John Foster Dulles

John Foster Dulles served as the Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He, along with his brother Allen Dulles, the CIA director, were infuriated by Israel's attempt to mask the extent of its military buildup prior to the 1956 Suez Crisis. He was regularly present at White House briefings where intelligence from U-2 flights, including early information on Dimona, was presented.¹

Biographical Record

John Foster Dulles was born on February 25, 1888, in Washington, D.C. He died on May 24, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., from colon cancer. Funeral services were held on May 27, 1959, at Washington National Cathedral. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.^bio1

He graduated from Princeton University in 1908, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate he attended the Second Hague Conference in 1907 with his grandfather John Watson Foster, who had served as Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison. After a year at the Sorbonne, he completed a law degree at George Washington University Law School in two years, graduating in 1911. He was admitted to the New York bar the same year and joined Sullivan and Cromwell, then New York's preeminent international corporate law firm, where he would remain for over four decades.^bio2

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Dulles served as chief legal adviser to Bernard Baruch on the Reparations Commission, drafting treaty clauses that sought to limit German compensation obligations. He predicted the punishing reparations imposed by the European powers would produce another war. Baruch later paid Dulles $10,000 to ghostwrite his account of the negotiations, The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty.^bio3

Dulles was appointed to the United States Senate from New York by Governor Thomas E. Dewey on July 7, 1949, to fill the seat vacated by the ailing Senator Robert F. Wagner. He served until November 8, 1949, losing the special election to the Democratic nominee Herbert H. Lehman. His four-month Senate tenure was his only elected office.^bio4

He served as Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from January 21, 1953, to April 22, 1959, the longest tenure in that position since Cordell Hull. He was the first Secretary of State to hold regular departmental press conferences. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1956, he underwent abdominal surgery at Walter Reed in February 1959 when the disease recurred. He resigned on April 22, 1959, and died thirty-two days later.^bio5

Sullivan and Cromwell: United Fruit and Latin American Clients

Dulles became a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1920 and was elevated to managing partner in 1927 at age thirty-eight, a position he held until becoming Secretary of State. During that period the firm represented United Fruit Company as a corporate client for roughly thirty-eight years, and both Foster and Allen Dulles held substantial blocks of United Fruit stock. Sullivan and Cromwell also represented two affiliated entities that together formed the structural core of United Fruit's power in Guatemala: American and Foreign Power Company, which owned the Empresa Electrica de Guatemala and controlled most of the country's electricity supply, and International Railways of Central America, which controlled the national rail network.^ufc1

Thomas McCann, a former United Fruit vice president and company historian, wrote that Dulles "was reputed to be the author of the actual concessions which the firm negotiated on our behalf" in Guatemala. The concession framework most relevant to McCann's description was the 1936 agreement with Guatemalan dictator General Jorge Ubico, under which United Fruit received a ninety-nine-year lease over tracts comprising one-seventh of the country's arable land, along with control of its only Atlantic port. Sullivan and Cromwell also negotiated comparable land-grant concessions for United Fruit in Honduras.^ufc2

Guatemala 1954: PBSUCCESS

The Eisenhower administration's decision to overthrow elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 was designated Operation PBSUCCESS. The conflict of interest involving Secretary of State Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles (Director of Central Intelligence) was direct: both had been on the United Fruit payroll through Sullivan and Cromwell, and the Arbenz government's land reform program had expropriated 40 percent of United Fruit's Guatemalan landholdings.

A declassified CIA dispatch from the PBSUCCESS operations center in Florida, dated June 2, 1954 (FRUS 1952-54 Guatemala, Document 169), records that Dulles had publicly protested the arrival of an Eastern European arms shipment at Guatemalan ports at a news conference on May 25, 1954, and that his State Department had formally supported United Fruit's land expropriation claim. The dispatch, written under the pseudonym William D. Playdon (Tracy Barnes), requested that the State Department issue a formal protest and publish a "White Paper" linking the arms shipment to communist influence, serving simultaneously as anti-Arbenz propaganda and operational cover for PBSUCCESS.^pb1

A telephone conversation memorandum (FRUS 1952-54 Guatemala, Document 252), dated June 28, 1954, records John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles coordinating directly on the coup's operational status. John Foster Dulles stated that "our side must use more air power" and that CIA air operations were "excellent and effective." Regarding the accidental sinking of a British vessel by CIA-supported forces, John Foster Dulles said "No authority was given for this. However, we can't say it," documenting both operational awareness and deliberate deniability.^pb2

A second telephone memorandum (FRUS 1952-54 Guatemala, Document 189), dated June 16, 1954, records Dulles telling Allen Dulles that Standard Oil of New Jersey executives had met with Allen about "the small country down south," and that John Foster wanted to "possibly slow things up without formalized action," referencing a Senate sanctions bill he had drafted but found unsatisfactory.^pb3

After Arbenz's resignation and the installation of a new government, Dulles delivered a national radio address in June 1954 framing the coup as a spontaneous Guatemalan rejection of Soviet infiltration. He asserted that communists had "dominated the social security organization and ran the agrarian land reform program," and praised the restoration of "peace and freedom to that sister Republic." The address made no reference to U.S. covert involvement. The full text was published in the Department of State Bulletin.^pb4

Iran 1953: TPAJAX

The U.S.-UK operation to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953 preceded the Guatemala operation by one year and involved Dulles in a parallel coordinating role.

On March 1, 1953 (FRUS 1951-54 Iran, Document 169), Dulles submitted a memorandum to President Eisenhower assessing the Iran situation. On April 4, 1953 (Document 184), CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt sent Dulles a proposal for operational action; the document records that "Wisner recommended approval and Dulles approved." The same month, CIA Station Tehran received authorization to spend up to $1 million in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh, including funding for propaganda, street demonstrations, and the cultivation of Iranian military officers. On April 21, 1953 (Document 194), Dulles received briefing notes to present to the National Security Council the following day, at which he characterized the Iranian political situation as "perpetual crisis" and described declining prestige of the Shah alongside growing Mossadegh influence.^iran1

British intelligence and Dulles jointly argued the U.S. position to Eisenhower by framing Mossadegh's continuation in power as a route to Soviet domination of Iran's oil resources. The coup succeeded on August 19, 1953. A CIA post-operation assessment dated August 28, 1953 (FRUS 1951-54 Iran, Document 306) recorded that "Secretary Dulles' and President Eisenhower's comments concerning the Tudeh were of great help" in shifting Iranian public sentiment against Mossadegh, citing Dulles's public anti-communist messaging as a component of the psychological operations preceding the coup. Following the coup's success, Dulles approved an emergency grant of $45 million to the new Iranian government.^iran2

Personal Rockefeller Connection

John Foster Dulles had a long personal relationship with the Rockefeller family predating his political career. In the 1920s, he defended Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick (the Rockefellers' minister at Riverside Church) during the Fundamentalist Controversy, emerging as a leader of Presbyterian modernists. He served on the Rockefeller-backed Federal Council of Churches' Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. John D. Rockefeller Jr. trusted and respected Dulles, making his criticism of Nelson Rockefeller at the San Francisco UN conference in 1945 particularly stinging.^rock1

Rockefeller Foundation Chairmanship

Dulles served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952. When he left to become Eisenhower's Secretary of State in early 1953, he handed the chair to John D. Rockefeller III (Nelson's brother) and tapped his friend Dean Rusk as the foundation's president. Rusk's transition from State Department intelligence work to the Rockefeller Foundation, and then back to government as John F. Kennedy's Secretary of State, was typical of the institutional circulation between the Rockefeller philanthropic network and U.S. foreign policy apparatus.^rock2

San Francisco UN Conference Confrontation

Dulles was a leader in the U.S. delegation at the San Francisco founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. He was adamant that the UN charter reflect Wilsonian internationalism and attacked Rockefeller's effort to exempt the Act of Chapultepec and the Monroe Doctrine from UN oversight, telling Rockefeller that the letter he had engineered through Senator Vandenberg "might wreck the conference." He called it "a most dangerous and damaging thing." Their confrontation at Stettinius's penthouse suite was a direct clash between Rockefeller's regionalism and Dulles's internationalism.^rock3

Conflict with Nelson over Open Skies

As Secretary of State, Dulles repeatedly clashed with Nelson Rockefeller over Cold War strategy. Nelson's Open Skies proposal originated from a working group Rockefeller convened at Quantico Marine Corps Base between June 5 and 10, 1955. Dulles rejected the plan and, together with Under Secretary Herbert Hoover Jr., blocked most Rockefeller foreign policy initiatives on the grounds that Rockefeller represented outside interference in State Department prerogatives. When Eisenhower nonetheless incorporated Open Skies into his presentation at the 1955 Geneva Summit on July 21, 1955, Dulles told colleagues he might have to resign if the Soviets accepted the offer; he dreaded having to be "the Devil at Geneva." Eisenhower overruled him and delivered the proposal.^rock4

Key Policy Instruments

Dulles was the primary architect of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), signed in Manila on September 8, 1954, establishing collective defense obligations among the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan, with a separate protocol designating Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as protected territories. He contributed to the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty (1955), the Formosa Resolution (signed January 29, 1955, Public Law 4), and the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957.^policy1

On January 12, 1954, Dulles delivered an address before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York articulating the doctrine of "massive retaliation": the United States would "depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing" rather than maintain large conventional forces at every potential flashpoint. The speech was published in the Department of State Bulletin, January 25, 1954, pages 107-110.^policy2

On December 14, 1953, Dulles warned the North Atlantic Council that a French failure to ratify the European Defense Community (EDC) would require "an agonizing reappraisal" of U.S. relations with France. The EDC failed in 1954 when the French National Assembly rejected it, and Dulles's threat was not executed.^policy3

Archival Holdings

The John Foster Dulles Papers at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (Abilene, Kansas) total over 88,000 pages across eleven series, spanning 1950 to 1961 with the bulk in the period 1953-1959. Key series include: the JFD Chronological Series (approximately 13,600 pages of correspondence, memoranda, and memoranda of conversations); the Telephone Conversations Series (13,000 pages of telephone memoranda covering Guatemala, Iran, Korea, Berlin, and other crises); the White House Memoranda Series (including memoranda of Dulles's conversations with Eisenhower and a file of conversations between John Foster and Allen Dulles on intelligence matters); and the Subject Series and General Correspondence and Memoranda Series. A separate collection of Dulles papers (1860-1988) is held at the Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.^arch1

The FRUS volume Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Guatemala (edited by Susan Holly, published 2003, 287 documents) is the primary State Department documentary record of PBSUCCESS. The FRUS volume Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951-1954, Iran is the primary record of TPAJAX. Both are available at history.state.gov.^arch2