(See Cover) In an icy conference room in West Berlin one day last February, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov sang an old, sour song. After nine years of delay and diatribe, the Soviet Union still refused to sign a peace treaty ending the occupation of Austria. As Molotov droned on, a tall man slouched low in a chair, whittling on a pencil, calmly watching the shavings drop to the floor. When the Russian had finished, John Foster Dulles blew the dust from his pocketknife, snapped it shut and shoved it into his pocket. Then the U.S. Secretary of State leaned forward.
"For about 2,000 years now," said Dulles, "there has been a figure in mythology which symbolizes tragic futility. That was Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek story, was given the task of rolling a great stone up to the top of a hill. Each time when, after great struggle and sweating, the stone was just at the brow of the hill, some evil force manifested itself and pushed the stone down. So poor Sisyphus had to start his task over again. I suspect that for the next 2,000 years the story of Sisyphus will be forgotten, when generation after generation is told the tragic story of the Austrian state treaty. We have repeatedly been almost at the point of concluding an Austrian treaty, and always some evil force manifests itself and pushes the treaty back again."
Then John Foster Dulles looked squarely at the man he had labeled the instrument of an evil force and said: "I think that the Soviet Foreign Minister will understand that it is at least excusable if we think, and if much of the world will think, that what is actually under way here is another illustration of the unwillingness of the Soviet Union actually to restore genuine freedom and independence in any area where it has once gotten its grip."
War Against Gullibility. The Berlin Conference might have marked the beginning of calamity for John Foster Dulles — and for the people and the cause he represented. Instead, it was at Berlin that Dulles started on the way to become 1954's Man of the Year. It was the first time in nearly five years that the foreign ministers of the Big Four had conferred. Much of the world was being lulled by new and gentle tones from Moscow. Did Malenkov's Russia really want peace? In trying to get an answer that all the world would understand, Secretary of State Dulles at Berlin pressed Molotov with greater skill and force than any U.S. diplomat had ever shown in dealing with the Communists. With one sharp stroke after another, he stripped the Communists naked of the pretense that they really wanted peace at anything less than their own outrageous price. If millions remained deluded by the "soft" Malenkov line, that was not the fault of Dulles, who rescued other millions from gullibility.
Everywhere, and especially in Europe, gullibility was nurtured by the fear that no power could stop the Communists, that the only alternatives were an appeasing coexistence or an atomic world war in which the dreadful best outcome would be liberation after U.S. "massive retaliation" against Red aggression. Neither at Berlin last February nor throughout the year did Dulles try to veil the free world's grim dependence on massive atomic retaliation.