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                                                                              ╚January 3, 1955

THE NATION

Man of the Year:John Foster Dulles



    In an icy conference room in West Berlin one day last
February, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov sang an old, sour
song. After nine years of delay and diatribe, the Soviet Union
still refused to sign a peace treaty ending the occupation of
Austria. As Molotov droned on, a tall man slouched low in a
chair, whittling on a pencil, calmly watching the shavings drop
to the floor. When the Russian had finished, John Foster Dulles
blew the dust from his pocketknife, snapped it shut and shoved
it into his pocket. Then the U.S. Secretary of State leaned
forward.

    "For about 2,000 years now," said Dulles, "there has been a
figure in mythology which symbolizes tragic futility. That was
Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek story, was given the task
of rolling a great stone up to the top of a hill. Each time when,
after great struggle and sweating, the stone was just at the brow
of the hill, some evil force manifested itself and pushed the
stone down. So poor Sisyphus had to start his task over again. I
suspect that for the next 2,000 years the story of Sisyphus will
be forgotten, when generation after generation is told the tragic
story of the Austrian state treaty. We have repeatedly been
almost at the point of concluding an Austrian treaty, and always
some evil force manifests itself and pushes the treaty back
again."

    Then John Foster Dulles looked squarely at the man he had
labeled the instrument of an evil force and said: "I think that
the Soviet Foreign Minister will understand that it is at least
excusable if we think, and if much of the world will think, that
what is actually under way here is another illustration of the
unwillingness of the Soviet Union actually to restore genuine
freedom and independence in any area where it has once gotten its
grip."

    War Against Gullibility. The Berlin Conference might have
marked the beginning of calamity for John Foster Dulles  -- and
for the people and the cause he represented. Instead, it was at
Berlin that Dulles started on the way to become 1954's Man of the
Year. It was the first time in nearly five years that the foreign
ministers of the Big Four had conferred. Much of the world was
being lulled by new and gentle tones from Moscow. Did Malenkov's
Russia really want peace? In trying to get an answer that all the
world would understand, Secretary of State Dulles at Berlin
pressed Molotov with greater skill and force than any U.S.
diplomat had ever shown in dealing with the Communists. With one
sharp stroke after another, he stripped the Communists naked of
the pretense that they really wanted peace at anything less than
their own outrageous price. If millions remained deluded by the
"soft" Malenkov line, that was not the fault of Dulles, who
rescued other millions from gullibility.

    Everywhere, and especially in Europe, gullibility was
nurtured by the fear that no power could stop the Communists,
that the only alternatives were an appeasing coexistence or an
atomic world war in which the dreadful best outcome would be
liberation after U.S. "massive retaliation" against Red
aggression. Neither at Berlin last February nor throughout the
year did Dulles try to veil the free world's grim dependence on
massive atomic retaliation. But he knew this to be a position of
desperation, one that could not be held indefinitely unless the
non-Communist world regained freedom of action, unless it found
other than ultimate and apocalyptic ways to gather and use its
strength.

    In pursuit of such ways, Dulles spent 1954 in a ceaseless
round of travel, logging 101,521 miles on journeys to Berlin,
London, Paris, Caracas, Bonn, Geneva, Milan, Manila and Tokyo. In
one fortnight last September, he munched mangoes with Philippines
President Ramon Magsaysay in Manila, conferred with Chiang
Kai-shek on Formosa, visited Premier Yoshida in Tokyo, reported
to President Eisenhower in Denver, consulted with Winston
Churchill in London and talked with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn. En
route, he read a detective story in mid-Pacific, slept soundly
across the Atlantic, and carried on U.S. State Department
business as he crossed one international border after another.

    On his trips to reinforce the free world outposts, Dulles
sometimes merely shored up a wall that the Reds had breached, but
on other sorties he served his primary mission: to develop the
cohesion and strength that would make Communist aggression less
likely and would, therefore, make the free world less directly
dependent on massive retaliation, the defense it feared.

    A Giant Stride. As the year ended, Dulles, back from his
eighth transatlantic trip in twelve months, was able to report to
the U.S. that plans for Europe's defense had entered a new phase.
Tactical atomic weapons (e.g., atomic howitzers and small
rockets) now make it possible to halt a Red army ground attack:
"The aggressor would be thrown back at the threshold" of Western
Europe. The 14 NATO nations that discussed this with Dulles are
agreed on how this threshold defense shall be coordinated. Said
Dulles: "Thus we see the means of achieving what the people of
Western Europe have long sought -- that is, a form of security
which, while having as its first objective the preservation of
peace, would also be adequate for defense and which would not put
Western Europe in a position of having to be liberated."

    John Foster Dulles played the key role in the NATO Council's
agreement on how to coordinate this giant stride. When Dulles got
to Paris for the council meeting last fortnight, he found that
both Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France had prepared strict
plans calling for consultation by the allies before nuclear
weapons could be used. After dinner with Eden, Dulles pulled out
his omnipresent yellow scratch-pad, scribbled out his own
resolution. Next day both Eden and Mendes-France dropped their
proposals, and the council adopted the Dulles plan within 30
minutes. It provided for consultation prior to use of nuclear
weapons by NATO forces, but it did not set rigid rules or tie the
hand of such non-NATO forces as the U.S. Strategic Air Command.

    A Year of Shadowed Joy. In Dulles' patient year of work and
travel, every task and every mile was made harder by the mood of
1954, a year in which temptations to complacency and reasons for
anxiety both mounted. For complacency, 1954 was superficially
like the peaceful and prosperous '20s. Between Sept. 18, 1931,
when the Japanese moved into Manchuria, and Aug. 10, 1954, when
the Indo-China fighting stopped, there was no day of worldwide
peace. Between Oct. 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed, and
1954, there had been some years of boom, but it took 1954's mild,
controlled U.S. recession to bring home the solidity of the
economic advance. The rest of the world had long feared the
magnified effect of even a mild U.S. recession. But in 1954
business forged ahead in Britain, West Germany and many another
country, despite the brief U.S. downswing. As U.S. indexes turned
upward at year's end, the 25-year-old belief that the world was
tied to a boom-or-bust economy began to bust.

    The result, as 1954 ended, was a feeling of firm confidence
in the U.S. economy and in dynamic capitalism as an economic way
of life. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, a hard man
with a dollar's worth of optimism, summed up this economic
feeling in a financial man's superlative. Said he: "I'm a bull on
the world."

    The main differences between the peace and prosperity of
1954 and of the '20s were: I) 1954's peace and prosperity had, in
reality, far better prospects; 2) the 1920s' feeling of
confidence, which proved illusory, was much higher. Americans of
1954 knew that the technical peace was not real, that they had to
keep almost 3,000,000 men under arms, maintain a peacetime
conscription and spend an average of $855 a family for defense.
The year that saw the hydrogen explosion at Bikini -- the biggest
explosion in man's explosive history -- was not one to foster
illusions about an indefinite peace.

    Yards Gained. The U.S. needed all its strength and
confidence to handle 1954's struggle with Communism, which has
been the overriding issue of every year since 1945. Dulles both
drew upon and nourished U.S. confidence in its national strength.
Far from offending allies, the emphasis on U.S. interests had a
wholesome effect of stimulating the national prides of other
Western nations in a war that made them more self-reliant and
more reliable partners in the struggle against the common enemy.

    Dulles is the man of 1954 because, in the decisive areas of
international politics he played the year's most effective role.
He made mistakes, and he suffered heavy losses. But he was nimble
in disentangling himself from his errors. The heavier losses of
1954 were prepared by serious mistakes made years ago; Dulles
limited the damage.

    Regionally, 1954's greatest area of success for American
diplomacy and the man who runs it was the Middle East. There, a
number of old problems were solved by new approaches. Items:

    -- After decades of dispute, the status of the Suez Canal
area was settled more firmly than ever before. On the surface
this was an affair between the British who agreed to withdraw
their troops, are Egypt's Man of the Year, Premier Gamal-Abdel
Nasser. In fact, the settlement was skillfully midwifed by the
U.S. State Department through Old Diplomat Jefferson Caffery,
then Ambassador to Egypt.

    -- After three years of shutdown and stalemate at Abadan
(caused by the stubborn egotism of 1951's Man of the Year
Mohammed Mossadegh), Iran agreed to let foreign firms (chiefly
British) resume operating the Iranian oil industry, which the
Iranians were incapable of operating. The agreement was prodded,
adjusted and pushed through by Loy Henderson, the U.S. Ambassador
to Iran, and Special U.S. Emissary Herbert Hoover Jr., now Under
Secretary of State.

    -- After long and careful negotiation by U.S. diplomats,
Turkey and Pakistan signed a military collaboration treaty. This
was a key step toward Dulles' goal of a "Northern Tier" defense
against Soviet expansion.

    In Europe and in the Americas, too there were some clear-cut
gains. Items:

    -- At Caracas, in March, Secretary Dulles personally pushed
through an inter-American resolution calling for joint action
against Communist aggression or subversion. Said Dulles: "It may
serve the needs of our time as effectively as the Monroe doctrine
served the needs of our nation during the last century." Only
three months after Caracas, Jacobo Arbenz' Communist-dominated
government of Guatemala, the only Red bastion in the western
hemisphere, was overthrown by the anti-Communist forces of
Castillo Armas.

    -- The status of Trieste was settled after nine years of
Communist-comforting tension between Italy and Yugoslavia. When
U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce impressed Washington with the
urgency of the settlement, U.S. and British diplomacy went to
work. The Italians and the Yugoslavs were persuaded to sign a
settlement dividing the territory, with the Italians getting the
Italian city.

    Holes Plugged. Dulles' job includes defense as well as
advance. He played goalkeeper in the free world's two major
setbacks of 1954: the death of the European Defense Community (to
which he had said there was "no alternative") and the defeat in
Indo-China. Both setbacks stemmed from a single mistake made a
decade ago, and never corrected in spite of mounting evidence.
The mistake: that the victory of France's allies over Germany
somehow meant that France had recovered from the basic political
weakness that caused its collapse in 1940. The postwar phrase --
the Big Four -- was a misnomer; France is not a great power, but
a great civilization, politically paralyzed. EDC asked France to
show a self-confidence it did not posses. Indo-China asked France
to show a will to win it did not possess. A new Premier, Pierre
Mendes-France, made France's allies face the old fact of France's
weakness.

    At the end of 1953, John Foster Dulles had said, quite
pointedly, that the U.S. would be forced to make an "agonizing
reappraisal" of its relations with France, of its policy toward
Europe if EDC failed of ratification. (That expression and
Dulles' "massive retaliation" became the cold-war phrases of
1954.) A smaller man than Dulles might have insisted on a
reappraisal immediately after Mendes-France presided over the
French assassination of EDC. But Dulles swallowed his pride and
helped the West lay the foundation for a substitute.

    The substitute, to rearm and grant sovereignty to West
Germany under a different set of agreements, was conceived by
Britain's Foreign Minister Anthony Eden one morning in his
bathtub. Last October in Paris, with the help of Dulles and of
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (the Man of 1953), Eden
got his alternative plan approved at the foreign-minister level.
Many military men discovered that they liked Eden's Western
European Union, with its appeal to nationalism, better than EDC,
with its emphasis on European political unity. The Communists
testified to the plan's potential: they fought as desperately
against it as they had against EDC.

    The disaster in Indo-China left no doubt that three
Communists were the Men of the Year in Asia. The victory belonged
to Communist China's Premier Mao Tse-tung, his Foreign Minister
Chou En-lai, and to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet Minh. For
a considerable measure of recovery from the Indo-China disaster,
the free world could thank John Foster Dulles. First Dulles
hammered out and pushed through the Manila Pact, which committed
eight nations to take joint action against subversion and
aggression in Asia.

    More important, perhaps, was Dulles' other Asian treaty of
the year, the mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and
Nationalist Chinese Leader Chiang Kai-shek. One tribute to the
treaty's impact was the angry reaction of the Communist Chinese.
The pact did not establish any new principle, but it wiped out
some doubts. Said Dulles: "It is my hope that the signing of this
defense treaty will put to rest once and for all rumors and
reports that the U.S. will in any manner agree to the abandonment
of Formosa and the Pescadores to Communist control."

    Despite these attempts to shore up the anti-Communist
position, the free world came to year's end with a net loss and a
troubled outlook in Asia. There was scant hope that the
Communists could be prevented from swallowing up all of Viet Nam.
There was great danger in the aura of success that surrounded the
Communists in the Far East, where the people want to know: Which
side will win? Even in Japan, where the West's good friend,
Premier Yoshida, was forced to resign, there was new talk of
trade and friendship with Red China. On 1954's Asian ledger, the
big figures were all Red.

    He Likes the Work. As the Man of 1954 went through his
incredibly difficult year, he was sustained by an important basic
attitude: he likes the work. President Eisenhower and most
members of his Cabinet can truthfully say that they did not dream
of holding the jobs they have, and took them only out of sense of
duty. But John Foster Dulles has wanted, almost all his life, the
job he now holds. He learned his first lessons in international
relations at the knee of his maternal grandfather, John Foster,
who was Secretary of State in Benjamin Harrison's Cabinet and who
helped negotiate the 1895 treaty that ended the Sino-Japanese
War. At 19, he was secretary of China's delegation at the Second
Hague Peace Conference; at 30, he served on the Reparations
Commission at Versailles. Between the wars he had a brilliant
legal career. In 1941 he got the Federal Council of Churches to
set up a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable
Peace, headed it, and wrote a report that applied Christian
principles to historical realities.

    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.

    In recent months Dulles has gained new confidence that he
has found the right words and phrases. His reports to the people,
e.g., his report on the Paris Conference at a televised Cabinet
meeting, have been remarkable for their sweep and clarity. Dulles
considers such reports a key part of his job for one large
reason: he believes that the citizens of the U.S. have the right
and the ability to understand his business.

    As he goes tirelessly about that business, Dulles, at 66,
displays a tremendous capacity for concentration and work. Almost
all of his waking hours are working hours, whether he is flying
across an ocean, seated in his map-lined office or resting at
home (the yellow scratch-pad is always at his bedside). His depth
of concentration sometimes unnerves staff members who have
brought him problems: they think he has forgotten that they are
there. His favorite form of relaxation literally gives his staff
the shivers: he likes to swim wherever and whenever he can, and
sometimes does so, in water more suitable for polar bears than
for Secretaries of State.

    One-Plan Department. When Dulles travels, his airplane
becomes a mobile State Department. He takes with him more aides
than made up the entire State Department personnel in John Quincy
Adams' day. (Adam's fullest staff: eight clerks.) On trips to
Europe, the staff is headed by Assistant Secretary (for European
Affairs) Livingston T. Merchant and Counselor Douglas MacArthur
II. When Asia is the landing place, the Secretary's chief aide is
Assistant Secretary (for Far Eastern Affairs) Walter S.
Robertson.

    The traveling State Department leaves at home 5,761
colleagues in a sprawling, uncertain organization that is at
least two decades overdue for genuine reorganization and
reorientation. Dulles has scarcely touched that herculean job,
and he may never get around to it. But whoever does may find a
legacy from Dulles' one-plane operation. A sense of policy
direction must precede any basic change in the setup of the
department; Dulles is providing direction to which the department
may be some day geared.

    "Pour la Paix." Obviously, John Foster Dulles goes about his
job as a missionary at large rather than as an administrator. At
first, some people at home and abroad thought that he was only
going to preach. They soon discovered that this missionary did a
lot of practicing. He not only carried the word into the jungle,
quieted the local tribes and performed marriages, but also helped
to clear the ground, dam the streams and stop epidemics of fear.

    At year's end there was evidence that Missionary Dulles was
making some converts where conversion was difficult. In Paris, a
French foreign office official told a TIME correspondent: "You
know, the other day a pamphlet came across my desk. Written in
French, it was entitled Pour la Paix. My first reaction was that
it was just another Communist propaganda tract. But it wasn't. It
was John Foster Dulles' recent speech in Chicago. For years now-
in Europe at least -- the Communists have made 'peace' their
private property. Even though people knew what the Communists
meant, the idea in their hands helped them and hurt us. It looks
now as if your Mr. Dulles is going to take peace away from the
Communists and restore it to its real meaning."

    During 1954, as he kept working pour la paix, Foster Dulles
disregarded the cries of those who would have had him take the
high road toward war or the low road of appeasement. He stayed,
instead, on the rutted, booby-trapped road in between, and he
made some forward progress. If he has, indeed, captured the word
peace for the U.S., his patience and caution were well worth the
prize.

    Three Tests Ahead. To 1954's Man of the Year, to his boss,
Dwight Eisenhower, and to the people of the U.S. whose destiny
they hold, 1955 will bring three critical tests. The immediate
problem is the French reaction to the Paris agreements. Somehow,
the rearmament of Germany will begin in 1955, whatever stand
France takes. The other two tests facing U.S. foreign policy in
1955 are more serious.

    After two years in office, the Eisenhower Administration has
failed to plug the yawning gap in its foreign policy -- the place
where history, logic, opportunity and the poverty of the world
cry out for U.S. leadership on a free worldwide front of economic
advance. In the year's closing months, the President, despite
strong opposition in his own Cabinet, seemed to be moving toward
a positive policy for liberalized world trade and stimulated
production. Dulles favors such a program. But he has been too
busy with the international politics of his job to give it his
own leadership: it has little chance of success unless he fights
for it -- in Washington and abroad.

    The second challenge of 1955 is even bigger. Almost
certainly, there will be a top-level conference between the
Western powers and the Russians. Whatever the paper headed
"Agenda" may say, the main business before the meeting will be
agreement on atomic weapons. If the U.S. submits to crippling
limitation on its power of massive atomic retaliation, it must
get in return an equivalent enforceable limitation on the
Communist superiority in land armaments and the techniques of
subversion.

    The prospects of agreement are not bright. But they are less
dark than they were before a practical missionary of Christian
politics began his extraordinary year of work.