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The substitute, to rearm and grant sovereignty to West Germany under a different set of agreements, was conceived by Britain's Foreign Minister Anthony Eden one morning in his bathtub. Last October in Paris, with the help of Dulles and of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (the Man of 1953), Eden got his alternative plan approved at the foreign-minister level. Many military men discovered that they liked Eden's Western European Union, with its appeal to nationalism, better than EDC, with its emphasis on European political unity. The Communists testified to the plan's potential: they fought as desperately against it as they had against EDC.
The disaster in Indo-China left no doubt that three Communists were the Men of the Year in Asia. The victory belonged to Communist China's Premier Mao Tse-tung, his Foreign Minister Chou Enlai, and to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet Minh. For a considerable measure of recovery from the Indo-China disaster, the free world could thank John Foster Dulles. First Dulles hammered out and pushed through the Manila Pact, which committed eight nations to take joint action against subversion and aggression in Asia.
More important, perhaps, was Dulles' other Asian treaty of the year, the mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Nationalist Chinese Leader Chiang Kaishek. One tribute to the treaty's impact was the angry reaction of the Communist Chinese. The pact did not establish any new principle, but it wiped out some doubts. Said Dulles: "It is my hope that the signing of this defense treaty will put to rest once and for all rumors and reports that the U.S. will in any manner agree to the abandonment of Formosa and the Pescadores to Communist control."
Despite these attempts to shore up the anti-Communist position, the free world came to year's end with a net loss and a troubled outlook in Asia. There was scant hope that the Communists could be prevented from swallowing up all of Viet Nam. There was great danger in the aura of success that surrounded the Communists in the Far East, where the people want to know: Which side will win? Even in Japan, where the West's good friend, Premier Yoshida, was forced to resign, there was new talk of trade and friendship with Red China. On 1954's Asian ledger, the big figures were all Red.
He Likes the Work. As the Man of 1954 went through his incredibly difficult year, he was sustained by an important basic attitude: he likes the work. President Eisenhower and most members of his Cabinet can truthfully say that they did not dream of holding the jobs they have, and took them only out of sense of duty.
But John Foster Dulles has wanted, almost all his life, the job he now holds. He learned his first lessons in international relations at the knee of his maternal grandfather, John Foster, who was Secretary of State in Benjamin Harrison's Cabinet and who helped negotiate the 1895 treaty that ended the Sino-Japanese War. At 19, he was secretary of China's delegation at the Second Hague Peace Conference; at 30, he served on the Reparations Commission at Versailles. Between the wars he had a brilliant legal career. In 1941 he got the Federal Council of Churches to set up a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, headed it, and wrote a report that applied Christian principles to historical realities.