(Feb 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) An American lawyer who helped draft the harsh and unreasonable reparations upon Germany in the Treaty of Versailles and continued to create policies that damaged America and progressed his agenda for a socialist world government until his death almost 40 years later while President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Dulles helped draft the preamble to the UN Charter, served Chairman of the Board for the Carnegie Endowment and a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952, a founding member of Foreign Policy Association and Council of Foreign Relations, and . Famed journalist Alan Stang concluded in his book The Actor that “Dulles deliberately did more damage to America while masquerading as a conservative Republican anti-Communist (all for temporary political cover), than Gus Hall [long-time head of the American Communist Party] could have imagined doing.”
Shortly after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, some Englishmen were curious about this new political figure in central Europe, asking, “This Hitler fellow, where was he born?” To which Lady Astor replied, “At Versailles.”
By that time, it was widely understood that the harsh peace imposed upon Germany after the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles — with loss of historic German territory; unreasonable reparations; and the hated Article 231, the “war guilt clause” — had given birth to Hitler. Some argue that the “war guilt clause” was perhaps the most onerous provision of the hated treaty. Under its provisions, the Germans were forced to admit that they, and they alone, were responsible for the Great War.
The person who drafted it was a young American lawyer, John Foster Dulles. The clause said, “Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damages to which the Allied and Associated governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” (Emphasis added.)
It would not be the last time that an action of the then 31-year-old Dulles would lead to “blowback” on his country. In fact, famed journalist Alan Stang concluded in his book The Actor on the career of Dulles — the ultimate “deep stater” — “Dulles deliberately did more damage to America while masquerading as a conservative Republican anti-Communist, than Gus Hall [long-time head of the American Communist Party] could have imagined doing.” Although the term was not in use at the time, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen were key architects in the construction of what we now refer to as “the deep state” — the permanent state behind the visible government in D.C.
From his negative influence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, until his death almost 40 years later while President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Dulles continued to create policies that damaged America. As Eisenhower’s chief foreign policy advisor, his influence was immense. Stephen Kinzer wrote in his book on Dulles and his brother, Allen (director of the CIA), The Brothers, “On some days, Foster spoke personally or by telephone with Eisenhower as many as ten times. At dusk he often visited the White House for a chat over drinks.”
Dulles’ advice to Eisenhower was consistent with the views he held as a young lawyer: He was an ardent globalist (the term more used then was “internationalist”) who believed military intervention was justified to achieve his desired globalist world order. And while Dulles occasionally peppered his résumé with conservative, anti-communist rhetoric, it was, as Stang concluded in The Actor, all for temporary political cover until he could achieve what he and other insiders like him wanted: a world socialist government.
Dulles came to his dogged pursuit of a global government naturally, via family connections and by educational training. His grandfather, John Watson Foster, was secretary of state to President William Henry Harrison. A pillar of the post-Civil War Republican Party, Foster helped direct the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii by its American settlers and supported sending American troops to aid the rebels who declared themselves the new government. The Harrison administration ended before it could act on the new government’s request for annexation (the next president, Grover Cleveland, quickly nixed the idea), but it did lay the foundation of the aggressive interventionism that would characterize Dulles’ career in the 20th century.
His mother’s sister married Robert Lansing, who replaced William Jennings Bryan as President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Bryan had been pushed aside largely for his opposition to American entrance into the First World War, and replaced by Foster’s Uncle Robert, who added his voice to Wilson’s principal advisor, Colonel Edward M. House, in urging American entry into the European war.
The Rise of John Foster Dulles
When the war ended in 1918, young Dulles was in the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. How did this happen? In a word, Dulles had “connections.” When he was just 16, he entered Princeton, where he soon became a protégé of a prominent history professor (and soon, college president), Woodrow Wilson. Dulles idolized Wilson, under whom he learned the virtues of globalism and the ability of government to correct evils — as Wilson and the progressives saw them anyway — of society. Wilson’s interventionist policies as president reinforced the idea that it was the proper role of the United States to intervene in smaller countries, such as Cuba, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.
After taking his law degree, Dulles’ family connections landed him a job at the prestigious international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, with such clients as the United Fruit Company, an important player in Latin American politics. Other important clients were J.P. Morgan, Brown Brothers, Standard Oil, and Goldman Sachs. Eventually, Dulles became the managing partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, and was, at one time, the highest-paid lawyer in the United States.
After the war, Dulles had extensive dealings with Germany, including the chemical giant I.G. Farben (responsible for making the infamous Zyklon B gas used in Hitler’s death chambers). He designed the Dawes Plan that helped Germany begin to pay off its oppressive war reparations — ironic, since it was Dulles who had drafted the section of the Versailles Treaty imposing those reparations.
Dulles continued his financial dealings inside Germany after the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler came to power. Dulles’ friend, Hjalmer Schacht, was even named minister of economics in the new regime. As Kinzer writes in The Brothers, “Working with Schacht, Foster [Dulles] helped the National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks, and industries.… Sullivan and Cromwell floated the first American bonds issued by the giant German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp A.G.”
By the mid-1930s, the partners of Sullivan and Cromwell decided they could no longer do business in Nazi Germany. As Kinzer noted, “Since 1933, all letters written from the German offices of Sullivan and Cromwell had ended, as required by German regulations, with the salutation Heil Hitler!” All but Dulles voted to pull out of Hitler’s Germany. Dulles wept at the decision.
Going back to the aftermath of the First World War, Dulles had been an ardent advocate of liberal internationalism. The principle of non-interventionism — which internationalists such as Dulles slurred as “isolationism” — was the enemy. To Wilson and the rest of his globalist delegation, including Dulles, at Paris in 1919, the most important segment of the Treaty of Versailles was that creating the League of Nations. Colonel House wrote the first draft of the Covenant of the League. To promote the idea of the league, intended from the start as the foundation for a world government, House put together a group of sympathizers to inquire into the facts of global affairs, which was dubbed “the Inquiry.”
The membership of the Inquiry included Norman Thomas, a leader of the American Socialist Party. Another member was Dulles’ good friend, Walter Lippmann, a founding member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Two other members in the small, select group were John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen.
Dulles Among Founders of the Globalist CFR
When Wilson failed (twice) to win ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, largely because the U.S. Senate was not yet prepared to merge the United States into a global government, the Inquiry became the core group of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in 1921. (The British had their own associated group, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.) As Kinzer explains in The Brothers, the defeat of the League of Nations “showed the Dulles brothers and others on Wall Street that internationalism had potent enemies. To resist those enemies, and to work toward a world that would welcome American corporate and political power, the brothers and a handful of their friends had decided to create an invitation-only club, based in New York, where the worldly elite could meet, talk, and plan.”
Source: This article appears in the March 5, 2018, issue of The New American. To download the issue and continue reading this story, or to subscribe, click here.