The Devil and John Foster Dulles

Boston, MA: Little, Brown, [1973]. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. xiv, 562 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ worn and torn. Townsend Walter Hoopes II (April 28, 1922 - September 20, 2004) was an American historian and government official, who served as Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1967 to 1969. During World War II, he served as a Marine Lieutenant in the Pacific theater of the war, participating in the U. S. 5th Marine Division capture of Iwo Jima and the initial occupation of Japan. Afterwards, he became assistant to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee from 1947 to 1948. He continued as staff aide to three Secretaries of Defense: James Forrestal, General George Marshall and Robert A. Lovett from 1948 to 1953. He then went on to work in the private sector for a number of years, spending 7 years as partner of an international consulting firm: Cresap, McCormick and Paget. In 1964, he returned to public service as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International affairs. From 1965 to 1967, he was Principal Deputy for International Security Affairs at the Pentagon. Serving as Under Secretary of the Air Force at the Pentagon from 1967 to 1969, he witnessed firsthand the effect of the 1968 Tet Offensive and Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent decision to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. After leaving the government, he became fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for two years. Hoopes also became co-chairman of Americans for SALT, director of the American Committee on U. S. Soviet Relations, and a distinguished international executive at the University of Maryland, College Park. Derived from a Kirkus review: Back in the '50's when Foster Dulles was scaring hell out of the world some of us called him the original misguided missile, not only because he looked and acted like one but because his policy of "brinkmanship" seemed as dangerous as a wayward nuke. In this major study of the Dulles diplomacy, Hoopes admirably dissects the legacy and in so doing buttresses the period wisdom that the hardline initiatives -- "agonizing reappraisal," "liberation," "massive retaliation," SEATO, etc. -- were neither wise nor particularly effective. Hoopes is not finished with this "preacher-politician," this Secretary of State who wrapped his annihilation tactics in the sentiments of a righteous God: Dulles' foreign policy "pervasively institutionalized" the Cold War at home by drumming on the need to defeat atheistic Communism wherever it might occur and hence, Hoopes argues, the last bequest of Dulles' stewardship at State -- Vietnam. It is the Dulles inheritance more than any other thing -- more than the policies of Johnson, Kennedy, or Truman (the latter attempted "to avoid setting in motion the runaway locomotive of a global ideological crusade") -- which pushed us into the rice paddies, which led America to the "extremes that increasingly failed to meet the tests of interest or reason, proportion or morality." This analysis stands as the most persuasive we have had or are likely to have for a long time to come.