von Leers: John Foster Dulles
A profile of the newly appointed US Secretary of State, 1953
Title: John Foster Dulles
Author: Johann Jakob von Leers [INDEX LINK]
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 07, Issue 05 (May 1953)
Page(s): 305-308 [LINK]
He resides at 72 East 91st Street in New York, a gentleman who still looks quite handsome. This is Mr. John Foster Dulles, now 64 years old, the man whom both Senator Taft and Governor Dewey have supported, that is, the two leaders of the rival "Right" and "Left" wings in the Republican Party, and whom moreover the great banks of Wall Street support.
John Foster Dulles is personally a very wealthy man, perhaps the highest-paid attorney in the USA. He has a cultivated manner of speaking (his enemies claim that he speaks outright English, not American) and a distinct talent for negotiation.
John Foster Dulles is the brother of Allen Welsh Dulles, who during the war directed American espionage against Germany from Switzerland. The latter was a stubborn hater of National Socialism and, at bottom, probably of the German people as a whole. As intelligence chief, he did his job well for his country, cautiously, deliberately, skillfully.
That those German traitors, starting with von Schulze-Gaevernitz, who became an American and spied against the land of his ancestors, through the whole group of the so-called "Breakers", who were supposed to break the backbone of the German people, up to the dishonorable Reich traitor Gisevius, ran to him and brought him the most important information, was more his luck than his merit. But in any case, he skillfully used for his cause the truffles that these truffle pigs rooted up for him.
John Foster Dulles has some character traits similar to those of his brother, calm waiting, something fox-like or hunter-like in observing the opponent, a supple energy. But he is intellectually more versatile than his brother, hardly an ideologue in any way, capable, which rarely occurs among North Americans, of putting himself in the ways of other people.
Almost everything separates him from his predecessor Dean Acheson. Acheson was "left-wrapped," a pupil of Felix Frankfurter and a conscious, cunning champion of an arrogant dictatorial left-wing democracy, which did not shy away from cooperating with communism and other "progressive" forces.
John Foster Dulles is, though in the purely American sense, rather to be addressed as "right-wrapped." He is the lawyer of big capital, of the Wall Street banks, who has only declared aversion for communism, in general for everything that means social revolution.
Of course, he too has his ties to Jewry. Who could stand in a leading position in the USA who is not somehow friendly with the declared master race? Who could be a successful lawyer on Wall Street as an "antisemite," enjoying the trust of the great Jewish financiers as well as the non-Jewish ones?
But it is certain that his Jewish friends also belong to the saturated, assimilated big bourgeoisie among the Jews in the USA, while Dean Acheson's collaborators largely come from the "mieses," from the small, half-revolutionary Jewish intellectual class, in part simply from the red "intellectuals."
Here, in his restraint toward every social reform movement and his consideration, which he too will always take for men of Jewish big capital, lies the unwritten boundary that will arise for the national liberation movements in Europe in relation to the new U.S.A. chancellor.
But Dean Acheson was an active antifascist, even if in his last period a strongly hindered one. John Foster Dulles is neither "anti" nor even "pro," but a soberly weighing representative of U.S. interests, as the old stratum, the big bourgeoisie, desires them.
Dean Acheson had a peculiar trait toward the petty-bourgeois. In his home he has a kind of combined carpenter and mechanic workshop and tinkers around in it in his free time; despite a certain erudition, his home is almost styleless, his intellectual interests completely one-sidedly directed toward left-wing literature. At bottom, he is a bohemian and conceivable only as a big-city dweller.
John Foster Dulles flies every free day that he can make for himself in his small sport airplane away from New York to the country, to his estate deep in the Canadian forest and bush, where he fishes, hunts, and in the afternoons and evenings reads in his very select library. At bottom, despite his urban profession, he is a country gentleman, even if in the Anglo-Saxon-North American style.
As a young man, he first appeared at the age of 19 in the framework of the North American delegation in 1907 at the peace conference in The Hague inaugurated by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Thus, he consciously experienced the happy, meaningful Europe before the First World War, before it was ruined by communism and democracy.
He was already active in financial policy, even if still as a beginner, at the time when the clever old President Taft governed the USA, the last president who really adhered to the Monroe Doctrine. His successor Wilson was then to drag the people of the USA into the entanglements of European politics with his malignant crusade "to make the world safe for democracy," which has already cost them hundreds of thousands of dead, and will cost still more.
From that time, a statement of the old Privy Councilor Kriege from the German Foreign Office, the legal head of the then imperial German delegation, is handed down, who is said to have said:
"This young American probably has a great future. He has legal thinking ability, looks good, and has surprisingly good manners for an American."
In 1911, John Foster Dulles entered the old law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, which today employs 21 first-class lawyers and of which he is today the senior chief, and which for decades has enjoyed the trust of the New York banking world. It was therefore always a highly political house.
The old Cromwell was, for example, the leading head behind the so-called "Revolution" of Panama, which tore this country from Colombia and enabled the USA to press the shares of the Panama Canal Company from the French. In Latin America, the vulture grip of this firm of the power-hungry Wall Street was felt hard more than once.
John Foster Dulles understood early on, and this essentially promoted his rapid rise in the firm, to play on the instrument of the press. His enemies want to know that many a financial scandal never reached the public if one interested Sullivan & Cromwell and the energetic young Foster Dulles in time.
According to the custom of the capitalist leadership class of the USA, he was repeatedly "lent" to the state administration and could gather rich experience there.
In 1917, he represented the State Department in Central America; in 1919, he was financial advisor to the USA in the preparation of the peace dictate of Versailles under Wilson; in 1924, Dawes drew him in for the preparation of the Dawes Plan.
Besides his influence on the press, he became above all an expert and confidant for foreign financial stabilizations. He was not narrow-minded in political terms.
In 1917, he put Poland's finances in order (insofar as Polish finances are capable of order) and thereby supported the old Marshal Piłsudski. Now, this old hero of his people was certainly no "democrat." That did not prevent John Foster Dulles from granting him his full financial support.
But he also regulated important financial questions with Denmark, Chile, Uruguay (whose transfer from the British to the North American sphere of influence is his work), Finland (to which he granted much sympathy), Colombia, China (where his financial policy, the fruits of which the unfortunate blockhead Truman and the communist-infiltrated U.S. foreign policy deprived him of, deserves a special study).
In the course of his activity, he became more and more the representative of interests of the Morgan group, but also of the Rockefellers (while keeping the left wing of the powerful family at a distance). He has good connections to the Schroeder Bank, from there also to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (so Mossadegh is not his friend, and experts believe that since his appointment to the head of the State Department, the resistance of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi against the all-powerful premier of Iran has increased in strength).
Through the "General American Investors Company," Sullivan & Cromwell then also work with numerous other bank groups, but above all represent the great armaments industry of DuPont and U.S. Steel Corporation.
After the war of 1939-45, John Foster Dulles became general counsel of the North American U.N. delegation. He then advised the U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes at the conferences in Paris and London.
He is also said to have supported General de Gaulle for a time, because he expected from him a strengthening of the fight against the Bolshevik internal advance in France. Only the incurable political stupidity of the "long asparagus" then caused him to distance himself again. He was also the one who patronized the currency reform of Austria, without much regard for its social victims.
His father was a clergyman. He himself describes himself as an active Christian, also in this a true representative of the North American big bourgeoisie, under whose pillows Bible and checkbook sleep faithfully united.
It may have been slightly bitter for him that the "Weltwoche" certified to him already in 1947:
"Christian and brotherly spirit is demonstrated only very little in capitalist countries and least of all on Wall Street, where John Foster Dulles has his law office. If there is anyone who has insight into the innermost mechanism and the methods of international capital, then it is this man."
During the Second World War, he was a decided opponent of the invasion and second front in Europe, because he hoped that the Soviet Union would succumb, but Germany would be so weakened that it would enter into a peace favorable for the USA. He advocated the support of South Korea, pushed through that peace was really concluded with Japan, and promoted the Pacific Pact.
We must not let ourselves be held fast in outdated trains of thought. With the replacement of Dean Acheson by John Foster Dulles, a fundamental and very decisive change in American foreign policy has occurred. In the place of a left-wing intellectual stands an old-liberal big bourgeois and lawyer of the great financial world.
Now realpolitik is being made toward Moscow. Right in his first speech, he said:
"We have enemies who plan our destruction. These enemies are the communist Russians and their allies in other countries ... the communist party in our country is part of a huge conspiracy to overthrow our government by force. ... Every North American who does not want to be clear about this danger is like a soldier who sleeps on watch. We must remain awake to this danger."
What does that mean for us? John Foster Dulles is no "pro-fascist," as the communist and the door-opener press defame him. He is the last "great old man" whom the bourgeoisie of the old, liberal style puts forward for the fight against communism. He confronts communism as the lawyer of the bourgeois order.
For this fight, he needs troops. With his intellectual world, rule of the capitalist class, Christianity, democracy, no fire of enthusiasm can be kindled in Europe.
They are values that perhaps still act persistently, no longer inspiringly, and cannot carry a heavy war. Thus, the more he steers toward a clarification of the world situation, the more he will have to pact with the forces of national renewal.
Interesting.
But ultimately didn't he just keep the Jewish plague at bay?
I wonder whether the Dean Acheson route of full Weimar-ification, followed by violent insurrection against the Jews, would ultimately have been better for America.