Dulles

About this book

Biographies of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles, children of Allen Macy Dulles and Edith Foster. Foster, Allen, and Eleanor Dulles were three extraordinarily strong individuals, yet, as Leonard Mosley shows so brilliantly, they were linked by a complex "family network," forged in an outwardly conventional childhood. This book's insight into their private lives--including their decidedly unusual years of growing up--reveals the remarkable interplay between private and public faces, ripping aside the accepted facades of statesman, spy, and sister. Foster was born older than his years, and automatically assumed the leadership position in the triad. His certainty about the rightness of his opinions and conduct was reinforced by his sense that he was carrying out God's work in this unhappy world. This in part explains his swift rise to the top of a major Wall Street law firm and his role as one of the cardinals of Republican foreign policy.^ History (and their uncle, "Bert" Lansing, Wilson's Secretary of State) put them on the scene at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, America's debut as a great power. Eleanor quickly established her expertise in international economics and German and Austrian affairs. Allen was inducted into the intelligence priesthood as a junior diplomat in Switzerland during World War I, faltering only when he refused to see one V.I. Lenin after office hours, thus leaving Lenin to catch a train for his rendezvous with history. One of the ties that bound them was a shared assumption that they would play key parts in shaping America's history--as inde…

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