by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, New York. 416 pages
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL PARKER
In the 1950s, when Americans were genuinely frightened that the Soviet Union might dominate the world, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, neatly divided the world into two parts: atheistic communism and Western Christian civilization. With a Manichean worldview giving them all the assurance they needed that they were on the side of the angels, the Dulles brothers launched a series of covert operations to topple hostile regimes around the world. The countries on the brothers’ black list included Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Republic of the Congo, Egypt and Cuba. Historians today generally believe that none of them were necessarily lackeys of the USSR. Their nationalist policies, however, were a threat to global capitalism and Western powers adjusting to a post-colonial world.
Stephen Kinszer tells this fascinating story in a fast-paced narrative, often noting the role that religion played. This was the time when Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God we trust” the national motto. President Eisenhower, baptized a Presbyterian early in his first term, declared that “without God, there could be no American form of government nor an American way of life.”
Kinzer holds the Dulles brothers morally responsible for their actions, but he is also careful to place them in their cultural context. Foster and Allen grew up in a Presbyterian home in New York. Their grandfather, uncle and father were all Presbyterian ministers. The boys attended three church services on Sundays and often spent their evenings around the family circle discussing religious readings about missionaries or excerpts from religious classics like “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Foster especially enjoyed memorizing long Bible passages. Though Allen, the spymaster, later seems to have rejected his pious upbringing and led a life of “near-pathological womanizing,” Foster embraced his Calvinist roots.
Foster was an elder at Park Avenue Presbyterian Church and a trustee of Union Theological Seminary. From 1940 to 1946 he used the Federal Council of Churches’ Commission to Study the Basis of a Just and Durable Peace as a platform for his Christian-inspired internationalist views. In 1943 he published “Six Pillars of Peace,” a Christian interpretation of how the postwar world might work. With these bona fides he became the major foreign policy advisor for Thomas Dewey in his failed 1944 and 1948 campaigns for president and later a spokesman for the Republican Party.
The Dulles brothers embraced what today would be called American exceptionalism — the belief that American virtue and high-mindedness places the nation above traditionally accepted rules of international conduct. In contrast, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr rejected simple dichotomies in favor of moral ambiguity and the belief that both sides in the Cold War were capable of sin and error. In his “The Ironies of American History” (1952), Niebuhr warned Americans against a self righteousness that divides the world too conveniently into good and evil and blinds us to the self-interest inherit in even the best-intentioned policies.
The appalling misuse of American power that Kinzer recounts is, in our post-9/11 world, a timely reminder that Americans have no corner on virtue and that our rhetoric of freedom and democracy is often rightly perceived by others as hypocritical and self-serving.
MICHAEL PARKER is director of graduate studies and professor of church history at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt.
