Man of the Year
(See Cover) In an icy conference room in West Berlin one day last February, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov sang an old, sour song. After nine years of delay and diatribe, the Soviet Union still refused to sign a peace treaty ending the occupation of Austria. As Molotov droned on, a tall man slouched low in a chair, whittling on a pencil, calmly watching the shavings drop to the floor. When the Russian had finished, John Foster Dulles blew the dust from his pocketknife, snapped it shut and shoved it into his pocket. Then the U.S. Secretary of State leaned forward.
"For about 2,000 years now," said Dulles, "there has been a figure in mythology which symbolizes tragic futility. That was Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek story, was given the task of rolling a great stone up to the top of a hill. Each time when, after great struggle and sweating, the stone was just at the brow of the hill, some evil force manifested itself and pushed the stone down. So poor Sisyphus had to start his task over again. I suspect that for the next 2,000 years the story of Sisyphus will be forgotten, when generation after generation is told the tragic story of the Austrian state treaty. We have repeatedly been almost at the point of concluding an Austrian treaty, and always some evil force manifests itself and pushes the treaty back again."
Then John Foster Dulles looked squarely at the man he had labeled the instrument of an evil force and said: "I think that the Soviet Foreign Minister will understand that it is at least excusable if we think, and if much of the world will think, that what is actually under way here is another illustration of the unwillingness of the Soviet Union actually to restore genuine freedom and independence in any area where it has once gotten its grip."
War Against Gullibility. The Berlin Conference might have marked the beginning of calamity for John Foster Dulles -- and for the people and the cause he represented. Instead, it was at Berlin that Dulles started on the way to become 1954's Man of the Year. It was the first time in nearly five years that the foreign ministers of the Big Four had conferred. Much of the world was being lulled by new and gentle tones from Moscow. Did Malenkov's Russia really want peace? In trying to get an answer that all the world would understand, Secretary of State Dulles at Berlin pressed Molotov with greater skill and force than any U.S. diplomat had ever shown in dealing with the Communists. With one sharp stroke after another, he stripped the Communists naked of the pretense that they really wanted peace at anything less than their own outrageous price. If millions remained deluded by the "soft" Malenkov line, that was not the fault of Dulles, who rescued other millions from gullibility.
Everywhere, and especially in Europe, gullibility was nurtured by the fear that no power could stop the Communists, that the only alternatives were an appeasing coexistence or an atomic world war in which the dreadful best outcome would be liberation after U.S. "massive retaliation" against Red aggression. Neither at Berlin last February nor throughout the year did Dulles try to veil the free world's grim dependence on massive atomic retaliation.
But he knew this to be a position of desperation, one that could not be held indefinitely unless the non-Communist world regained freedom of action, unless it found other than ultimate and apocalyptic ways to gather and use its strength.
In pursuit of such ways, Dulles spent 1954 in a ceaseless round of travel, logging 101,521 miles on journeys to Berlin, London, Paris, Caracas, Bonn, Geneva, Milan, Manila and Tokyo. In one fortnight last September, he munched mangoes with Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay in Manila, conferred with Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa, visited Premier Yoshida in Tokyo, reported to President Eisenhower in Denver, consulted with Winston Churchill in London and talked with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn. En route, he read a detective story in mid-Pacific, slept soundly across the Atlantic, and carried on U.S. State Department business as he crossed one international border after another. On his trips to reinforce the free world outposts, Dulles sometimes merely shored up a wall that the Reds had breached, but on other sorties he served his primary mission: to develop the cohesion and strength that would make Communist aggression less likely and would, therefore, make the free world less directly dependent on massive retaliation, the defense it feared.
A Giant Stride. As the year ended, Dulles, back from his eighth transatlantic trip in twelve months, was able to report to the U.S. that plans for Europe's defense had entered a new phase. Tactical atomic weapons (e.g., atomic howitzers and small rockets) now make it possible to halt a Red army ground attack: "The aggressor would be thrown back at the threshold" of Western Europe. The 14 NATO nations that discussed this with Dulles are agreed on how this threshold defense shall be coordinated. Said Dulles: "Thus we see the means of achieving what the people of Western Europe have long sought--that is, a form of security which, while having as its first objective the preservation of peace, would also be adequate for defense and which would not put Western Europe in a position of having to be liberated."
John Foster Dulles played the key role in the NATO Council's agreement on how to coordinate this giant stride. When Dulles got to Paris for the council meeting last fortnight, he found that both Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France had prepared strict plans calling for consultation by the allies before nuclear weapons could be used. After dinner with Eden, Dulles pulled out his omnipresent yellow scratchpad, scribbled out his own resolution. Next day both Eden and Mendes-France dropped their proposals, and the council adopted the Dulles plan within 30 minutes. It provided for consultation prior to use of nuclear weapons by NATO forces, but it did not set rigid rules or tie the hand of such non-NATO forces as the U.S. Strategic Air Command.
A Year of Shadowed Joy. In Dulles' patient year of work and travel, every task and every mile was made harder by the mood of 1954, a year in which temptations to complacency and reasons for anxiety both mounted. For complacency, 1954 was superficially like the peaceful and prosperous '20s. Between Sept. 18, 1931, when the Japanese moved into Manchuria, and Aug. 10, 1954, when the Indo-China fighting stopped, there was no day of worldwide peace. Between Oct. 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed, and 1954, there had been some years of boom, but it took 1954's mild, controlled U.S. recession to bring home the solidity of the economic advance. The rest of the world had long feared the magnified effect of even a mild U.S. recession. But in 1954 business forged ahead in Britain, West Germany and many another country, despite the brief U.S. downswing. As U.S. indexes turned upward at year's end, the 25-year-old belief that the world was tied to a boom-or-bust economy began to bust. The result, as 1954 ended, was a feeling of firm confidence in the U.S. economy and in dynamic capitalism as an economic way of life. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, a hard man with a dollar's worth of optimism, summed up this economic feeling in a financial man's superlative. Said he: "I'm a bull on the world."
The main differences between the peace and prosperity of 1954 and of the '20s were: 1) 1954's peace and prosperity had, in reality, far better prospects; 2) the 1920's feeling of confidence, which proved illusory, was much higher. Americans of 1954 knew that the technical peace was not real, that they had to keep almost 3,000,000 men under arms, maintain a peacetime conscription and spend an average of $855 a family for defense. The year that saw the hydrogen explosion at Bikini--the biggest explosion in man's explosive history--was not one to foster illusions about an indefinite peace.
Yards Gained. The U.S. needed all its strength and confidence to handle 1954's struggle with Communism, which has been the overriding issue of every year since 1945. Dulles both drew upon and nourished U.S. confidence in its national strength. Far from offending allies, this emphasis on U.S. interests had a wholesome effect of stimulating the national prides of other Western nations in a way that made them more self-reliant and more reliable partners in the struggle against the common enemy.
Dulles is the man of 1954 because, in the decisive areas of international politics, he played the year's most effective role. He made mistakes, and he suffered heavy losses. But he was nimble in disentangling himself from his errors. The heaviest losses of 1954 were prepared by serious mistakes made years ago; Dulles limited the damage.
Regionally, 1954's greatest area of success for American diplomacy and the man who runs it was the Middle East. There, a number of old problems were solved by new approaches. Items:
P: After decades of dispute, the status of the Suez Canal area was settled more firmly than ever before. On the surface, this was an affair between the British, who agreed to withdraw their troops, and Egypt's Man of the Year, Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser. In fact, the settlement was skillfully midwifed by the U.S. State Department through Old Diplomat Jefferson Caffery, then Ambassador to Egypt.
P: After three years of shutdown and stalemate at Abadan (caused by the stubborn egotism of 1951's Man of the Year, Mohammed Mossadegh), Iran agreed to let foreign firms (chiefly British) resume operating the Iranian oil industry, which the Iranians were incapable of operating. The agreement was prodded, adjusted and pushed through by Loy Henderson, then U.S. Ambassador to Iran, and Special U.S. Emissary Herbert Hoover Jr., now Under Secretary of State.
P: After long and careful negotiation by U.S. diplomats, Turkey and Pakistan signed a military collaboration treaty. This was a key step toward Dulles' goal of a "Northern Tier" defense against Soviet expansion.
In Europe and in the Americas, too, there were some clear-cut gains. Items:
P: At Caracas, in March, Secretary Dulles personally pushed through an inter-American resolution calling for joint action against Communist aggression or subversion. Said Dulles: "It may serve the needs of our time as effectively as the Monroe Doctrine served the needs of our nation during the last century." Only three months after Caracas, Jacobo Arbenz' Communist-dominated government of Guatemala, the only Red bastion in the western hemisphere, was overthrown by the anti-Communist forces of Castillo Armas.
P: The status of Trieste was settled after nine years of Communist-comforting tension between Italy and Yugoslavia. When U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce impressed Washington with the urgency of a settlement, U.S. and British diplomacy went to work. The Italians and the Yugoslavs were persuaded to sign a settlement dividing the territory, with the Italians getting the Italian city.
Holes Plugged. Dulles' job includes defense as well as advance. He played goalkeeper in the free world's two major setbacks of 1954: the death of the European Defense Community (to which he had said there was "no alternative") and the defeat in Indo-China. Both setbacks stemmed from a single mistake made a decade ago, and never corrected in spite of mounting evidence. The mistake: that the victory of France's allies over Germany somehow meant that France had recovered from the basic political weakness that caused its collapse in 1940. The postwar phrase--the Big Four--was a misnomer; France is not a great power, but a great civilization, politically paralyzed. EDC asked France to show a self-confidence it did not possess. Indo-China asked France to show a will to win it did not possess. A new Premier, Pierre Mendes-France, made France's allies face the old fact of France's weakness.
At the end of 1953, John Foster Dulles had said, quite pointedly, that the U.S. would be forced to make an "agonizing reappraisal" of its relations with France, of its policy toward Europe if EDC failed of ratification. (That expression and Dulles' "massive retaliation" became the cold-war phrases of 1954.) A smaller man than Dulles might have insisted on a reappraisal immediately after Mendes-France presided over the French assassination of EDC. But Dulles swallowed his pride and helped the West lay the foundation for a substitute.
The substitute, to rearm and grant sovereignty to West Germany under a different set of agreements, was conceived by Britain's Foreign Minister Anthony Eden one morning in his bathtub. Last October in Paris, with the help of Dulles and of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (the Man of 1953), Eden got his alternative plan approved at the foreign-minister level. Many military men discovered that they liked Eden's Western European Union, with its appeal to nationalism, better than EDC, with its emphasis on European political unity. The Communists testified to the plan's potential: they fought as desperately against it as they had against EDC.
The disaster in Indo-China left no doubt that three Communists were the Men of the Year in Asia. The victory belonged to Communist China's Premier Mao Tse-tung, his Foreign Minister Chou Enlai, and to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet Minh. For a considerable measure of recovery from the Indo-China disaster, the free world could thank John Foster Dulles. First Dulles hammered out and pushed through the Manila Pact, which committed eight nations to take joint action against subversion and aggression in Asia.
More important, perhaps, was Dulles' other Asian treaty of the year, the mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Nationalist Chinese Leader Chiang Kaishek. One tribute to the treaty's impact was the angry reaction of the Communist Chinese. The pact did not establish any new principle, but it wiped out some doubts. Said Dulles: "It is my hope that the signing of this defense treaty will put to rest once and for all rumors and reports that the U.S. will in any manner agree to the abandonment of Formosa and the Pescadores to Communist control."
Despite these attempts to shore up the anti-Communist position, the free world came to year's end with a net loss and a troubled outlook in Asia. There was scant hope that the Communists could be prevented from swallowing up all of Viet Nam. There was great danger in the aura of success that surrounded the Communists in the Far East, where the people want to know: Which side will win? Even in Japan, where the West's good friend, Premier Yoshida, was forced to resign, there was new talk of trade and friendship with Red China. On 1954's Asian ledger, the big figures were all Red.
He Likes the Work. As the Man of 1954 went through his incredibly difficult year, he was sustained by an important basic attitude: he likes the work. President Eisenhower and most members of his Cabinet can truthfully say that they did not dream of holding the jobs they have, and took them only out of sense of duty.
But John Foster Dulles has wanted, almost all his life, the job he now holds. He learned his first lessons in international relations at the knee of his maternal grandfather, John Foster, who was Secretary of State in Benjamin Harrison's Cabinet and who helped negotiate the 1895 treaty that ended the Sino-Japanese War. At 19, he was secretary of China's delegation at the Second Hague Peace Conference; at 30, he served on the Reparations Commission at Versailles. Between the wars he had a brilliant legal career. In 1941 he got the Federal Council of Churches to set up a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, headed it, and wrote a report that applied Christian principles to historical realities.
Called in by the Truman Administration after the end of World War II, Dulles negotiated a peace treaty with Japan that was the soundest bit of diplomacy that he inherited when he became Secretary of State in 1953. The rest of his policy inheritance was jerry-built on emergency and crisis. Dulles' first aim was to build a foreign policy for the long haul. To replace fear as the glue of the free world's alliances, he said he wanted to develop a cement compounded of strength, understanding and cooperation. He has explained the difficulty of this operation: "The best insurance against war is to be ready, able and willing to fight. Now it is extremely difficult to hold that position without leading some of our friends and allies to think that we are truculent and want to have a fight."
Ducking the One-Two. Because Presbyterian Dulles (a clergyman's son) talked a great deal about moral principle, some feared that he was trying to force his Christian morals on the rest of the world. But he has demonstrated that a diplomat who is clear about his own principles can find them highly useful in practical international politics.
By the end of 1954, Dulles, who had been accused of saber rattling with such phrases as "massive retaliation," found himself the target of other critics who accused him of speaking too softly about coexistence, particularly after the Chinese branded 13 imprisoned Americans as spies. Dulles' restraint in this case was deliberate, and resulted from his highly practical analysis of why the Reds made their announcement on the 13 prisoners. He was convinced that the Soviet and Chinese Communists were attempting to give the U.S. a diplomatic one-two punch: soft talk from Moscow and hard action from Peking.
In Paris last fortnight, Dulles analyzed the situation for the NATO foreign ministers' council. Said he: "At the present time, the U.S. is being subjected to the most severe kind of provocation in Asia. This appears to be deliberately planned in the hope of provoking the U.S. into actions which our European friends and allies would regard as ill-advised and which would perhaps shake our unity at a time when we hope it will be reinforced by the pending London-Paris accords. The U.S. does not intend thus to be hastily provoked into needless action." This highly practical talk was the more forceful because Dulles' line had already been proved right. U.S. allies, especially Britain, had been reassured by Dulles' verbal restraint and had not hesitated to denounce the Reds in terms as strong as any Dulles could have used.
At that kind of diplomatic opinion-molding, John Foster Dulles is a master. He recognizes the importance of communicating his ideas and policies to others, and works hard at checking his circuits of communications. (In his early months as Secretary of State, he would often ask associates, after a Cabinet meeting or a conference, whether he had gotten his ideas across.) When he finds he has been misunderstood, he tries again, tirelessly editing his own public speeches, and even his own thoughts.
In recent months Dulles has gained new confidence that he has found the right words and phrases. His reports to the people, e.g., his report on the Paris Conference at a televised Cabinet meeting, have been remarkable for their sweep and clarity. Dulles considers such reports a key part of his job for one large reason: he believes that the citizens of the U.S. have the right and the ability to understand his business.
As he goes tirelessly about that business, Dulles, at 66, displays a tremendous capacity for concentration and work. Almost all of his waking hours are working hours, whether he is flying across an ocean, seated in his map-lined office or resting at home (the yellow scratchpad is always at his bedside). His depth of concentration sometimes unnerves staff members who have brought him problems: they think he has forgotten that they are there. His favorite form of relaxation literally gives his staff the shivers: he likes to swim wherever and whenever he can, and sometimes does so, in water more suitable for polar bears than for Secretaries of State.
One-Plane Department. When Dulles travels, his airplane becomes a mobile State Department. He takes with him more aides than made up the entire State Department personnel in John Quincy Adams' day.* On trips to Europe, the staff is headed by Assistant Secretary (for European Affairs) Livingston T. Merchant and Counselor Douglas MacArthur II. When Asia is the landing place, the Secretary's chief aide is Assistant Secretary (for Far Eastern Affairs) Walter S. Robertson.
The traveling State Department leaves at home 5,761 colleagues in a sprawling, uncertain organization that is at least two decades overdue for genuine reorganization and reorientation. Dulles has scarcely touched that herculean job, and he may never get around to it. But whoever does may find a legacy from Dulles' one-plane operation. A sense of policy direction must precede any basic change in the setup of the department; Dulles is providing direction to which the department may be some day geared.
"Pour la Paix." Obviously, John Foster Dulles goes about his job as a missionary at large rather than as an administrator.
At first, some people at home and abroad thought that he was only going to preach. They soon discovered that this mission ary did a lot of practicing. He not only carried the word into the jungle, quieted the local tribes and performed marriages, but also helped to clear the ground, dam the streams and stop epidemics of fear.
At year's end there was evidence that Missionary Dulles was making some converts where conversion was difficult. In Paris, a French foreign office official told a TIME correspondent: "You know, the other day a pamphlet came across my desk. Written in French, it was entitled Pour la Paix. My first reaction was that it was just another Communist propaganda tract. But it wasn't. It was John Foster Dulles' recent speech in Chicago. For years now--in Europe at least--the Communists have made 'peace' their private property. Even though people knew what the Communists meant, the idea in their hands helped them and hurt us. It looks now as if your Mr. Dulles is going to take peace away from the Communists and restore it to its real meaning."
During 1954, as he kept working pour la paix. Foster Dulles disregarded the cries of those who would have had him take the high road toward war or the low road of appeasement. He stayed, instead, on the rutted, booby-trapped road in between, and he made some forward progress. If he has, indeed, captured the word peace for the U.S., his patience and caution were well worth the prize.
Three Tests Ahead. To 1954--5 Man of the Year, to his boss, Dwight Eisenhower, and to the people of the U.S. whose destiny they hold, 1955 will bring three critical tests. The immediate problem is the French reaction to the Paris agreements. Somehow, the rearmament of Germany will begin in 1955, whatever stand France takes. The other two tests facing U.S. foreign policy in 1955 are more serious.
After two years in office, the Eisenhower Administration has failed to plug the yawning gap in its foreign policy--the place where history, logic, opportunity and the poverty of the world cry out for U.S. leadership on a free worldwide front of economic advance. In the year's closing months, the President, despite strong opposition in his own Cabinet, seemed to be moving toward a positive policy for liberalized world trade and stimulated production. Dulles favors such a program. But he has been too busy with the international politics of his job to give it his own leadership; it has little chance of success unless he fights for it--in Washington and abroad.
The second challenge of 1955 is even bigger. Almost certainly, there will be a top-level conference between the Western powers and the Russians. Whatever the paper headed "Agenda" may say, the main business before the meeting will be agreement on atomic weapons. If the U.S. submits to crippling limitation on its power of massive atomic retaliation, it must get in return an equivalent enforceable limitation on the Communist suneriority in land armaments and the techniques of subversion.
The prospects of agreement are not bright. But they are less dark than they were before a practical missionary of Christian politics began his extraordinary year of work.
* Adams' fullest staff: eight clerks.
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