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Reward for Effort. For all his innocent appearance, Allen Dulles is uniquely qualified by background and experience to run the CIA. Like older brother John Foster Dulles, Allen was virtually predestined to take a hand in the management of U.S. foreign affairs. His father, a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, N.Y., was a nephew of John Welsh, envoy to Britain during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Maternal grandfather John Watson Foster had been Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison and uncle Robert Lansing was to become Secretary of State under Wilson. At the age of eight, Allen, already deep in the problems of international relations, turned out a 31-page history of the Boer War, roundly criticizing the British. Fond relatives arranged to have the booklet published, and despite wrong grammar and juvenile misspellings, it sold 4,000 copies and earned some $1,500, which was turned over to a Boer relief fund. (This youthful literary effort served Dulles well in 1920 when he asked Columbia Professor Henry Alfred Todd for permission to marry his daughter Clover. Professor Todd, a man with deep respect for erudition, rushed over to the Columbia library to see whether Dulles had published anything, found a card which read "DULLES, Allen W.—The Boer War; A History. Without further research, Professor Todd promptly gave his consent to the marriage.)
Man with a Beard. In 1916, with an M.A. from Princeton and a year's teaching experience at India's Allahabad Christian College, Dulles joined the Foreign Service. After a year in Vienna, Dulles was transferred to Switzerland when the U.S. entered World War I. In Switzerland he got his first taste of intelligence work. Assigned to the job of gathering political intelligence from southeast Europe, he organized an undercover group which made a determined but unsuccessful effort to lead the Austro-Hungarian empire out of the German camp.
In the course of his intelligence-gathering, Dulles spent a good deal of time meeting people, many of them highly unusual types. On the advice of other U.S. officials, however, he passed up as a waste of time a chance to meet a strange journalist with a beard and some off-center political ideas. The bearded scribbler, Dulles later discovered, was Nicolai Lenin, who was about to leave Switzerland for Russia and the revolution. Ever since, Dulles has insisted on seeing almost anyone who wants to talk with him. Says he: "You never know when or where lightning will strike."
Time Out for Beer. By the time he was 33, Dulles, then chief of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Division, had a family and the realization that he could not maintain the scale of living that would be required of him in any more exalted diplomatic job. In 1926, after getting a law degree from George Washington University in his scarce spare time, he went back to New York to join brother John Foster in the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. For the next 15 years he made money as a Wall Street lawyer.