When Ike-he, too, had a nickname-summoned his own efficiency experts to check up on the agency, they warned him against the dangers of having two brothers in these high places and recommended he replace Allen Dulles at CIA. Allen had been by turns the Office of Strategic Services chief in Switzerland during World War II, an agitator for the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an efficiency expert enlisted by President Harry Truman to check up on CIA progress, and then the agency’s chief of operations-all before Dwight Eisenhower made him the top boss. Allen, a lawyer too-the brothers had both worked for the same Wall Street law firm-was more openly associated with diplomacy but more craftily connected with the secret world of spies. diplomatic job, one previously held both by his uncle and by his grandfather. A stalwart of the Republican Party, he latched early on to Eisenhower, advised him in the campaign of 1952, and emerged with the top U.S. “Foster,” as the president familiarly called him, was a Bible-toting lawyer, a fire-breathing Cold Warrior, and a major architect of the Japanese Peace Treaty of 1951. In The Brothers Stephen Kinzer sets out to craft a joint biography of these two characters.Īnd characters they were. The two men, brothers in fact and in mission, were central to Cold War history for nearly a decade. Eisenhower than John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state and Allen Welsh Dulles, his director of central intelligence.

That was the day of the Eisenhower administration, and no figures were more important to President Dwight D. During the high Cold War no power was more central to global affairs than the United States.

The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer