John Foster Dulles: Controvertial, Paradoxical

About a dozen years ago Carol Burnett's nightclub repertoire included a number, “I Made a Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles.” In 1971, in an era of massive discontent with American foreign policy, Miss Burnett would be unwise to restore it to her program. For even though the song is pure camp, some youthful member of her audience would certainly jump to his feet with a denunciation of Dulles as the archetypal villain of the foreign-policy establishment he repudiates. To the new generation Foster Dulles stands condemned as thevery model of the Modern Cold Warrior. To them he is the moralist whose platitudes reduced the world situation to a struggle between Western “good” and Communist “evil” and the brinkman who stood poised on the edge of Armageddon and revelled in the confrontation. His veto of United States assistance in the building of Egypt's Aswan Darn, the indictment further runs, alienated Gamal Abdel Nasser and began the fatal series of steps that led to a massive Soviet influence in the Middle East, against which we are now contending. At the real brink, some of his other critics assert, he frustrated the Anglo-French-Israeli armed intervention at Suez, without providing any countermeasure to preserve the Western position in that area. Finally, it is charged, his efforts to maintain staunch anti-Communist leadership in power in Saigon after 1954 make the Vietnam war in good part his legacy.