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Called in by the Truman Administration after the end of World War II, Dulles negotiated a peace treaty with Japan that was the soundest bit of diplomacy that he inherited when he became Secretary of State in 1953. The rest of his policy inheritance was jerry-built on emergency and crisis. Dulles' first aim was to build a foreign policy for the long haul. To replace fear as the glue of the free world's alliances, he said he wanted to develop a cement compounded of strength, understanding and cooperation. He has explained the difficulty of this operation: "The best insurance against war is to be ready, able and willing to fight. Now it is extremely difficult to hold that position without leading some of our friends and allies to think that we are truculent and want to have a fight."
Ducking the One-Two. Because Presbyterian Dulles (a clergyman's son) talked a great deal about moral principle, some feared that he was trying to force his Christian morals on the rest of the world. But he has demonstrated that a diplomat who is clear about his own principles can find them highly useful in practical international politics.
By the end of 1954, Dulles, who had been accused of saber rattling with such phrases as "massive retaliation," found himself the target of other critics who accused him of speaking too softly about coexistence, particularly after the Chinese branded 13 imprisoned Americans as spies. Dulles' restraint in this case was deliberate, and resulted from his highly practical analysis of why the Reds made their announcement on the 13 prisoners. He was convinced that the Soviet and Chinese Communists were attempting to give the U.S. a diplomatic one-two punch: soft talk from Moscow and hard action from Peking.
In Paris last fortnight, Dulles analyzed the situation for the NATO foreign ministers' council. Said he: "At the present time, the U.S. is being subjected to the most severe kind of provocation in Asia. This appears to be deliberately planned in the hope of provoking the U.S. into actions which our European friends and allies would regard as ill-advised and which would perhaps shake our unity at a time when we hope it will be reinforced by the pending London-Paris accords. The U.S. does not intend thus to be hastily provoked into needless action." This highly practical talk was the more forceful because Dulles' line had already been proved right. U.S. allies, especially Britain, had been reassured by Dulles' verbal restraint and had not hesitated to denounce the Reds in terms as strong as any Dulles could have used.
At that kind of diplomatic opinion-molding, John Foster Dulles is a master. He recognizes the importance of communicating his ideas and policies to others, and works hard at checking his circuits of communications. (In his early months as Secretary of State, he would often ask associates, after a Cabinet meeting or a conference, whether he had gotten his ideas across.) When he finds he has been misunderstood, he tries again, tirelessly editing his own public speeches, and even his own thoughts.