The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War Kindle Edition

I have read a number of Kinzer's books and this is one of my favorites. I read the book in conjunction with listening to the audio version. This book presents a picture of American foreign policy that I found shocking. I had been acquainted with some of the incidents that are recorded in this book, but the book tied together numerous incidents in mid to late 20th century American history that were affected by the Dulles brothers. I knew about Allen Dulles and the fact that he was the person who led the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of JFK, but I had no idea of the depth of his and his brothers effects upon US Soviet relationships , the Cold war, Indochina, Africa and Central America. Reading this book made me sad - these two brothers are greatly responsible for many of the problems that the US faces abroad. If you take the time to read this book you might also like to read Kinzer's "All the Shah's men" . If you take the time to read this book it is likely to leave you shaken and wondering how our country could have condoned the actions of these two men.

This book is a rollercoaster ride; it has its ups and its downs. Structured as a short (328 pages of text) joint biography, it focuses on the covert activities that were guided by the Dulles brothers in their roles as Secretary of State and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s. The author brings to this task the writing skills of an experienced journalist. The book is well written and highly readable.John Foster and Allen Dulles were both intelligent, but differed in personality. John Foster was hard working and serious. Allen was more sociable and somewhat unscrupulous. Both brothers became lawyers, and both joined Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent New York law firm. With the advent of the Second World War, Allen joined the Office of Strategic Services, and Foster became a political leader in the Republican Party. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Allen went to work as the deputy director of operations in the Central Intelligence Agency. Foster was appointed adviser to the Secretary of State.At about this point, I began to experience substantial doubt about the validity of many of the opinions asserted by the author. Sullivan & Cromwell is repeatedly presented as a sinister entity, at odds with the best interests of the United States. I know Sullivan & Cromwell. It is a law firm – a good one. It is comprised of exceptionally talented lawyers who work hard. It is not the sinister entity pictured in this book. The international threat of communist Russia is labeled “illusory.” There was nothing illusory about the trumped up trial of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in Hungary in the late 1940s. His face stared out at you from every newspaper and every newsreel for several years. It was our first brush with the techniques of brainwashing. But Mindszenty is not even mentioned. The movies “Shane” and “High Noon” are presented as reinforcing a cultural consensus that America was doing the right thing in its international efforts to ensure the triumph of justice. There is no mention of Solzhenitsyn or the Gulag, or any other example of Soviet communist brutality.The dust jacket states that the book asks why the United States behaves as it does in the world. The book presents an interesting analysis of the way that the Dulles brothers responded to the efforts of third-world nations that were seeking independence from established colonial powers. In particular, the author focuses on six third-world leaders that the Dulles brothers thought were “monsters:” Mossadegh, Arbenz, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Lumumba, and Castro. The covert activities of the CIA against each of these monsters are described in summary fashion. The reasoning is subject to dispute, but the importance of the subject matter is obvious. This book is a good start for a review of the covert activities conducted by the CIA under the colors of the United States.

One of them was the most powerful US Secretary of State in modern times. The other built the CIA into a fearsome engine of covert war. Together, they shaped US foreign policy in the 1950s, with tragic consequences that came to light in the decades that followed. These were the Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen, born and reared in privilege, nephews of one Secretary of State and grandsons of another.What they did in officeAllen Dulles masterminded the coup that turned Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh out of office and installed the Shah on the Peacock Throne. Less than a year later he presided over the operation that ousted Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. He set in motion plots to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Fidel Castro in Cuba. He delegated to his deputy, Richard Bissell, leadership of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Later, out of office, he chaired the Warren Commission on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. “‘From the start, before any evidence was reviewed, he pressed for the final verdict that Oswald had been a crazed gunman, not the agent of a national and international conspiracy.’”Foster Dulles repeatedly replaced US ambassadors who resisted his brother’s assassination plots in countries where they served. Pathologically fearful of Communism, he publicly snubbed Chinese foreign minister Chou En-Lai, exacerbating the already dangerous tension between our two countries following the Korean War. The active role he took in preventing Ho Chi Minh’s election to lead a united Vietnam led inexorably to the protracted and costly US war there. He reflexively rejected peace feelers from the Soviet leaders who succeeded Josef Stalin, intensifying and prolonging the Cold War. Earlier in life, working as the managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the leading US corporate law firm, Foster had engineered many of the corporate loans that made possible Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the growth of his war machine.What does it mean now?At half a century’s remove from the reign of the formidable Dulles brothers, with critical documents finally coming into the light of day, we can begin to assess their true impact on US history and shake our heads in dismay. However, during their time in office that spanned the eight years of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency and, in Allen’s case, extended into Kennedy’s, little was known to the public about about Allen’s activities (or the CIA itself, for that matter), and Foster’s unimaginative and belligerent performance at State was simply seen as a fair expression of the national mood, reflecting the fear that permeated the country during the most dangerous years of the Cold War.Diving deeply into recently unclassified documents and other contemporaneous primary sources, Stephen Kinzer, author of The Brothers, has produced a masterful assessment of the roles played at the highest levels of world leadership by these two very dissimilar men. Kinzer is respectful throughout, but, having gained enough information to evaluate the brothers’ performance against even their own stated goals, he can find little good to say other than that they “exemplified the nation that produced them. A different kind of leader would require a different kind of United States.”Their unique leadership stylesTo understand Foster’s style of leadership, consider the assessments offered by his contemporaries:Winston Churchill said “‘Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.’”Celebrated New York Times columnist James Reston “wrote that [Foster] had become a ‘supreme expert’ in the art of diplomatic blundering. ‘He doesn’t just stumble into booby traps. He digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps.’”Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Foster “misleads public opinion, confuses it, [and] feeds it pap.”“A foreign ambassador once asked Foster how he knew that the Soviets were tied to land reform in Guatemala. He admitted that it was ‘impossible to produce evidence’ but said evidence was unnecessary because of ‘our deep conviction that such a tie must exist.’” (Sounds similar to the attitude of a certain 21st-century President, doesn’t it?)Allen, too, comes up very, very short: “He was not the brilliant spymaster many believed him to be. In fact, the opposite is true. Nearly every one of his major covert operations failed or nearly failed . . . [Moreover,] under Allen’s lackadaisical leadership, the agency endlessly tolerated misfits.” He left the CIA riddled with “lazy, alcoholic, or simply incompetent” employees.Stephen Kinzer was for many years a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, reporting from more than fifty countries. The Brothers is his eighth nonfiction book. It’s brilliant.

This is a wonderful book, deeply engaging and hard to put down, and certainly one of the best and most readable dual biographies and review of American foreign policy in the 1950s and early 60s.The author, Stephen Kinzer, has brought together material from many different sources and sown it into a seamless, fast moving, narrative that reads better than most spy fiction and yet is ‘jaw-droppingly’ true. Kinzer traces the career of the Dulles siblings John Foster, Allen and to a lesser extent Eleanor from their strict Presbyterian and highly privileged childhood, onto Princeton. He traces Foster’s facilitated move into the premier law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell and Allen’s easy transition to the State Department and a career in diplomacy.The career of the two brothers through the 1930s and during the Second World War makes very interesting reading but the book certainly shifts into top gear following the election of Eisenhower in November 1952 and the appointment of Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of the CIA.. At this point the brothers launch their extraordinary foreign policy, fully endorsed by Eisenhower, that became known at the time as ‘brinkmanship’ but was variously described as ‘containment’ or even ‘roll-back’ as they confronted the supposed demon of a global communist threat.The book then deals with the covert action taken by the State Department and the CIA against targets in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, the Congo and finally Cuba. Kinzer reveals the various actions in a straight forward manner that belies the totally shocking and entirely ill-judged interference by the United States in the affairs of these countries and the total insouciance of the brothers to the loss of life and mayhem that resulted. In these activities were sown the seeds of disaster that has plagued American foreign policy ever since.Finally Kinzer draws some quite disturbing conclusions regarding the attitude of the American public towards the rest of the world. These views throw an interesting perspective on current American adventures around the world and do not make comforting reading.This book is highly recommended for the general reader and all those interested in foreign affairs and is as gripping and readable as any notable work of spy fiction. Finally this book should be made required reading, as a corrective, for our current crop Western foreign ministers.

I'd read Stephen Kinzer's 'All the Shah's men' and 'Overthrow' both of which I found excellent. I didn't know he'd written this book, until I stumbled on a youtube video of the author giving a talk.I'd long been fascinated by the Dulles brothers seeing them as vaguely sinister without knowing very much at all really about them. I knew for example that Allen Dulles was put on the Warren Commission into the Kennedy Assassination, even though he'd been fired by him a couple of years earlier.It would be very easy to go chapter and verse into the biography of the Dulles brothers and try to summarize the book, but I think you'd get much more from just reading the actual book.Suffice it to say that the Dulles brothers were a product of their time and their unique background (very well connected, deeply religious, unquestioningly committed to corporate free enterprise and deeply phobic of any form of communism or socialism). They rose to prominence in the light of the 1st and 2nd world wars, and they really put their stamp on history with their virulent hatred of anything that vaguely smacked of communism, concluding that even neutral countries were legitimate targets for overthrow, because by being neutral they were "not on our side, and worse an easy target for a communist takeover".The book really comes to life in the 2nd part (the first part explains their background in depth and how they got into the very high positions in government) , the 2nd part focuses on 6 'monsters' that the brothers tried (and in some cases succeeded) in taking down. These being, Mossadegh of Iran, Arbenz of Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Sukarno of Indonesia, Lumumba of the Congo and Castro of Cuba.Each one of these chapters is a riveting tale of the sheer depth of the perfidy of the brothers and their willingness to go to any lengths to disrupt the internal politics of countries that they thought were acting against US interests.Kinzer writes really really well, I do feel though that he ultimately absolves the brothers of any bad faith by saying that they were America and America was them. He could be right, I could be wrong, but I see them as far more malevolent, and I see them as having duped the American people who would have ultimately been much happier with far wiser people at the helm during the Cold War.One particularly striking theme is just how deceptive and involved Eisenhower was. We always see that clip of him warning us about the 'military-industrial complex' as if he was one of the good guys. He was not, he backed every single one of these 6 take-downs. The Dulles brothers were not deceiving him, they were acting out his (and their) will.Still in all, a fantastic book, and a fantastically enjoyably written one.

This thought-provoking and timely history of two of the most evil men in recent history is one of those books you can't put down, in part because I was a child of the Cold War and used to wonder why we had to hate the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, etc etc etc. Kinzer has unravelled the history of the Dulles brothers and revealed them warts and all. It's essential reading for any who want to understand the myth of American exceptionalism.The only criticism is that he starts with one episode, like the overthrow of the Iranian government, and then jumps across the other side of the world to another murky adventure. It does tend to jolt you a bit but he does return to the story and finish it, which tends to break up the flow but nonetheless, it's a riveting read if you want to understand the machinations and prejudices of American foreign policy, such as it is.

I found this book riveting. My view of Eisenhower has changed over the years. At the time he was portrayed as a part time president who spent most of his time playing golf and I thought him ineffectual. Then after reading a biography it was apparent that he was very hands on but kept a low profile on his activities, I changed my opinion to very good. Now I read what he was doing behind the scenes and once again I have to revise my opinion. Now I see him as very effective, cold, calculating but naive. He seems to have been putty in the hands of his advisers who were advising him to do what was best for their own business connections. Communism was bad for those connections but not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm a sadder but wiser person.

Yes, I enjoyed this book very much. It is recommended by Sir Alex Ferguson in his book about Leadership. It lived up to expectations. Very well researched and very well written, in my opinion. Most insightful on American Foreign Policy pre- and post-WW2, in particular the Eisenhower years of the 1950's.