SHARP at 9 a.m., Jan. 22, 1953, John Foster Dulles showed up for work in his fifth-floor office at the State Department, a tall, austere-looking man, eyes wary, mouth turned down at the corners, shoulders hunched, necktie slightly off-center. He sat down behind a big desk across from a big grandfather clock, surveyed a couple of portraits that he had ordered hung—one of his sideburned grandfather John Watson Foster, U.S. Secretary of State 1892-93 (under President Benjamin Harrison), the other of his uncle Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State 1915-20 (Woodrow Wilson). On a small table within reach of his swivel chair, he laid out three books that through decades of international law and diplomacy he had rarely been without. The books: Stalin's Problems of Leninism, The Federalist papers, the Bible.
"Soviet Communism." the new Secretary of State had written of Stalin's Problems of Leninism, "starts with an atheistic, godless premise. Everything else flows from that premise. If there is no God, there is no moral or natural law . . . Since there is no moral law, there is no such thing as abstract right or justice. Laws are the means, the decrees, by which the dictatorship of the proletariat enforces its will 'for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies' . . . There is a duty to extend this system to all the world."
"Our founders," the new Secretary had said of the other two books, "represented many creeds, but most of them took a spiritual view of the nature of man. They believed that this nation had a mission to help men everywhere to get the great opportunity to be and to do what God designed . . . Freedom cannot be contained—it is all-pervading . . . It is the despots who should feel haunted. They, not we, should fear the future."
In the six years that followed, it was the contribution of John Foster Dulles to his countrymen and to freedom that he best defined and actively waged the cold war in those terms. "The arena is vast," he wrote in his book, War or Peace. "It embraces the whole world, and all political, military, economic and spiritual forces within it." And as he handled the unending procession of Communist-made crises—Korea, Indo-China, Formosa Strait, Iran, Guatemala, Jordan, Lebanon, Quemoy, Berlin—he threw into the cold struggle all of freedom's political, military, economic, spiritual strength. Specifically, he:
¶ Developed the NATO collective-defense system from a Europe-first "position of strength" into a world network of alliances, offered U.S. friends U.S. military and economic help against aggression and subversion if they wanted it, gave millions of free men a new sureness, a new basis for hope;
¶ Maneuvered U.S. land-sea-air power across thousands of miles, stopped the Communists at the pressure points, slowed down the rate of Communist military adventurers when he warned the Communists that the U.S. would not necessarily meet the enemy on the enemy's chosen battlefields, but would "retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing";