Brothers in armchairs: for Allen and John Foster Dulles, regime change was an extension of the family business.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Book review

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

by Stephen Kinzer Henry Holt, 416 pp.

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The Eisenhower era is often seen as a placid time, presided over by a president who shunned wars and had a healthy skepticism about big military expenditures. But as Stephen Kinzer's sparkling new biography, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, indicates, Dwight Eisenhower did embrace the idea of regime change abroad, and with a vengeance. His instruments for creating it in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, and Cuba were John Foster and Allen Dulles, two brothers who grew up in privilege and were groomed to regard it as America's birthright to exercise its power around the globe, whenever and wherever it saw fit.

They were quite different in personality. John Foster was the dour fire-and-brimstone secretary of state. Harold Macmillan declared, "His speech was slow but it easily kept pace with his thoughts." Allen, by contrast, was the suave and secretive spymaster (author Rebecca West, asked if she had been one of his mistresses, replied, "Alas, no, but I wish I had been"), but both inherited an evangelical streak that they translated into a secular war against communism. Their influence lingers on in the massive national security state that they helped construct during the early years of the Cold War and that continues to expand and search relentlessly for fresh enemies to justify its own existence.

Both brothers have been the subject of previous biographies, with Allen enjoying perhaps the most perspicuous by Burton Hersh, a longtime student of the intelligence agencies. But Kinzer, a former longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, effectively joins them in his panoramic survey of their lives. He traverses a great deal of ground, some of which he previously covered in his study of the 1954 coup in Iran All the Shah's Men, and he is an acidulous critic of American foreign policy. His main point is that America, or at least a man like Allen Dulles, was not an innocent abroad. Instead, the Dulles brothers were calculating figures who essentially turned American foreign policy into an annex of the business interests of their old law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, deftly annealing moralism about American democracy to their own self-interest. To be sure, Wilsonian liberal internationalism was predicated on the notion that more-interconnected financial interests would...