A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today's world During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world. John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world? The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies—many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country's role in the world. Propelled by a quintessentially American set of fears and delusions, the Dulles brothers launched violent campaigns against foreign leaders they saw as threats to the United States. These campaigns helped push countries from Guatemala to the Congo into long spirals of violence, led the United States into the Vietnam War, and laid the foundation for decades of hostility between the United States and countries from Cuba to Iran. The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Biographies of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles, children of Allen Macy Dulles and Edith Foster.

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures. Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.

Allen Dulles was at the forefront of building a U.S. spy service long before WWII and was the driving force behind the CIA.

Part I - Cardinal Dulles's Legacy in His Words. Part II - Cardinal Dulles's Legacy in His Witness.

"Was the John Foster Dulles who personified the Cold War as U.S. secretary of state in the 1950s the same man who denounced narrow nationalism as a leader of worldwide ecumenism and liberal Protestantism in the 1930s? In this remarkable study Mark Toulouse documents the 'transformation' of Dulles 'from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism,' overturning misconceptions of those historians who have tended to read Dulles's early years backward from what they know of him as secretary of sate. Christian missions and international diplomacy shaped John Foster Dulles from childhood. His father was a liberal Presbyterian minister; one grandfather had been a missionary to India, while the other had served as U.S. secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, and an uncle would serve Woodrow Wilson in the same office. As a Princeton undergraduate Dulles accompanied his grandfather to an international peace conference at The Hadue in 1907, where he became a secretary to the Chinese delegation. That experience, and a year at the Sorbonne, pointed Dulles toward international law rather than the ministry. But he remained an active, ecumenically minded Presbyterian lay leader, serving in several important denominational posts. He successfully defended the the controversial Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry P. Van Dusen before the Presbyterian General Assembly when fundamentalists attempted to depose them. In 1921 Dulles was appointed to the newly formed Commission on International Justice and Goodwill of the Federal Council of Churches. Dulles emerged as an international leader in 1937 at the ecumenical Oxford conference on life and work. Convinced in his discussions there of the ned to translate his inherited 'spiritual values' into practical international diplomacy, Dulles organized and became chairman of the Federal Council's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace. Through the years of world war and as a participant in the United Nations Conference in 1945, Dulles sought a peace that would transcend the narrow concerns of nationalism and political ideology. But after 1945, as Professor Toulous shows, the 'prophetic realism' that had guided Dulles's ecumenical quest for world peace and justice became a 'priestly nationalism' that uncompromisingly pursued the international political aims of the United States in the name of a 'supreme moral law.' Toulouse's incisive analysis of that 'transformation' is compelling reading for scholars of international diplomacy and American religion, and for every person who seeks to reconcile the imperatives of religion with the necessities of statecraft" --

As Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles came to personify the shortcomings of American foreign policy. This collection of essays, representing the first archivally based reassessment of Dulles's diplomacy, examines his role during one of the most critical periods of modern history. Rejecting familiar Cold War stereotypes, this volume reveals the hidden complexities in Dulles's conduct of foreign policy and in his own personality.