The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  The different ways these institutions grappled with the assaults from McCarthy shed a fascinating light on Washington’s pyramid of power—as well as on the distinctive personalities of the Dulles brothers. It would become clear in the course of this labyrinthine power struggle just who wielded the biggest sword on the Potomac.

  There was little doubt about who the big brother was in the Dulles family. Foster had carried himself with a grave sense of familial responsibility ever since he was a boy, while Allen felt free to pursue more mischievous pleasures well into adulthood. Family members inevitably brought their requests and troubles to Foster, not Allen—though the elder brother’s advice, as Eleanor discovered, was not always sound. She once lost her savings on a bad investment that Foster advised her to make. Nonetheless, the Wall Street wise man projected a sober wisdom; titans of industry paid close heed to his counsel, which he dispensed in a deliberative manner, confident that his every word was money.

  As the brothers assumed their positions in the Eisenhower government, they brought with them a unique working chemistry, one that had been forged from the time they shared tasks on their Lake Ontario fishing expeditions. Their relationship was not without its tensions and petty squabbles. Allen thought he actually should have been named secretary of state, since he had more experience with foreign affairs and had a more intricate network of overseas connections. He sometimes chafed under his older brother’s imperial rule.

  Foster seemed blithely unaware of Allen’s frustrations. “The thing that has puzzled me a great deal is that I’m not sure how much Foster realized this situation,” Eleanor observed years later, after the older brother was dead. “If he realized it, he didn’t show it by any overcompensation or by any overconsideration. All his dealings with Allen were as if there was no psychological essence or problem that had to be dealt with. They dealt with the subject matter and not with each other as people with certain sensitivities and certain prejudices, and so on.”

  But Eleanor, the psychologically acute sister, could feel Allen’s jealousy and competitiveness. “I felt it in Allen. I didn’t feel it in Foster. I think you can imagine why. Foster did have more power and more experience, and,” she added matter of factly, “I think [Foster had] the better brain.”

  Allen was well aware of the Washington chatter about the unusual brother act. “Every once in a while we were teased, of course, as brothers are likely to be when each of them has a position of a certain amount of importance and are working together,” he remarked in later years. “But I was very conscious of the danger in that situation and I tried to avoid either appearances or actions which would justify any criticism on that score.”

  It was very important to Allen that people not think he got his CIA position because of his brother. “You see,” he told an oral historian after his brother’s death, “I was in there before my brother became secretary of state. I was deputy director [of the CIA]. . . . So then when Bedell Smith retired, it was more or less normal that I would be appointed. I mean, that was not considered a particular show of nepotism on the part of Eisenhower. Personally, Eisenhower and I were very close to each other. We’d gotten to know each other very well. Nobody, as far as I know—I’m sure Foster exercised no pressure at all—because it was quite normal that I would take over that place.” But the truth is that Foster did exert his influence on his brother’s behalf, and Eisenhower never felt close to the younger Dulles, regarding him as a necessary evil in his shadow war with world Communism.

  Despite its underlying complexities, the Dulles brothers’ partnership proved very effective. They conferred on a regular basis during their Washington reign. “Normally they saw each other once, twice, maybe three times a week. Allen used to go to [Foster’s] house on Saturday and sit down and talk to him for two or three hours,” recalled Eleanor, who—after Foster reluctantly agreed to give her the State Department’s Bonn desk—sometimes joined her brothers at the spacious stone house in a wooded neighborhood of Washington. “I know Foster valued these conversations.”

  Unlike the gregarious Allen, Foster was somewhat of a loner. “I’m not sure that there are more than a half dozen people in Washington that he felt really at home with. Maybe a dozen,” said Eleanor. Allen was Foster’s essential link to the Georgetown power circles where the spymaster easily circulated. He collected vital gossip and inside information from his social outings, bringing it back to his brother. Allen was the only frequent visitor that Eleanor ever saw in Foster’s home.

  It was Allen, the master of persuasion and seduction, who also expertly handled relations with the press. He counted among his friends not only press barons such as Luce and New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and TV network moguls like William Paley of CBS, but also leading Washington pundits such as Joseph and Stewart Alsop. Allen enjoyed wining and dining the nation’s opinion makers, while Foster would “almost rather negotiate with the Russians than be bothered by that,” in Eleanor’s estimation.

  The brothers sometimes clashed. David Atlee Phillips, a CIA counterintelligence official whose career flourished under Allen Dulles, later recalled the time Foster instructed his brother to arrange a secret CIA payment to a foreign political candidate. After consulting with his operatives in the field, Allen informed his brother that it was a bad idea. “The secretary of state, in crisp terms, said he had not asked whether the idea was good or bad,” Phillips recounted, “but that he had instructed the CIA chief that it be done.” The cash was duly delivered—and the candidate still lost (a fact noted by Phillips with evident satisfaction).

  On other occasions, Allen expressed his opposition to his brother in more vehement terms. He once told Foster that a speech he planned to deliver on the Soviet Union was “rotten” and he should scrap it. “I am the secretary of state and it is my speech,” Foster insisted. “And I damned well will say it if I want to.” But Allen would not back down. “My Soviet expert here says it is wrong. And I won’t let you make a damned fool of yourself, secretary of state or not!”

  By and large, though, the Dulles fraternal partnership was a machine of humming efficiency. “We didn’t realize in the early winter months of 1953 as the new administration took shape just how cozy the Dulles brothers’ arrangement for handling all American business abroad would be,” recalled veteran CIA officer Joseph Smith. “It came to mean very quickly that when a situation would not yield to normal diplomatic pressure, Allen’s boys were expected to step in and take care of the matter.”

  Before business abroad could be addressed, however, there was some messiness at home that needed to be taken care of. Allen Dulles might have labored under the shadow of his more esteemed older brother through most of his career, but he was about to show Washington who was the tougher power player.

  As the Eisenhower presidency got under way in January 1953, the State Department was the target of no less than ten separate, ongoing congressional probes by McCarthy and his Capitol Hill confederates, who saw Foggy Bottom as a hotbed of pansies, pointy-headed intellectuals, parlor room pinkos, and other soft types who were vulnerable to the siren song of Communism. In the beginning, Foster thought McCarthy’s reign of terror could be useful. He was just as eager as the Republican right wing to purge the State Department of all New Deal remnants.

  Foster, courting favor with party hard-liners, agreed to hire a security deputy to oversee the massive screening of all State Department employees. Scott McLeod, the man he hired, was an ex-FBI agent and former reporter for the influential right-wing New Hampshire newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. McLeod, who proudly displayed an autographed photo of McCarthy on his desk inscribed “To a Great American,” was the Wisconsin senator’s man inside the State Department. Like McCarthy, McLeod brought a cynical Irish beat cop’s attitude to the complex task of sorting out the beliefs and allegiances of the U.S. diplomatic corps. McLeod was “anti-intellectual, shrewd, conspiratorial, quick-tempered [and] vindictive,” as John Foster Dulles biographer Townsend Hoopes
later observed. A State Department colleague of McLeod put it more sympathetically: “Scotty lived in an essentially simple world.”

  As with the other paroxysms of paranoia that seized Washington during the Cold War, McLeod’s witch hunt turned up very few genuinely worrisome suspects. Most of its victims were highly competent, experienced members of the foreign service whose policy differences with the new Dulles regime simply rendered them “incompatibles,” in McLeod’s Orwellian term. A number of these purge victims, such as John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies Jr., were veterans of the China desk, where their only crime was infuriating the right-wing Taiwan lobby by honestly evaluating why Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung had been able to defeat corrupt warlord Chiang Kai-shek. The civil service apparatus was supposed to protect respected officials like this, many of whom had made valuable contributions to the U.S. government’s understanding of the world. But ideology trumped ability in Foster’s intensely politicized State Department.

  Foster even forced out one of the brightest, most respected intellectual stars in the foreign service firmament, Soviet expert George F. Kennan, simply because he took exception to the secretary of state’s “liberation” strategy aimed at Eastern Europe—a policy so dangerously unviable that even Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers themselves would soon make clear that they had no intention of following through on this campaign promise to “roll back” the Iron Curtain.

  As McLeod’s quickly assembled battalion of some 350 inexperienced but gung ho investigators began snooping through State Department employee records, a cloud of fear settled over Foggy Bottom. Those whose files were tagged and sent over to McCarthy’s subcommittee knew their days in government were over—nobody who endured the snide and relentless grilling at the hands of McCarthy and his equally ruthless chief counsel, Roy Cohn, could expect their career to survive. By the time McCarthy’s Washington bonfires were extinguished two years later, the careers of several hundred State Department officers and employees lay in ashes.

  Early in the McCarthy-McLeod inquisition, Foster realized that it could burn out of control. While he was happy to see political opponents consumed in its flames, he soon grew worried that the State Department itself was at stake. By subjecting employees to humiliating loyalty tests and exposure of their private lives, the wide-reaching security program was emptying the State Department of its best and brightest.

  Even Eleanor Dulles, who was reluctant to confront her impregnably self-confident brother, felt compelled to complain to him. After all, the State Department was the family business, it had been entrusted to Foster—and now he was allowing McCarthy to ruin it. Eleanor had seen the danger early on, when the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign made its unsavory alliance with McCarthy. She first confronted Foster then. “I went over to New York. I called up Foster and said I was coming. He said, ‘Come to dinner.’ You know, he was generous and friendly in that sort of thing, even if he was busy. He was very frank though, if he didn’t want you, he would tell you. . . . But I went to dinner, and he made a very fine martini. I had one. Then he started to fill my glass again, and I said, ‘No, I don’t need another.’

  “He looked at me sort of queerly and he said, ‘You must have come over here for a serious purpose, if you won’t have two martinis.’

  “I said, ‘I have.’ So then I said to him, ‘I want you to know that I think this is an evil business that’s going on. If the Republicans don’t repudiate McCarthy, I’m going to vote the Democratic ticket.’”

  Eleanor’s threat only had the effect of “amusing” Foster, who asked his sister a few questions about why she felt the way she did, and then simply dropped the subject.

  In the end, Foster Dulles never confronted McCarthy—even when the senator repeatedly embarrassed both the president and the secretary of state. The administration had no sooner taken office than McCarthy began using his Senate power to hold up the nominations of key appointments, including close Eisenhower associates like Beetle Smith, who had been nominated to serve as Foster’s undersecretary of state. Smith had annoyed McCarthy at some point by saying something positive about a State Department official whom the senator considered a card-carrying Communist.

  Eisenhower was infuriated by McCarthy’s antics. The senator was challenging the new president’s authority to control his own government. Ike’s Cold War propaganda adviser, C. D. Jackson—a fascinating and somewhat mysterious character who had a background in the OSS and served as a sort of intelligence link among the White House, the CIA, and Henry Luce’s media empire—advised the president to launch an all-out attack on McCarthy. But Nixon, who thought of McCarthy as a friend and essential ally, urged that the administration try to make the troublesome senator a member of the team. Nixon was supported by others in the president’s inner circle, including even the hot-tempered Beetle Smith himself, who warned that a direct assault on McCarthy would risk splitting the Republican Party.

  Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers decided to use Nixon as their mediator with McCarthy. The two men were, in some ways, cut from the same rough cloth. Aggrieved outsiders in the Ivy League/Wall Street world of the power elite, they had both grabbed onto the club of anti-Communism as the blunt tool of their ferocious ambition. They had a working stiff’s bitterness that they clearly enjoyed venting at Harvard types like Alger Hiss as much as they did at hard-core Communists. McCarthy went as far as challenging the nomination of Harvard University president James B. Conant as high commissioner to Germany, before Nixon talked him down.

  But Nixon was more sophisticated and intelligent than McCarthy. McCarthy’s ambition was a raw force that he wielded with little or no concern for where his blows might land—even if President Eisenhower or the mighty Dulles brothers stood in his way. Nixon, on the other hand, knew that men like these controlled his path to the top, and he was eager to please them. He was, in Adlai Stevenson’s words, “McCarthy with a white collar.” The vice president kept setting up private meetings with the headstrong senator, where he would try to talk sense into him, dangling political favors before his eyes.

  The easily dazzled McCarthy would take Nixon’s bait for a while, but a few days later he would come out swinging again, usurping Eisenhower’s power by announcing his own anti-Communist measures or accusing another administration nominee of some shocking infamy. In the end, not even the wily Nixon could bring McCarthy under control as he thrashed about in the Washington arena.

  Foster, deathly afraid of losing the job for which he had been groomed since boyhood, did everything he could to placate the reckless McCarthy. The elder Dulles, observed the veteran diplomat Charles “Chip” Bohlen, was a man “with one obsession: to remain secretary of state.” To do that, Foster was willing to sacrifice nearly everything, including his dignity and the integrity of his department.

  “My brother was never a witch hunter,” Allen insisted years later, still defensive about the reputation his brother had developed during the McCarthy era. “I mean, he realized the subtleties of Communist penetration, and all that. But he didn’t go along with the sort of blanket condemnation of people.” The truth, however, is that Foster Dulles’s groveling efforts to pacify McCarthy not only encouraged his aggression but institutionalized his witch hunt within the State Department.

  When Eisenhower nominated Chip Bohlen, who had served in the U.S. embassy in Moscow before and during the war, to be his ambassador to the Soviet Union, McCarthy inevitably detected something amiss with the distinguished diplomat—a hint of homosexuality somewhere in his family (it turned out that the allegations involved his brother-in-law). Bohlen was as upstanding a member of the foreign service club as the American establishment had ever produced: grandson of a U.S. senator, graduate of Harvard, respected member of the diplomatic corps since 1929, adviser to three presidents. Eisenhower decided that this time he would take a stand, and he recruited his rival—Senator Robert Taft, leader of the GOP’s right wing—to help push through Bohlen’s nomination.

  But Foste
r remained a bundle of nerves throughout the Bohlen confirmation process, terrified that if the nominee’s head were lopped off, his would be next. The secretary of state was ready at any moment to urge Eisenhower to abandon Bohlen if things got too hot on Capitol Hill. When Foster and Bohlen were being driven to the nominee’s Senate confirmation hearing, Foster awkwardly asked Bohlen not to be photographed with him. Later, after Bohlen was finally confirmed, Foster asked the new ambassador—who planned to fly to Moscow a week or two ahead of his family—to delay his trip, so his solo arrival in Russia would not set off another round of heated speculation about his sexuality.

  During the early months of the Eisenhower presidency, Foster repeatedly surrendered to the McCarthy onslaught. When the senator shifted his target from Communists to homosexuals in the State Department, Foster allowed his employees’ privacy to be blatantly violated. Ironically, it was McCarthy’s aggressive chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who took the lead in questioning suspected homosexuals. Cohn, whose heavy-lidded eyes and leathery, perpetually tanned skin gave him a serpentine look, was not only gay but had installed his twenty-six-year-old playmate, a rich golden boy with no particular credentials named David Schine, on his staff. The son of a hotel and movie theater tycoon, Schine was known while a Harvard undergraduate for paying secretaries to take class notes for him. “Essentially,” observed one Cold War historian, “Schine was Cohn’s dumb blonde.” Despite his own sexual leanings, Cohn took obvious pleasure in humiliating the gay witnesses who appeared before the subcommittee, demanding to know the locations of their illicit trysts and the names of their sexual partners.