The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s

John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower made U.S. foreign policy together for seven years, during which time they established an effective working relationship. Dulles as secretary of state was, without doubt, the president’s key foreign policy ally, implementer, and emissary. Although Ike did not particularly like the secretary personally, he appreciated the man’s talents, experience, and status in the Republican Party. It would have been astonishing had Eisenhower appointed anyone else.¹

As secretary, Dulles courted Ike, aware of the great importance of good relations with the president, learned in part from the difficulties that had developed between his uncle Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Dulles deliberately contacted Eisenhower daily to review events and policies, but even more to remain vital to Ike’s decision making. Eisenhower would write that he and Dulles generally agreed on tactics and goals. By 1957, however, Eisenhower realized that most people who dealt with Dulles at home and abroad saw him as “legalistic, arrogant, sanctimonious, and arbitrary.” He was not, as one interlocutor remarked, “a likeable or well-balanced personality.”² Some of this was personal style, and Eisenhower shared complaints about Dulles as aloof, austere, judgmental, and overzealous. On the other hand, Ike aggravated the tension surrounding Dulles by intentionally using him to deliver unpleasant messages and oversee execution of some of the least popular administration decisions.

Accordingly, the usual picture of Dulles has been unflattering, highlighting the bombastic gambler whose fire-and-brimstone oratory mirrored an inner compulsion to fight Communism because of his uncompromising religious principles. Dulles became the emblem of the toughest administration initiatives. The doctrine of massive retaliation was firmly identified with him, for instance, even though he and Eisenhower had begun discussing the idea not long after meeting in 1948.

Privately Dulles could be better appreciated as an effective statesman. Konrad Adenauer, president of West Germany, for one, saw Dulles as “a very sober, coolly deliberating person, a logical thinker, willing to listen to the arguments of others.”³ Those who would give Dulles so much credit were few. Even Dulles remarked, “I prefer being respected to being liked.”⁴

In reality, for Dulles, and for Eisenhower, the rhetorical excesses repeated year after year sought to create a public safety zone within which they could operate with greater freedom. Both Eisenhower and Dulles publicly threatened and berated China, declaring intentions to crush a sworn enemy, throw the Communists out, and liberate the citizenry. They wanted conservatives and critics to be persuaded of their toughness, they wanted Communist governments to reconsider undesirable policies, and they wanted friends and allies to believe they were alert to threats.

The problem proved to be the line between rhetoric and reality, between a purposefully created illusion and an unintentionally insurmountable barrier to rationale policymaking. Public discourse came to dominate confidential deliberations. The secretary and president frequently characterized China as repugnant and dastardly, leaving no room for the moderate views that the two policymakers shared and expressed privately.

Like Eisenhower, Dulles approached his tenure in the Department of State as a bargain with ruthless political forces whose deference he could not take for granted and whose expectations made him cautious and defensive. An idealistic Wilsonian and a willing bipartisan in his youth, he became increasingly conservative to further his political ambitions in an environment of escalating anti-Communism. By the 1950s, he had emerged as a strident advocate of rolling back Communists and defending the Free World. Conversely, as historian H. W. Brands, Jr. notes, when Dulles was given opportunities for splitting the bloc at Joseph Stalin’s death, for instance, he “back[ed] away from the campaign promises of liberation,” warning instead that such efforts would expedite regime consolidation and spark war.⁵ Sounding quite different from the rabid public Dulles, in 1958 he told Under Secretary of State Christian Herter and Assistant Secretary for East Asia Walter Robertson, “I suspect that the determining cause of change in both Communist China and Eastern Europe will be natural forces within rather than stimulants from without.”⁶

Descended from a family of diplomats, Dulles had amassed extensive international experience, particularly by representing the United States at countless multilateral conferences. Admirers considered him a broad gauged expert, so adept that he commanded Asian as well as European issues. His service as secretary to the Chinese delegation at the Second Hague Conference on Peace in 1907 and his travels to China and Japan in 1938 (when he met Chiang Kai-shek) unwisely led him to share this view of his expertise.⁷ Harry Truman appointed him to negotiate the Japanese peace treaty signed in 1951 and sought unsuccessfully to name him ambassador to Japan. Dulles preferred to stay in the heart of the action, not to be exiled to “the end of the transmission line.”⁸ Dulles’s 1950 book War and Peace was a partisan effort to distance him from Democratic policies, reflecting his disillusionment with containment and attacking Truman’s decisions on Asia as dangerously unsuited to fighting Moscow.⁹

However, like his president and his predecessor as secretary of state, Dean Acheson, Dulles is more accurately classified as an Atlanticist. Europe took precedence, its adversaries and dependencies worthy of greater concern because of their role in European affairs. He worried mostly about Soviet threats to Europe and protecting the economic prosperity and political stability of France, Germany, and Great Britain. Asia seemed significant largely as its resources and markets served European interests or as an arena for thwarting Soviet ambitions. The people held little interest for him, and he demonstrated the widespread prejudice against “the Oriental mind,” which he regarded as “always more devious.”¹⁰ Even his appearance with the Chinese at the Hague taught him more about Europe than China.¹¹ To Dulles the U.S. fight in Korea meant thwarting Stalin, an effort to “paralyze the slimy, octopus-like tentacles that reach out from Moscow to suck our blood.” The Koreans seemed almost irrelevant.¹² He understood little about the internal dynamics of the region and proved slow to appreciate either the force of decolonization or third world nationalism.¹³

McCarthyite condemnation of the Department of State bolstered Dulles’s European orientation and defensiveness. From his perch as advisor to the Truman administration, where he advocated and sought to demonstrate bipartisanship, he saw Acheson denounced for curtailing aid to Chiang Kai-shek. Attacks on Acheson demonstrated the brute force of anti-Communist politics in America. Determined not to suffer Acheson’s fate, Dulles cultivated the China Lobby, joining with it to insure financing for the Nationalist Chinese and to stabilize Chiang’s international support. In charge of producing a peace treaty to end the Pacific war, he engineered a separate, parallel agreement between Tokyo and Taipei so that he could exclude Communist Chinese authorities from peacemaking and prevent relations with Japan.¹⁴ As secretary, he launched harsh rhetorical attacks on Beijing to appease the Republican right, hoping to distract them from his past record as a friend of Alger Hiss, a supporter of moderate, internationalist Republicans like Thomas Dewey, and his service in the Truman administration.¹⁵ Dulles knew that his international experience and enthusiasm for dealing with with foreigners made him suspect to conservatives. His refusal to shake Zhou Enlai’s extended hand at the Geneva Conference of 1954 reflected his willingness to sacrifice an informal exchange on neutral territory rather than risk headlines alleging that he was soft on Communism.¹⁶

Dulles, however, also was a pragmatic statesman who recognized that dealing with China was a complex problem with no obvious solutions. He understood that the Communist world should not be considered monolithic. During the 1930s, he had held onto the idea that Mao Zedong and his followers were “agrarian reformers.” At the end of the 1940s, although troubled by Moscow’s influence over Beijing, he wrote about the need to admit Chinese Communists into the United Nations.¹⁷ In 1950 he even penned a letter to Representative Walter Judd (R-MN), a powerful member of the congressional China bloc, to argue that the People’s Republic should not be isolated and barred from the UN for ideological reasons so long as it demonstrated that it could effectively rule its people.¹⁸ Until the Korean War, he hoped that Mao like Tito would follow an independent path.¹⁹ At his 1953 confirmation hearings, he suggested that it might be in American interests to open relations with Beijing if the Chinese Communists ever renounced their allegiance to the Soviets, knowing such remarks would produce howls of protest from Taiwan and the China bloc.²⁰

Moreover, Dulles viewed Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang skeptically despite his self-protective endorsement of the Generalissimo. Early on he became convinced that Chiang did not provide effective leadership for the anti-Communist Chinese, and in 1950 he collaborated with Dean Rusk to try to drive the Generalissimo from power. Their plan, which substituted UN trusteeship for a KMT government, did not win Acheson’s approval and Chiang survived to tighten his grip on Taiwan.²¹ Dulles’s hostility toward the Communist Chinese did not erase his visceral objection to the manipulative and opportunistic nature of the Nationalist government. When Eisenhower unleashed Chiang in 1953, Dulles followed with an admonition to the National Security Council that the Nationalist leader must not be allowed to see the new policy as license to attack China. Therefore he could not be allowed to purchase jet bombers until he had pledged not to use them recklessly in a manner inimical to U.S. interests.²² In a world of great instability and danger, Dulles believed that Chiang would not hesitate to incite World War III if such a conflict would promise to return him to the mainland.

Over time—though few have noticed—Dulles’s dislike for the KMT grew, and his animosity toward the Chinese Communists abated. Although his determination to preserve a Free Chinese government on the island of Taiwan remained, he resisted Chiang’s efforts to shape American policy. He continued to see the KMT regime as unstable and doubted its durability, suggesting to the British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955 that, like the white Russian forces of the 1920s, the KMT regime did not understand developments at home and could disappear overnight.²³ He found his efforts to collaborate with Taipei frustrating and ineffective. He struggled for many months to avoid an entangling alliance with Chiang that would restrict his freedom of action, relenting only in order to secure cooperation with a diplomatic initiative at the UN to try to end the Taiwan Strait crisis. More successfully, he blunted Nationalist efforts to provoke Beijing.

Dulles, the alleged champion of Nationalist China, ignored Taipei’s protests against American interaction with the mainland. Those contacts took place primarily through ambassadorial talks held at Geneva and Warsaw, which Dulles agreed to reluctantly but came to appreciate. He saw the sessions as a way to enmesh China in aimless, stultifying chatter and urged his negotiator U. Alexis Johnson to do whatever he could to keep the conversation going.²⁴ As long as the Chinese were talking, they would, he believed, refrain from shooting. Further, the talks shielded the administration from criticism that it refused to moderate tension in the Strait. But Dulles monitored the cable traffic from the U.S. representative carefully, often writing Johnson’s instructions himself, since the talks were the only point of contact and an opportunity perhaps to educate the Chinese.²⁵

The consequence of his complex view of the China problem was a commitment to a policy of Two Chinas. Dulles insisted that a Free China must exist, but he also recognized that a Communist China did exist. Ignoring it long-term would not be productive. The Eisenhower administration might be compelled to behave irrationally on the subject, but he, and the president, hoped the period of insisting that Chiang Kai-shek represented the whole of China’s people would be short. He had, in fact, concluded that a Two Chinas solution was probably the only solution as early as 1950.²⁶

Dulles accepted that Beijing’s suspicion of the United States and the Nationalists might be justified. He favored efforts to split China and the Soviet Union. And he had little hesitation, as he told the NSC, about “dealing with… [the PRC] on a de facto basis when circumstances make this useful.”²⁷

The secretary’s convictions regarding China and Taiwan reflected more than a private intellectual journey. Dulles shaped his ideas based in part on interaction with a small group of men in the State Department whose views he trusted. Like other secretaries of state, Dulles created an inner and outer department. Unlike most of his predecessors and successors, he not only gathered friends and allies into a tight circle of advisers, he used the outer array of officials to pretend fidelity to a particular political position, in this case China Lobby principles. Behind this protective shell, his inner circle disparaged Chiang Kai-shek and sought moderate approaches to handling the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Walter S. Robertson’s designation came at the direct suggestion of Walter Judd. Robertson had served in China as charge d’affaires ad interim between the ambassadorships of Patrick Hurley and John Leighton Stuart in the 1940s, as economic counselor in the embassy, and as U.S. commissioner at the Peiping Executive Headquarters during the civil war.²⁸ But what recommended him to Judd was his rigid anti-Communism and contempt for the Chinese followers of Marx and Lenin.²⁹ Robertson believed so completely in the perversity of the Communist system that, although he possessed a degree of financial expertise from his banking career and had earlier been an economic advisor to the State Department, he rejected evidence of economic successes on the mainland and advised the secretary that U.S. pressures could force a collapse.³⁰ If Roberston’s judgment sometimes failed, and his effort to enforce a pro-Chiang policy grated, the courtly Virginian was personally well liked. Robert H. Scott of the British Embassy considered it “impossible to doubt that [Robertson] is a man of honour and integrity” despite his “obstinacy and blindness.”³¹ Moreover, his political affiliation as a Democrat and his frustration with some of Dulles’s policies did not lessen his loyalty to the secretary. He was tougher on subordinates, who recalled he “was quite a desk-banger” and “had absolutely no use for the more balanced view that some of us took with regard to Chinese issues.”³²

Working in tandem with Robertson, Walter McConaughy imposed an equally inflexible view of Communist China upon his subordinates. McConaughy had actually been a critic of the Nationalists during his years as consul general in Shanghai in the late 1940s. He had favored trying to encourage Titoism among the Chinese Communists and warned Washington against provoking irredentist feelings regarding Taiwan. Repeatedly he told his superiors that Shanghai American businessmen and missionaries favored recognition of and trade with the Chinese Communists, hoping to lure China away from the Soviet Union.³³ But McConaughy’s cautious sympathy for the new regime diminished with the harsh attacks on Foreign Service colleagues who had not condemned the Communist Chinese strongly enough. His sympathy disappeared entirely with the outbreak of the Korean War. Mao, he later said, “contemptuously rejected opportunities for friendship and normal relations” with the United States. All that could be done was “pressure and diplomatic isolation.”³⁴

Neither Robertson nor McConaughy had to convince Washington’s representatives in Taipei of the rectitude of Chiang Kai-shek’s cause. Both ambassadors, Karl Rankin and Everett Drumright, agreed that the United States had no choice but to support Free China. Rankin admired Chiang’s honesty, intelligence, and determination to fight Communism as well as his willingness to cooperate with American officials and to bring American-trained bureaucrats and officers into his government and his military. So convinced did Rankin become of Chiang’s centrality to the protection of U.S. interests that he knowingly wrote cables to Washington that exaggerated threats to Taiwan and drafted Nationalist government letters and cables to Washington.³⁵

Hoping to strengthen the hand of those in Washington fighting for aid to Chiang, Rankin convinced others that he could not be trusted to represent the United States should its goals diverge from those of Nationalist China.³⁶ Rankin actively opposed Dulles’s pursuit of a Two Chinas policy, which he dismissed as a London plot designed to rescue British investments at the cost of American principles.³⁷ Any thought that Mao could be weaned from the Soviets by being nice to him Rankin considered ludicrous.³⁸ Admitting Red China to the United Nations would be dangerous as it increased China’s prestige, signaled acceptance of permanent Communist control, encouraged accommodation of Asian states to Beijing, and weakened the coherence and authority of the UN.³⁹ Rankin went so far as to declare American ideals wrong for Taiwan: “We are trying to develop strength on this island, and the introduction of reforms or Western democratic ideas should be pushed only as they promise to increase the sum-total of that strength.”⁴⁰

Everett Drumright championed the Nationalist cause almost as vociferously as Rankin. He brought to the ambassadorship years of China experience dating back to 1931, but like Robertson, it was Drumright’s conservative political credentials that facilitated his confirmation by the congressional China bloc.⁴¹ Less than six months after he arrived in Taiwan during the1958 Straits crisis, he urged Washington to approve Nationalist attacks on mainland artillery batteries and called for the defense of Jinmen.⁴²

Finally, to Dulles’s chagrin, Henry Cabot Lodge made his post as the United States representative at the United Nations an independent power base, trading on his ties with Eisenhower, which dated from World War II, and blossomed as Lodge enthusiastically participated in efforts to draft Eisenhower to run for president.⁴³ An old-fashioned aristocrat who has been caustically described as “a collection of fine qualities in search of a personality,” Lodge represented moderate Republicanism. Dulles objected to Lodge’s strong opinions on a variety of issues, including China. Lodge was not just too outspoken in support of the Nationalists; he also demanded to be given discretion to veto Red China’s admission to the UN.⁴⁴

The views of these men suggested a secretary of state seeking like-minded officials to staff his department. But Dulles did not rely on any of these people when he made China policies. Dulles saw them as biased and their advice hazardous.⁴⁵

At the same time, Dulles, despite his notorious aloofness and self-confidence, did have advisers he trusted. The secretary depended upon a small collection of intimates with whom he could review and argue about options and who would not leak information to pro-Chiang media or members of Congress. The precise composition of this “kitchen cabinet” fluctuated, but key figures included Robert Bowie, Douglas MacArthur II, Herman Phleger, and Livingston Merchant.⁴⁶ During some periods, he met with them daily, early in the morning. All were European-oriented generalists lacking China expertise to bring to deliberations, but all distrusted Chiang Kai-shek, resented the China Lobby, and favored a more constructive approach toward Beijing.

Robert Bowie as director of the Policy Planning Staff, although originally appointed by Be dell Smith, rapidly impressed Dulles with his sharp intellect and blunt advice. According to biographer Townsend Hoopes, “Dulles relished a real argument when he respected his opponent,” making Bowie “an important catalyst on a range of major issues.”⁴⁷ Bowie opposed uncritical support for Chiang Kai-shek and sustaining “the total illusion about Chiang’s real role.” He reflected years later about his differences with Walter Robertson, noting that “Robertson was too decent a person to be a real zealot.… He knew that from time to time I’d taken a different view about China. Not that I had illusions about China, I didn’t think we were going to have a friendship,” but Bowie urged reexamination of American policy toward the People’s Republic.⁴⁸ During his 1956 confirmation hearings, he advocated granting Beijing a United Nations seat, adding that China would have to moderate its behavior to qualify.⁴⁹ Efforts to isolate China could not, he believed, be sustained, and when that wall crumbled, Washington’s prestige and influence in Asia would be damaged. Instead, the United States should embrace the pariah state, allowing journalists to travel to China and including Beijing in arms control talks. He supported Dulles’s Two Chinas policy, which, as Bowie summarized it, would accept the permanency of both Chinas, embark upon a long, slow process of bringing the PRC into international organizations and “call for eventual recognition of both countries by most states (but not necessarily by [the] US).”⁵⁰

Douglas MacArthur II also entered the State Department with connections to Eisenhower rather than Dulles. As with Smith, Eisenhower may have sought to use MacArthur as a means of keeping the pugnacious secretary contained and monitoring his contacts with the isolationist Taft wing of the Republican Party. A shrewd and urbane diplomat, MacArthur served in Europe before World War II and was interned by the Nazis. Subsequently, he joined Eisenhower’s staff in London and Normandy, despite past familial friction with Ike. He headed the Western Europe Bureau at the State Department and played an important role in the establishment of NATO. Between 1951 and 1953, he served as international affairs adviser to the Supreme Command in Europe, resuming a productive and warm relationship with Eisenhower. At Ike’s behest, in 1953 he became State Department counselor, giving up a stint as ambassador to Vietnam, and Dulles made him the department’s liaison with the NSC and subsequently coordinator of plans and policies. MacArthur routinely accompanied Dulles to meetings with Eisenhower at the White House and traveled around the world with him as well. Quite early he overcame whatever suspicions Dulles might have entertained about his loyalties, and they collaborated easily.⁵¹ As he told MacArthur, Dulles needed someone who would tell him when he was wrong.⁵²

Like the others, MacArthur saw the third world through the lens of Europe’s needs and interests. Nevertheless, he recognized the power of de colonization movements and believed that Asian nationalism would have to be accommodated. For expressing those sentiments among State Department Europeanists, “some of them sort of put their fingers to the side of their eyes and made slant eyes at me, as if I’d suddenly changed my nationality and I’d committed a heresy by talking this way.”⁵³ MacArthur proved instrumental in establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), although he thought it irredeemably flawed given the membership of colonial powers. He also became ambassador to Japan in 1957 and negotiated a new Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. He saw himself as a “EUR boy” but more than most took a hand in Asia policy.

Regarding the future of China and Taiwan, MacArthur worried that “If Taiwan ever fell into unfriendly hands, then there would be the capacity… to interdict communication between the north and the south, our positions…in the Philippines and in Japan, and we would, in effect, have to have two Seventh Fleets… and it would be an intolerable position.”⁵⁴ Nevertheless, he did not urge strong support for the Kuomintang government in Taiwan, believing as did Dulles that it would not be returning to the mainland. Thus he reinforced the secretary’s determination to avoid closer ties with the Kuomintang.

Aversion to the KMT also colored Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Livingston Merchant’s recommendations regarding America’s China policy. Merchant, a brilliant, lively, and funny addition to Dulles’s circle, spoke consistently for the primacy of European interests and disparaged the less important, less effective, and less reliable Nationalist Chinese.⁵⁵ He had originally encountered KMT corruption and incompetence during his tour of duty in Nanjing during the civil war years and wrestled with the resulting problems when he rose to be assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. In 1949, Acheson sent him on a special mission to Taiwan, hoping that Merchant could find a viable independence movement that would allow the Truman administration to jettison Chiang Kai-shek. Merchant reluctantly concluded that no effective movement existed and Chiang remained too strong to overthrow. But he also advised against giving the Generalissimo further American assistance.⁵⁶ It was while Merchant struggled with the decline of Kuomintang fortunes that he first worked with Dulles, collaborating on the Japanese peace treaty.⁵⁷

Herman Phleger, a distinguished lawyer and judge who signed on as the State Department’s legal adviser, had known Dulles since 1945 and probably became his closest confidant. Sharing the secretary’s lawyerly approach to international issues, Phleger possessed the same pragmatic attitudes, combative style, and facile mind. But where Dulles seemed prone to exaggeration and simplification, Phleger emphasized precision and caution. Even when the Chinese Communists provided grounds for retaliation, as in the detention of American military personnel, Phleger urged restraint.⁵⁸ Dulles demonstrated his absolute trust in Phleger’s views by placing him in charge of the difficult and politically dangerous talks convened in 1955 between Washington and Beijing (known as the Ambassadorial or Warsaw Talks), trusting him to coordinate information and help draft instructions to the American delegation.⁵⁹

Perhaps the most critical support Foster Dulles got in formulating his ideas and department policies, however, came from Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA. The Dulles brothers joined the overt and covert resources of foreign policymaking in a uniquely intimate embrace. Although Allen and Foster could hardly have been more different in personality—the CIA chief amiable, gracious, and humorous, liked by all, and the secretary aloof, austere, and everyone’s least favorite person—together they proved a formidable force on a range of issues vital to the nation. As Allen Dulles biographer Peter Grose noted, “Allen was ever imaginative in devising intelligence operations that by their very nature determined the shape of national policy.”⁶⁰ Or, as Allen himself joked, he served as the secretary of state “for unfriendly countries.”⁶¹

Allen, however, had shied away from Asian affairs, sharing his brother’s conviction that countries in Asia were not as important as those in Europe. Further, he maintained that he did not understand the region, a conclusion possibly confirmed by months of travel in India, China, and Korea during the year following his graduation from Princeton (1915). In 1926 he resigned from the Foreign Service rather than accept an appointment as counselor to the American embassy in Beijing. His uncle Robert Lansing, speaking as secretary of state, urged him not to go, saying “that problem will not be solved in your lifetime.”⁶² Allen did plan a brief foray to China in 1946 to negotiate an aviation treaty, but Sullivan and Cromwell’s senior legal partner refused to let him go. By 1950, he had left both diplomacy and law behind to become the head of covert operations, the deputy director of plans, at the CIA.

Apart from official interest or disinterest in China, CIA activities proved ineffective in Asia during the Truman years. Efforts to spark an uprising against Mao went nowhere, and operations in Korea and Burma similarly failed. Two CIA agents, Richard Fecteau and Jack Downey, were even lured into a trap and imprisoned for decades in China. Allen Dulles had not been part of that dismal history, but it did not make involvement in China issues more appealing when he returned to clandestine duties and collaboration with his brother.

During the Eisenhower administration, the agency worked erratically in Asia. Just four months after taking office, Eisenhower sent intelligence veteran “Wild Bill” Donovan as ambassador to Thailand, where he spent the next eighteen months plotting covert actions against the Communist Chinese. He was followed by John Peurifoy, fresh from overthrowing the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in Operation Success, who continued Donovan’s efforts. Meanwhile in Indochina, Allen Dulles opted to rely on France for information. After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Allen sent Edward Landsdale, a bold operative who had been assisting Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines, to Vietnam to promote the fortunes of Ngo Dinh Diem.⁶³

Allen Dulles’s disinterest in China, however, did not deter him from making the CIA a haven for China specialists whom he chose to protect even when Foster was sacrificing them to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. Allen himself, however, remained an activist, not an analyst. Allen’s more usual indifference to China strongly suggests that he never pushed Foster to implement any particular China policies. Rather, Allen acted as confidant and sounding board for the difficult decisions his brother had to make despite increasingly divergent views.⁶⁴

Finally, there were the members of Congress. Dulles did not rely on them for advice, but he believed that an intimate embrace would protect him personally as well as the policies of the administration. Not the least, talking to Congress before launching initiatives co-opted the leadership and spread responsibility if things went badly. Some, such as William Knowland, he regularly spoke to by phone and met frequently over breakfasts, working hard to defuse his harsh critiques especially regarding China. Others he found he could cooperate with even on China, such as Senator Walter George (D-GA), with whom he met at least biweekly.⁶⁵ Throughout, Dulles took the time out of a heavy schedule to court key individuals and neutralize them. As historian Richard Immerman has observed, “Dulles paid inordinate, indeed obsessive attention to coalition building and protecting his bases of power,” having learned from the past that “pandering” would pay. Thus “Dulles appeared more prone to appease than to lead.”⁶⁶

John Foster Dulles was neither the fanatic that detractors have suggested nor the sole architect of American foreign policy in the 1950s as admirers have insisted. Dulles functioned as Dwight Eisenhower’s partner, advisor, front man, and subordinate. He shaped Eisenhower’s policies but never made decisions without consulting the president. He consulted a small coterie of intimates on his decisions but otherwise ignored proffered advice. As the president trusted his own judgment in military affairs, so Dulles believed he understood diplomacy better than most anyone else.

Dulles, however, shared Eisenhower’s disinterest in Asia and dismay at having to pay so much attention to Chinese affairs. He probably knew somewhat more about the region than the president—negotiating the Japanese peace treaty having been a better learning opportunity than serving with MacArthur in the Philippines. Even more than Eisenhower, Dulles feared the Republican right and the China Lobby, feeling the constraint of partisan politics and public opinion to a degree that most secretaries of state have not.

Thus, in seeking to understand why so little happened to resolve the China problem, one need only to look at the menacing atmosphere of the time and the higher priority accorded other goals. Joined with ignorance about and indifference to Chinese realities, the ominous environment made it far easier and less painful to go along with the existing flow of anti-China rhetoric and action than to behave responsibly and change things. It is not surprising that Dulles and Eisenhower accomplished little.