"The Brothers" by Stephen Kinzer - an incredibly important book.

[hifiguy]

This book is a dual biography of Allen and John Foster Dulles, CIA director and Sec of State during the Eisenhower administration. Most of why the US government and its foreign policy is so hated and/or mistrusted around the world to this day is explained by this book.

The Dulles brothers manifested all the very worst qualities of Americans - inability to understand or even consider complexity, a truly nauseating missionary Calvinism, a belief that American big business should be able to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants anywhere in the world, and that rich, white "Christian" men should run the world. These values, which they built into the instruments of foreign policy, still dominate today. Their power, in their day, was near-absolute. Millions of people around the world continue to suffer to this day from their arrogance and ignorance.

One of the most enlightening books I have ever read. Well written and a damn good read, to boot.

[leveymg]

1. Without the Dulles, Germany wouldn't have been able to raise the funds to rearm during the 1930s

From their perch at the powerful Wall Street law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, John Foster and Allen were truly the financial godfathers of Nazi Germany. They found loopholes in World War One sanctions, rounded up financing for industrialists who owned large German companies such as the Steel Trust that financed the Nazi movement, and defended multinationals that expanded chemical and engineering operations in Germany essential to weapons production.

It is probably not too much to state that Hitler likely would not have become Chancellor without the western investment dollars and legal protection the Dulles Bros. provided the Nazis early financiers.

[hifiguy]

2. Foster Dulles was quite fond of Fascist Germany

and did everything he could to build it up from his position at S&C and on many corporate boards. Add Prescott Bush and his deep connections to various industrialists who financed Hitler's rise to power and one begins to understand the mindset of the plutocracy that persists to this day.

[Major Hogwash]

12. Is that in the book?

Did they use Swiss bank accounts to funnel the money to Germany?
What legal protection did the Dulles brothers provide to the early financiers of Hitler?

[awoke_in_2003]

3. I need to put it on my list. nt

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

4. K&FuckinR. nt

[Octafish]

5. CIA and Secret Government largely a creation of the GOP

Which is, come to mention it, who most benefits from CIA Secret Government.

From Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

(Allen Dulles's) ability to press his case (for the establishment of the CIA) improved sharply after the 1946 congressional elections, in which Republicans took control of both houses for the first time in sixteen years. The new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, named one of Allen's old OSS comrades, Lawrence Houston, to his staff. Houston had directed many covert operations and shared Allen's love of them. Together they drafted a bill that would create a National Security Council to advise the president on foreign policy, and a Central Intelligence Agency authorized to collect information and to act on it. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the widely admired former OSS director, lobbied for the bill in Congress but found some members reluctant. Several wanted State Department, not a secret new agencey, to oversee covert operations, but their case was weakened when Secretary of State Marshall announced that he did not want his department to be involved in such operations. The bill made its way through Congress in a matter of weeks. on July 26, 1947, Truman signed it into law.

[font color="green"]"There were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority both to collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the President," according to one history. "The objections were overruled, and CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities."

The new National Security Act contained a tantalizing clause worded to allow endlessly elastic interpretation. It authorized the CIA to perform not only duties spelled out by law, but also "such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This gave it the legal right to take any action, anywhere in the world, as long as the president approved.[/font color]

"The fear generated by competition with a nation like the USSR, which had elevated control of every aspect of society to a science, encouraged the belief in the United States that it desparately needed military might and counterespionage by agencies that could outdo the Soviet spymasters," the historian Robert Dallek has written. "Dean Acheson (who would succeed Marshall as secretary of state) had the 'gravest forebodings' about the CDIA, and 'warned the President atht neither he nor the National Security Council nor anyone else would be in a poistition to know what it was doing or to control it.' But to resist the agency's creation seemed close to treason."

--Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulls, and Their Secret World War, pp. 88

The Dulles Brothers played a major role in getting us into Vietnam and bringing the BFEE -- the Buy-Partisan/War Party/Money Party -- to power for much of the 20th and 21st century.

Kirkus Reviews via Amazon:

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today’s world

During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world.

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?

The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies—many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country’s role in the world.

Propelled by a quintessentially American set of fears and delusions, the Dulles brothers launched violent campaigns against foreign leaders they saw as threats to the United States. These campaigns helped push countries from Guatemala to the Congo into long spirals of violence, led the United States into the Vietnam War, and laid the foundation for decades of hostility between the United States and countries from Cuba to Iran.

The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Terry Gross interviews Kinzer on the book:

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-who-shaped-u-s-policy-inside-and-out

Most importantly: Thank you, hifiguy! Great book, a great OP and thread.

[hifiguy]

6. I labor in the shadow of your work.

You have given me a profound education in deep history. Thank you.

[ND-Dem]

7. I just recently learned that john foster dulles was a primary force behind the treaty of versailles.

the one that made the germans pay excessively for ww1, thus leading to ww2.

[lovemydog]

8. k & r

[malaise]

9. K & R

Great thread

[hifiguy]

10. Kick!

[MrMickeysMom]

11. HUGE DU K&R, highfiguy!

There are many good books to describe how the Dulles brothers went about their business, and this one apparently lays out the history and where that intent came from.

Thanks for this!