Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [15]
In terms of background and upbringing, Dulles and LeMay came from different worlds. Each cultivated a distinctive operating style. Yet their similarities outweighed those differences and explain their influence.
THE GREAT WHITE CASE OFFICER
A cool, urbane, Princeton-educated patrician, Allen Dulles was born into a family with a strong tradition of public service. His grandfather John Foster and uncle Robert Lansing had each served as secretary of state, as would his older brother, John, in the Eisenhower years. Allen had spent his early career first as a diplomat, serving in 1919 as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I and then as a corporate lawyer with the prominent New York City firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.19 Yet he entertained ambitions that success in the private sector could never satisfy.
In that regard, World War II came as a godsend. During the war, Dulles left Wall Street and became a leading figure in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, heading up the large OSS operation in Bern, Switzerland. There, he developed an acute fascination with and demonstrated a pronounced knack for intelligence work. After the war, Dulles was prominent among those urging the creation of a permanent intelligence service. Soon after Congress created the CIA in 1947, he joined its ranks, managing the Agency’s embryonic clandestine service before accepting Eisenhower’s invitation to become director.
Dulles presided over the CIA’s “golden years,” when the Agency’s autonomy, prestige, and reputation reached their height.20 Allowing its agents to operate on a very long leash, Eisenhower tacitly indulged Dulles’s belief that covert action offered a way for the United States to take the offensive against the Soviet Union. That Allen’s brother, John Foster, was serving as the president’s trusted chief diplomatist elevated his standing even further. With the family business encompassing both the overt and covert aspects of U.S. policy (sister Eleanor was also an influential State Department official), the Dulles franchise in 1950s Washington glittered.
Breeding and education seemingly fitted Dulles for his sensitive post. If the United States was going to dirty its hands in the spy business, at least there was a gentleman in charge. In his dealings with people from outside the Agency, he exuded a combination of worldliness, sophistication, and refinement. In a fawning 1953 profile, the New York Times took note of his “intellectual forehead surmounted by a tidy thatch of sparse gray hair,” wrote approvingly of his “close cropped gray mustache,” and admired his suits with their “expensively casual look of Savile Row.” His teeth “clenched around the stem of a thick briar pipe,” he evinced “the composure as well as the look of a headmaster of an English boys’ school.” With his “cultured tastes and cosmopolitan interests,” Dulles was someone Americans could trust.21
Other observers agreed. In August of that year, Time made Dulles the subject of a flattering cover story. Describing him as a “scholarly, hearty, pipe-smoking lawyer” with “the cheery, manly manner of a New England prep-school headmaster,” the magazine credited the CIA director with shouldering “the most important mission in the long, sordid, heroic and colorful history of the intelligence services.” Dulles was “uniquely qualified” to head the Agency and had already demonstrated the ability to run it “smoothly and with apparently inexhaustible energy.” There was always room for improvement, but Time left no room for doubt that the CIA was in good hands.22
For its part, Congress was happy to shovel money at Allen Dulles’s CIA with few questions asked. Most members of the press viewed it as their patriotic duty either to keep mum or lend a hand. Among a host of projects initiated at Dulles’s direction, two in particular served to demonstrate the Agency’s claim to perspicacity, daring, and competence: Operation TPAJAX, which in 1953 overthrew the democratically elected government