"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" --

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.

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.

Three distinguished diplomatic historians offer an assessment of the Cold War in the realist tradition that focuses on balancing the objectives of foreign policy with the means of accomplishing them. America and the Cold War, 1941–1991: A Realist Interpretation is a sweeping historical account that focuses on the policy differences at the center of this conflict. In its pages, three preeminent authors offer an examination of contemporary criticism of the Cold War, documenting the views of observers who appreciated that many policies of the period were not only dangerous, but could not resolve the problems they contemplated. The study offers a comprehensive chronicle of U.S.-Soviet relations, broadly conceived, from World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It places the origins of the Cold War as related to the contentious issues of World War II and stresses the failure of Washington to understand or seriously seek settlement of those issues. It points out how nuclear weaponry gradually assumed political stature and came to dominate high-level, Soviet-American diplomatic activity, at the same time discounting the notion that the Cold War was a global ideological confrontation for the future of civilization. A concluding chapter draws lessons from the Cold War decades, showing how they apply to dealing with nation-states and terrorist groups today.

America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support. A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”

This book will illustrate that despite the variations of nuclear tensions during the Cold War period—from nuclear inception, to mass proliferation, to arms control treaties and détente, through to an intensification and “reasonable” conclusion (the INF Treaty and START being case points)—the “lessons” over the last decade are quickly being unlearned. Given debates surrounding the emerging “new Cold War,” the deterioration of relations between Russia and the United States, and the concurrent challenges being made by key nuclear states in obfuscating arms control mechanisms, this book attempts to provide a much needed revisit into US presidential foreign policy during the Cold War. Across nine chapters, the monograph traces the United States’ nuclear diplomacy and Presidential strategic thought, transitioning across the early period of Cold War arms racing through to the era’s defining conclusion. It will reveal that notwithstanding the heightened periods when great power conflict seemed imminent, arms control fora and seminal agreements were able to be devised, implemented, and provided a needed base in bringing down the specter of a cataclysmic nuclear war, as well as improving bilateral relations. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of American foreign policy, diplomatic history, security studies and international relations.

In his book, 'Building the Kingdom of God on Earth', Dr. Erdmann deals primarily with John Foster Dulles' participation in the ecumenical movement from 1919 to 1945. Dulles' role in shaping the religious, economic, and political policies of the Federal Council of Churches in its support of world order and peace, especially in his function as chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, was crowned with success in the founding of the United Nations Organisation in 1945. His personal friends Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, the principal leaders of the Round Table Group, come into the pictures at various times. By and large they pursued the same objectives as those of Dulles. The book shows the detailed influence of the Round Table Group and its affiliated organisations - such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London) and the Council for Foreign Relations (New York City) - on the ecumenical movement, using it successfully for their purpose of creating an international community of nations.