PART I
1
Early every summer morning in the first years of the twentieth century, two small boys awoke as dawn broke over Lake Ontario. Their day began with a cold bath, the only kind their father allowed. After breakfast, they gathered with the rest of their family on the front porch for a Bible reading, sang a hymn or two, and knelt as their father led them in prayer. Their duty done, they raced to the shore, where their grandfather and uncle were waiting to take them out to stalk the wily smallmouth bass.
Never have a couple of catboats on any lake held three such generations. The old man with billowing sideburns had been America’s thirty-second secretary of state. His son-in-law was on his way to becoming the forty-second. As for the two boys, they would ultimately outshine both of their illustrious fishing partners. The elder, John Foster Dulles, would become the fifty-second secretary of state and a commanding force in world politics. His brother, Allen, would also grow up to shape the fate of nations, but in secret ways no one could then imagine. Later in life he came to believe that his interest in espionage was shaped in part by the experience of “finding the fish, hooking the fish and playing the fish, [working] to draw him in and tire him until he’s almost glad to be caught in the net.”
Those morning fishing trips through the lakes and rivers of upstate New York, and the afternoons and evenings that followed, were a cascade of lessons in American history and global politics. They influenced the boys in ways they could not yet begin to fathom, making them part of the swirl of forces that would shape the United States when, half a century later, it entered its period of greatest prosperity but also most terrifying dread.
“Here in delightful surroundings we indulged ourselves not only in fishing, sailing and tennis, but in never-ending discussions on the great world issues which our country was then growing up to face,” Allen later wrote. “These discussions were naturally given a certain weight and authority by the voice of a former secretary of state and a secretary-of-state-to-be. We children were at first the listeners and the learners, but as we grew up we became vigorous participants in international debates.”
The first American member of this extraordinary Scots-Irish family, Joseph Dulles, fled Ireland in 1778 to escape anti-Protestant repression, made his way to South Carolina, and became a prosperous, slave-owning planter. His family was pious and inclined to the clergy. One of his sons, Joseph Heatly Dulles, served as an officer of three Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia. That officer’s son, John Welsh Dulles, “a delicate boy,” went to Yale to study medicine but felt called to missionary work instead. At the age of twenty-six he set off to preach the gospel in India, famously traveling for 132 days aboard a tempest-tossed ship to reach Madras. Five years later, health problems forced him to return home to Philadelphia, where he took a job directing missionary campaigns for the American Sunday School Union. He wrote a religious manual for Union soldiers in the Civil War, traveled in the Holy Land, and published two books with strongly Christian themes, Life in India and The Ride Through Palestine.
Two of John Welsh Dulles’s three sons followed him into the clergy. Reverend Joseph H. Dulles III directed the library of Princeton Theological Seminary for nearly half a century. His brother Reverend Allen Macy Dulles was a preacher and theologian whose two sons became secretary of state and director of central intelligence.
One of the most cosmopolitan young American women of her generation, Edith Foster, met Allen Macy Dulles in 1881, when both were touring Paris. Edith, just eighteen, was living a Gilded Age fairy tale. Her extravagantly bewhiskered father was John Watson Foster, an eminent lawyer, diplomat, and pillar of the Republican Party. Foster had a fascination with children, and after his only son and one of his daughters died in childhood, he lavished attention on the two daughters who survived. He took Edith and her younger sister, Eleanor, with him when he was named minister to Mexico, and the family lived there for seven years. Then they moved to St. Petersburg, where Foster was minister to the court of Czar Alexander II, emancipator of the Russian serfs. The girls grew up in elegant diplomatic circles, riding horseback in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, dancing at grand balls with Russian princes, and touring European capitals alongside their doting father. Edith’s blossoming romance with Reverend Dulles was interrupted when her father was named minister to Spain. For the next year and a half the young clergyman waited patiently while she enjoyed life among Spanish aristocrats, making a special friend of the infanta. When the family returned home in the summer of 1885, Edith found her suitor as ardent as ever. They were married the following January.
The couple settled in Watertown, a haven for New York millionaires on the shore of Lake Ontario, where Reverend Dulles was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. When Edith became pregnant, she moved to Washington for a few months to enjoy the comfort of her father’s three-story mansion. On February 25, 1888, she gave birth there to her first child and named him after her father: John Foster Dulles. Five years later, on April 7, 1893, came a second son, Allen Welsh Dulles. There were also three girls, and all developed a strong sense of family solidarity.
The boys grew up swimming, sailing, hunting, and fishing, but neither was especially strong or athletic. Foster, as the older brother was called then and throughout his life, survived a severe fever as an infant and at the age of thirteen caught typhus, nearly died, and for many months was too weak to walk and had to be carried wherever he went. Allen, whom the family called Allie, was born with a clubfoot, which was then considered a source of shame, but was operated on secretly as soon as doctors considered him old enough and came to walk almost normally.
Religiosity permeated the Dulles household. Morning rituals were only part of their piety. Each Sunday the boys attended three church services, carrying pencil and paper so they could take notes on their father’s sermons. Afterward the family would discuss and analyze them. On many evenings they gathered for religious reading: stories about missionaries, articles from the Herald & Presbyter, and devotional classics like Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. Home life was shaped by contests to see who could recite the longest Bible passage, and by singing hymns.
Foster, whose favorite hymn was “Work for the Night Is Coming,” felt the impact of this environment most deeply. According to his mother’s diary, by the age of two he was fascinated with prayers and “always says Amen very heartily”; at four he was a fully attentive Sunday School pupil; at five he displayed a “lovely devotional spirit”; and he celebrated turning seven by memorizing seven psalms.
Missionaries on home leave were frequent guests at the Dulles household. Many told captivating stories of their efforts to convert unbelievers in lands from Syria to China. Their commitment to spreading the Gospel was held up as fulfillment of a divine ideal.
“We did not think of these people in terms of foreign policy, but we did grow to understand the life, the poverty, the superstitions, and the eager hopefulness of those with whom the missionaries dealt,” the boys’ younger sister Eleanor later wrote. “Foster gained much from these contacts, some of which he renewed in later life.… There was something unique that left an indelible mark on all of us—not only a deep faith in central religious truths, but also a sense of the obligation of such a faith toward each other and toward those distant people who were striving to gain new light and freedom.”
Edith considered her boys too special to be left to public schools, and arranged for them to be given extra tutoring from live-in governesses and at a private academy. When Foster was fifteen, she took him on a grand tour of Europe; Allie joined them later. She did much to open their eyes to the world’s possibilities. For all her influence, though, most of what they learned as they grew up came from two formidable men.
Reverend Dulles was a vigorous Presbyterian and a product of missionary tradition. He was austere and demanding, but also scholarly, wise, and devoted to his family. His fervent belief in Christianity, and in the need for missionary work to spread its essential truths, blended easily into a conviction that America’s destiny was to go forth and raise up the world’s benighted masses.
“Its strengths, I think, lie in the feeling that you are given a certain task to perform,” one member of the Dulles clan later wrote of this Calvinist approach to life. “Its weakness lies in the reverse of that, that you may make the mistake of feeling that you are God’s spokesman.”
The other towering figure of the Dulles brothers’ youth, “Grandfather Foster,” gave them a quite different but strikingly complementary set of interests, perspectives, and values. During summers on Lake Ontario as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and later at his manse in Washington, he mesmerized them with tales from his tumultuous life: moving westward, clearing land, subduing nature and hostile natives, starting a business, joining with ambitious men, and finding a path to wealth and power. He had lived a classic pioneer life in the age of manifest destiny, embodying the archetypal story of a brave man who sets off to tame wild lands and illuminate dark places. America was to him a nation blessed by Providence, powerful to the point of invincibility, whose people were destined to spread, civilize, and command. He transmitted this belief to his grandsons. From him they also learned how profitable it can be to ingratiate oneself with men of wealth and influence.
“Grandfather Foster” grew up on the Indiana frontier, became editor of his hometown newspaper, and used it to promote the Republican Party. His diplomatic posts were rewards for helping to elect Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield. In 1892 another Republican president, Benjamin Harrison, appointed him secretary of state. He served just eight months because Harrison failed to win re-election.
History remembers John Watson Foster’s brief term as secretary of state for a singular accomplishment. In 1893 he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. President Harrison had discreetly encouraged white settlers in Hawaii to rebel against Queen Liliuokalani, and when they did, Secretary of State Foster endorsed the landing of American troops at Honolulu to support them. The settlers proclaimed themselves Hawaii’s new government, the United States quickly recognized their regime, and the monarchy was no more.
“The native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government,” Foster later wrote, “and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages which Providence had given them.”
This made John Watson Foster the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government. Others would follow—including, more than a half century later, his grandson.
After leaving office, “Grandfather Foster” considered returning to his Indiana law practice, but after hearing another Indiana lawyer recount a long legal battle over a hog, he decided to stay in Washington. He set out not to become a lawyer like others, but to invent a new profession: broker for corporations seeking favors in Washington and chances to expand abroad. It was an idea that fit the era. American farmers and manufacturers had so effectively mastered the techniques of mass production that they were producing far more than the United States could consume. They needed foreign markets to fend off ruin. Many also coveted resources from overseas. This required a muscular, assertive foreign policy that would force weaker countries to trade with Americans on terms Americans considered fair. With a career of diplomatic service behind him, capped by a term as secretary of state, and with deep ties to the Republican Party, John Watson Foster was ideally placed to help these American businesses. Corporations hired him to promote their interests in Washington and in foreign capitals. He was counsel to several foreign legations. The White House sent him on diplomatic missions. He negotiated trade agreements with eight countries and brokered a treaty with Britain and Russia regulating fur seal hunting in the Bering Sea.
This visionary protolobbyist thrived on his ability to shape American foreign policy to the benefit of well-paying clients. Both of his grandsons would do the same.
In order to be near his daughter and her boys, “Grandfather Foster” bought a home at Henderson Harbor, near Watertown. Soon afterward, another eminent figure entered their remarkable family. Edith’s sister, Eleanor, married a dapper lawyer and diplomat named Robert Lansing, whose family had deep roots in Watertown. Lansing and “Grandfather Foster” had many interests in common, among them fishing, Washington intrigue, and global politics. The old man welcomed Lansing into the clan, and the boys came to adore their “Uncle Bert.” This was the foursome that set out onto the choppy waters of Lake Ontario every summer morning.
“Grandfather Foster” was infatuated with the boys and decided that spending summers with them was not enough. He arranged to “borrow” them for the winter months at his red brick mansion near Dupont Circle in Washington. There they lived amid exotic art objects from China and other faraway lands, studied under private tutors, and were attended by liveried servants directed by a majordomo one member of the clan remembered as “Madison, the graying colored butler.” Best of all, they had the chance to sit through dinners with a dazzling parade of America’s political and business mandarins.
Foster was first “borrowed” when he was just five years old, and soon after arriving made his first visit to the White House, as a guest at a birthday party for one of President Harrison’s grandchildren. Allie began his visits a few years later. During their childhood and early teens, both brothers came to feel at ease in the most rarefied circles. They dined with ambassadors, senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and other grand figures including William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Andrew Carnegie, and Woodrow Wilson. Although they were too young to join dinner-table discussions of world events, they paid close attention. From these long evenings they absorbed not only the precepts, ideas, and perceptions that shaped America’s ruling class, but also its style, vocabulary, and attitudes.
“The women with their sequins and plumes and the men with their decorations and sashes were dashing and romantic,” their sister Eleanor later recalled. “Altogether, the teas and dinners had a dignity and graciousness that make modern cocktail parties seem chaotic by comparison.”
Even at this early stage of life, Allie showed extraordinary curiosity about other people. In Watertown he had made a hobby of observing his father’s habits and making notes about them. He was only seven years old when his grandfather “borrowed” him for the first time, but he was fascinated by the lively debate that shaped dinner conversations. After the guests departed, the future spymaster would sit in his bedroom and write reports of what he had heard, summarizing the opinions of the statesmen whose company he had just left and seeking to analyze their characters.
“I was an avid listener,” he later recalled.
During that first winter in Washington, Allie developed a fascination with the Boer War, and he poured out his passion in a six-thousand-word essay asserting that “the Boers want peace but England has to have the gold and so she goes around fighting all the little countries.” His grandfather was so impressed that he paid to have the essay privately printed, complete with spelling errors, and Allie became a published author at the age of eight. His older brother was unimpressed, sniffing that Allie’s anticolonial ideas were “wrong-headed and infantile.”
That view may have been correct, but in pronouncing it, Foster showed a judgmental harshness that never softened. From early childhood he was solemn, disciplined, and reserved, but also sharply self-righteous. He never lost his temper or complained, but disdained those who fell short of his standards. Memorizing long Bible passages—he could recite the book of John by heart—was one of his favorite pastimes.
Already the two brothers were developing markedly different personalities. Foster was hardworking, narrowly focused, socially inept, and serious beyond his years. His sister Eleanor saw him “more like a second father than a brother.” Allie was outgoing and amiable, but prone to explosions of temper. “His intensity of rage, his emotion when he objected to something, was often overwhelming,” Eleanor wrote.
The passage of time deepened these differences. Foster’s trademarks were a dark hat and umbrella, Allie’s a rakish mustache and pipe. Foster became rich and powerful, but remained nearly friendless and often seemed ill at ease. Allie developed into a witty raconteur whose genial manner could beguile almost anyone. He was, as one biographer put it, “the romantic and adventurous member of the family” but also “a much darker, more ruthless and unscrupulous man than his brother.”
Two of the boys’ three sisters lived their lives away from the limelight—Margaret married a clergyman, Nataline became a nurse—but the third, Eleanor, was as formidable a character as they were. She was nearsighted almost to the point of blindness, but her upbringing made her a hardy swimmer and nearly as good a hunter and angler as either of her brothers. Though hardly a rebel, she was a free thinker who quietly rejected much of her family’s Christian piety, had lesbian encounters while an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, wore silk stockings, cut her hair short, smoked in public, and was even known to swear. Later she earned a doctorate from Harvard, traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, taught economics, helped run the Social Security system, attended the Bretton Woods conference that reorganized the world economy after World War II, held a variety of diplomatic posts, and wrote a dozen books with titles like The French Franc 1914–1928. Her intellect was comparable to that of either of her brothers. Had attitudes toward women been different during her lifetime, she might have risen to outshine them both.
In the autumn of 1904, when Foster was sixteen, he entered the all-male environment of Princeton, his father’s alma mater, which had been founded by Presbyterians and was considered a kind of country-club seminary. He was uncomfortable at first, partly due to an outburst of self-hatred fueled by what the family biographer Leonard Mosley called “an emotion of a kind he had never experienced before.”
He developed a schoolboy “crush,” for he was only sixteen, on one of his fellow students, a wild-eyed rebel two years older than himself. The feeling was more than returned. It was an exhilarating experience until the moment when he discovered from his adored older partner that male relationships can also have their physical side. To a young man who had, so far, only embarrassedly bussed a girl at a party, it was a devastating and shocking revelation of what he knew from his Bible to be a shame and a sin. He conveyed this sense of degradation with such effect that the fellow student walked out of his room and left the college.
At the end of his junior year, Foster was given an opportunity few college students could imagine. The imperial government of China, which “Grandfather Foster” represented in Washington, hired the former secretary of state to advise its delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference in the Netherlands, and he took his grandson along as secretary. The conference was part of an ambitious effort, promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, to establish global rules that would reduce the danger of war. History assigns it only modest importance, but for nineteen-year-old John Foster Dulles it was a breathtaking introduction to the world of high-level diplomacy and international law. He was able to watch statesmen from dozens of countries ply their trade, with his grandfather at hand to interpret their aims, motives, and tactics.
By the time he returned to Princeton, Foster had decided he would not become a preacher, as those closest to him had expected, but a “Christian lawyer.” This “nearly broke my mother’s heart,” he later confessed.
Not every student at Princeton during those years dreamed of life in the political and economic elite. One young man who graduated in 1907, a year ahead of Foster, chose a radically different path. He was a Nebraskan named Howard Baskerville, like Foster the son and grandson of clergymen but moved by another sort of idealism. Neither Washington nor Wall Street appealed to him. Upon graduation he took a mission job as a schoolteacher in Iran. When he arrived, he found the country in the throes of revolution. He passionately supported the embattled democratic movement and, when it seemed about to be crushed by foreign-backed royalists, recruited a band of young fighters to defend it. On April 20, 1909, he was killed in battle, becoming the first and only American martyr to the cause of Iranian democracy. The news shocked Princeton. There is no record of how Foster reacted—he had already graduated—but the two young men’s life choices reflected much about both of them. They also foreshadowed a fateful clash. Howard Baskerville died defending parliamentary democracy in Iran; forty-four years later, Foster and his brother would help crush it.
Foster graduated second in the class of 1908 with a degree in philosophy. His thesis, entitled “The Theory of Judgment,” won him a year’s scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied under the philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson. Upon his return to the United States, he enrolled at George Washington University Law School, which he chose so he could live with “Grandfather Foster.” He finished the three-year course in two years. When not in class or studying, he worked as an assistant to his grandfather.
During these years, Foster sharpened his ambition. He saw how effectively “Grandfather Foster” used an insider’s knowledge of politics and diplomacy to promote the interests of corporate clients with global ambitions. This, he decided, was the career he wanted.
Allie arrived at Princeton two years after Foster graduated. Their dramatically different campus experiences reflected the psychic gap that separated them all their lives. Allie plunged into a sparkling world of clubs, parties, and girls. This drove his father to distraction and set off angry arguments whenever he returned home. Allie’s practice of last-minute cramming for exams always seemed to work, though, and like his brother he graduated with distinction. His thesis won him a cash prize of five hundred dollars, which he used to book passage to India, where through a Princeton connection he had found a job teaching English. It was his first step out from under his family’s long protective wing.
Among the many girls Allie dated while at Princeton was a dainty, fragile one named Janet Avery, whose family lived in Auburn, New York, where Reverend Dulles had moved to teach at Auburn Theological Seminary. Allie found Janet staid and boring, and quickly moved on. Soon afterward, Janet became the object of his older brother’s affection. The traits that led Allie to drop her—steadiness, down-to-earth practicality, conventional attitudes, lack of frivolity—were just the ones Foster admired. With typical precision, he made a date to take her canoeing on the same day his bar exam was scheduled in Buffalo; if he felt confident he had passed, he would propose. The exam went well. A few hours later, while paddling, Foster asked Janet to marry him. She accepted immediately.
As Foster had guessed, he passed the bar exam easily. At his grandfather’s suggestion he applied for a position at Sullivan & Cromwell, the country’s most eminent corporate law firm. His credentials were impressive: an outstanding academic record at Princeton, graduate study at the Sorbonne, a precocious understanding of international law, some command of French, German, and Spanish, and even a summer of behind-the-scenes work at a major diplomatic conference. The partners at Sullivan & Cromwell were unimpressed. They rarely hired anyone who had not graduated from an Ivy League law school.
Foster, however, was better connected than most applicants rejected by Sullivan & Cromwell. He turned to his grandfather, who had known Algernon Sullivan, the firm’s late co-founder, and was willing to use that connection to appeal to the surviving co-founder, William Nelson Cromwell. “Isn’t the memory of an old association enough to give this young man a chance?” he asked Cromwell in a letter.
Cromwell understood that when a former secretary of state recommends his grandson for a job, a law firm that relies on Washington connections should pay heed. He overruled his partners, and in the autumn of 1911 Foster joined Sullivan & Cromwell as a clerk. His starting salary was $12.50 per week, which his grandfather generously supplemented. From his new office at 48 Wall Street—the firm occupied the nineteenth and twentieth floors of the Bank of New York Building—he could see the portico of Federal Hall, where President George Washington was inaugurated in 1789.
“Just you wait!” he wrote to Janet upon learning that he had been hired. “In a year or two, I’ll be hiring young men myself. I’ll be a partner, too.”
The two were married in Auburn on June 26, 1912. Foster was twenty-four and Janet had just turned twenty-one. If she did not already realize that work would always be the center of his life, it became clear during their honeymoon in the Catskills. He had contracted a severe case of malaria while on a Sullivan & Cromwell mission to British Guiana—his assignment was to persuade its government to allow duty-free imports of American flour—and the combination of its effects and those of the quinine he took as treatment left him barely able to walk. A nurse accompanied them throughout their honeymoon. Nonetheless their marriage began splendidly, and they remained devoted to each other. Half a century later, after Foster’s death, she was told that a forthcoming book would portray him “warts and all.”
“What warts?” she asked. “Foster was perfect.”
By the time Foster joined Sullivan & Cromwell, it had already become a unique repository of power and influence. Enormous fortunes were accumulated in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many of the men who accumulated them used Sullivan & Cromwell as their link to Washington and the world.
Algernon Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell founded their law firm in 1879 to pursue a new business art: bringing investors and enterprises together to create giant corporations. Sullivan & Cromwell played an important role in the development of modern capitalism by helping to organize what its official history calls “some of America’s greatest industrial, commercial, and financial enterprises.” In 1882 it created Edison General Electric Company. Seven years later, with the financier J. P. Morgan as its client, it wove twenty-one steelmakers into the National Tube Company and then, in 1891, merged National Tube with seven other companies to create U.S. Steel, capitalized at more than one billion dollars, an astounding sum at that time. The railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a “malefactor of great wealth” and “enemy of the Republic,” hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central Railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at the Wells Fargo bank. It won the first with tactics that a New York newspaper called “one of those ruthless exercises of the power of sheer millions,” and the second with complex maneuvers that, according to a book about the firm, amounted to “deceit, bribery, and trickery [that] was all legal.”
Soon afterward, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan & Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. Through a masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse its decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead. Then he helped engineer a revolution that pulled the province of Panama away from Colombia and established it as an independent country, led by a clique willing to show its gratitude by allowing construction of a canal on terms favorable to the United States. One newspaper called him “the man whose masterful mind, whetted on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus.”
Clients favored Sullivan & Cromwell because its partners, as Cromwell later put it, had “come to know, and be in a position to influence, a considerable number of public men in political life, in financial circles, and on the press, and all these influences and relations were of great and sometimes decisive utility.” Sullivan & Cromwell thrived at the point where Washington politics intersected with global business. John Foster Dulles worked at this intersection for nearly forty years.
His first clients were an early taste of the Sullivan & Cromwell mix: investors in Brazilian railroads, Peruvian mines, and Cuban banks. After war broke out in Europe, he traveled there to promote the interests of other clients, including Merck & Co., the American Cotton Oil Company, and the Holland America Line. All were pleased with the young man’s work.
Allie was also setting out on the path that would define his future. Soon after graduating from Princeton in 1914, he departed for Ewing Christian College in central India. On the way he stopped in Paris, which for him, as for many of his class of Americans, would become almost a second home. He ran with a crowd of Princeton men who were enjoying the good life there, and although he later recalled reading about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his stay, his most vivid recollection was of the Grand Prix at Longchamp, a highlight of the thoroughbred racing season and a social event of the first order.
Aboard the steamship that took him from France to India, Allie read and was captivated by Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel about the “great game” of big-power conflicts and the clandestine maneuvers that shape them. Its hero is an Irish orphan who is reared as a Hindu in the teeming bazaars of Lahore, learns eternal truths from a Tibetan lama, and finally becomes a secret agent for the British, who are described as “the sort to oversee justice” because “they know the land and the customs of the land.” In the book, Kim is told that “from time to time, God causes men to be born—and thou art one of them—who have a lust to go ahead at the risk of their lives and discover news. Today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some nearby man who has done a foolishness against the State.… He must go alone—alone and at the peril of his head.”
Kim is about the glory of empire and the nasty things that must sometimes be done in secret to defend it. In an introduction to a later edition, the critic and activist Edward Said called it “a master work of imperialism.” To Allie it was beyond inspirational. He never parted with his copy. It was on his bedside table when he died.
During his stay in India, Allie developed a lifelong taste for servants; afterward, his sister Eleanor wrote, “there was hardly a time when he didn’t have someone to fetch and carry for him.” He also explored ancient ruins, studied Hindi and Sanskrit, and even heard a reading by the mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore. The anticolonial movement intrigued him, and after attending several subversive meetings, he was invited to the home of an activist leader, the lawyer Motilal Nehru. There he met Nehru’s two children, Jawaharlal, who was just back from Cambridge and would become India’s first prime minister, and his teenage sister, Vijaya, an even more passionate advocate of independence, who would become a diplomat and the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Allie completed his year of teaching at Ewing Christian College and was invited to stay, but much of the world was at war and he wanted to be closer to the action. He could not return home across the Atlantic because German submarine attacks had made the passage too dangerous. So in the spring of 1915 he set off eastward, taking steamers and trains on a leisurely trip that included stops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton, Peking, Shanghai, and Tokyo. American diplomats welcomed him at each stop, and he was invited to several formal receptions. He understood why.
“It is a great thing to have had illustrious relatives,” he wrote in a letter home.
The homeland to which Allie returned at the age of twenty-two, after circumnavigating the globe, was much changed from the one he had left fourteen months earlier. America’s complacency had been shaken by news of war in Europe, driven home most terrifyingly by the torpedoing of the liner Lusitania with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, including those of 128 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson, who had been Foster’s favorite professor at Princeton, differed with his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, on how to respond to Germany’s attack on the Lusitania, and their dispute led Bryan to resign. In his place Wilson appointed Bryan’s deputy, Robert Lansing, the mustachioed Anglophile who was also Foster and Allie’s beloved “Uncle Bert.”
The boys had grown up with a grandfather who had been secretary of state, and now “Uncle Bert” had been elevated to that post. This gave them closer connections to the inner circle of American power than any pair of young siblings in the country.
Foster had already made use of these connections to secure a job at Sullivan & Cromwell and was building a lucrative career there. Allie had not yet decided what he wished to do with his life. Indirectly, the sinking of the Lusitania set him on the path toward espionage and covert action. It led to his “Uncle Bert” becoming secretary of state, which gave him a strong new tie to Washington’s most exclusive elite—and his first glimpse of the clandestine world.
Much of the outrage that erupted in the United States after the Lusitania attack was based on the belief that she was a defenseless passenger liner, although Germany charged that she was engaged in a secret mission to supply weapons to Britain in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act. This outrage contributed to the American decision to enter World War I two years later. Only a handful of people knew that Germany’s charge was actually correct. One of them was Secretary of State Lansing.
Few in Washington had ever paid much attention to collecting intelligence about other countries, either because they believed the United States did not need it or because of the notion that, as a previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably 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 the practice of assigning military attachés to American legations and embassies, and had dispatched agents to European cities to “examine the military libraries, bookstores, and publishers’ lists in order to give early notice of any new or important publications or inventions or improvements in arms.” He also established a Military Intelligence Division in his office, staffed by an army officer and a clerk, to analyze their reports. When Robert Lansing became secretary of state a generation later, the division had more than doubled in size—to three officers and two clerks. With war on the horizon, Lansing moved decisively to expand it. By 1918 it had more than twelve hundred employees who systematically analyzed intelligence from diplomats, military officers, the Secret Service, the Justice Department, and the Postal Inspection Service. Some of these employees also conducted what Lansing called “investigations of a highly confidential character.”
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 one day direct.
Of all that Lansing did to steer Allie toward a career in covert action, nothing had more effect than introducing him to Captain Alex Gaunt, a suave and elegant British agent based in Washington during World War I. The two older men spent weekends at Lansing’s estate at Henderson Harbor and attended football games in New York. Often “Uncle Bert” brought Allie along. In this close company, Gaunt spoke candidly about his work, which included hiring Pinkerton detectives to monitor American ports and sending agents to infiltrate groups he suspected of anti-British leanings. Allie was transfixed.
“He thought Gaunt was one of the most exciting men he had ever met,” according to one account. “He made up his mind that one of these days, he would become an intelligence operative just like him.”
With that ultimate goal in mind, Allie took the foreign service examination in 1916. He passed, joined the State Department, and set off on a decade-long career as a diplomat.
His first post was Vienna, capital of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had the lowest rank in the foreign service: secretary of embassy class five. A few months after arriving, he and Minister Frederic Penfield represented the United States at the funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had ascended to the throne sixty-eight years earlier following the revolutions of 1848. Mechanized war was raging across Europe. As Allie stood in mourning dress at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral on November 30, 1916, he could not have avoided the sense that an era was ending and a new one, full of unknown possibilities and terrors, was about to dawn.
In the spring of 1917, as the United States prepared to declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary, Allie was transferred to the Swiss capital, Bern. Because Switzerland was neutral, it had become a magnet for exiles, agents, and revolutionaries from across Europe and beyond. When Allie asked his new boss what his responsibilities would be, the answer came like a gift from Heaven—or, perhaps, from “Uncle Bert.”
“I guess the best thing for you to do is to take charge of intelligence,” he was told. “Keep your eyes open. This place is swarming with spies. And write me a weekly report.”
The war years gave Allie his first chance to plunge into the netherworld where he would spend much of his life. Though not yet twenty-five, he became a genuine spymaster, spending his days and nights with a polyglot carousel of Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Albanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Czech, Bulgarian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Russian plotters. Often, like other foreign agents, he worked from the ornate lobby and dining room of the Bellevue Palace Hotel, surrounded by baroque elegance that posed a surreal contrast to the hellish trench warfare being waged not far away. He also had a small apartment where he could, as he wrote to Foster, “entertain all the strange characters whom one can hardly meet in a hotel or a restaurant.” 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.
“The Department finds these dispatches of the highest value, and considers that they show not only careful labor in preparation but also exceptional intelligence in the drawing of conclusions,” his superiors wrote in a commendation.
While he was doing such impressive work, Allie also found time to enjoy Bern, which unlike other European capitals remained lively during the war years. He joined a fun-loving circle of expatriates who filled their days with tennis, golf, and hiking, and partied their nights away with balls, formal dinners, and jazz concerts at the Bellevue Palace. By one account he also “made the most of the area’s recreational facilities, including the attractive young ladies from the staid local community, from refugee families, and from among the pool of Swiss girls who flocked to the embassies to work as secretaries, stenographers, and clerks.” When tennis balls became hard to find, he delighted his friends by arranging for Foster, through friends in the State Department, to send him a dozen in each week’s diplomatic pouch.
In one letter home Allie reported that his life as a secret agent was full of “unmentionable happenings” and “incidents of more than usual interest.” Years later, two of them came to light.
Allie was preparing for a date on a Friday afternoon—according to one version he was meeting “two blonde and spectacularly buxom Swiss twin sisters who had agreed to a weekend rendezvous at a country inn”—when he received a telephone call from a Russian exile who said he had an urgent message to deliver to the United States, and insisted they meet that night. With his mind focused on the forthcoming weekend, Allie brushed him off. Years afterward he learned that the caller was Lenin, and that the reason Lenin never called back was that the next day he boarded his sealed train to St. Petersburg and set off to change the course of history.
“Here the first chance—if in fact it was a chance—to start talking to the Communist leaders was lost,” Allie later admitted.
Around the same time, Allie was informed by British officers that a young Czech woman he was dating, who worked with him at the American legation and had access to his code room, was passing information to Austrian agents. They had decided she must be liquidated, and he understood it as a necessity of wartime counterespionage. One night he took her to dinner and then, instead of squiring her home, delivered her to two British agents who were waiting in front of the fourteenth-century Nydegg Church. She was never heard from again.
By the time the Dulles brothers’ first great patron, John Watson Foster, died in 1917, “Uncle Bert” was secretary of state and had become their new one. He subsidized Allie’s freewheeling lifestyle in Bern with a private stipend, and also gave Foster his first chance to intervene in the politics of a foreign nation.
A pro-American regime in Cuba, led by the Conservative Party, was seeking to hold power after losing an election, and followers of the victorious Liberals rose up in protest. Violence threatened the interests of thirteen Sullivan & Cromwell clients, owners of sugar mills, railways, and mines who had $170 million—the equivalent of $3 billion in the early twenty-first century—invested in Cuba. They turned to the firm for protection. Foster took the case and traveled immediately to Washington. The next morning he had breakfast with “Uncle Bert.” By his own account he “suggested that the Navy Department send two fast destroyers—one for the northern coast and one for the southern coast of the portion of Cuba controlled by revolutionaries.” Lansing agreed, and the warships were dispatched that afternoon. Marines landed and spread into the countryside to repress protests, beginning what would be a five-year occupation. Liberals realized the futility of resistance and called off their uprising.
This was the first foreign intervention in which Foster played a role. It showed him 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.
“Uncle Bert” was impressed with his nephew’s understanding of how American power can be used abroad. A few months later, he gave the young man another mission. One of his projects as war drew near was to cleanse Central America of German influence and confiscate the property of German immigrants who lived there. He decided to send an envoy on a secret trip to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama to enlist the support of their leaders—and who better than his twenty-nine-year-old nephew? Sullivan & Cromwell had played a key role in creating the Republic of Panama and building the Panama Canal, and it was legal counsel to the Panamanian regime. Questions about the conflict of interest inherent in sending a private lawyer on a diplomatic mission to a region where his clients had deep financial interests—and where one of the governments with which he was to negotiate was also his client—were subsumed by family ties, and Foster was duly appointed.
Costa Rica at this time was ruled by the most brutal dictator in its modern history, General Federico Tinoco, who had seized power in a coup promoted by the United Fruit Company, a Sullivan & Cromwell client, and whose family was deeply in debt to United Fruit. Foster found him a willing partner and urged the State Department to reward his “sincere friendliness” by recognizing his government; President Wilson, who took a dimmer view of generals who deposed democratic governments, declined to do so. At his next stop, Nicaragua, Foster worked equally well with General Emiliano Chamorro, a pliant dictator whose Conservative Party the United States had helped place in power after engineering the overthrow of a Liberal regime that had tried to borrow money from European rather than American banks. In Panama he persuaded the regime to declare war on Germany by suggesting that if it did not, the United States might start taking a new tax out of the $250,000 it paid Panama each year to rent the Canal Zone.
By the time Foster returned from Central America, the United States had finally entered World War I. He took a leave from the firm and sought to enlist for military service, but poor eyesight, an affliction in the Dulles family, kept him out. “Uncle Bert” arranged for him to be given the rank of captain and made legal adviser to the new War Trade Board, which was tasked with turning American factories into efficient suppliers of war matériel. While in Washington he met and impressed one of the era’s best-known financiers, Bernard Baruch, who was working on another war-related commission. Baruch had made a fortune speculating in sugar while still in his twenties and had become one of the wealthiest and most influential deal makers on Wall Street. Foster found in him a mentor, role model, and soul mate. Later he would give Foster a decisive boost toward the top level of international diplomacy.
While working at the War Trade Board, Foster also recruited new clients for Sullivan & Cromwell and nourished existing ones. He secured lucrative government contracts for the Aetna Explosives Company, and arranged for the German-owned Mumm Champagne Company to avoid seizure by the U.S. government through a sham stock sale to American investors. Already he had become comfortable tending simultaneously to the interests of the United States and those of Sullivan & Cromwell clients.
* * *
The armistice ending World War I took effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month of 1918. Less than a week later, on Sunday morning, November 17, Foster and his wife were arriving for a service at Washington Presbyterian Church when a friend gave him startling news: President Wilson had decided he would personally head the American delegation to the peace conference in Paris, where the post-war world was to be designed. No president of the United States had ever left the country while in office—except for Theodore Roosevelt’s trip to Panama and two American territories, the Panama Canal Zone and Puerto Rico—so this was momentous. The next day, as Wilson was announcing his decision, Foster visited “Uncle Bert” at the State Department and asked to be named part of the delegation. The prestige of this assignment, he realized, would be an ideal capstone to his wartime experience and add diplomatic luster to his growing reputation.
Foster found his uncle, who had hoped to head the American delegation himself, deeply distressed by Wilson’s decision. He not only believed that his mastery of craft would be more useful in Paris than Wilson’s naive idealism, but also imagined that if he could return home covered with the glory of having helped reshape the world, he might use it to propel himself to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920. Wilson, however, not only rejected Lansing’s appeal to head the American delegation but was offended by it. He could not leave his secretary of state behind, but their tiff left “Uncle Bert” unable to ask permission to bring Foster.
This news naturally disappointed the young man, but a few days later he found another route to Paris. Wilson chose Bernard Baruch to be one of his counselors at the talks, and when Foster asked to come along as his assistant, Baruch agreed. He booked passage on the liner George Washingtonand passed much of the trip playing bridge in a foursome that included the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, who was also on his way to the peace conference.
Foster’s nine months in Paris were even more rewarding than he had hoped. Baruch became the American delegate to the Reparations Commission, which was charged with deciding what punishments should be meted out to Germany. Foster threw himself into the commission’s work, mastering arcane details of debt financing that would prove invaluable to his banking clients. His European counterparts were young men of equal ambition and talent, among them John Maynard Keynes, who would soon begin revolutionizing economic theory, and Jean Monnet, one of the visionaries who, a generation later, would lay the foundation for what became the European Union.
In between negotiating sessions, Foster concentrated on expanding his already impressive network of international contacts. On some days he lunched with foreign dignitaries like the president of Brazil, whose railroad network Sullivan & Cromwell was then reorganizing. Other days, he invited influential American politicians like George Sheldon, a financier who had helped direct William Howard Taft’s presidential campaign and was treasurer of the Republican Party in New York. One night he hosted four guests: his uncle Secretary of State Lansing; his boss, the legal genius William Nelson Cromwell; Foreign Minister Lou Tsen-Tsiang of China; and the American ambassador to France, William Graves Sharp, whose son would later join Sullivan & Cromwell. In a letter to his wife, he reported that the dinner had cost him the remarkable sum of $110.
“Still,” he added, “it was worth it, don’t you think?”
An event of such global significance as the Paris peace conference naturally attracted Allie as well. He arrived from Bern, having managed to win a post on the Boundary Commission, whose job was to draw new borders in Europe, and installed himself at the Hotel Crillon along with the rest of the American delegation. Following a predilection that would mark his life, he quickly sought female company. He found what he wanted at Le Sphinx, an elegant brothel in Montparnasse where the air was redolent of rose perfume, lush fabrics covered the walls, and nude women sat at an elaborate art deco bar. It was one of several lavish houses that became legendary in Paris and far beyond during the 1920s. They attracted an array of sensualists, among them the writers Lawrence Durrell, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, and Henry Miller; film stars including Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich (women were welcome); artists like Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti; and even the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. All pursued what one chronicler of the age called “an art of living fueled by desire and eccentricity [in] a world where money and class put moral judgments in abeyance.”
For Allie, a visit to Le Sphinx satisfied more than just his well-developed sexual appetite. It also gave him a chance to mix with a new kind of elite and to observe people’s behavior at moments free of inhibition. By day he watched statesmen grapple with great questions of war, peace, and the fate of nations. By night he saw some of the same people, plus a diverse parade of others, in far looser circumstances. It was food for the mind.
And for the heart as well. According to Allie’s future boss General Walter Bedell Smith, also a patron of Le Sphinx, he became attached to a woman who worked there and rented an apartment for her nearby. By one account she became pregnant and Allie wished to marry her, but Foster brought him to his senses and sent the expectant mother a sum of money to forget the relationship.
Their sister Eleanor was also in France. She had asked “Uncle Bert” to find her a useful position in the post-war relief effort, but he dismissed her, saying that the only way a woman could contribute would be by knitting socks. Infuriated, she paid her own way to Europe and went to work for a Quaker relief group that was building homes for refugees along the Marne River. Every week or two she would turn up at the Crillon for dinner and a hot bath, then return to her work in the devastated countryside.
“Thousands of fine young men were buried in their blood, covered with rubble and mud,” she wrote afterward. “I felt sick and lost among the ghosts of broken bones, the shards of warfare and its desolation.”
This was a grand chance for the three siblings to throw themselves into the heart of world events while still young—Foster was thirty, Allie twenty-five, and Eleanor just twenty-three. The only member of the clan who did not thrive in Paris was “Uncle Bert.” President Wilson pointedly ignored his advice, relying instead on his own instincts and the counsel of his ubiquitous alter ego, “Colonel” Edward House. He spent more time with Allie and Foster, who idolized him from Princeton days, than with his secretary of state.
Present and future leaders of nearly a dozen countries came to Paris to promote their causes. One of them would later duel with the Dulles brothers for the fate of his people.
The twenty-eight-year-old Vietnamese nationalist who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh had already seen much of the world. He had visited India, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States, where he worked briefly as a pastry chef at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. The end of the Great War found him in France, which ruled his native Vietnam as a colony. There he became an anticolonial agitator. Soon after the peace conference convened, he published a broadside demanding for Vietnam “the sacred right of all people for self-determination.” He had several thousand copies printed, distributed them widely—the text set off riots when it reached Saigon—and on a June morning in 1919 carried one to the Hotel Crillon, where he hoped to present it to Wilson. By one account he even rented a morning suit for the occasion. He was unable to see Wilson, but delivered his pamphlet to Colonel House, and received a note acknowledging its receipt. As far as is known, neither of the Dulles brothers was aware of him.
Wilson argued ceaselessly for the principle of self-determination. He defined the term as meaning that “national aspirations must be respected,” that no people should be “selfishly exploited,” and that all must be “dominated and governed only by their own consent.” His application of this principle, however, was highly selective. He believed that self-determination was the right of people who lived in the collapsing Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, but not those who lived in overseas colonies. That excluded the Vietnamese, so the conference ended with Ho Chi Minh empty-handed. A year later he became a founding member of the French Communist Party. He then made his way to Moscow, joined the Comintern, and set out to wage revolutionary war against the overlords of the world—among them, three decades later, the Dulles brothers.
Wilson’s double standard set off four other explosions of anger from subject peoples. All broke out within a few months of one another in the spring of 1919: a revolution against British rule in Egypt, an anti-Japanese uprising in Korea, the opening campaign of Gandhi’s epic resistance movement in India, and a wave of protest by anti-imperialists in China, which the independence leader Sun Yat-sen attributed to their anger at “how completely they had been deceived by the Great Powers’ advocacy of self-determination.”
By refusing to confront nationalist demands that were emerging in these and other countries, the Western leaders who gathered in Paris laid the groundwork for decades of upheaval. Their determination to preserve their dominions far outweighed their commitment to the abstract principle of self-determination. This was as true for Wilson as for the others.
“If the United States delegation had agreed to examine the status of the French colonies, a colossally pernicious Pandora’s box would have been opened, and a principal edict of diplomacy violated, having to do with those living in glass houses,” the historian David Andelman wrote in his account of the peace conference. “After all, who were the Americans to cast stones when they had their own possessions—from the Philippines to the Caribbean? If the peace conference were open to the issue of places like [Vietnam], why not Hawaii or Puerto Rico for that matter?”
There is no hint that Foster or Allie ever regretted the failure of delegates in Paris to address the aspirations of colonized nations. They did, however, come to rue some of the other decisions embodied in the final treaty, which was signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919. Foster feared the consequences of crushing Germany with demands for exorbitant reparations, but the victorious European powers insisted that the Germans must suffer for their role in starting the war. Allie helped award the disputed Sudetenland, populated mainly by German-speakers, to the new nation of Czechoslovakia, and later admitted that his Boundary Commission had turned Czechoslovakia into “a banana lying across the face of Europe.” Fourteen years later, the Nazis would rise to power in part by exploiting German anger at these two fiats.
The Paris conference was a global coming-out party for a triumphant America. Wilson’s delegation numbered in the hundreds, far more than had ever represented the United States anywhere. Europe gave him a tumultuous reception, and, without hesitating, he reached to assume the mantle of global leadership. It was the destiny of the United States, he declared in a speech before departing, “to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity” to the world’s less civilized peoples, and to “convert them to the principles of America.”
One or the other of the Dulles brothers was involved in almost every important matter that came before the peace conference. They gained Wilson’s confidence and met many of the titans who would shape world politics over the next half century. Allie wrote home that the experience was “one of thrilling interest and opportunity” that gave him “a rare chance to get a glimpse into world politics.” For Foster it was that and more: a decisive push toward wealth and power.
This was also the first chance in several years that the two brothers managed to spend time together. They had been living on different continents and maintained only sporadic contact, but in Paris they occupied adjoining rooms at the Crillon and enjoyed long hours of conversation. They came to realize how similarly they viewed the world. The intimate connection that would define their later lives—and shape the fate of nations—grew from a deep mutual trust and sympathy that they developed for the first time as adults in Paris. Opposites in personality, they were in perfect accord politically and philosophically.
During their months in Paris, Foster and Allie fell fully under the spell of Woodrow Wilson. He influenced them every bit as much as their father and “Grandfather Foster” had during their childhood. Foster had sat at Wilson’s feet in college—he later said that the chance to take his courses was “the major benefit I got from Princeton”—and like many Americans, he and his brother were thrilled by Wilson’s meteoric rise from campus to the White House. In Paris they came to know him well. He was the quintessential missionary diplomat: cool, pontifical, sternly moralistic, and certain that he was acting as an instrument of divine will. Both brothers took his example deeply to heart.
Wilson’s idealism had a strong pro-business aspect. When preaching his internationalist gospel, he often described it in commercial rather than idealistic terms. “Our industrial fortunes are tied up with the industrial fortunes of the rest of the world,” he declared in one speech. “I am looking after the industrial interests of the United States.” This principle—that American engagement with the world is good for American business—fit perfectly with what the Dulles brothers had already come to believe.
A strong strain of paternalism also shaped Wilson’s worldview. He was a product of Southern gentility, admired the Ku Klux Klan, and considered segregation “not humiliating but a benefit.” As president he ordered both the federal bureaucracy and the Washington transit system segregated. He hosted the premiere of the film The Birth of a Nation at the White House and lamented afterward that its portrayal of black men as violent simians “is all so terribly true.” During his eight years in office he sent American troops to intervene in more countries than any previous president: Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and even, in the turbulent period following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union.
Presidents had ordered interventions before, but Wilson’s were different because of the reason he repeatedly gave: he wanted to bring democracy to oppressed people. This was a radically new concept. Past American leaders had taken the opposite view, that darker-skinned people were incapable of self-government and needed to be ruled by others—a view summarized by the first American military commander in Cuba, General William Shafter, when he pronounced Cubans “no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.” Wilson thought otherwise. “When properly directed,” he asserted, “there is no people not fitted to self-government.”
The Dulles brothers were products of the same missionary ethos that shaped Wilson. His example strengthened their conviction that there is nothing intrinsically wrong—and indeed, much that is admirable—in American intervention abroad.
The overwhelming emotion that drove the Paris conference was fear of what Wilson called “the poison of Bolshevism.” Secretary Lansing described Communism as “the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived,” supported only by “the criminal, the depraved, and the mentally unfit.”
His nephews enthusiastically agreed. This was a natural reaction from men devoted to defending the existing order. Not every capitalist at the Paris talks, however, saw the ideological threat so simply. No less a pillar of conservatism than Herbert Hoover, who was advising President Wilson on food relief issues, urged the president to recognize Bolshevism’s “true social ends” and roots in “grievous injustices to the lowest classes in all the countries that have been affected,” and to “rap our own reactionaries for their destruction of social betterment and thereby their stimulation of Bolshevism.” No such thoughts clouded the mind of either Dulles brother.
Once home from the peace conference, Wilson did all he could to combat the poison he saw emanating from Russia. Using the newly passed Sedition Act, he endorsed the deportation of supposed subversives, and after several anarchist bombs exploded and police uncovered a plot to mail others to wealthy industrialists and bankers, he authorized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to launch the first of what would become two years of raids that led to the arrest of thousands of immigrants and the deportation of hundreds. No less than twenty-five times in 1919 and 1920, Wilson deployed the United States Army to suppress “labor unrest” or “racial unrest.” Americans were in the grip of their first great Red Scare, set off in part by Palmer’s prediction to Congress that radicals would “on a certain day … rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.” They never did, but many Americans were seized by the fear of a new, unknown, diffuse but evidently horrific enemy.
The Dulles brothers returned from Paris with newly burnished reputations. Foster in particular had made a powerful debut on the world stage. By impressing influential Europeans and becoming a confidant of President Wilson, he showed his boss, William Nelson Cromwell, how fully he had learned to thrive in those lucrative thickets where business, politics, and diplomacy overlap. Soon after he returned to work in New York—and let it be known that another firm had offered him a job—Cromwell made him a partner. Some of his work was domestic, like merging a group of oil drillers and refiners into the corporation that became Amoco. More was international. His clients owned mines in Chile and Peru, sugar plantations in Cuba, utilities in Panama, oil wells in Colombia, banks in France, and paint factories in Italy and Russia. Two of his specialties were organizing overseas-loan syndicates for New York banks and helping utility companies take control of utilities in foreign countries.
Foster also took a ghostwriting assignment from his mentor Bernard Baruch, who like many of Wilson’s friends and admirers was disturbed by the runaway success of a 1919 book attacking the Versailles treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes. The book warned that the treaty’s reparations section, which Foster had drafted and Baruch presented as his own, exposed Europe to “the menace of inflationism.” Baruch resolved to reply. His book, ponderously titled The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty, argued that reparations clauses were “vital to the interest of the American people and even more vital to world stability.” Foster did most of the writing and editing, for which Baruch paid him ten thousand dollars.
Soon after the United States resumed diplomatic relations with Germany, the State Department assigned Allen—he had stopped calling himself “Allie,” even in letters to his parents—to the American legation in Berlin. He arrived at the beginning of 1920 and witnessed the early days of the Weimar Republic and the right-wing Kapp Putsch that sought to destroy it. “Uncle Bert” had resigned his post as secretary of state by then, but both brothers had established their reputations and no longer needed a patron.
Three months after taking up his post in Berlin, shortly after celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday, Allen took a vacation and returned to his childhood home in upstate New York. On one of his first weekends there, he attended a party at a posh resort and met a green-eyed blonde named Martha Clover Todd, the daughter of a language professor at Columbia University. He proposed to her a week later, and on August 3, 1920, they were married.
It was not a happy match. Clover was sensitive, delicately balanced, and prone to fits of melancholy. Her philandering, workaholic husband, who once wrote to her suggesting that she ask friends for advice on “how to live with a queer duck like me,” proved unwilling or unable to give her the emotional support she needed. He had a fierce temper and often ranted at her. She would respond by curling her body into the fetal position and then, when he was finished, silently leaving the house to wander, sometimes for hours. They contemplated divorce several times, but remained together until his death nearly fifty years later.
Rather than send Allen back to Berlin after his holiday, the State Department posted him to Constantinople, the capital of the defeated Ottoman Empire. He and Clover spent their first year together in a two-story house overlooking the Bosphorus. In 1922, with Clover pregnant and desolate over distressing news from home—her older brother had committed suicide—they returned to the United States. On the day they departed, Allen received a cable informing him that he had been promoted, and that instead of returning to Constantinople he was to settle in Washington as chief of the State Department’s division of Near Eastern affairs. Over the next four years, he shuttled between Washington and the Levant, cultivating figures like King Faisal of Iraq, King Abdullah of Transjordan, Kemal Atatürk of Turkey, and even T. E. Lawrence, whom he knew from the Paris peace conference.
Meeting with remarkable men was not all that Allen did during his years in the Middle East. The State Department was actively promoting American oil interests there, especially those of Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller family. Allen spent much time learning this new form of commercial diplomacy. As the world’s navies were converting from coal-powered to oil-powered warships, marking the beginning of the petroleum age, he worked to ensure that the United States won its share of access to the resource that would shape the unfolding century.
Between trips to the Middle East, Allen found enough time to attend evening and early-morning classes at George Washington University Law School, from which he graduated in 1926. Nonetheless he sensed his career and life stalling. He was in his thirties, living on a civil servant’s salary and a modest inheritance from “Grandfather Foster.” His work had little impact. Once he found a packet of his reports lying unopened in a State Department closet.
Life with Clover was increasingly complicated. At one point Allen confronted her with an exorbitant bill from Cartier’s, and she calmly explained that she had learned of his relationship with another woman and had bought herself an emerald necklace as “compensation.” She then announced that she intended to buy a new piece of jewelry each time she discovered one of his affairs. This would have led the couple quickly to bankruptcy, and she did not carry out her threat.
A decade had passed since the exciting days of World War I, when Allen had spent mornings dispatching agents on clandestine missions across Europe, afternoons with his mistress of the moment, and long evenings debriefing spies over cognac at the Bellevue Palace Hotel in Bern. He longed to be a case officer again, but the United States had no intelligence service. His path was uncertain. Later he called this period “the slough of my Despond.”