The Attack Against Dulles

In London, U.S. Ambassador John Hay Whitney was chatting not long ago to a roomful of influential Britons and Americans about some airy new suggestions for U.S. foreign policy. Said he: "There is even the proposal to send Mr. Dulles behind the Iron Curtain." From somewhere out of the back of the room a senior civil servant muttered something that sounded like "and keep him there." "Jock" Whitney broke into a grin and said chidingly, "Now, now." The whole room shook with laughter.

U.S. diplomats in almost every major capital of the free world could sympathize with Jock Whitney's predicament. Reason: foreign antagonism to the U.S. Secretary of State, long serious but diffuse, is becoming more and more a concentrated and measurable factor in world affairs. "Damned Dulles!" swore an Indian lawyer in Calcutta last week. "He is responsible for the tensions of the world! He is not allowing the Americans to come to terms with the Russians!" Added a high French Cabinet minister in Paris: "This man thinks like a theologian. Eisenhower is the mystic. Dulles is the theologian. He is against the Russians because they don't believe in God." Said West German President Theodor Heuss in what was interpreted in Bonn to be a pointed criticism of Dulles' diplomacy: the West should "disentangle" itself from the "web of slogans and ideologies." And in London, when an expatriate American university professor told an audience of 2,000 British schoolchildren, "If Mr. Dulles resigned tomorrow, he would be making the greatest contribution to world peace," the schoolchildren cheered.

Hard Man, Hard Decisions. The current surge of anti-Dulles feeling comes principally because many of the free world's politicians and pundits are trying to sidestep the hard decisions of defense by agitating for a new parley at the summit with the Kremlin. Dulles is known for his unchanging distrust of Communist promises. "Dulles," said England's liberal Manchester Guardian, "is creating for himself something of the reputation of a professional anti-Soviet, someone to whom every action by the Soviet government appears suspect or worse by reason of its origin rather than by its nature. That is a reputation which no one who is responsible for America's foreign relations can afford."

But ill will toward Dulles has been building for a long time. Britain never forgave him for blurting, after the Suez crisis--while attempting to point up the Middle East's low esteem for Britain and France--that if he were an American soldier he would not like to fight beside British and French troops in the Middle East. (DULLES INSULTS OUR FORCES, shrieked London's tabloid Daily Sketch.) France will not forgive Dulles for his support of local movements against French colonial rule in Indo-China, Tunisia and Morocco. Nor will India forgive him for calling Goa, an Indian-claimed Portuguese colony on the India mainland, "a Portuguese province." Israel remembers that U.S. policy was much more pro-Israel during the Truman Administration. Egypt's Nasser hates Dulles for calling Nasser's attempt to play off Russia against the West. And Arabs in general will not forgive him for defending Israel's right to exist.

Loved for His Enemies. Noting the rising attack on Dulles, his friends, often less articulate than his enemies, have begun to rally. Turkey, threatened only last fall by Khrushchev's rocket-rattling, is all the way for Dulles. In Bonn, a West German Cabinet minister, while urging more energetic U.S. leadership, added thanks for America's Dulles: "We would rather have a purposeful man than a gambler. The stakes are too great. Dulles is a sober man. He would never go to Munich, as Chamberlain did."

In the U.S., while Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop sniped at Dulles and Chicago Publisher John S. Knight clamored for his resignation. Columnist David Lawrence noted: "If ever a man should be loved for the enemies he has made, it is John Foster Dulles...who believes that the U.S. should be guided by its conscience in world affairs and should not encourage gangsterism or the exploitation of weak and undeveloped countries by imperialists. He is convinced that moral force can win the support of right-thinking people throughout the world, and that meanwhile a strong military force, capable of massive retaliation, is the best deterrent of aggression."

Expert Solace. Dulles himself is aware as rarely before that it is almost impossible for a U.S. Secretary of State, by the power of his position and the difficulty of pleasing everybody, to be popular. Beyond that, he is disturbed by the personal criticism and by the fact that some of his decisions have turned out worse than others, but he is not disturbed by the central attack against his evaluation of Communism. He is convinced that meaningless summit parleys tend to produce a letdown in the free world's sense of urgency. He is convinced that his policy toward the Kremlin, far from being "rigid" and "negative," is actually "flexible" and "positive," because it is based on the human aspirations and human drives of man's quest for freedom.

If Dulles needed any kind of expert solace last week, he could get it from behind the bars of the Iron Curtain cell of Milovan Djilas, ex-guerrilla leader, ex-Tito crony, now imprisoned for writing scathing anti-Communist articles and the bestseller The New Class. Wrote Djilas: "Dulles makes great mistakes in timing and procedure; but despite such mistakes he undoubtedly has a greater understanding of the world political picture than any other man in America."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.