J.F.D.

Toward week's end the free world's biggest headlines dealt not with threats of war, or Communist perfidy or international politicking, but with the fact that one man--U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles--lay ill. "Wise counsel," "singleminded strength," "indispensable man" --the tributes buzzed in dozens of languages and dialects from Tripoli to West Berlin. The British Foreign Office, which had despised him for Suez, was "extraordinarily sorry." The French Foreign Office, which had blamed him for North Africa, now regretted "the greatest possible loss for the West." The Foreign Office of West Germany, which Dulles had upheld through freedom to prosperity, worried that "a spoke had been torn from the wheels of Western policymaking."

Gleaming Weapon. Dulles was still very much alive and within telephone reach of both the State Department and the White House, but the sense of shock grew, nonetheless, out of the conviction that the free world could ill afford even the temporary loss of a unique cold-war leadership. A boy who had grown up dreaming of being not President but Secretary of State, a man who had trained for the job during 50 years of corporation law and international diplomacy, Dulles translated his respect for Theodore Roosevelt's lessons about peace-by-power and Woodrow Wilson's lessons about peace-by-moral-fervor into a gleaming weapon against Communism.

As Secretary of State he wielded this weapon brilliantly--Trieste, Iran, Guatemala, Indo-China, Malaya, Austria, Formosa Strait, Lebanon, Berlin. He built up even more commanding influence because he wrapped up the political, military, economic and moral complexities of cold war into his own fighting faith. "Freedom must be a positive force that will penetrate," said John Foster Dulles. "If we demonstrate the good fruits of freedom, then we can know that freedom will prevail."

Vital American. Even more--and perhaps even more surprisingly--the world's reaction turned around the kind of man Dulles was, in a sort of commentary on the timelessness of character. Here was Dulles, devout Presbyterian elder, reading grim-voiced lessons in church. There was Dulles, lover of life, tucked away on Duck Island with wife Janet, reading aloud, or birdwatching, or downing rye on the rocks, or washing pots and pans.

In carpet slippers, on any one of dozens of planes, Dulles, world citizen, would pull out a whodunit from his worn briefcase ("The detective must put his mind to work--my mind is relaxed as I read of his deductions"), or, as he often did, make plans in mid-Atlantic to stop off for a swim at Bermuda.

"Time is the most valuable thing in life, and I don't want to waste it," he said once. Feeling a stab of pain on the eve of his latest mission to Europe (see The Administration), he told a close friend: "If it isn't cancer, then I feel the trip is too important to put off. If it is cancer, then any additional discomfort doesn't fundamentally matter anyway."

"America needs him," said the President at his news conference last week. "And I think each one of us needs him."

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