(2 of 8)
But he knew this to be a position of desperation, one that could not be held indefinitely unless the non-Communist world regained freedom of action, unless it found other than ultimate and apocalyptic ways to gather and use its strength.
In pursuit of such ways, Dulles spent 1954 in a ceaseless round of travel, logging 101,521 miles on journeys to Berlin, London, Paris, Caracas, Bonn, Geneva, Milan, Manila and Tokyo. In one fortnight last September, he munched mangoes with Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay in Manila, conferred with Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa, visited Premier Yoshida in Tokyo, reported to President Eisenhower in Denver, consulted with Winston Churchill in London and talked with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn. En route, he read a detective story in mid-Pacific, slept soundly across the Atlantic, and carried on U.S. State Department business as he crossed one international border after another. On his trips to reinforce the free world outposts, Dulles sometimes merely shored up a wall that the Reds had breached, but on other sorties he served his primary mission: to develop the cohesion and strength that would make Communist aggression less likely and would, therefore, make the free world less directly dependent on massive retaliation, the defense it feared.
A Giant Stride. As the year ended, Dulles, back from his eighth transatlantic trip in twelve months, was able to report to the U.S. that plans for Europe's defense had entered a new phase. Tactical atomic weapons (e.g., atomic howitzers and small rockets) now make it possible to halt a Red army ground attack: "The aggressor would be thrown back at the threshold" of Western Europe. The 14 NATO nations that discussed this with Dulles are agreed on how this threshold defense shall be coordinated. Said Dulles: "Thus we see the means of achieving what the people of Western Europe have long sought—that is, a form of security which, while having as its first objective the preservation of peace, would also be adequate for defense and which would not put Western Europe in a position of having to be liberated."
John Foster Dulles played the key role in the NATO Council's agreement on how to coordinate this giant stride. When Dulles got to Paris for the council meeting last fortnight, he found that both Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendès-France had prepared strict plans calling for consultation by the allies before nuclear weapons could be used. After dinner with Eden, Dulles pulled out his omnipresent yellow scratchpad, scribbled out his own resolution. Next day both Eden and Mendès-France dropped their proposals, and the council adopted the Dulles plan within 30 minutes. It provided for consultation prior to use of nuclear weapons by NATO forces, but it did not set rigid rules or tie the hand of such non-NATO forces as the U.S. Strategic Air Command.
A Year of Shadowed Joy. In Dulles' patient year of work and travel, every task and every mile was made harder by the mood of 1954, a year in which temptations to complacency and reasons for anxiety both mounted. For complacency, 1954 was superficially like the peaceful and prosperous '20s. Between Sept. 18, 1931, when the Japanese moved into Manchuria, and Aug. 10, 1954, when the Indo-China fighting stopped, there was no day of worldwide peace. Between Oct.