Religion, Power, and the Life of John Foster Dulles

Abstract

Religion, Power, and the Life of John Foster Dulles Benjamin E. Varat (bio) John D. Wilsey, God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. xv + 253 pp. Notes and index. $21.99. John D. Wilsey, God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. xv + 253 pp. Notes and index. $21.99. Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in January 1961, yet actions he and his longtime Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, undertook still reverberate powerfully across the globe. They cast a shadow over our contemporary world. Studying these actions can illuminate what the year 1953 means for an Iranian, why newspaper articles about Guatemalan refugees mention 1954, and why Chinese students stay after class to discuss the Taiwan Strait in 1954–55. The long-term significance of what Eisenhower and Dulles wrought provides so much fodder for historians seeking to reveal the motivations and impulses that animated these two men. The first line of the preface to John D. Wilsey's God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles promises an exploration of Dulles's "worldview as informed by his religion." Dulles openly expressed his faith and made clear, at least rhetorically, that this faith animated his Manichaean vision of the Cold War as a battle between good and evil. Yet his fire-and-brimstone public persona was, to an uncertain extent, an act designed to rally public support for whatever policies he and Eisenhower put into practice. Recent studies by Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013), and Walter McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016), provide scholarly and provocative analyses of how religion informed the making of foreign policy in the Eisenhower administration (Kinzer) and more broadly in U.S. history (McDougall). These works and Wilsey's demonstrate that teasing out the actual effect Dulles's religious beliefs had on his practice of diplomacy and his input into Eisenhower's decision-making is a rich area for study. Early on, Wilsey states he is a Christian historian and his faith animates his scholarship. While faith by itself is an irrelevant qualification for historical analysis, a deep knowledge of Christian thought certainly could add significant color and shade to an examination of Dulles's public life, especially his years [End Page 576] as Secretary of State. In the end, though, little of this potential is realized, as the book suffers from four major shortcomings: a serious lack of secondary sources with a heavy reliance on a few outdated texts; a failure to identify any consistent worldview informed by Dulles's Christianity; a lack of engagement with Dulles's fully divergent reactions to fascism and communism; a shallow, poorly researched exploration of Dulles's long legal career and—most surprisingly in a book entitled God's Cold Warrior—his tenure as Secretary of State. The first and strongest chapter of the book is an extended look at Dulles's familial roots. Born in 1888, Dulles grew up in Watertown, New York, a wealthy manufacturing center on the shores of Lake Ontario. Wilsey, who refers to Dulles as Foster, discusses Dulles's father, the minister Allen Macy Dulles, at length, highlighting his descent from a long line of influential Presbyterian leaders. John Foster Dulles's mother, born Edith Foster, was the elder daughter of John Watson Foster, a prominent lawyer, longtime diplomat, and Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. Edith's younger sister, Eleanor, married Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920. Wilsey describes in great detail the outdoor activities Dulles and his siblings engaged in with their grandfather and uncle. From almost the beginning of his life, Dulles had access to the highest levels of diplomatic, political, and business circles in the United States. Wilsey argues that Dulles's religious outlook derived largely from his father, Allen Macy Dulles, especially his notion that there existed a religious duality within Christianity centered on a conflict between those...