The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War

by Stephen Kinzer

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today's world

During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world.

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?

The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies—many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country's role in the world.

Propelled by a quintessentially American set of fears and delusions, the Dulles brothers launched violent campaigns against foreign leaders they saw as threats to the United States. These campaigns helped push countries from Guatemala to the Congo into long spirals of violence, led the United States into the Vietnam War, and laid the foundation for decades of hostility between the United States and countries from Cuba to Iran.

The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Espionage, War

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him "among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling." (source)

Reviews

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! Makes you question the notion that competence in managing American foreign policy has declined in recent years. As bad as the George W and chief henchman Dick Cheney legacy is, Eisenhower’s and the Dulles brothers’ is arguably worse…at least as bad. My notes below.

John Foster and Allen Dulles looked at the world through the same prism. Both had a strict Presbyterian upbringing. Both saw corporate interests, American interests and Christian morality as deeply intertwined. Both saw a world in need of the paternalistic leadership of the United States to defend it against bolshevism. Despite their similar views they had completely opposite personalities. John Foster was reserved, starchily correct and a loyal husband. Allan was a charmer, warm and engaging, and a womanizer. Allen had some nuance, John Foster was Manichean.

Both worked for the global law firm Sullivan and Cromwell which had extensive investment in Germany in the thirties. Allen could see Hitler was evil and trouble in the early thirties. John Foster steadfastly supported Hitler apologizing for him right up to America’s entry into the war. Allen challenged his brother asking him how he could support Hitler and call himself a Christian. John Foster’s Christianity was deeply aligned with making money off of his client’s investments and fighting communism, all of these went together in John Foster’s mind.

When Eisenhower became president he made John Foster his Secretary of State and Allen his CIA chief. John Foster, doing the bidding of Joe McCarthy, decimated the State Department, eliminating anyone with differing views including the old China hands with Asian expertise, leaving no one who could challenge his clueless Viet Nam policy. The State Department became a reflection of John Foster’s views. He took the lead at the National Security Council ensuring it too saw in every indigenous movement the hand of the Soviet Union and international communist conspiracy. The brothers’ answer was to use the CIA to conduct undercover operations against the growing wave of nationalism. Their plans fit perfectly Eisenhower’s “New Look” military policy of trimming conventional forces while relying on nuclear weapons and covert action as a way to balance the budget.

Convinced Iran was headed into the Soviet orb, the brothers put operatives in Tehran, toppled the elected government and put in the Shah to protect British oil interests and sell a huge Sullivan and Cromwell development deal. They moved on to Guatemala to protect another Sullivan and Cromwell client, United Fruit, which treated their local workers practically as slaves. Again, with bribery and covert action, the brothers fomented revolt deposing Guatemala’s land reform president and putting in place leaders controlled by United Fruit. Next were two situations the brothers woefully underestimated, taking on Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam and Sukarno in Indonesia. Putting the arrogant hapless Diem in South Viet Nam, the US took over from the French and began a policy which culminated in the disastrous war a decade later. In Indonesia, bribery and CIA military action failed to unseat Sukarno.

In all of these cases the brothers made up cover stories depicting local freedom fighters fending off communist takeovers. Given today’s news coverage it is hard to imagine the credibility the press gave their fabrications. Even the New York Times supported the brothers’ denials of US involvement. The US public throughout all of these CIA operations was fed disinformation through the powerful Henry Luce’s “Time” and “Life” and the rest of the press. The public bought it. There was a naiveté hard to imagine today.

John Foster died in 1959. Allen carried on next in the Congo where the CIA bribed and armed Mobuto to take out Lumumba, perceived through Allen’s cold war lens as another communist. Eisenhower authorized Lumumba’s assassination, which eventually was carried out by his tribal enemies into whose hands Belgian agents with CIA support delivered him.

The sad end to this history is the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Approved by Eisenhower including the assassination of Castro, Allen delegated the planning to deputy and longtime associate Dick Bissell. Allen was probably already suffering from dementia and busied himself with destabilizing Tibet and neutral Laos as long as it didn’t interfere with following his beloved Washington Senators baseball team. The CIA’s arrogance led them to underestimate the difficulty of taking on Castro. Much went wrong once underway: 1. Secrecy essential to the plan was entirely lost as the buildup was followed in the major newspapers. 2. Castro was to be assassinated prior to the invasion. The CIA hired the mob to do the job even providing them with poison pills, but Castro remained alive to rally his troops and crush the invaders. 3. Kennedy fearful of the US being identified as the perpetrator cut back essential air support and changed the landing site to one that favored the defenders. 4. Serious misgivings went unheeded including the pleas of key CIA operational leaders to call off the invasion. When Kennedy questioned Allen about aborting the plan, he pointed out that Kennedy would then be blamed for not having the guts to go through with it despite his campaign promises to take on Castro. Kennedy caved. 5. Dulles was accustomed to Eisenhower’s decisiveness. He and Bissell figured Kennedy would do what it took to pull the plan off even if it meant providing additional resources at the last minute. When the Guatemala coup was in trouble, Eisenhower had authorized additional aircraft to bail out the CIA. As things went awry at the Bay of Pigs Kennedy’s reaction was just the opposite. Allen was fired. This final escapade was a fitting cap to the Eisenhower/Dulles policies that totally alienated the US from the developing world creating suspicion and hatred that persists to this day. Seriously undermined were Kennedy’s new efforts to reach out to the third world with programs like the Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress.

The Dulles brothers were a mix of missionary Calvinism (the world as a battleground between good and evil), American exceptionalism (We can clean up this town (planet) as exemplified by the movies Shane and High Noon), and unrestrained Wall Street capitalism (Greed is good). These values allowed them to propagate fear in the American public during the 1950’s, deepen the cold war, and justify crimes and amoral behavior throughout the world. Kinzer summarizes that the brothers failed in three respects: 1) Rejecting any negotiations with the Soviets, increasing cold war risks and foregoing any opportunity to reduce tensions; 2) Seeing communism behind all nationalistic movements, destroying them and destabilizing societies throughout the developing world; 3) Not taking into account any repercussions for the US such as the Viet Nam War, the widespread enmity for the US, and the Iranian revolution with its virulent hatred of America.

A more recent take is that the Dulles brothers were Eisenhower’s “attack dogs”. It was the president’s foreign policy they were executing. Eisenhower appointed them and approved everything. The three reinforced each other. The brothers listened to primarily to each other and to their common boss who shared their views of American exceptionalism and its moral responsibility to police the world. Eisenhower always kept the cloak of deniability, but was always informed. As one who should know, Nixon, said, “Eisenhower was one of the most devious men I've ever met.” Eisenhower hid behind his grandfatherly smile and misled the American people time and again taking advantage of his unparalleled credibility as America’s war hero.

One last extra scary tidbit to share: Prior to nominating Earl Warren for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Eisenhower had offered the job to John Foster. Just imagine how different history and our lives would be if John Foster had accepted and we were living in the legacy of a Dulles Court!

[Dmitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reporter asked John Dulles if he could imagine meeting his Chinese counterpart in Geneva. "Not unless our automobiles collide" he replied. - John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State

A reporter asked Allen Dulles what the CIA was. "A State Department for unfriendly countries" he replied. - Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence

''He’s the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.'' - Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the UK on John Foster Dulles

''Dull, Duller, Dullest.'' - Anthony Eden, Prime Minister of the UK on John Foster Dulles

*************

John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles were brothers born in the gilded age to a rarified clan of politicians and businessmen. The grandfather had been Secretary of State under Harrison and a broker for international trade deals. He was the first US Secretary to overthrow a foreign government, in Hawaii. The father was a fervent Presbyterian reverend who believed it was America's duty to enlighten heathen masses. Together with 'American Exceptionalism' their creed was to spread trade, democracy and Christ. Their uncle later became US Secretary of State under Wilson during WWI. Growing up in their grandfather's Washington DC home, they dined with Carnegie, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson.

John graduated from Princeton and strings were pulled. He was hired by the law firm that created General Electric and US Steel, with robber barons JP Morgan and EH Harriman as clients. The firm backed a revolution that separated Panama from Columbia to build the canal. Passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by a German u-boat in 1915 and turned US opinion to enter the war. Their uncle was among few who knew it secretly carried ammunition to Britain; he had established a prototype intelligence agency. John rose quickly through the law firm, promoting business in Brazil, Peru and Cuba while exploiting his connections in politics and global business. When uprisings threatened clients the US Navy was sent in.

Allen went to India after Princeton in 1914. En route he read Kipling's Kim, enthralled by the international spy. He joined the State Dept. for ten years until 1926. During WWI he was an intelligence agent in Switzerland and then a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, as was John. They were both enamoured with Wilson's ideals which included US business, liberty and democracy. Those principles weren't extended to colonies who promptly rose in revolt. Allen was director of the Near East Division for five years. Posted in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean he met with Kings Abdullah and Faisal, Kemal Ataturk and TE Lawrence. He simultaneously represented both the US and Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

John supported the Nazis rise to power in 1933, an outcome of work done by the brothers on boundaries and reparations in Paris. Allen was the first foreign emissary to meet Hitler. While Allen had an uneasy feeling John saw the Nazis as a bulwark against Bolshevism and his clients lent billions to Germany. The loans helped develop industries like Farben and Krupp, makers of arms and poison gas. As war spread in Europe John reluctantly conceded to his partners business was no longer feasible. It was a rare falling out with Allen. John argued for internationalism and against isolationism, guided by his religion. FDR wasn't interested in Christian imperatives, nor the British foreign office busy with war.

Allen had earned a law degree in 1926 and joined the law firm where his brother was director and he quickly rose to a partner. They became even more wealthy and well connected than before but Allen was less happy in the corporate world. As America entered WWII in 1941 he was asked to set up a new US intelligence agency which became the OSS. After recruiting hundreds of agents he left for Switzerland where he gathered information and aided resistance in Germany, Italy and France. The war over, Truman ended the OSS and entered the UN, sending John as the Republican delegate. With publisher Time-Life he promoted US business, world leadership, and cast the USSR as the world's greatest threat.

John popularized the cold war theory that held nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America were directed from Moscow. He compared communism to the Islamic conquests, an existential threat to Christianity. Supported by the Truman Doctrine of 1947 the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency were created. Allen was passed over for director by a Democrat. Truman had little patience for covert action. When he was re-elected John's hopes to become Secretary were delayed. He was made US senator in 1949 when a NY Republican became ill, but his term lasted only four months. With Truman's term nearly over John bided his time until the tides of politics turned.

Allen was appointed as CIA Director and John Secretary of State when Eisenhower came to power in 1953, and interest increased for covert operations. With the brothers in charge there was no need to consult anyone but Ike. Ike imagined waging war without loss of US lives. It would not be fought with the great communist powers but against third world anti-colonialists, presumed stooges of the Kremlin. When Iran nationalized British oil and blocked Allen's clients a communist plot was claimed and prime minister Mossadegh replaced by US flunky Shah Pahlavi. As Guatemala's Arbenz threatened John's client United Fruit Company the elected government was overthrown for a CIA sponsored dictator.

John believed the front line against communism was now in east Asia. Ho Chi Minh had appealed to Wilson in Paris for Vietnamese independence. Denied, he joined the Comintern. The US funded most of France's colonial war which ended in defeat. John pushed for US troops but Ike demurred. Instead puppet PM Diem was installed in 1954, setting the stage for future war. Indonesia's President Sukarno was invited to the White House in 1956. He was neutral to the great powers and visited China and Russia, infuriating his former hosts. Afraid he leaned left the CIA armed and trained an insurgent army to overthrow him but failed. In 1965 a US backed purge of communists by military dictator Suharto left a million dead.

Allen made plans to depose Egypt's Gamal Nasser in 1956 but was thwarted by the bungled British invasion of Suez. Nasser had shaken off UK puppet King Farouk in 1952 and accepted Soviet aid. In turn the brothers backed Saudi Arabia and Israel, plotting against Nasser in Syria and Lebanon. In 1960 the CIA schemed to poison Congo PM Lumumba who had declared independence from Belgium and wasn't pro-western business. The plan failed, but he was executed by future dictator Mobutu and Belgians. From poisoned cigars to dipilatory boots wild ways to kill Castro were envisioned. John died from cancer in 1959. After the Cuban debacle of 1961 JFK pinned a medal on Allen's chest and called it quits.

This book explains how US postwar policy was shaped in the 20th century by two wealthy WASPs. Their legacy has lived on. After the Soviet Union fell a new enemy was needed and presented itself in Islamic extremism. Cold war veterans Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld disrupted the middle east and created more terrorism than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein combined. The military industry marched on but as wars ended economies suffered recessions and financial crises. Stephen Kinzer gives an interesting account of how things were done in the highest government offices and agencies. The relationship between privilege and power is nothing new. In fact it is as familiar as politics itself.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Idea Older Than the New World

The idea that Americans have a special mission to the world is older than the United States itself. It was brought to America by the Puritans and summarized in a few lines of John Winthrop’s sermon: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” If they should fail to become that “city upon a hill,” warned he, it was not the people of the world who would be harmed by the lack of a beacon, but they themselves, as God’s blessing would be withdrawn.
Although Winthrop's sermon was written for a specific group of people faced with a specific challenge, his "city-upon-a-hill" invocation has survived and thrived, and become the symbol of US domestic and international ambitions: to become a model for other nations by championing values that Americans deem, at a particular time, to be good. The dreadfully mistaken assumption that underlies this American policy is that the United States is inherently more moral and farther-seeing than other countries, that it can not only topple governments but guide the course of history.

Four Men in a Boat

Every summer morning two little boys took fishing trips through the lakes and rivers of upstate New York with their grandfather and uncle. Those weren't ordinary trips, for their grandpa was former Secretary of State John Watson Foster (whose singular accomplishment was the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawai'i) and their uncle was Robert Lansing, future Secretary of State, (one of the few men who would later know the sunk Lusitania was not a defenseless passenger liner, but was engaged in a secret mission to supply weapons to Britain in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act). In addition to stalking fish, the two men discussed Washington intrigue and global politics, while the boys, Foster and Allen Dulles, listened attentively. Soon, the little brothers began participating in this discussions, and gradually two of the three convictions that would dictate all their actions were bred into them. The first was the idea of America's exceptional mission in the world; the second was the presumption that protecting the right of large American corporations to operate freely in the world is good for everyone. Their father, Reverend Allen Macy Dulles, a preacher and theologian, impressed on them the last conviction – that Christian missionaries understand eternal truths and have an obligation to convert the unenlightened.

Two Brothers

The two boys grew into two very different, at least at first glance, men. Although their grandfather had taken them to Washington since they were kids and they had dined and conversed with prominent political figures, John Foster had remained sullen and socially awkward (his favorite pastime was memorizing long psalms from the Bible). His younger brother Allen "Allie" Dulles, on the other hand, had become even more easygoing. Both of them attended Princeton from which their father had graduated and which was considered a country-club seminary at the time, but their experiences there were radically different too. Foster stayed his taciturn, withdrawn self; Allie became a philanderer, who spent his time with girlfriends or partying with his many friends, news that sent Reverend Allen Macy Dulles into conniption fits.

After college, Foster used his connections to "Grandfather Foster" to be accepted as a clerk to Sullivan & Cromwell, the country’s most eminent corporate law firm. By the time he joined, it had become a unique repository of power and influence. Enormous fortunes were amassed in the States during the last decades of the 19th century, and many wealthy men used Sullivan & Cromwell as their link to Washington and the world. The firm "thrived at the point where Washington politics intersected with global business." Foster worked at this intersection for nearly forty years, rising from a clerk to a partner. Aside from his upbringing, nothing shaped his character as much as this job. It reinforced his conviction that the unrestricted operation of large American corporations in the world is beneficial for everyone.

Meanwhile, Allen joined the foreign service, thus making his first step to the "netherworld" where he would spent most of his life.
Prior to WWI, few in Washington had paid attention to collecting intelligence about other countries, either because they believed the USA didn't need it or because, as Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” One of the few American officials who had promoted intelligence gathering was John Watson Foster, who in 1892–93 had begun dispatching agents to Europe "to give early notice of any new or important publications or inventions or improvements in arms.” When Lansing became secretary of state a generation later, he also had agents who conducted “investigations of a highly confidential character.” Ironically, so it was that two of Allie’s beloved relatives, “Grandfather Foster” and “Uncle Bert,” laid the foundation of the American intelligence network he would later direct.

After an unremarkable post in Vienna, in the spring of 1917, Allen was transferred to Bern. Neutral Switzerland had become a "magnet" for exiles, agents, and revolutionaries from across Europe and beyond. Not yet twenty-five, he became a genuine spymaster, spending his days and nights with plotters from all over the world. His results were impressive: a stream of detailed reports about German troop movements, planned attacks, and even the location of a secret factory where Zeppelin bombers were being manufactured. Allie was loving it: in one letter home he reported that his life as a secret agent was full of “unmentionable happenings” and “incidents of more than usual interest.” One of those "happenings" was missing a call from Lenin (who never called again because the next day he boarded his train to St. Petersburg to change history) because of a date with two "spectacularly buxom Swiss twin sisters", an incident that foreshadowed the carelessness with which he would later direct the CIA.

Oh So Secret

During the late 1930s, Allen became involved in a secret organization known as “the room", where three dozen bankers, businessmen, and corporate lawyers met to exchange the most sensitive information about events unfolding around the world. Nearly all had either backgrounds in intelligence or unusually deep contacts in foreign capitals, and importantly, all of them were fabulously rich. These patricians not only advised the FDR administration on covert operations abroad, but arranged corporate cover for agents undertaking them.

One of "the room"'s members was William Donovan, a war hero who had become a Wall Street lawyer and dabbled in intelligence. Donovan was concerned that the United States was about to enter a global conflict without an intelligence service. Having just returned from a private mission to London for FDR, he knew that the war would continue and ultimately the USA would get involved. Therefore, he was assembling a team of clandestine officers to work "for an agency that did not yet exist". Allen Dulles, one of America’s few experienced spies, was an obvious recruit. He had joined Foster in Sullivan & Cromwell after the end of the Great War and had proceeded to obtain information for the firm through "unusual and diversified means". Donovan's offer was exactly what Allie needed; diplomacy had made him world-wise, corporate law had made him rich, but a return to the shadows would make him what he desired to be – decisive but secret.
FDR needed little persuasion, especially after the raid on Pearl Harbor, and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, or as the OSS agents' wives joked, Oh So Secret) was born. Allen was thrilled to finally see a US intelligence agency "which brought . . . under one roof the work of intelligence collection and counterespionage, with the support of underground resistance activities, sabotage . . ." For him, the OSS wasn't simply a means to gather intelligence for United Joint Chiefs of Staff; for him, the OSS was a powerful force designed to strike swiftly from the shadows. This sentiment would transform the OSS into the deadly CIA of the Cold-War period.

Two Jaws of a Serpent

Truman's administration was not a happy time for the brothers. Foster, who had acquired significant experience in foreign service by working with foreign clients and by advising "Uncle Bert", had hoped to assume the post of Secretary of State to Thomas E. Dewey, but shockingly, the Republican candidate lost the election of 1948 to the "farmer from Missouri".
Allen, meanwhile, spent hours writing nostalgic letters to his former OSS comrades, trying to answer the question "What does a wartime spymaster do when the fighting ends and his government has no more use for him?" Mary Bancroft, a spy with whom he had an enduring affair, described his new behavior as that of "an exuberant young person when his parents suddenly show up". While in the years immediately after the war Truman became convinced of the need for a secret intelligence service, he was reluctant to give any intelligence agency the right to carry out covert operations. "Wild Bill" Donovan and Allen wanted to change this. Yet, although they managed to push a bill on the creation of the CIA through Congress, Truman still showed no inclination to use it as Allie and his friends wished it to be used. Appointing Admiral Hillenkoetter, a quiet, steady officer as the first CIA director instead of Allen, he reasoned that the CIA was not created "to be a ‘Cloak and Dagger Outfit’", but merely to keep the President informed "about what was going on in the world". This attitude went against Allen's grandiose plans. The CIA was ready, they were ready. All they lacked was a friend in the Oval Office.

The tide turned as soon as Eisenhower succeeded Truman in the White House and appointed Foster as his Secretary of State.
While the brothers hadn't seen much of each other during the "Thirty Years War" (as Anthony Eden had called the two world wars and the period of tumultuous peace between them), now they had united again, spending hours and hours talking, as their sister Eleanor wrote. What Foster and Allie discovered is that despite their different public and private lives, their ideologies were in unison. Foster possessed a rigorously organized mind, but he was not a deep thinker. His ideology was the defense of the two principles that he believed best served global commerce: free enterprise and American-centered internationalism. Allen's ideology was identical to his brother's. He, however, was less moved by religious and ethical imperatives, and felt a compulsive need to act, to strike and then strike again. "Nations were to him like women: a succession of challenges to be mastered." He could not suffer the idea of allowing history to take its course; he wished to shape it.

Eisenhower was the right man for this duo. He "combined the mind-set of a warrior with a sober understanding of the devastation that full-scale warfare brings". That led him to covert action. Truman had drown the line at the CIA plotting against foreign leaders. That line evaporated when he left office – Eisenhower wished to wage a new kind of war. With the two brothers behind his back, he led the USA into a secret global conflict that raged throughout his presidency. Foster plotted it. Allen, appointed by Ike to the post of Director of the CIA, waged it. "They attacked like a serpent: two jaws not organically connected but working in perfect harmony."

Six "Monsters" & Two "Doves"

During the 40s-50s, Americans were told that Soviet leaders were actively plotting to overrun the world; that they would use any means to ensure victory, which would mean the end of civilization and meaningful life; and that therefore they must be resisted by every means, no matter how distasteful. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles personified this worldview. Everything in their background – from missionary Christianity to decades of work defending the interests of America’s biggest multinational corporations – prepared them for this role.
In his famous Independence Day speech to the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Dulles brothers, however, did. Six fervent idealists in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became the "monsters" they went abroad to destroy. Some of the countries they targeted never recovered. Nor did the world.

The first "monster" Foster and Allen set out to destroy was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratic prime minister of Iran, who fervently opposed colonialism by nationalizing his country's oil industry. His dramatic step boded ill for one of Allen’s most important clients, the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, which served as financial agent for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and on whose board he sat. More importantly, Mossadegh’s opposition to Western privilege made him the sort of leader the brothers instinctively mistrusted, a populist rabble-rouser who rejected the way the world is run. He also represented the new "enemy" Foster had just identified in the world – neutralism.
In the CIA coup against Mossadegh, three hundred people were killed. The brothers had successfully prevented not what they were convinced was an imminent Communist victory, but the first truly democratic Iranian government. The shah, "America's best Iranian friend" reclaimed the Peacock Throne, ruled with increasing repression for a quarter century, and then was overthrown by fanatically anti-Western clerics. This was the tragic long-term result of the CIA coup.
Allen brought his CIA into its "golden age" by showing that he could topple governments with minimum cost and almost complete discretion. Foster understood the power this implied. For General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, three hundred deaths (especially not American) were a cheap cost. He also realized the power of the CIA and helped transform it into what Allie called "the State Department for unfriendly countries."

Mossadegh's case is crucial because it served as a precedent. Regarding the five remaining "monsters", Foster and Allen perseveringly clung to the same beliefs: World Communism was a monolithic movement directed from the Kremlin; it now sought to conquer Asia; every country that doesn't succumb to America's will automatically was a Soviet pawn. Any threat to big corporations, such as the Guatemalan uprising against the oppressive United Fruit, was perceived as a Communist overtake. Secretary of State Dulles presided over a country mired into an anti-Communist deafness and blindness.
One of the most dangerous things a superpower can do in world affairs is to castrate its analytic capacity and shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice. But who had mired the Americans of the 40s and 50s into this shortsightedness? According to Kinzer, Foster and Allen reflected the spirit of the American people, but I disagree, for I doubt the Americans had themselves come to embrace such pernicious ideologies. The leader of the Korean independence movement, Syngman Rhee, carefully distinguished between the true American values and those upheld by US political leaders. Such difference undoubtedly existed during the Cold War, although someone had indeed managed to impress upon Americans that the USSR was the most formidable threat. That someone was Allen Dulles.
Law prohibited the CIA from operating within the States, but Allie interpreted it loosely. He shaped coverage of world events in the American press through calls to editors and publishers. His most imaginative media operation was taking control of the cartoon version of Orwell's anti-totalitarian Animal Farm. The book’s ending, in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, contradicted much of what the States was saying about the Cold War. Allen arranged for the cartoon to end quite differently – only the pigs are corrupt and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell’s widow was indignant, but the film reached a wide audience.
Therefore, I concluded that it was not the American nation that gave birth to Foster and Allen, but rather it was the Dulles brothers, who – supported by Ike – instilled their radical ideology in the minds of Americans. They were the most fervid promoters of the fear they sew among US citizens. They did as much as anyone to shape America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union. Soon after they became secretary of state and director of the CIA, they failed their first "test": after Stalin's death, his successors made overtures to the West, but Foster and Allen categorically rejected them. They sharpened and lengthened the Cold War by pronouncing each Soviet call for “peaceful coexistence” a ruse designed to lull America into a false sense of security.

Their next great failure was their inability to understand the Third World. They were too quick to see Moscow’s hand behind cries for social reform in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, which were to them little more than a vast Cold War battleground. They never engaged with the aspirations of the peoples emerging from colonialism and looking for their place in a turbulent world. Instead they waged destructive campaigns against foreign “monsters” who never truly threatened the USA.

A third fatal failure was their shortsightedness. Foster and Allen never imagined their intervention in foreign countries would have such ruinous long-term effects – that Vietnam would be plunged into a war costing more than one million lives, or that Congo would descend into a horrific civil war. No wonder Allie was a James Bond fan; his and Bond's cases were dangerously alike: in each novel, a spymaster sends an intrepid agent to a faraway land, and the agent secretly crushes a great threat to civilization. Most importantly, neither Bond nor his superiors ever worry about the long-term consequences of their acts, and there never are any.
The brothers also never reexamined their assumptions. They wrested the facts to suit themselves, instead of adjusting their convictions to reality. They were drawn to order and predictability, always searching for patterns in an ever-changing world.

Another question this book answered is Why so many people around the world, many of my compatriots among them, dislike the USA?
When he addressed the world, John Foster Dulles used "a stern preacher’s tone" – dark, bellicose and threatening, rarely uplifting or inspirational. His inability to empathize with masses of people in a changing world conveyed a snarling image that contributed to generations of anti-Americanism. While Foster did not live to see his reputation decline, Allen did. His last and best-known operation, the Bay of Pigs invasion intended to topple Fidel Castro's government, was an epic disaster that humiliated him and his country before the world.

I will not say that the story of Allen and Foster is the story of America. However, I will insist that their story is the story of the modern US government. Ike wan't the only one who gave the Dulles full scope. Vice President Nixon, the Congress that never asked the CIA anything beyond what Allen deemed necessary to share, Senator Arthur Vandenberg were all supporters of their actions. The brothers tell American leaders much about themselves, and not all of it is pleasant. Maybe this is the reason why the brothers' memory had faded into obscurity. Yet, understanding what they did, and why they did it, is a step toward understanding why the United States acts as it does in the world. Rather than swept under the rug, their story should be known to all, so that Americans will be able to correct the mistakes of their leaders and to restore the values that had made the United States "the envy of the world".

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

When John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State 1953-59) died in 1959, he was one of the most respected men in America. Thousands of people paid their respects. Leaders from all over the world spoke about their admiration for him. He would be posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom and have an airport named after him. At the same time, his brother Allen was head of the CIA, and was also widely respected for his legacy. One year later John F. Kennedy chose to keep him at the head of the CIA, even though he was a Republican. It must have seemed that they would go down in history as wise statesmen who led American foreign policy through the complicated post-WWII years and kept us out of war.

That’s not how they are thought of now. Their legacy now consists of being key decision makers in these American actions:

The coup to depose the elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953 (both brothers involved).

The coup to depose the elected president of Guatemala in 1954 (both).

Attempts to convince Eisenhower to get involved militarily to fight the Viet Minh when France left Vietnam in 1954 (both).

Plans to assassinate the elected leader of Congo in 1960 (Allen).

The humiliation of Eisenhower getting caught in bald faced lies about the U2 spy plane (Allen).

Refusal to engage in talks with China and the Soviet Union, including a history of needlessly insulting and antagonizing them (Foster).

The failed Bay of Pigs invasion (Allen).

I don’t think the Dulles brothers have many defenders anymore, even amongst Republicans.

The book does a great job at highlighting these events and raising important questions about the consequences. I had very little knowledge of the above events and the author does a valuable service by bringing attention to them. The book was well written. It was concise, easy to follow, and a very compelling read throughout.

Kinzer seems to take the role of a prosecutor making the case against the Dulles brothers, and at that task he does an excellent job. But there was something missing in this book. I don’t feel like I was able to really get into the brother’s heads and understand what made them tick. Kinzer described their poor decisions as being the result of a combination of (1) an irrational fear of the threat of Communism, (2) an unflagging belief that the US is morally superior to other nations, and (3) a desire to protect big corporations. I share the author’s conclusion that these were bad decisions that had terrible consequences, but I just don’t think it was that simple. Lots of smart, decent people agreed with these decisions. There is something about the Dulles brothers' philosophy that was compelling to many people. I’m not sure what exactly is missing, but all I can say is I just came away feeling part of the story was left out.

Relatedly, I don’t understand how the Dulles brothers got to be as successful as they did. Dulles takes a lot of digs at their intellectual capabilities. In Foster’s case, he was also awkward, off-putting, arrogant, and close-minded – exactly the opposite characteristics you would want from a statesman. Allen was more charming, but also seemed to be lacking in leadership skills, as Kinzer describes him as being rather sloppy. Neither were good at inspiring and motivating the teams they led. But they both did continually keep moving up into more powerful positions. There must be a reason for this, but I feel like the book spent so much time taking shots at them, that I didn’t understand why others kept promoting them and looking to them for leadership. Again, I feel like the book lacked depth in revealing what exactly it was about the brothers that turned them into such powerful leaders.

These last two paragraphs sound kind of harsh, but overall, I still thought it was a great book. This is an underappreciated part of American history, that is still very relevant to today. Kinzer did a great job explaining what happened and making the case for the Prosecution.

[Tom LA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating but biased fresco of the early Cold War era as seen through the lives of the extraordinarily powerful Dulles brothers.

The author has a strong bias and an agenda: you won't see anyone who has serious respect for history give 5 stars to this book. Kinzer is pushing the message that the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower made ONLY terrible foreign policy mistakes that America is still paying for.

This position embraced by the author left me perplexed. YES, in those years the United States helped some coups that ended up in regime changes in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, and other countries, YES, from the “moral” standpoint some of these operations might be deemed as "dirty work", and YES, these covert activities were heavy-handed and often messy (some of them were even complete disasters), BUT the Cold War was NOT an illusion, it was a very harsh reality and it had to be fought. Kinzer never considers this once.

I see Kinzer's overall narrative as not serious or at least not completely objective, especially in that he is too quick to dismiss the Russia of the '50s as "non interested AT ALL in sponsoring regime changes or in influencing other countries governments".

That’s preposterous. How can you say that?

I believe the people who say that Russia didn’t have all the resources that it pretended to have back then - that is probably true. But it had A LOT OF RESOURCES. what about all the social, cultural and political sponsorship that Russia (and broadly speaking, Communism) did around the world? Sorry, that was REAL. I saw a lot of that even in my country (Italy). Communism and Russia had an immense power in Italy in the 60s and 70s. And they actually still do, especially in academia (that’s always been their playbook).

Or take Congo, where Krushchev sent military planes only 2 days after a panicked Lumumba asked Russia for help. Is that not having any resources or interest in aggressive foreign policy from Russia’s side? No. As unbalanced as it might have been, the Cold War was a harsh REALITY, and not a U.S. invention like Kinzer would like us to think.

And here they come, the evil Dulles brothers and their boss, Eisenhower, making huge irreparable damages only to defend the interest of the evil of ALL evils: the US corporations.

Simplistic and cartoonish as it sounds, that is Kinzer's opinion.

Overall, however, I would say that despite Kinzer's view being unbalanced, it is probably faithful to the facts that today we have access to.

Kinzer believes that the communist threat was over-estimated (sometimes on purpose) especially by Foster Dulles, and his reaction to it was exaggerated. He might be right on both counts, but he fails to indicate any realistic alternative geo-strategic policy that would have actually led the US to prevail in the Cold War.

Let-live diplomacy and isolationism? Yeah, right. What exactly would have been a "different and better" policy, that would have brought more benefits to the US? The point is, we actually do not know what would have happened to the world's balance of power if America had pursued such a different policy in those years. We can only guess.

Having said all this - despite not agreeing with the author's tendency to over-simplify, with his main ideas and transparent political leanings, I enjoyed the book very much, as it is very well-written and it provides a great high-level description of a piece of history that is not very much talked about.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live not too far from the Dulles International Airport, and had looked up the name now and then to learn more about the man it was named after, so I knew a little about the brothers, but nowhere close to how Stephen Kinzer tells it here. Kinzer delivers a very well-researched and well-written story. In short, slightly rephrasing the blurb, the story of Dulles Brothers is the story of the US (foreign policy). Just the list of their covert or overt operations to overthrow governments from Iran to Vietnam, from Guatemala to Congo to Cuba shows the influence they had during Cold War. Their hardline with the axis of good vs evil continued to shape up the US foreign relations for the following decades as same lines were repeated to start Iraq/Afganistan wars. Their other ideas for American exceptionalism and the desire to protect big corps like they did at Sullivan Cromwell are coming back stronger than ever, therefore a very timely and informative read indeed. Recommended.

[Numidica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many people have reviewed this book, so I'll keep this relatively short. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, with the support of Eisenhower, arguably did more damage to the international reputation of the United States than any other major figures of the Twentieth Century. They almost singlehandedly wrecked the US' relationship with Central and South America, ruined US-Iranian relations in the long term, directed the initial steps into Vietnam, and generally soured US relations with all nations that were emerging from colonial rule. On top of all this, the CIA under Dulles was a notably incompetent organization that failed in every major mission it attempted after Iran, and provided precious little valuable information to policymakers. Both Allen and Foster believed that the US should be able to bully smaller nations into following the US' lead, and if the leader of a smaller nation resisted, he had to be gotten rid of, because (obviously) he must be a Communist. They established as "fact" that there was an international Communist movement, and neutrality on the part of small nations simply meant they were secretly Communist. It was a crazy idea in retrospect, and it gave no credence to the clearly quite reasonable idea that small nations simply wanted to determine their own futures, regardless of what the US wanted. In fairness, the brothers reflected their era, and the 1950's was a distinctly paranoid time.

One wonders how different history might have been if Dean Acheson could have stayed on as Secretary of State (not possible because he was a Democrat), or if George Marshall, calm, prudent, selfless George Marshall could have come back as Secretary of State under Eisenhower. Oh well.

[Steven Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having written or co-authored books on the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, Jacobo Arbenz, BITTER FRUIT, and a general compendium of American coups in OVERTHROW it seems inevitable that Stephen Kinzer, an award winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times would proceed to publish a work on the two men whose goal centered on maintaining American corporate interests abroad and were obsessed with the concept that indigenous nationalism was another term for communism. Kinzer has accomplished his mission in his new dual biography of John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles who served respectfully as Secretary of State and Director of the CIA during the Eisenhower administration. In THE BROTHERS: JOHN FOSTER DULLES, ALLEN DULLES AND THEIR SECRET WORLD WAR Kinzer presents an in depth study of Foster and Allen (as he refers to them in the book) as they implement American foreign policy during the Cold War. The author goes beyond the analysis of the individual decisions that they made as he places events within the context of American foreign policy today. As a result he reaches the conclusion that both men were active proponents of what has been termed “American Exceptionalism,” which many of our leaders still affirm, and their actions help explain many of the foreign policy problems the United States currently faces. Since the work of the Dulles brothers still rings true today, “understanding what they did, and why they did it, is a step toward understanding why the United States acts as it does in the world.” (328) If that was what Kinzer was trying to achieve in his latest work, he has been remarkably successful.

Kinzer minces no words as he traces the early years of the brothers. The reader sees that foreign policy and government overthrow were in their DNA as their grandfather; John Watson Foster was Secretary of State in 1893 when he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Keeping with tradition, Eleanor Dulles, Foster and Allen’s sister married Robert Lansing, who became Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. For the brothers many doors were opened by these family connections including positions at the Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. It was early in Foster’s legal career during W.W.I. under the auspices of “Uncle Bert,” (Robert Lansing’s nickname) that he participated in his first foreign intervention as Sullivan and Cromwell clients’ interests were threatened in Cuba in 1917. Foster and Uncle Bert agreed to send American destroyers to Cuba along with marines to protect American corporate clients. As Kinzer correctly points out it showed Foster “how easy it can be for a rich and powerful country, guided by the wishes of its wealthiest corporations, to impose its will on a poor and weak one.” (25)

Foster became the managing partner at Sullivan and Cromwell at the age of thirty-eight at a time when the United States went from a debtor nation to a creditor nation for the first time. New York would replace London as the world’s financial capital and wealthy Americans spread their money and financial interests around the world, and those wealthy Americans “clamored for Sullivan and Cromwell’s services. “The list of those Foster represented reads like a guide to the upper reaches of American commerce, manufacturing, and finance.” (37-38) It was from this perch that Foster and Allen, who joined the firm in 1926, would develop their unquestioned belief in “liberal internationalism,” the idea “that trouble in the world came from misunderstanding among ruling elites, not from social or political injustices, and that commerce could reduce or eliminate this trouble. This was a refined version of the ‘open door’ policy the United States had embraced for decades... [a policy] aimed at forcing other countries to accept trade agreements favorable to American interests. At its core was the reassuring belief that whatever benefited American business would ultimately benefit everyone.” (55-56) According to Kinzer it was this firm belief held by the brothers that guided them through their careers whether it was support for Hitler and the Nazis before Pearl Harbor or the myriad coups they arranged to protect American corporate interests in the 1950s.

World War II found Allen’s career in espionage take off as a member of William Donavan’s inner circle at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), first as a station chief in New York then moving to Bern, Switzerland to develop American spy capabilities in Europe. He was able to create a web of spies that allowed the United States to learn what was happening behind enemy lines and inside Nazi Germany itself. Following the war Allen’s career took a hit as President Truman abolished the OSS. During the war Foster emerged as one of the top two foreign policy spokespersons for the Republican party (Arthur Vandenberg was the other) as an advisor to Thomas Dewey who ran for President in 1944 and 1948. It was during this period that Foster honed his view of communism that began in the 1920s as the Soviet Union struggled to survive. By the end of WWII Foster was warning that the Soviet Union was bent on “eradicating the non-Soviet type of society and that if the United States did not strike back, an alien faith will isolate us and press in on us to a point where we shall have be faced with surrender or with a new war.” (83)

The shift in American foreign policy in 1950 was embodied in NSC-68, a document that redefined the communist threat and by arguing “that the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” As a result Truman now facing the North Korean invasion of the south immediately asked Congress for $10 billion to expand the army. After the North Korean attack Walter Bedell Smith became head of the CIA and named Allen as Deputy Director of Operations. By 1952 with the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President, Smith became Undersecretary of State, allowing Allen to replace him as head of the CIA, and Foster became Secretary of State. Now all was in place for the brothers. As Kinzer points out, never in history did two siblings hold such powerful offices together and their missionary zeal, belief in American exceptionalism, years of defending corporate interests, and a view of themselves as instruments of destiny would now be put to the test.
When one reads THE BROTHERS, the author’s command of his material as he synthesizes the most important works on Foster and Allen is readily apparent. This is true as he explores how the brothers overthrew of Mohammad Mossedegh in Iran, removed Jacobo Arbenz from power in Guatemala, tried to deal with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, sought to win Gamal Abdul Nasser to the western point of view, failed to replace President Sukarno in Indonesia, participated in the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and failed to cope with Fidel Castro leading to failure at the Bay of Pigs. In all instances the brothers refused to accept the concept of indigenous nationalism and argued that it was nothing more than an excuse for communism. They made no attempt at understanding Third World nationalism and its roots. Once independence was gained many former colonies joined a “neutralist” movement highlighted by the Bandung Conference in 1955. The brothers saw neutral nations as nothing more than communist puppets. They refused to engage “the aspirations of hundreds of millions of people who were emerging from colonialism and looking for their place in a tumultuous world.” (313)

When one thinks about all the covert operations attempted in the 1950s one must ask were the brothers totally responsible and what role did President Eisenhower play. For many years historians assumed that John Foster Dulles set the agenda and Eisenhower allowed him to carry it out. During the last twenty years as further and further documentation emerged the reverse is now believed. One of the first to argue this view was Richard Immerman in his HIDDEN HAND DIPLOMACY and I found in my own research for DAWN OVER SUEZ that Eisenhower held the levers of power and he used them. According to Kinzer it was Ike who ordered the death of Patrice Lumumba, it was Ike who was the guiding hand behind the Bay of Pigs operation. In these and other “coups” the only thing that mattered to Eisenhower was that they be successful and could not be traced back to the United States. According to Blanche Wesson Cooke in her study DECLASSIFIED EISENHOWER there were more coups attempted during the Eisenhower administration than any other in American history. As Richard Bissell, the CIA operative in charge of the Bay of Pigs recalled, “Eisenhower was a tough man behind that smile.” (293)

Kinzer discussion of the overthrow of Mohammad Mossedegh in 1953 was a recapitulation of material he presented in his previous works. Operation AJAX was fully approved by Eisenhower and Foster’s law firm Sullivan and Cromwell had the most to lose once Mossedegh came to power as one of Allen’s most important clients, “the J. Henry Shroder Banking Corporation served as the financial agent for Anglo-Iranian Oil Company… It also jolted Foster who was then seeking business in Iran for another Sullivan and Cromwell client, the Chase Manhattan Bank.” (123) Mossedegh’s attempt at having the Iranian people benefit from its country’s own resources was abhorrent to the Dulles brothers because of self-interest which was couched in virulent anti-communism. After the overthrow of Mossedegh the next target was Jacobo Arbenz the president of Guatemala who wanted to institute land reform. His proposal was simple, it required large landowners to sell the uncultivated part of their holdings to the government for redistribution to peasant families. The problem was that the United Fruit Company, a Dulles client of which Foster held stock in controlled 85% of Guatemala’s uncultivated land. As Kinzer pointed out in a previous book he co-authored on the Guatemalan coup, BITTER FRUIT, the United Fruit Company was the power and the Guatemalan government was the subsidiary. Arbenz was overthrown and Brother’s policy in Central America was clear, “they embraced the regions dictators while working to undermine its few democracies.” (159) The next target for the brothers was Ho Chi Minh who had written President Truman and asked him to support Vietnamese independence and not allow the French to return after WWII. The rationale was simple, “they singled him out not simply because who he was, but where he was. Europe had settled into its Cold War pattern, and although Foster and Allen still considered it the center of the world, they believed the front line had moved to East Asia. They mistakenly saw China as a pawn of the Soviet Union, and Ho, also mistakenly, as a puppet of both.” (176) Following the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu, the Geneva Conference in April, 1954 decided to divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel, Ho receiving the north, and the new western mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of the south. In addition within two years elections would be held to unify the country. Edward Landsdale was the CIA operative in charge of dealing with coup. His instructions were clear, to recreate his earlier success in the Philippines when he installed Ramon Magsaysay to national leadership and crushed a guerilla insurgency. Landsdale could not repeat history and by early 1956 it was clear Ho might garner 85% of the vote. Landsdale’s major success was organizing the mass movement of one million Catholics from the north to the south by employing psy-ops and other propaganda means. Since Diem was a catholic (in a country that was 90% Buddhist) he thought it could help solidify Diem’s reign after the United States refused to allow an election to take place. For the United States the Vietnam War had begun.

The only area that I have reservations about Kinzer’s analysis is the Middle East. As mentioned earlier the Dulles brothers abhorred the concept of neutralism and the neutral bloc that emerged from the Bandung Conference in 1955. One of its leaders was Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser. Kinzer skirts over all American policy in dealing with Nasser up until the United States reneged on a deal in July 1956 to build the Aswan Dam. He fails to discuss secret project ALPHA which was designed to try and bring about peace between Israel and Egypt and then use Nasser as sort of a pied piper in leading the other Arab states into a Middle East Defense Pact. Nasser played the United States along until a peace mission led by former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson finally failed. The result was a shift in US policy. At a National Security Council meeting on March 28, 1956 Eisenhower and his Secretary of State implemented Operation OMEGA designed to replace Nasser as the preferred Arab leader with King Saud of Saudi Arabia and the withdrawal of food and other financial aid that was designated for Egypt. A March 28 Dulles memo concluded that “planning should be undertaken at once with a view to possibly more drastic action in the event the above courses of action do not have the desired effect.” (Memorandum from the Secretary of State to the President, March 28, 1956, Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitman File) Kinzer further skirts Foster disingenuousness after Nasser seized the Suez Canal in July, 1956 and fails to mention that on October 29, 1956 the same day that Israel invaded the Sinai as part of its conspiracy with England and France that led to the Suez War, an American-sponsored coup was scheduled to take place in Syria, which because of the invasion was rescinded. (DAWN OVER SUEZ, 188) Kinzer correctly points to the issuance of the Eisenhower Doctrine in January, 1957 as another attempt to control communism in the Middle East, but Dulles’ policy in the region would be a failure especially with the overthrow of the pro-western Nuri al-Said and King Feisal II in Iraq in 1958 by the military, and the continued machinations by Nasser throughout the region as he emerged from the Suez War as an Arab hero. Kinzer quotes historian Ray Takeyh who believes that Suez was “a sideshow that disrupted Eisenhower’s policy of covertly undermining Nasser and his radical allies.” (224). I would respectfully disagree as events in France under DeGaulle, Foster’s move to get closer to Israel, and the complete failure of the Eisenhower Doctrine have shown.

As the 1950s was drawing to a close the Dulles brothers continued to pursue foreign policy by coup despite the fact that their record was not as stellar as they believed. When President Sukarno became a major proponent of neutralism in Indonesia and accepted $100 million dollar loan from the Soviet Union in 1957, the brothers began planning a military coup with disgruntled officers. In the end, Operation ARCHIPELAGO’s attempt to foment a civil war by providing weapons, planes and other logistics was concluded in failure. By May, 1958 the coup was called off as The Director of the CIA called the Secretary of State and told him “We’re pulling the plug.” (241) After Foster died in 1959, Allen was left to deal with the next target on the American “hit list,” Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected president of an independent Congo. Both the United States and Belgium, the former colonial overlord of the Congo, opposed Lumumba because the southeastern province of Katanga was “an invaluable source for industrial diamonds, and strategic metals like copper, manganese, zinc, cobalt and chromium.” (260) Once Lumumba began speaking out against the colonialism that dominated the Congo’s past he had to disappear. Working with Belgium, President Eisenhower order Lumumba’s murder, and for the first time an American president ordered the death of a foreign leader. The United States and Belgium fostered the secession of the Katanga province under the leadership of Joseph Mobutu, a Congolese military officer, who had Lumumba captured, tortured, and then murdered. Not what Allen Dulles had expected. The last failure of the Dulles reign of coups was the Bay of Pigs. So much has been written about this catastrophe, but Kinzer brings up a number of interesting points. First, Allen Dulles did not direct the operation, he put it in the hands of Richard Bissell. Dulles’ hand off approach would cost him a great deal in the end to his reputation and it eventually cost him his job. Secondly, Eisenhower was directly involved at all stages of planning and was able to convince John F. Kennedy to continue the operation once the senator from Massachusetts was elected president. Kennedy would fire Dulles and because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco developed an aversion to accepting advice from the CIA and the Pentagon at face value.

The Brothers policy of replacing governments was mostly a failure if one takes into account the long range implications of what they tried to accomplish. Allen emerges “not the brilliant spymaster many believed him to be. Nearly every one of his major covert operations failed or nearly failed. Foster’s diplomatic planning and Allen’s operational failures spread all across the globe: Berlin, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Indonesia, Tibet, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Cuba, and beyond.” (319) In the end Foster and Allen could not have attempted what they had without the complete support of President Eisenhower. In the final analysis, “Foster and Allen were born into privilege and steeped in the ethos of pioneers and missionaries. They spent decades promoting the business and strategic interests of the United States. More than any two figures of their age, they were the vessels of American history. No other secretary of state or director of central intelligence could have done what they did. Only brothers could have achieved it—and only these two.” (319) As Kinzer correctly points out, we are still reaping the “lack of benefits” from what they sowed—this is why this book is an important read.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to the people at LT early reviewers and to Henry Holt for my copy of this book. Simply put, it's amazing.

If you've ever just sat for a moment and wondered about why so much of the world hates us here in the US, this book will provide a few of the answers. It examines, among other things, how the brothers Dulles, Allen and John Foster (Foster), through their incredible political power and family/corporate/foreign connections, helped to shape our current world, paving the way for American policy abroad to best serve corporate interests. The overt and covert means they employed to protect American interests throughout the globe set into motion events that continue to have repercussions today and will probably continue on well into the future. As the author notes, "Fundamental assumptions that guide American foreign policy have not changed substantially" since the Dulles brothers were in power, and this book is a great place to learn exactly what encompassed American foreign policy during their time and why their "approach to the world" has had deleterious effects on our nation. He also examines the concept of "exceptionalism" as a guiding force in setting policy, a belief that is still held by many today, that somehow the US is more moral than other countries, so that as a nation, we have the right to "behave in ways that others should not." That belief encompasses another idea in which we should be able to take out governments "we" don't like or do other deeds to help shape the course of history.

Aside from examining exactly what the Dulles brothers did over the course of their respective and then combined careers, and how their policy led to such immense episodes of global upheaval, the author also delves into who these two brothers were, how they got their start in the combined areas of finance, multinationals, politics, foreign relations, and the murky world of US intelligence. Trust me, these are not people you will like; there is nothing redeeming about either of them -- they had zero empathy, no compassion and could care less about how many people were killed in the course of their operations.

The book is extremely well written, and is not at all difficult to read; you need no expertise in history, politics or foreign relations to understand it. It's important if you are at all curious about why our government does what it does or how we seem to involve ourselves in sticky quagmires all over the world and what the government is not telling us. It's also a must read, because as the author notes, even though the brothers' actions were products of their time, their story is also the "story of America," and tells us a lot about ourselves as Americans.

Frankly, I have to say that not much really catches me by surprise any more: the political front, the spins on global events, the media as the monkey to the big power players, the disregard for the common people and the Constitution, and this book just goes to show that while the players have changed, really, the same sort of stuff was going on during the heyday of the brothers' power and influence. But back then It was just kept more tightly under wraps and better concealed from the public. The Brothers is simply a stellar work -- and I recommend it highly.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book most interesting. I knew some of the information contained in the book but this is the first time I had seen in presented in this manner. I was aware of the Dulles brothers but it did not register with me that they were both in power at the same time. The Dulles family has served the government through many generations. John W. Foster was Secretary of State (1892-93) for President Benjamin Harrison. Eleanor Foster married Robert Lansing who served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Under FDR Allan Dulles served a decade in the State Department then served in the OSS where he was sent to Switzerland. He was to commission Carl Gustav Jung to prepare psychological profiles of Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Kinzer portrays Allen as a facile, charming womanizer with a lifelong passion for the ethos of espionage. Kinzer paints Foster as a stridently moralistic cunning strategist in international commerce. The author writes “They made an ideal team: one brother was great fun and a gifted seducer, the other had uncanny ability in building fortunes.”

Foster served as a foreign policy adviser to Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York. Forster became an avid critic of Stalin’s essays and speeches. In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower became President and appointed Foster as Secretary of State. Allen became director of the CIA. Never before had two siblings enjoyed such concentrated power to manage United States foreign policy until the Kennedy brother came to power.

Eisenhower adopted the Containment Doctrine developed by George F. Kennan. I read “The Kennan Diaries” in March of 2014. This book goes into depth about the containment strategy. The author covers in great detail, the six different nationalist and communist movements around the world that covert action was taken by the Dulles brothers. There are Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, African Congo and Cuba. Kinzer blunt assessment of Foster’s intellect, quoted Winston Churchill’s disparaging verdict that the Secretary of State was “dull unimaginative, uncomprehending.”

Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther that this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interest and cynical arrogances on the part of two men who were among the most powerful in the world.
The author blames the two brothers for most of the evil of the cold war on the other hand he gives little attention to their sister who was their opposite. Eleanor Lansing Dulles graduated from Harvard with a doctorate in economics. She worked for the State Department for over twenty years overseeing the reconstruction of the economy of post war Europe. She helped establish the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. When her brother, John Foster Dulles, became Secretary of State he tired to remove her from State but she successful fought him. She was hailed as “The Mother of Berlin” for helping to revitalize Berlin’s economy and culture during the 1950s. She retired in 1962 and became a professor of economics at Georgetown University.

If you are interested in history, cold war, covert operation this is the book for you. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. David Cochran Heath did a good job narrating the book.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who wants to learn about America’s involvement in international politics in the 1950’s should read this well written book. The Dulles brothers promoted economic colonialism and violent interference in nations trying to succeed after ridding their country of colonialism even though they were anti-colonialists.
They ruled during the Cold War and believed you were either for American style capitalism or were a communist. There could be no neutral countries. Of course they succeeded with their regime change plans with relatively weak democratic leaders like Arbenz of Guatemala and Mossadegh of Iran however they underestimatedCastro and the Cuban nationalists and failed to revert Cuba back to mafia and American companies’ control.

You would think with all their anti communist rhetoric they would have helped Hungary with their brief revolt against the Soviet Union, but no, they sent no help to them at all!

My only problem with Kinzer’s analysis of the brothers is when in the last chapter he equates them with all of America at that time. I think there were always Americans against their policies but couldn’t stop them. The origin of the Vietnam War began with them , and that brought to the forefront all the Americans against this American policy of interference and began the counter cultural movement of the 1960’s.

This is not only a biography but an excellent source of history. I learned so much from this book!

[Kyle Federo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a weak oversimplification of the early Cold War period. The author would have us believe that two brothers because they went to church and were lawyers for oil and fruit companies almost single handedly determined the foreign policy of the United States for not only the decade that they were government officials, but for the 4-5 decades that they have been dead! He tries to make us believe that it is because of the actions of these two brothers that much of the Muslim world wishes to destroy the United States. How about all the previous (and most likely future) centuries of middle eastern wars? The author tries to show that the Vietnam war, the revolution in Cuba, and events in Central America are all because of them also.

What he conveniently leaves out is that Allen, and John Foster Dulles as employees of the United States worked for and with Presidents of the United States, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of career State Department and Intelligence Agency employees. They did not work in a vacuum like villains in a James Bond movie. The dawn of the atomic age and the publicly stated Soviet goal of world domination was very real. (Remember Khrushchev's, "We will bury you") The brothers Dulles were carrying out the wishes of the country more than they were secretly hijacking it. In addition the 1950s and 60s the United States still had credible journalism. The editorial pages of the big city papers were still well thought of at that time, and would have alerted public opinion if these two brothers were doing business other than directed. The fact that world events didn't turn out all that great doesn't mean that it was due to treachery.

The people in charge of foreign policy (including the Dulles brothers) for the United States made their share of mistakes along the way. However the truth was that most of these situations did not have a simple right or wrong answer. The world is a complicated place.

A quick example:
The author is comfortable blaming the Iranian coup of 1953, and all subsequent problems in the Middle East on the Dulles Brothers.

In actuality the coup in Iran was done primarily at the request of the British. They occupied Iran in WW2 in order to ensure a steady supply of oil to the Soviet Union. The British desperately needed the Russians to stay in the war to buy time. Then after the war, the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (that eventually became BP) assumed it could go back to business as usual. The Arab-American Oil company in Saudi Arabia had a agreed to a 50/50 split of profits, but the British didn't want to play fair. So the Iranians nationalized the company and announced plans to build a pipeline to the Soviets. The British then came up with the idea of the coup, and an Iranian General came to the Americans asking that it be done. The United States needed Great Britain to remain an ally in the Korean War, and needed continued support of RAF bombers and more importantly the use of British bomber bases in order to deter the soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles did not exist yet) So the United States led coup in Iran wasn't just something the Dulles brothers cooked up because they had been lawyers for oil companies. Like most things, it is way more complicated than that. (And way more complicated than a book review should try and explain)

The book is full of instances like that, where the author takes very complex situations like Cuba, Guatemala, Vietnam, the Congo, etc and by selectively choosing his facts he turns something as complex as 50 years of world events into an "Austin Powers" sequel.

[Martin, I stand with ISRAEL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Princeton is renaming a building named after Woodrow Wilson. Orange County Is renaming John Wayne Airport. Perhaps Washington D.C. should rename Dulles international airport.

The brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were Secretary of State and Director of the CIA respectively during the Eisenhower administration.The brothers hated communism. They viewed individual countries as either friendly towards America or enemies if friendly with Russia/China. If a country was neutral, then you were an enemy. No shades of gray were allowed. This policy towards communism reverberates til today.

Let us look at Iran. Mohammed Mossadegh was prime minister of the country. He was democratic leader, but hostile towards the United States. This worried the Dulles brothers. They were afraid he may seek support from the Soviet Union. The Brothers had Mossadegh overthrown and brought the Shah back to power Needless to say this action reverberates till this day with the United viewed as he great satan. ( I am no fan of Iran).

Another example is Vietnam. After WWII Vietnam was considered a colony of France.Ho Chi Minh led a revolt against France to free Vietnam. Hi Chi Minh was a proclaimed communist. The Dulles brothers didn’t like that and gave France millions of dollars to fight Vietnam.. Ho Chi Minh wanted to set up some peaceful meeting and arrangements with the United States. The Dulles brothers ignored him.

Eventually these actions were precursor to the Vietnam war with America.
Think of the lives that could have been saved had we negotiated with Vietnam at an early stage. The 1960s would have been far less turbulent.

These are only two examples of bad foreign policy that had unfortunate future consequences for America. The Dulles brothers failed at their jobs and that is why one never hears them mentioned in history.

I bought the author did an incredible job researching and writing the book.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers is a dual biography of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower, and brother Allen, longtime director of the CIA. Kinzer examines the two men as different in personalities (Foster was a straight-laced, pompous evangelical; Allen, a womanizing libertine) but possessing the same evangelical view of American foreign policy. Both came of age during Woodrow Wilson's presidency (their uncle, Robert Lansing, served as Wilson's Secretary of State), and despite being Republicans they absorbed his "liberal internationalism" which espoused America's role as introducing democratic values to foreign countries - a viewpoint strengthened by their presence at the Paris Peace Conference, diplomatic negotiations of the 1920s and watching Europe fall to fascism a decade later. Of course, the Dulles view of "democratic values" mingled Christian piety, rabid anticommunism, muscular capitalism and a condescending view of the "developed world" as a testing ground for American power. This mindset afforded little room for nuance or negotiation; positing the United States as a "free empire" against the evils of godless communism. One had to pick a side; being neutral was as bad, maybe worse than open hostility.

So when the two brothers rose to power in the 1950s, they found in Eisenhower a president equally hostile to communism but reluctant to risk outright war with the Soviet Union. The Dulles pursued their goals through covert action, propaganda and economic destabilization. Kinzer has written entire books about some of the events chronicled here - the CIA-sponsored coups in Guatemala and Iran, in particular - and while his account adds little to those earlier volumes, it does a nice job putting them in the broader context of the Cold War. Kinzer dispels the idea, propagated by writers like David Talbot, that the Dulles' were Machiavellian chessmasters. In fact their missions often failed - neither Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia nor Castro in Cuba fell due to their machinations, nor did their efforts to subvert the Eastern Bloc or Communist China amount to much, though not for want of trying. But the astonishing influence the two brothers held over American foreign policy for an entire decade was bad enough; in their combination of bellicose conservatism and liberal idealism, the Dulles-Eisenhower Doctrine provided a foreign policy framework that both parties could endorse. And did, for the duration of the Cold War and beyond. A solid volume about the crafting of America's postwar empire.

[Eric_W]

Can't wait to dig into this, although I fear it may result in another of my mammoth reviews. Fascinating interview of Kinzer by Brian Lamb at http://www.c-span.org/video/?315393-1.... Even if you never read the book, you must watch the interview. For the only time in our history two brothers controlled both overt and covert foreign policy, and their Calvinist good v. evil view of everything, coupled with their fear of neutralism, led them to embark on a host of nation building (and ultimately anti-democratic) experiments that left us with several messes, the largest of which was Vietnam followed by Iran.

Way too much really good stuff out there.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer shows how instrumental these brothers were in the design of US foreign policy in the post war years. He shows how their attitudes and personalities were formed, developed, and grew to influence the course of history.

The brothers’ learned statecraft at their grandfather’s side. John W. Foster, US ambassador to three countries, later served as President Harrison’s trouble shooter and Secretary of State. He helped in the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii and later used his State Department connections to engineer government policy to benefit his corporate clients. Kinzer shows how the brothers benefited from their grandfather’s access and came to dual pinnacles of power in shaping US foreign policy: one heading the CIA, the other the Department of State.

The 1950’s operations weren’t as hidden as I expected. Allen Dulles, in the Saturday Evening Post, beamed with pride for removing Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. He even has copies made of Diego Rivera’s critical mural where he is depicted taking money while his brother shakes hands with a local puppet and Eisenhower is pictured on a bomb. Many willingly joined in dirty tricks, for instance Cardinal Spellman wrote a pastoral letter to Guatemalan Catholics calling their President a dangerous communist.

I was surprised that President Eisenhower, whose administration is commonly thought to be one of tranquility, approved toppling governments and assassinating leaders. In some ways, he was the front man, for instance urging Congress to approve funds for “maintenance of national independence” but it was really for fomenting a coup in Syria and installing a king in Saudi Arabia to get US friendly governments to oppose Gamal Nasser (p. 225).

With today’s internet and 24 hour news cycle, can large covert operations such as those against the President Sukarno (the first president of Indonesia who naively looked to the US for help in developing his nation’s fledgling democracy) go under the radar? I presume the CIA budget can still hide items such as the $6 million a year paid to the Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen (who should have been tried at Nuremberg (p. 185)).

Kinzer presents the events that show that by preventing compromise when compromise was possible, the brothers and President Eisenhower, prolonged the Cold War into the Khruschev era and sowed the seeds of the Vietnam War. The lack of reflection or personal responsibility is clear in the quote on p. 283 when years later Allen Dulles coolly tells Eric Sevareid regarding the torture and murder of Patrice Lumumba, that “… we may have overrated the danger..” How would the Congo be today if the US had left its fledgling democracy alone, and not have installed Mobutu in a leadership position?

The last coup attempt in the book is the Bay of Pigs. It was an Eisenhower approved intervention and there seemed that to be no turning back for Kennedy. Its fiasco signaled the end of Allen Dulles, but not the Cold War since its relic, Vietnam as a domino, was an image deeply ingrained in policy DNA.

In a side story, it is shown how little the brothers consider their sister, who had to push to have a career. She marginally benefited from the family name. They do not see that they have been born on third base and she on first. In fact, when it is convenient for them, they try to fire her, yet still go to her house for holiday dinners.

Kinzer concludes with recent work in psychology and personality profiling (“… blind ourself to contrary positions… prepared to pay a high price to preserve our most cherished ideas… declarations of high confidence mainly tell you an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind… beliefs become how you prove your identity..” p. 322) that not only characterize the brothers, but a lot of the thinking in the Cold War.

These paradigms are with us today. Too many politicians and their appointees still see their jobs as responding to lobbyists, not just for big business, but for foreign countries with interests contrary to those of the US. Similarly there are those who force their economic ideology on small and helpless countries.

The book tells a sobering and troubling story. It is greatly at odds with what is taught in high schools. This book has been out for a year now, and it seems the story told is just more noise in the political system. Unfortunately it will take a large event for insiders in Washington to reflect on what we now call "muscular" foreign policy and its results.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all let me say that I've never had the experience of having people tell me just how much they've heard about a book or that they want to read it when they see me carrying around with me. I must've talked to almost 10 people who told me that. I received this book as a gift for Christmas last year and I just began it about a week and a half ago. Frankly I don't know what took me that long to read it. But now that I've read it all I can say is 'wow this book was amazing' an d everyone that's talked about this book is exactly right in what they're saying about it!

For many people today the Dulles brothers are not that very well-known except for the eponymous named airport and for Carol Burnett's satire "I Made A Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles." But seriously all joking aside I don't know how anyone could make a fool of themselves over John Foster Dulles or even better yet, who would want to is totally beyond me. In their day both of the Dulles brothers were seen as paragons of American Cold War supremacy and its position in the world. Hailing from a line of important American statesman both John Foster and Allen Dulles played a major role in the foreign policy and crucial intelligence spheres of American Government: John Foster as Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State and brother Allen as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, respectively. I find it quite interesting to think if two positions so prominent in the upper echelons of American Government would ever again be filled by siblings. In the era of tailfins, poodle skirts, Davy Crockett and Elvis Presley these men dictated the rigid foreign-policy of the day. Americans usually think of the 1950s as a placid, tranquil time between World War II and Vietnam; however the reality is much more sobering if not frightening at that. From the overthrow of foreign governments in Iran and Guatemala to the crisis in the Suez Canal to the rise of a Soviet-backed dictator only ninety miles from the shores of Florida the Dulles brothers seemingly had their hands in everything.

If anything, one should read this book with a strong sense of relief tinged with a modicum of sadness. Relief for the fact that we as Americans have grown ever stronger since this strange era of foreign policy commanded our place and standing in the world order; albeit sadness because of the fact that for the actions of two men numerous regions of the world are where they're at today. Did the Dulles brothers have the best interests of the United States in mind or were they just mandarins for their own brand of armageddon and just didn't care who they hurt or who they rolled over? Trust me, after you read this book you'll never be able to see American foreign policy the same way again. I know for certain that I won't! Extremely informative, very sobering and at times very chilling this book details just what it means to be an American on the world stage and the results and ramifications of policies set so long ago.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2013.

[Alan Tomkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, this is an engaging and highly interesting read about the Dulles brothers' role in shaping and driving America's Cold War foreign policy through their positions as Secretary of State and CIA Director. The effect was that America's diplomacy and covert adventurism were intertwined...with ultimately less than favorable long term results for America and the rest of the world. Read this book. It explains why America behaved the way it did during the post WWII years, and why we have been largely hated across the world as a result. The Dulles brothers were powerful, dynamic movers and shakers; but they were not deep thinkers, and they were not able to view events and nations outside the context of their own Cold War viewpoint. In particular, they could not understand nationalist sentiments within third world countries emerging from colonial pasts, and they could not tolerate neutral states: countries were either with us or with monolithic communism directed by the Kremlin. One has to wonder what things would have been like if Ho Chi Minh (whose success in Vietnam was a foregone conclusion acknowledged as far back as 1953 by the entire world except for the Dulles brothers and the Eisenhower administration) had been offered an Asian equivalent of the Marshall Plan when he approached the U.S. seeking friendship and cooperation. And that is only one example. The Dulles brothers' plots and actions throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are directly responsible for many of the foreign policy dilemmas and conundrums we have faced ever since. One can speculate on all sorts of "what ifs" had their personalities and characters been different, or if others had held their jobs; but the way they shaped history and American attitudes, and the adventures they engaged in make for fascinating, thought provoking reading. I felt the author was a bit of a communist apologist, only mentioning briefly in passing toward the end of the book that the Soviets actually were a formidable threat. And I could have done without the final pages where he psychoanalyzes Foster and Allen Dulles--and American society as a whole--as if he is preaching or lecturing at the reader. But overall, I really enjoyed this book, and not least because it revealed to me a whole new side of the Eisenhower administration of which I was totally unaware, darker and more secretive and devious than the Eisenhower White House depicted in my favorite historian, Jean Edward Smith's biography of Ike. I recommend this book. If you like both history and spy thrillers filled with political intrigue, it will appeal to you.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer's new biography of the Cold Warriors John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen (JFD was Secretary of State and AD was the head of the CIA during the Eisenhower years) is superb. Having grown up during the Cold War, I have a very strong sense of the mentality or paradigm that drove U.S. foreign and domestic policy during that period. Kinzer does a brilliant job of sketching what that paradigm was and why it persisted despite evidence that was frequently brought forward to discredit it. The parallels between the Cold War era mentality shared by the Dulles brothers and many Americans of their generation and the "War on Terror" mentality shared by key individuals in the U.S. government and many Americans of the present generation are so powerfully implied in this book as to be almost overwhelming. I cannot overstate the significance of Kinzer's biography for understanding the present political scene as it pertains to the role of the U.S. in the world today and its relationship to Muslim majority states.

[Clif · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cold War is thankfully over. For the US and the USSR it was a time of mutual suspicion where agreement was almost impossible and the lands of small nations were battlefields by proxy.

John Foster and Allen Dulles were rock solid Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose shared vision of the world as the scene for conflict between good and evil was not disturbed by any facts to the contrary. The widespread outbreak of nationalism in the many countries liberated from European colonialism could not in the view of the Dulles brothers be anything other than an occasion for the malign power in Moscow to spread influence in hope of world domination. Nikita Krushchev's often outrageous statements helped support this view.

The American people were continually advised to be both afraid and resolute in confronting communism. John Foster Dulles, known as Foster Dulles, as Eisenhower's Secretary of State toured the world giving speech after speech preaching that the good people of the United States needed to face down the evil behind the Iron Curtain. Long before George W. Bush used the phrase, Foster Dulles told the world it could only be with or against the US; no middle ground, no compromise was possible.

At the same time, Allen Dulles headed the CIA, an organization that he was instrumental in establishing on the basis of his WW2 experience in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that employed espionage against Nazi Germany. Foster and Allen were in constant contact and each took the advice of the other with far greater weight than that of anyone else. It was an echo chamber. Both had been in the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm (it still exists) that specialized in business mergers and foreign investment and that had made them rich. As might be said on Wall Street, their outlook on the world accorded with their book.

The new intelligence agency was made up of Allen Dulles' network of the elite; graduates of prestigious US universities with intellect and income to spare and a common worldview, but little understanding of foreign peoples and politics. It was an agency of cronies in big business with far too much ignorance of the real world not inhibiting an enthusiasm to mold it. Inducing chaos in distant lands could be easily planned in a large home outside of Washington DC while enjoying a pipe after a hearty dinner with friends.

In personality the brothers were quite different. Foster was the cold, adamant preacher without doubts quite ready to tell others they were wrong. Winston Churchill said that Foster was "the only bull I know that carries his china shop around with him." Allies could expect lengthy and tiresome lectures. If things appeared to Foster to be likely, then they were factual. In sharp contrast, Allen was easy-going, personable, delighted in conversation and was always on the lookout for a new sexual conquest not excluding the queen of Greece. His long suffering wife, Clover, settled for this to the point of befriending at least two of Allen's lovers.

Behind both brothers was President Eisenhower who was determined that the United States not get into another world war or break the federal budget over defense. Ike saw covert action as a suitable partner for nuclear weaponry in his "New Look" defense posture that rejected large numbers of armed men in response to the immense Red Army that stood ready in eastern Europe. Ike presented a mild mannered face to the American people, but Stephen Kinzer leaves no doubt that the president was fully behind all of the operations of the CIA and agreed with the Dulles view of the USSR as a menace to be contained if not rolled back. This explains how covert operations in third world countries could be aggressively pursued even as direct challenges such as occurred in Czechoslovakia and Hungary were not opposed.

Early success for the CIA in Guatemala and Iran that overthrew Arbenz and Mossadegh respectively were hardly kept secret and won admiration for Allen Dulles who delighted in the details, secrecy and daring-do of such operations; an arm-chair spy who loved his job. What we now call blowback was never a consideration. That the seeds of resentment of the US were being firmly planted by these deeds even as they were denied by Eisenhower at the exact time that they were underway seemed beyond the grasp of Ike and his operatives. Readers should take this history into consideration as we witness the current bad relationship between Tehran and Washington.

US support for insurgencies had nothing to do with the promotion of democracy. Dictators could be just as easily backed as an elected president or prime minister. All that counted was that a government supported private enterprise and respect for religion.

The case of Indonesia is quite poignantly related. Prime Minister Sukarno was a big fan of the United States, visiting it and receiving a ticker tape parade in NYC only to be undermined by the United States shortly thereafter when a CIA operation supporting rebel forces attempted to overthrow Sukarno in a civil war simply because Sukarno allowed a communist party to participate in Indonesian politics. The CIA effort failed and was exposed by way of a CIA pilot, an American, who was captured along with full documentation of his bombing runs. Sukarno was outraged and called out US involvement while at the same time expressing bewilderment that his friendship should be so easily snubbed.

The Dulles brothers and Ike have passed into history, but the CIA only went on to become an ever larger agency taking on further operations that brought condemnation and quite legitimate charges of hypocrisy against the US, not to mention going beyond control in the Iran-Contra operation during the Reagan years. A comprehensive account of CIA deeds is in the book Killing Hope by William Blum.

Stephen Kinzer wraps up the book by telling us that the Dulles brothers were not significantly different from the majority of Americans in their views during the 1950's. It's worth noting the similarities as follows:

>We know what is best
>We are unique
>We are the instrument of destiny
>We are civilized and moral and in a position to judge others accordingly
>We are champions of liberty
>Private enterprise is unquestionably good and should be spread everywhere
>Prompt action is superior to cautious analysis
>The world for its own good is to be shaped as we see fit
>Good and evil are easily defined, simplifying the world
>There are good people and bad people, a good world comes from getting rid of the bad people
>Determination can overcome any obstacle

As someone who was born in 1950, this accords very well with the America I knew growing up and far too much of this thinking that is both arrogant and ignorant remains today. If all Americans knew the contents of the book, at least some ignorance could be reduced.

[Frank Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Dulles brothers are two of the more fascinating figures in 20th century US foreign policy. One helped create the CIA and the other became the influential Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration. But their reach and impact reached back to World War l and the creation of the post-war world that directly created the world crisis that fomented World War ll.

Stephen Kinzer has done a lot of research on both brothers and presents a clear, crisp accounting of their lives - intertwined and mutually encouraging over the decades. What is undeniable is the Dulles brothers were more than anything the products of tremendous family privilege and power (having a grandfather and uncle as Secretary's of State helps - a lot). One was a roving rake who enjoyed seducing women as much as he enjoyed the spy game (Allen) while the other thrived as perhaps the leading corporate lawyer in America who sought to shape Republican foreign policy in a way that it was deeply impressed by a muscular Presbyterian missionary spirit.

And both had many personal flaws and were responsible for policy failures and missteps - which Kinzer reports with abundance and bias. And this is the real setback of Kinzer's book. He is so critical of the Dulles brothers to the point you are left with the clear understanding the book is flawed and not entirely fair.

Adding to this are a number of odd references and clearly biased descriptions. Two quick examples: Kinzer referes to the President Harry Truman's famous and Cold War policy decision to contain Communism and the foundation of US foreign policy for more than 40 years - which was enunciated in the a document known as NSC 68 - as a "chilling policy decree." The fact is the only one who felt the "chill" of NSC 68 was the politburo in Moscow.

Shortly thereafter this reference, Kinzer extensively quotes the well-known Communist hack/spy I.F. Stone as a "polemist" and uses him as an objective commentator of John Foster Dulles comments and views.

But the most egregious statement Kinzer makes is when he says: "during the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Americans projected the worst images of their World War ll enemies, including the Nazi campaigns of mass murder, onto Soviet Communism." Americans did view Soviet Communism in this way because it was true (!!!). Kinzer grotesquely seems to forget the tens of millions of people slaughtered by Stalin.

While Kinzer overall offers a highly readable and, again, well researched book, the Dulles brothers deserve a better biography than this.

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know, I know this isn't a real review— but isn't a Malory Archer gif almost as good?

If not, then just take my word for it and read the book anyway. Seriously! Allen Dulles had a Jungian analysis done of Hitler (by a woman who was involved in his bizarre open marriage to Clover), and Foster (that's what all the cool kids called JFD) was so taken with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie that he launched a Jazz Diplomacy initiative as Secretary of State. At the very least, the fact that Malory is confident that this duo is rotting in hell should pique your interest.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Brothers is a dual biography of Alan and John Foster Dulles. From boyhood lunches with high government officials and business magnates to leading roles in one of the world's most elite law firms to toppling governments, these men lead extraordinary lives. While Kinzer does a good job of relating basic facts, his strong bias makes this a rather simplistic work. It is clear that many--if not most--of the policies implemented by the Dulles brothers were misguided, despicable, and, upon occasion, even heartbreaking. Nevertheless, throughout the narrative, Kinzer attributes only negative motives to the brothers' actions while viewing those of their adversaries--such as Soviet premiers and various third world leaders--as entirely benevolent. The truth is rarely so simple. Surely, the Dulleses had some admirable intentions and certainly Soviet premiers often dissembled. Rather than writing a nuanced and thoughtful piece of history, Kinzer committed one of the very mistakes he frequently attributed to Alan & John Foster--seeing the world in terms of black and white rather than in shades of gray.

[David Buccola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer does a great job of providing insight into the lives of the Dulles brothers and their impact on foreign policy. There's a lot to like about this book. The elite background of the Dulles brothers is crucial in understanding the trajectory their lives took, and Kinzer does a great job of walking us through that. In so many critical ways these two men directed the course of events for the United States in ways that are still felt today and Kinzer does a fantastic job of laying that out for the reader. Kinzer does a great job of presenting the facts. It's his conclusions that I found so distressing, and I think in the end they take a lot away from an otherwise fantastic book.

Kinzer again and again goes out of his way to make excuses for the inexcusable, undemocratic and criminal acts of the Dulles brothers. These men who grew up behind the curtain of power, spent their lives working for the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet, and spent much of their lives scaring their fellow citizens with the cold war narrative, Kinzer wants us to believe, were somehow just as fooled as the rest of us. I think it's safe to say that Kinzer makes a fatal error here. While it's clear that the documentary record left by the Dulles brothers is full of examples of them justifying just about everything they did on a Communist Conspiracy, is there any reason to think they themselves believed that? The short answer is no.

What's odd is that Kinzer documents the ties the Dulles Brothers had with corporations like United Fruit and their interests in Guatemala but rarely draws the conclusion that their obvious financial motivations might trump their supposed fear of the communist menace. And yet again and again, whether we're talking about the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala or the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran there were clear corporate interests at stake. But what's most distressing about this failure on Kinzer's part is that he goes out of his way to blame the rest of us for the crimes of the Dulles Brothers:

"Americans who seek to understand the roots of their country's trouble in the world should look not at Foster and Allen's portraits but in a mirror." Really? There's on obvious problem with this irrational conclusion by Stephen Kinzer: nearly everything the Dulles brothers actually did across the globe was completely unknown to the American people, kept secret and denied for decades. It wasn't a secret from the victims of these crimes. If these two terrorists--and that's what they were--were in such lock-step with the American people, why the need for such secrecy? Why the need for such duplicity? The American people loved Mossedegh; they loved Fidel Castro when he visited New York. They loved Lumumba. And again and again these victims of the Dulles Brothers crimes loved America. Ho Chi Minh modeled his declaration of independence on our own. Mossedegh begged Eisenhower for help even while Eisenhower was plotting with the British to overthrow him.

The problem here goes beyond the personal biases of Stephen Kinzer and point to a more systemic problem with what constitutes history in this country. The Dulles brothers, by all accounts, were secretive. They were raised in the art of state craft and well understood their class role in society. They were raised from an early age to be rulers, not ruled. And from the numerous examples cited in the book it's clear that they both understood the role of media and the art of "manufacturing consent" to borrow a phrase from their contemporary Walter Lipman. All that being said, where Kinzer draws his conclusions is from the written record by the Dulles brothers and their underlings. Would men of this calibre be so dumb as to commit their crimes to writing? Would they be so naive as to put the farce of their world wide communist conspiracy to writing? Of course not. But it's no surprise that those below them either believed it or were good at regurgitating its major talking points, and this is what passes for real history. Allen Dulles publicly and privately wrote about a communist conspiracy, his underlings reiterated these talking points, thus it must be true that he believed this.

Not surprisingly, Kinzer never quotes one of the Dulles brothers claiming that we need to go into Guatemala to protect our shares of United Fruit; nor do we find any quotes from the brothers aiming to protect western oil interests in Iran. I doubt any such quotes exist and yet it's quite clearly the real motivation behind much of what these men did with their lives. But there was an official narrative that could be used to hide what was actually happening and somehow that gets passed off by people like Kinzer as the real history. We were scared of the communist menace because of people like the Dulles brothers who fabricated the entire thing up and then were told that they believed it too!

The lengths to which Stephen Kinzer goes to absolve these two heinous men of their crimes disgusts me. That he pretends that the American people are somehow to blame for creating these two sociopaths is beyond the pale. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of very good information here and Kinzer is a good writer. But the assumptions he makes and the conclusions he draws just don't stand up to scrutiny. The Dulles Brothers should be reviled for the war criminals they were. The American people did not vote these men into office and we were rarely appraised of the massive crimes they were committing across the globe in our name. Their undermining of our democracy and that of many other countries should be a lesson to all of us.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to warm up to this book. I had to get used to the way the prose runs because rather than purring like a Cadillac it kind of clunks like an old farm tractor, an engine that misses and misfires, though it does slowly move along, planting the seeds of information and analysis. Maybe the reason the engine of this biography doesn't run more smoothly is because it's clogged with venom and spite. It's a near-assassination. It's a negative slant. Kinzer seems to want to paint a negative portrait of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. The former was Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, the latter the first civilian director of the CIA during the early years of its operation. I've read other biographies like this. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, which I reviewed here on Goodreads in 2009, and the Albert Grossman biography of Elvis disappointed in the same way. Biography approaching its subject in such a negative way and telling the life from all the bad angles makes for unbalanced biography. Unfair, too, because it can't be the complete story of these men who lived long, productive lives in service to American society and government. But it must be the story Kinzer wants to tell. He writes more on expose and polemic than biography.

The book is structured around 6 international leaders of the period Kinzer says the Dulleses called monsters: Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, President Sukarno of Indonesia, and Fidel Castro of Cuba. The governments of the first 3 were overthrown by U. S. intervention and influence, primarily through actions initiated by John Foster and Allen Dulles, at State and the CIA. In my opinion, to explain the intricate, global-encompassing foreign policy of the U. S. in the 1950s as the intervention in 6 countries is to rob your work of the high octane fuel needed to write successful biography. I don't doubt that the Dulles brothers in power during those years had a hand in subverting governments. But by trying to make me believe they did no good, either, or didn't act in the best interests of America is to subvert my sense of history and my values of good biography.

To be fair, the book becomes less strident following the death of John Foster in 1959, leaving Allen alone in government. Though the reader knows the seriously-flawed Bay of Pigs, a CIA operation. is still to come. But Kinzer's summation claims the brothers misread Soviet intentions, motives, and attitudes, and that misunderstanding led them and America into a more threatening stance which created friction between the ideologies. He writes, "John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles guided their country through the world during an era of extremes. The passage of time, and the end of the Cold War, make it difficult to grasp the depth of fear that gripped many Americans during the 1950s. Foster and Allen were chief promoters of that fear. They did as much as anyone to shape America's confrontation with the Soviet Union. Their actions helped set off some of the world's most profound long-term crises." To me, to blame the Dulles brothers for the confrontational stance and fear generated by the ideological competition is to forget that Churchill advocated a preventive war against the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, that George F. Kennan's influential views of Soviet intentions and motives encouraged the policy of containment adhered to during all those years, and that Harry Truman's actions in Berlin and Korea began the pattern of confrontation before the Dulleses came to power. Sometimes I thought Kinzer wrong. To claim that singer and actor Pat Boone's announcement that he wouldn't kiss his leading ladies was an example of the religious climate of 1950s America is to misjudge the times. (Even at 15 I knew he was making a mistake by not kissing Ann-Margret.) To compare the interventions of the Dulles brothers to Shane ridding the valley of bad guys, or Eisenhower to a sheriff in a lawless town, is to misjudge men.

But to be fair again, by Kinzer's summation the engine was running more smoothly, the rattling rhetoric not so noisy. The stars are generous. The skies are clearing here, and I can see them again. Just as I could always see there was some truth in Kinzer's telling. It's just that he didn't tell it all.

[David Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story that Stephen Kinzer tells is an important one, tracing the sometimes tragic meaning of "American Freedom," in real terms, for other parts of the world. The role of US corporations in developing countries has formed a lasting part of the image of the United States in those countries, yet most Americans remain ignorant of it, and of the degree to which US foreign policy has been shaped to fit corporate interests. His choice of the Dulles brothers at first seems an ideal vehicle for this exploration, but ultimately clouds and confuses his thesis. For it is not really clear if he's more upset when they succeed or when they fail. The author's anger at his subjects is clear; a less overtly angry book would have been more effective at producing anger in his readers, for the facts, once uncovered, speak eloquently enough.

Kinzer begins with tracing the early life of the brothers, whom fortune had placed ideally for future prominence. No shades of Horatio Alger here. And the pattern of ready movement between the corridors of corporate and government power was well established and thoroughly modeled for the young brothers.

Both brothers held prominent roles in the international law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and it held a prominent role in their lives, particularly of the elder brother. He suggests that their work here led to the habit of comfortably equating the interests of the corporations and that of the US itself, which seems a fair conclusion. But more on the substance of the work, and its effects internationally would have been welcome.

The Brothers reached the height of their power in the Eisenhower administration, and the six campaigns that they undertook, against Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and President Sukarno in Indonesia, form the core of the book. Events in Europe and the Middle East provide additional context.

At this point, the choice of the brothers as the vehicle for this story shows its difficulty. The brothers represent two different types of American who have had influence on the world. Kinzer is right to highlight these archetypes, but the very closeness of the two brothers means that their cooperation often left no record. JFD emerges as a man of self-righteous principles. His worldview easily equated the interests of his own kind with virtue, and those of others with evil. AMD, in contrast, seems to have been little troubled by principles, and mostly enjoyed the activity in which he engaged, and unashamedly sought the fruits of power. One of the most remarkable omissions of the book, in my mind, is that there is no consideration of how the ostentatiously virtuous JFD rationalized the equally ostentatious amorality of his brother.

Dwight Eisenhower in this account demonstrates his mastery of a role later adopted by Ronald Reagan: an avuncular figure disarming and distracting critique of the real activity of his administration.

At the end of his work, Kinzer resorts to psychological studies to describe how beliefs shape perception. And here, the difficulties of his approach congeal: if one believes that 'what's good for General Motors is good for America,' then the Dulles brothers were just hard-headed, unsentimental men, who like their boss Eisenhower, did their duty as well as they could, which included some unpleasantness, and inevitably a few mistakes. But that usurpation of American government--of, by, and for corporate interests--is, I think, Kinzer's real enemy. The choice of biography as a vehicle gives disproportionate prominence to instances of personal conflict, where a named enemy like Lumumba or Castro enables a personal obsession that a rising in Germany or Hungary does not. Even more important, concentration on the foibles of the Dulles brothers are a distraction. If a JFD is dangerous, it is not through failure to live up to his principles, but because of the very nature of those principles, and the untroubled sincerity with which he follows them.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A workmanlike elucidation of the employment history of two nutters and the paranoiacs who hired them, and the F’d Up things they did. It started with wealthy clients of Sullivan &Cromwell, changing governments in Central America to tweak their ROI (return on investment). …Your heart goes out to Sukarno, that Indonesian playboy and idealist, trying to steer his newly independent country through the treacherous straits of the Cold War stare down. Sukarno travels across the US and wows the average American, then after he goes to Moscow the CIA goes after his countrymen like the L.A. cops on Rodney King as Sukarno cries “Can’t we all just get along?” The author gives us a slow burn, and a fair portrayal of the context of Cold War paranoia in which these two brothers gleefully and fearfully shot, tortured and bombed their way through the nascent democracies of the third world.

SPOILER: the author gives us a terrific oh snap at the end of the book, viz.:

“The half century of history that has unfolded since Foster and Allen passed from the scene suggests that they share responsibility for much that has gone wrong with the world. The blame, however, does not end with them. To gaze at their portraits and think, “They did it,” would be to reassuring. It would also be unfair. Americans who seek to understand the roots of their country’s trouble in the world should not look at Foster and Allen’s portraits but in a mirror.

Diego Rivera’s mural Glorious Victory [portraying the Dulles brothers] should not be in the basement of the Pushkin Museum, it should be a Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington. Keeping it out of view allows Americans to ignore realities that many wish to ignore. It encourages the childlike belief that since bad things are done by bad people, they will stop happening when the bad people are gone.
… Rather than forget or vilify them, however, Americans should embrace them. Their stories are full of deep meaning for the United States. They are us. We are them.”

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful book about the Dulles brothers. The book is divided into 3 sections with the first being a fascinating look that the Brothers and their families, families that included 2 US Secretaries of State and then the Brothers involvement in high stakes legal and diplomatic efforts. The second section outlines 6 of the covert actions the brothers were involved in from Iran and Guatemala to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. A fascinating look at US Foreign policy from the late 1940's through the early 1960's. A lot of revisionism is seen in this book, and sometimes 20-20 hindsight makes the Brothers actions look even worse in the 21st Century. A third section neatly wraps things up. I have read other of Kinzer's books and he is extremely detail oriented. He is dead-on with his facts and research and that makes this and all his other books necessary reading for those interested in the US role in role in the world (As good as this book is, his previous book "Overthrow" is even better!) from the days of the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy until today. This is not a fast book to read, nor should it be. The topic is heavy, the actions and results are extremely consequential and we all have to come face to face with US foreign policies for the past 125 years.

[alex angelosanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a country (colonial project) filled with guys (settlers) being dudes (extracting value through exploitation, coercion, and violence), and that makes the Dulles boys both theme and variation in the frontier's dirge.

Kinzer is maybe the best writer today in tieing the disparate worlds of the American 19th and 20th centuries together in one cohesive vision of expansion. the scientific sense of "For something to happen it often needs to happen twice" is true here as well, both in history and personally between these masters of state and espionage

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Kinzer makes the point in "The Brothers: .." that most Americans do not recollect the names of the two brothers who shaped the foreign policy of the United States in the mid-century Cold War period. This is somewhat remarkable because John Foster Dulles' death in 1959 was a nationally-recognized period of mourning, only eclipsed by the public grief surrounding the death of President John Kennedy four years later. During that short interim, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, and no one regretted his passing from the scene of power diplomacy.

This book is rooted in the careers of these two individuals. They were raised in privileged, upper-middle class circumstances. The Calvinist beliefs of their minister father especially influenced Foster. The brothers were the grandsons and nephews of two Secretaries of State. Their uncle Bert (Robert Lansing) was Woodrow Wilson's second Secretary, during World War I. He used his influence to get them started in life. Allen learned the spy trade during that time and spent the war engaged in intelligence gathering in Switzerland; he would go back there to run American spy and intelligence operations in that important neutral country in World War II. His involvement in those activities would lead to a job in the new Central Intelligence Agency after World War II, and he would eventually become its director while Foster would become Secretary of State.

Foster's rise to prominence began with his employment as a lawyer for the extremely powerful firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. This law firm represented the interests of major American corporations throughout the world. S & C's involvements included everything needed to make money for their clients at the nexus where commerce and government meet. The company was involved in countless deals with all kinds of governments. One of the first assignments for Foster was working in Costa Rica for the interests of United Fruit Company. This company engaged in bribing South American dictators while enriching itself to their countries' rich agricultural resources free of government oversight.

Foster would eventually bring Allen into the firm during the inevitable inter-war shutdown of American spy activity. After World War II, Allen's wartime employer, the O.S.S., was also disbanded. Rapidly developing activities leading to the Cold War would necessitate a return to intelligence work, and the CIA would be founded under Allen's old boss, Wild Bill Donovan, who would bring Allen into the firm. Allen would eventually become its head.

The brothers became State and CIA heads on the same date Dwight Eisenhower took the oath of office in January 1953. From this time forward the diplomatic and secret foreign policy of the United States was dominated by two siblings who carried over the philosophy that corporate business interests were paramount, to the extent that the government was obligated to protect them, with military force if necessary. They shared a drive to find and confront evil, which now would take the form of enemies of their country.

And they saw lots of threats to their vaunted corporate society, in the governments of Guatemala, Iran, the Congo and Indonesia. It didn't matter that the first two countries had open societies, and the others were headed by leaders who were trying to find a neutral niche in the world of power blocs while looking for a way to govern poor populations emerging from colonial rule. The brothers saw patriots, nationalists and anti-colonialists in these and other countries as Communist "stooges"; in the case of the above-mentioned countries, the "stooges" were Jacobo Arbenz, Mohammad Mossodegh, Patrice Lumumba and President Sukarno. Nationalism of the property of foreign companies and indifference to the Dulles' "devil theory" of Communism meant that those governments were hostile to the interests of the U.S. It didn't take long for plots to be hatched to bring down these leaders, with the combined analytical powers of the State Department and CIA subjugated to the pre-ordained common assumptions and prejudices of two agency heads who bypassed layers of departmental expertise while making monumental decisions between themselves.

Plots to discredit and eventually overthrow legitimate leaders of foreign countries were facilitated by the enabling law placed into effect when the CIA was formed, in which the intelligence gathering, analysis and covert action approval and planning were legally allowed to take place in one agency, contrary to the intelligence/analysis/oversight relationships of other governments. With a captive State Department providing the rationale for defining where ideological threats to the United States were emerging, it was very easy to mobilize military or paramilitary operations into any part of the globe.

Of course, these two governmental leaders were required to report to the President. One can wonder if some of their worst interventionist meddlings were the result of pulling the wool over the eyes of the grandfatherly Ike, but Kinzer solidly dispels that notion. He makes it clear that Eisenhower was an enthusiastic practitioner of destabilizing operations against suspect countries. Ike also believed that the world was a battleground between the United States and its allies and the center of of global conspiracy, the Soviet Union, and its minions. The only problem in combatting the other superpower was that no one could risk open conflict with Russia or China, since that would being on a nuclear armageddon. So, clandestine activities would be initiated against countries that could be described as proxies for the Politburo's evil intentions. This meant that the official U.S. policy toward Communism of rollback, appraisal and retaliation were never actually carried out.

It can be argued that two other of Foster and Allen's "Devil" countries, Vietnam and Cuba, were legitimate enemies of the United States because they were Communist. Regarding Vietnam, however, Kinzer points out that that country never declared war or carried out any act of aggression against the United States before we started covering France's 1950's losses with our own involvement. The Dulles' and Eisenhower put American forces where the French, who had actual colonial interests in the country, decided to pull out. The American rationale was based on the Dulles' "Domino Theory" of keeping all of the countries of Southeast Asia from becoming puppet dominions of Russia and its pawn, China, as in Vietnam. The only trouble was, Ho Chi Min was no one's puppet, and China was not Russia's pawn.

Certainly the United States has maintained that the interests of any country in the Western Hemisphere were also its interests, since the early nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine. The disclosure that the former freedom fighter, Fidel Castro, was going to run his country as a Marxist state was of deep concern to its northern neighbor. However, the ill-conceived CIA operation to invade Cuba was green-lighted after the CIA's failure of a wacky attempt to partner with organized crime bosses to assassinate Castro. Eisenhower had enthusiastically approved planning for the invasion, but it was left to his successor, Kennedy, to approve the landing at the Bay of Pigs. The resulting catastrophe was a good lesson for the new President on the dangers of relying on blind faith when dealing with agency experts on military and espionage operations.

Kinzer lists three continuing legacies which characterized the foreign policy direction taken by the United States since the tenure of the Dulles': A deepening and lengthening of the Cold War resulting from a "ruthlessly confrontational view of the world" (p. 616); a lack of understanding of the Third World; and an ignorance of the long term effects of clandestine operations.