If ever a man was born to international privilege, it was John Foster Dulles. His family traced its ancestry to Charlemagne. As a boy he thrived under the special encouragement of his grandfather and namesake, the lawyer-diplomat John Watson Foster, who had been a treaty negotiator, minister to Russia and Spain, and secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison...
Dulles was hired as a clerk at the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, with a monthly salary of $50. Unlike other clerks, he was able to live well, since his grandfather allowed him to draw on the $20,000 that had been set aside as the young man's inheritance. He needed that help only for a short time. Propelled by his sharp legal mind and network of connections, Dulles rose through the firm more quickly than anyone ever had. By 1927, sixteen years after being hired, he was its sole managing partner and one of the highest-paid lawyers in the world...
By the time he reached his mid-thirties, Dulles was on easy terms with some of the world's richest and most powerful men...
The list of Dulles's clients at Sullivan & Cromwell is nothing less than a guide to the biggest multinational corporations of early-twentieth century America... Dulles arranged loans to governments across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East; sued the Soviet Union on behalf of American insurance companies; organized a worldwide takeover campaign for the American Bank Note Company, which had printed the fateful Nicaraguan stamp showing a volcano in fictitious eruption; and negotiated concessions in Mexico and Panama for the American & Foreign Power Company. His clients built ports in Brazil, dug mines in Peru, and drilled for oil in Columbia...
Dulles was especially interested in Germany, which he visited regularly during the 1920s and 1930s. According to the most exhaustive book about Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm "thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime," and Dulles spent much of 1934 "publicly supporting Hitler," leaving his partners "shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression." When asked during this period how he dealt with German clients who were Jewish, he replied that he simply decided "to keep away from them." Finally, facing a revolt by his partners, he agreed in 1935 to close the firm's Berlin office, later backdating the decision to a year earlier.
Soon after World War II ended, Dulles found in Communism the evil he had been so slow to find in Nazism. His epiphany came when he read Stalin's Problems of Leninism, which he found gripping. Several times he compared it to Hitler's Mein Kampf as a blueprint for world domination...
Law and politics were not Dulles's only passions. Throughout his life, he was also moved by deep Christian faith. It was an integral part of his character, and from it grew the intensity of his anti-Communist zeal. He cannot be understood apart from it...
Dulles believed the heritage of the United States, which he described as "in its essentials a religious heritage," placed Americans under a special obligation. He felt what he called "a deep sense of mission," a conviction that "those who found a good way of life had a duty to help others to find the same way." Like his father, he was a born preacher; like his grandfather, a missionary. When the 1950s dawned, he was looking for a way to channel his "Christian insight and Christian inspiration" into the fight against "the evil methods and designs of Soviet Communism."
The best way to do that, Dulles quite reasonably concluded, was to become secretary of state.
~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow, pp. 112-115
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