Secretary of State John Foster Dulles last week found himself—surely without surprise—in the center of a new national and international uproar. It began when the Secretary gave TIME-LIFE Washington Bureau Chief James Shepley, in an exclusive interview in LIFE, his interpretation of how the Eisenhower Administration has kept the peace. There have been three times in the last three years, Shepley reported, when the U.S. "was brought perilously close to war, and when the new policy of deterrence instituted by Dulles preserved peace." Shepley reported Dulles' interpretation:
Korea, June 1953. Dulles warned Red China through India's Prime Minister Nehru that the U.S. was prepared to attack Manchurian bases with atomic weapons if the Communists did not sign a truce agreement at Panmunjom. Although South Korea's President Syngman Rhee subsequently and illegally released 22,000 Chinese and North Korean P.W.s, the Communists decided to sign.
Indo-China, April 1954. Dulles flew to London to advocate united action to save the French fortress at Dienbienphu. Dulles returned believing the British had agreed to support him, but two weeks later "the British had had a change of heart." Nonetheless, Dulles now contends, his readiness to intervene in Indo-China gave the British and French a basis of strength from which they negotiated the truce agreement at Geneva. Shepley wrote: "Dulles had seen to it that the Chinese and the Soviets knew that the U.S. was prepared to act decisively to prevent the fall of all of Southeast Asia."
Formosa Strait, 1954-55. Dulles felt that the Communists were deterred from attacking the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu by the resolution, framed by himself and passed by the Congress, giving the President a free hand to use U.S. forces against the Communists if they attacked Formosa and related territories. Shepley added: "Dulles has never doubted, incidentally, that Eisenhower would have regarded an attack on Quemoy and the Matsus as an attack on Formosa."
Dulles summed up the historical argument: "Nobody is able to prove mathematically that it was the policy of deterrence which brought the Korean war to an end and which kept the Chinese from sending their Red armies into Indo-China, or that it has finally stopped them in Formosa. I think it is a pretty fair inference that it has."
"Verge of War." Dulles explained to Shepley that his concept of retaliation did not mean the starting of World War III, but the fitting of the punishment to the crime. Limited targets in the Korea and Indo-China crises, for example, were selected in the event that retaliation became necessary. "They were specific targets reasonably related to the area. They did not involve massive destruction of great population centers like Shanghai, Peking or Canton. Retaliation must be on a selective basis. The important thing is that the aggressor know in advance that he is going to lose more than he can win. He doesn't have to lose much more. It just has to be something more. If the equation is such that the outcome is clearly going to be against him, he won't go in."