John Foster Dulles and the Japanese Peace Treaty

Phillip A. Cantrell, II

West Virginia University

John Foster Dulles, born on February 25, 1888 in Watertown, New York, is best known for his service as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1952 until his death by cancer in 1959. During his term as Secretary of State and after his death, Dulles was known for his stern anti-Communism, and his frequently bellicose speeches often generated considerable alarm, especially in light of Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation. Dulles was, in Richard Challener’s words, “…a stern Presbyterian who thundered endlessly about the evils of atheistic communism.”[1]

John Foster, as Secretary of State, fully accepted the containment doctrine and saw the world as two armed camps. The United States was the embodiment of good and the Soviets were evil incarnate. In 1958, Reinhold Niebuhr observed of Dulles’ character, “Mr. Dulles’ moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear…For self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments, placed in the service of moral complacency.”[2] Dulles’ impassioned speeches about the evils of world communism seemed to be the righteous diatribes of a political evangelist who was fusing a dangerous new nationalism with an old-time religion.

My purpose here, however, is to bring to light a different John Foster Dulles, by examining the origins of his arguably progressive approach to the Japanese Peace Settlement of 1951. I will call to attention several of the early influences on John Foster Dulles, including his upbringing and his experience at the Versailles Peace Conference following the First World War. I particularly wish to look at the influence of the Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher Henri Bergson, who, I argue, heavily influenced many of Dulles’ early ideas on diplomacy and world affairs. Dulles’ pre-Cold War progressivism has received insufficient attention thus far and the picture that emerges of John Foster is one of a man considerably more complex and open-minded than his later reputation suggests.

Regardless of his public image in the 1950s, Dulles was not a religious fundamentalist early in life, nor was he throughout most of it. Dulles’ father was a Presbyterian of a more moderate persuasion, even to the point of being considered a liberal in his day. Michael Guhin writes, “…several passages in Reverend Dulles’ major theological work, The True Church, suggest that he was basically a church moderate with at least three important inclinations toward a liberal theological viewpoint.”[3] Certainly young John Foster was raised in a rigorous and conservative Presbyterian home. Yet, he was raised to be a theological moderate with an internationalist, worldly out-look. The moderate teachings of his father and the influences of his elder statesman grandfather, John Watson Foster, made deep and long-lasting impressions on the young man.

When John Foster was an accomplished lawyer at the age of thirty-six, his moderate theological leanings were made evident at the 1924 Presbyterian General Assembly. The fundamentalist Presbyterian core, led by no lesser a figure than William Jennings Bryan, was attempting to excommunicate Dr. Harry Fosdick. Fosdick had disputed the validity of the Virgin birth, and Reverend Dulles sent his son to defend Dr. Fosdick and the modernist position. John Foster engaged in a series of shrewd parliamentary maneuvers and the modernists won the day.

Dulles’ road to becoming an accomplished lawyer began at Princeton, where his early college career had progressed uneventfully. Dulles struggled with grammar and language arts at first, attesting to the somewhat average education he received at his Watertown schools. Towards the end, however, he began to excel, first earning the Chancellor Green Mental Science Fellowship, giving him a year of study in Europe at the Sorbonne under Henri Bergson. In the end, Dulles decided on a degree in philosophy and was elected to Phi Betta Kappa. Upon graduation, he delivered the valedictory speech, having finished second in his class.

Although he gave consideration to his parent’s wishes for him to enter the ministry, he chose the path of his grandfather. As he grew older, Dulles became increasingly impressed by the examples set by John Watson Foster and his uncle, Robert Lansing. At Princeton he had also discovered his own sympathies for many of the views espoused by then university president, Woodrow Wilson. An early stepping stone in his career was in 1907, when he was granted leave from Princeton to participate in the Second Hague Conference.

His grandfather was a delegate for the Imperial Government of China and used his position to secure a secretaryship for John Foster. At the young age of nineteen, he proved himself useful with his ability to translate French. His year of study at the Sorbonne came after the conference, during which he immersed himself in French culture and philosophy, taking further courses in international law during his free time.

Upon returning home, Dulles entered the George Washington Law School. Dulles’ life in school was far from the normal life led by law students. Living with his influential grandfather in a large patrician house in downtown Washington, Dulles was a frequent guest at White House parties where he quickly became friends with President William Howard Taft’s two sons, Robert and Charles. Completing the three year curriculum in two while engaging in an active Washington social life, Dulles exhibited the energy that later characterized his diplomatic and political life. Though he never actually received a degree on technical grounds, he passed the New York State Bar in 1911.

The coming of World War I, in 1914, brought another chance for Dulles to work in a diplomatic capacity. Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing, who was now the Secretary of State under President Wilson, chose him for a confidential mission to Central America. The crux of the mission was to insure that the Central American governments would side with the United States when the inevitable entry into World War I came.

Upon the completion of his mission, Dulles served for the duration of the war as a military lawyer on the War Industries Board, his eyesight barring him from combat. He rose to the rank of major and, at the war’s end, received tributes for his service from both Vance McCormick and Bernard Baruch. Dulles’ exemplary service, experience, and family connections, particularly that of Robert Lansing, earned him an invitation to accompany the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as an economic and legal expert. Dulles served in many capacities at the Conference, but was noted most highly for being a representative on the Reparations Committee under Bernard Baruch and Vance McCormick.

His influence at the Conference continued to grow, as Michael Guhin points out, for although he officially served only as counsel to the American Reparations group, he quickly became its principal spokesman and writer.[4] Moreover, Dulles agreed with the other American delegates that French and British demands on Germany were preposterous and would serve only to create a dangerous European dilemma in the future. Though he labored with distinction to forge compromises and statement revisions, Dulles’ efforts were in vain. Despite John Maynard Keynes’ declaration that the British and French arguments for reparations inclusive of war costs were “…overwhelmed by the speeches made on behalf of the American delegates by Mr. John Foster Dulles”[5], the victors gathered the spoils at Versailles while Wilson returned home to fight his own political battles. Dulles remained in Paris for a short time at Wilson’s behest before returning in 1920 to his law practice, where he continued to take an active interest in issues related to the reparations settlement.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, John Foster continued in a legal career at the Wall Street firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, rising to senior partner and building a comfortable lifestyle for his family. He maintained an active interest in diplomacy and world politics as well, taking part where occasion saw fit. During this period Dulles more fully developed his thoughts on international relations and solidified the ideas that preoccupied him in the years leading up to World War II. Again, the picture that emerges is strikingly different from the one that later generations developed.

In terms of global politics, Dulles preoccupied himself mainly with the pursuit of peaceful change and the avoidance of war. After Versailles, and generated in large part by the spirit he found at Versailles, Dulles rejected ideological nationalism. In his major writing from the period, War, Peace and Change, Dulles called for an abandonment of the tendency to “identify one’s personified state with deity and the other national personality with evil.”[6] In Dulles’ world view, nationalism must give way to internationalism, driven by enlightened national self-interest. Conflict and, ultimately war, is brought on by uncompromising nationalism to the exclusion of international realities, a situation he no doubt observed both prior to and present at the frustrating Versailles conference.

Moreover, to Dulles, greed was not necessarily the engine that drove destructive nationalism. The original sin was the desire to preserve the national status quo, no matter what the cost. Dulles was compelled to write in 1935:

The true explanation of the imminence of war lies in the inevitability of change and the fact that peace efforts have been misdirected toward the prevention of change. Thereby forces which are in the long run irresistible are temporarily dammed up. When they finally break through, they do so with violence.[7]

Thus, change, on a global scale, was and is inevitable. For Dulles, change had to be accepted because of what he called the on-going struggle between the forces of the static and dynamic. Dulles defined the static forces as people and nations who were, because of power or wealth, content with their national or world situation. The dynamic was summed up as the forces of change that sought to improve an existing situation or to correct some perceived injustice in their past.

Disagreement and conflict arose when the static forces perceived change as threatening to their largely satisfied state of being. The dynamic forces fueled the threat by placing blame on the static nations of the world for the inequalities that existed. Numerous historians have argued that John Foster Dulles left no creative legacy on foreign policy matters. However, the record speaks otherwise. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, Dulles was warning that “cooperation between a dynamic and a static power is impossible, and that peace demands constant readjustment.”[8] Many scholars have argued that Dulles’ ideas originated in the 1920s or ‘30 or possibly at the Versailles Conference. Rather, to locate the genesis of Dulles’ ideas one must to look to his experience in Paris after the Second Hague Conference, where he encountered Henri Bergson and was “impressed with his theories of flux, of the irresistible force of change in human affairs.”[9] Bergson’s theories revolved primarily around the concept of perception versus reality in terms of movement and change. For Bergson, and concoursely for his students, change and movement are constant and unstoppable.

In Matter and Memory, Bergson wrote, “Movement is…an indisputable reality…that there is real motion no one can seriously deny.”[10] Dulles later applied Bergson’s thinking on human nature to the realm of politics. Bergson asked the question, “Whence comes then the irresistible tendency to set up a material universe that is discontinuous, composed of bodies which have clearly defined outlines…”[11] Dulles seized upon Bergson’s ideas of change and, from there, fashioned his own theory of the static and the dynamic. John Foster preoccupied himself with how to reconcile these two forces in such a way as to avoid international conflict and war.

Moreover, because the forces in question were always in motion with new demands encountering the same rigidities, any solution had to be viewed, of necessity, as temporary. Any treaty that sought to preserve a given situation indefinitely was worthless in the long term. Notably, only seven years after the implementation of the Japanese Peace Treaty, Dulles himself was recommending that it be changed to account for an altered situation in the Far East. Dulles believed the best prospect for world peace was an international body that would exclude no nation based on its political system or ideology and would seek to recognize the legitimate and enlightened aspirations of change for its member nations.

Looking back to Versailles as an example, Dulles recognized that an industrious and historically dynamic nation like Germany could not be restrained indefinitely by a series of clauses, myopically written by the present victors at Paris. In 1935, Dulles wrote, “It was recognized, even at Versailles, that a nation such as Germany could not be placed in perpetuity in a position of inequality and inferiority.”[12] Such an observation leads one to believe that the victors at Versailles, having recognized it themselves, may have sought even harder to keep Germany restrained.

 In the world view that John Foster had developed, Bergson’s theory of flux in human affairs had to be allowed for in the final settlement. At Versailles, it was not. Rather, at Versailles, Dulles recognized that the victors were trying to deny the inevitable changes demanded by the European situation; in effect, pushing Europe backwards to the same divisions that had led to war in the first place. In Clemanceau and Lloyd George, Bergson’s lament was fulfilled. Bergson noted, “…are we likely to gain a nearer knowledge of things by pushing the divisions yet further? In this way we do indeed prolong the vital movement; but we turn our back upon true knowledge.”[13] As Europe began to stumble into war in 1936, Dulles viewed the events and divisions of the day as a “struggle between the dynamic and the static—the urge to acquire and the desire to retain.”[14] The resulting tension historically led to war. Being that change is unavoidable, it was more in the national interest to accommodate such change, rather than go to war.

Throughout the period and during the Second World War, Dulles remained conciliatory and moderate in his stance. He embraced neither political party at this time and worked for bipartisan solutions and peace settlements in the form of a body such as would become the United Nations. Though he did not absolve the leadership of Germany and Japan from responsibility for their actions, he also placed some measure of blame for the Second World War on the mindset of the Allies.

The system of rigid national sovereignty, as evidenced at Versailles, accounted for the war. The desire to maintain the status quo was the original sin. Rather than punish the defeated and return the world to its pre-World War I state, had the victors at Versailles sought to reconcile the forces of the static and forces of dynamism that were becoming apparent in the twentieth century, the crisis of 1939 may have been avoided.

Moreover, while no supporter of isolationism, Dulles originally opposed American intervention on the grounds that it would identify America with the “senseless repetition of the cyclical struggle between the dynamic and static forces of the world.”[15] Needless to say, Dulles received no small measure of criticism for his perceived complacency toward the Nazi abuses that Europe was becoming painfully familiar with. Michael Guhin observed, “…because of his detached viewpoint, [Dulles] seriously misjudged the real dangers of Hitler’s Germany and manifested less sensitivity than many of his contemporaries.”[16]

In the years after the war, as in the years before the war, Dulles operated in and out of both Republican and Democrat circles. Because of his foreign policy his views, Dulles was more closely identified with the moderate, internationally inclined wing of the Republican party. Yet, even as late as 1949, “Dulles was not really considered a ‘party man’ and, in some Republican circles, was viewed as a crypto-Democrat”, especially when President Truman asked Dulles to be a delegate to the United Nations from 1946 until 1948.[17] His relative popularity with Truman’s administration was made evident again in 1951 when President Truman asked him to takeover the long dormant negotiations for a peace treaty with Japan.[18]

Japan had been under U.S. Occupation since the end of the war, dutifully administered by Douglas MacArthur and SCAP. When the decision was made by the Truman administration to negotiate a formal peace settlement, the Occupation had been dragging on for five years, with the U.S. seemingly in no hurry vacate Japan. In his memoirs, Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister and foreign minister in 1950, noted that the delay in negotiating a settlement only benefited Japan and his reference point was Versailles. Yoshida writes, “The basic factor that guided our approach to peace was that unlike the Versailles Peace Conference, the conference that would be held this time would not be one in which victor and vanquished came together to discuss the terms of peace.”[19] His rational was that by delaying the settlement, Japan would get much more favorable terms.

Several considerations were driving the U.S. to finalize a settlement. The “Long Peace”, as John Lewis Gaddis describes it, had become considerably less peaceful since 1945. Tensions with the Soviet Union had escalated dramatically, especially as America’s nuclear monopoly ended in 1949. Mao’s forces had driven the Nationalists from China in the same year. The Iron Curtain had fallen on Europe and Korea itself was divided in 1950, with war soon to follow. Regional alliances and economies needed to be shored-up.

Moreover, Japan itself needed internal stability and a better relationship with the U.S. Truman’s administration was receiving reports from men like Alex Pendleton. Pendleton was a retired naval officer who, in 1950, was still living in Japan and running a law practice. In August, 1950, Pendleton submitted a confidential report to the White House condemning SCAP policies and arguing that, contrary to news reports, “…Japan would overwhelmingly go communistic rather than submit to a continuation of the present American policies.”[20] If reports such as Pendleton’s were taken seriously, Truman’s administration was forced to act. The White House and the Democrats could not afford another loss to communism. Japan needed to be strengthened, liberated, and welcomed into the Western family of nations as an equal, not a defeated foe.

John Foster Dulles was chosen to be the White House’s special representative in the negotiations for numerous reasons but, as the final settlement with Japan revealed, Dulles was the ideal candidate. His beliefs about diplomacy and relations among nations were enlightened and progressive, dating back to his days as a student of Bergson. His experiences at Versailles reinforced what he was already beginning to believe, and those lessons were applied in Tokyo in 1950–51. Dulles stated in a preliminary meeting with the Soviet representative in October, 1950 that “…the U.S. attitude toward a treaty with Japan was based on the theory that the best way to assure Japan’s adherence to peaceful ways was to conclude with her a non-restrictive and liberal peace treaty.”[21] The agreement reached in 1951 does indeed reflect U.S. aims, carried out and bore to fruition by John Foster Dulles.

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[1]Richard D. Challener, “The Moralist as Pragmatist: John Foster Dulles as Cold War Pragmatist”, The Diplomats, 1939–1979, Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loewenheim, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 135.

[2]Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Moral World of John Foster Dulles” New Republic (December 1, 1958), 8.

[3]Michael Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 13.

[4]Ibid, 27.

[5]Quoted in Guhin, 29.

[6]Quoted in Guhin, 40.

[7]John Foster Dulles, “The Road to Peace” Atlantic Monthly (October 1935), 492.

[8]“Dulles Points Out Russian Dynamism”, New York Times, October 15, 1943.

[9]Ronald W. Pruessen, “John Foster Dulles and the Predicaments of Power”, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, Richard Immerman, ed. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 23.

[10]Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912), 254–255.

[11]Ibid, 260.

[12]Dulles, “The Road to Peace”, 495.

[13]Bergson, 262.

[14]Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 46.

[15]Quoted in Hoopes, 52.

[16]Guhin, 47.

[17]Ibid, 52.

[18]Challener, 139.

[19]Yoshida Shigeru, The Yoshida Memoirs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 246.

[20]The Papers of Harry S Truman, The President’s Secretary’s FilesFiles, Foreign Affairs Series, Box 182, File “Japan”. Harry S Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri.

[21]Truman Papers, The President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 117, File “D”. HST Library.