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.

When John Foster Dulles died in 1959, he was given the largest American state funeral since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1945. President Eisenhower called Dulles—his longtime secretary of state—“one of the truly great men of our time,” and a few years later the new commercial airport outside Washington, DC, was christened the Dulles International Airport in his honor. His star has fallen significantly since that time, but his influence remains indelible—most especially regarding his role in bringing the worldview of American exceptionalism to the forefront of US foreign policy during the Cold War era, a worldview that has long outlived him. God’s Cold Warrior recounts how Dulles’s faith commitments from his Presbyterian upbringing found fertile soil in the anti-communist crusades of the mid-twentieth century. After attending the Oxford Ecumenical Church Conference in 1937, he wrote about his realization that “the spirit of Christianity, of which I learned as a boy, was really that of which the world now stood in very great need, not merely to save souls, but to solve the practical problems of international affairs.” Dulles believed that America was chosen by God to defend the freedom of all those vulnerable to the godless tyranny of communism, and he carried out this religious vision in every aspect of his diplomatic and political work. He was conspicuous among those US officials in the twentieth century that prominently combined their religious convictions and public service, making his life and faith key to understanding the interconnectedness of God and country in US foreign affairs.

John Foster Dulles was one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. Active in the field for decades, Dulles reflected and was a reflection of the tension that pervaded U.S. international conduct from its evolution as a global power in the early twentieth century through its emergence as the 'leader of the Free World' during the Cold War. His life and career embody the best and most troubling aspects of American foreign policy as it progressed toward international supremacy while swaying between altruism and self-interest. In this biography, Richard Immerman traces Dulles's path from his early days growing up in the parsonage of the First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, N.Y., through his years of amassing influence and power as an international business lawyer and adviser, to his service as President Eisenhower's secretary of state. This volume illuminates not only the history of modern U.S. foreign policy, but its search for a twentieth-century identity. Sophisticated yet accessible, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy is an important resource for graduate and undergraduate courses in U.S. history and U.S. foreign relations.

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

"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" --