two foreign ministers later compared notes, they both felt that they had been deceived.]

Such was the price in terms of substantive foreign policy that Dulles had to pay for his domestic triumph. Did it have to be paid? The answer to that question depends upon one's judgment of the strength of the potential domestic opposition and of the need for different foreign policies. This writer is convinced that the price was unnecessarily high by far; for Dulles, fully supported by President Eisenhower's unprecedented prestige, could have pursued whatever foreign policies he chose without fear of a domestic opposition. But, then, would different foreign policies have been desirable, and would Dulles have wanted to pursue them had he not feared that opposition? Future historians will debate these questions, and perhaps history will one day answer them.