SOURCE: "John Foster Dulles and the Predicaments of Power," in John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, edited by Richard H. Immerman, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 23-45.

In the following essay, Pruessen undertakes a survey of Dulles's actions and policymaking as U. S. Secretary of State. Pruessen maintains that Dulles's intellectual achievements far outnumbered his practical ones, and that his diplomatic endeavors in Europe proved much more successful than those in Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America.

Exiled for twenty years from the White House, Republicans were straining at the bit in 1952. John Foster Dulles was certainly among them: he turned down an offer to become the ambassador to Japan, explaining that he preferred the "power house" in Washington to "the end of the transmission line" in Tokyo. The exhilaration that came with control of the "power house" was quickly tempered, however, by the...