Dulles’s greatest failing as a statesman was that he thought and spoke like a lawyer

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 250.

Ever more outrageous claims by Senator McCarthy were failing to maintain the red scare, and with Ike and Dulles in power and the compromised Democrats out, much of the heat went out of the domestic foreign policy debate. Although the competition is fierce, John Foster Dulles may be the American statesman most tendentiously vilified and misrepresented by leftists on both sides of the Atlantic. The reason is not hard to identify: he had strong Christian views and uncompromisingly condemned Communism as evil. A bit like Marxists, Dulles believed ‘there is a moral law which, no less than physical law, undergirds our world’. This was not exclusive to Christianity but common to many religions, as he had found when dealing with people of other faiths. Nonetheless, he believed that with its God-given form of government, the US had a unique mission to extend the values it incarnated to the rest of the world. A spiritually robust America would operate as a moral force, breathing life into such international organizations as the United Nations, through overseas aid and by the promotion of individual freedom and human rights.

Dulles had strong ethical objections to the survival of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive spin on ‘racial segregation’, if only because it undermined the US case in the struggle with Soviet anti-imperialists. He discussed the difficult ethical choices he had to make with his high-level contacts in the American Churches, to which he also appealed to mobilize popular support for the administration’s foreign policy. He recruited the evangelist Billy Graham, a confidant and supporter of the President, as a roving US ambassador, notably to darkest Britain. Dulles’s relations with Church leaders were not without frictions, particularly over the issue of nuclear weapons, with the religious supporting disarmament and Dulles insisting on the necessity of maintaining a massive nuclear deterrent. The Time-Life journalist and presidential speechwriter Emmet Hughes judged that Dulles’s greatest failing as a statesman was that he thought and spoke like a lawyer, engaged in prosecuting the Soviet Union in a long-drawn-out case in the court of history. He was absolutely invested in his case, ‘quickly excited by small gains, suddenly shaken by minor reverses, and ever prone to contemplating the drastic remedy of the massive retort.'