In the early fifties, John Dulles Foster was a leading personality in the US foreign mission establishment whose memorable assertion shaped the future of Eritrea, the first to be freed, but the first to be recolonized due to the conspiracy of the then allied nations. He was an idealist not a realist as such to see the fate of Eritrea from the perspective of the US utilitarianism as the following ill-intention denotes:-
"From the point of view of justice, the opinion of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea Basin and world peace make it necessary that the country be linked with our ally Ethiopia." (U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, 1952)
Psychologically the modality of leadership can not be seen apart from the personality of the person who is at the helm power or in strategic postion. Following was his psychological make up and the opinion of his counterparts with whom he worked during his tenure:-
John Foster Dulles was, in the words of Samuel Flagg Bemis, ' the only religious leader, lay or clerical, ever to become Secretary of State', and some of his pronouncements and vocabulary he preferred reflected a lifetime of filling offices in the Presbyterian Church. A large, somber figure with downward-curving lips and hands thrust deep into his pockets, he was given at his regular press conferences and occasional interview in depth to formulating theoretical concepts of foreign policy in sometimes embarrassingly memorable phrases. During the 1952 presidential campaign he had written about the ' liberation of captive peoples' in a way that suggested a more activist policy against the Soviet Union; Europe was threatened in 1954 with an ' agonizing reappraisal' of America's commitments there; and at the outset of 1956, summing up his experiences to date, he told Life magazine: " The ability to get to the verge without getting into war it the necessary art... [I]f you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. we walked to the brink and we looked it in the face.'
Strong men balanced at the prospect of even one more such phrase. The word on Washington's Embassy Row, according to a British diplomat, as ' Three brinks and he's brunk.' In his New York Times column, James Reston wrote of the Secretary, " He doesn't stumble into booby traps; he digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps.' But, for all his waywardness, Foster Dulles had formidable professional skills, As a leading international lawyer he was able to present a technically complex case with great address, his ideas, developed in longhand on yellow legal pads, were never negligible; and his knowledge of international relations was prodigious. He had a certain wintry charm, which had it appeal but totally escaped Winston Churchill. After he had had met him for the first time in Washington in January 1953, the aged Premier went off to bed muttering that he wished to have no more to do with a man whose 'great slab of a face' he disliked and distrusted. This was not a passing thought. Six months later Churchill was remarking to his doctor that Dulles was 'clever enough to be stupid on a rather large scale.'
Dulle's relation with Eden - one prima donna with another, but of a very different type- were to be of critical importance at the time of Suez. Lord Sherfield, who as Sir Roger Makins was British Ambassador in Washington throughout Eisenhower's first term and knew both men well, says that the difference sprang from the fact that Dulles was a thinker who needed time to develop his thoughts whereas Eden was intuitive. He lost patience with Dulles's monologues and would himself make throw-away remarks which Dulles would seldom catch. Evelyn Shuckburgh, who served Eden first as private secretary and then as Assistant Under-Secretary in charge of the Middle East, a man of musical tastes, thought that Eden and Dulles were like two flute strings whose vibrations never coincide. The tempo of their minds was not in harmony. But Eden had not got on well with Dean Acheson, Dulles's Democratic predecessor, either. Apart from quirks of personality, the situations of the two countries made a friction that had, for compelling reasons, to be dressed up as harmony.
Source:
Kyle, Keith (1991). Suez.
----[Mailing List for Eritrea Related News ]----
Received on Thu May 31 2012 - 10:27:47 EDT
