The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [157]
The Republicans also brought to office a domineering policy-maker in foreign affairs, John Foster Dulles, a man devoted to the offensive by training and temperament. If Truman and Acheson adopted cold war rhetoric even to excess, it was at least partly in reaction to being accused of belonging to the “party of treason,” as McCarthy called the Democrats, and to the peculiar national frenzy over the “loss” of China. Dulles, the new Secretary of State, was a cold war extremist naturally, a drum-beater with the instincts of a bully, deliberately combative because that was the way he believed foreign relations should be conducted. Brinksmanship was his contribution, counter-offensive rather than containment was his policy, “a passion to control events” was his motor.
When a Senator in 1949, following the fall of Nationalist China, he stated that “our Pacific front” was now “wide open to encirclement from the East.… Today the situation is critical.” His concept of encirclement was a Chinese Communist advance to Formosa and from there to the Philippines, and a capacity, if once allowed to push beyond the Chinese mainland, “to move and keep on moving.” When Mac-Arthur’s forces in Korea were thrown back by the Chinese, Dulles’ estimate of the enemy grew more bloodcurdling. Huk banditry in the Philippines, Ho Chi Minh’s war in Indochina, a Communist rising in Malaya, Communist revolution in China and the attack on Korea were “all part of a single pattern of violence planned and plotted for 35 years and finally brought to a consummation of fighting and disorder” across the length of Asia.
This melding of the several countries of East Asia as if they had no individuality, no history, no differences or circumstances of their own was the thinking, either uninformed and shallow or knowingly false, that created the domino theory and allowed it to become dogma. Because Orientals on the whole looked alike to Western eyes, they were expected to act alike and perform with the uniformity of dominoes.
As the son of a Presbyterian minister, a relative of missionaries and himself a devoted churchman, Dulles possessed the zeal and self-righteousness that such connections endow, not precluding the behavior, in some of his official dealings, of a scoundrel. His perception of Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee was that “these two gentlemen are modern-day equivalents of the founders of the Church. They are Christian gentlemen who have suffered for their faith.” Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had in fact been a source of power for both.
Under the title “A Policy of Boldness,” Dulles published in Life magazine in 1952 his belief that with regard to Communist-dominated countries, America must demonstrate that “it wants and expects liberation to occur”—“liberation” meaning of course overthrow of Communist regimes. As author of the foreign-policy section of the Republican platform in that year, he rejected containment as “negative, futile and immoral,” and spoke in a muffled jargon of encouraging “liberating influences … in the captive world,” which would cause such stresses as would make “the rulers impotent to continue their monstrous ways and mark the beginning of the end.” If the rhetoric was more than