The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War
Stephen Kinzer, 2013
Henry Holt
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805094978
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1951
• Raised—Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Stephen Kinzer is a United States author and newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more than fifty countries on five continents.
During the 1980s he covered revolution and social upheaval in Central America. In 1990, he was promoted to bureau chief of the Berlin bureau and covered the growth of Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet rule. He was also New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul (Turkey) from 1996 to 2000. He currently teaches journalism and United States foreign policy at Boston University.
Kinzer has written several non-fiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, the US overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, and about Rwanda's recovery from genocide.
Views
Kinzer has spoken out widely against a potential U.S. attack on Iran, warning that it would destroy the pro-US sentiment that has become widespread among the Iranian populace under the repressive Islamic regime. He is also a fierce opponent of US foreign policy toward Latin America. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he stated:
The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call “American values.” In many cases, if you take Chile, Guatemala, or Honduras for examples, we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those democratic, quasi-democratic, or nationalist leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.
In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, published in 2006, Kinzer critiques US foreign policy as overly interventionist.
In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for the peace, development, and stability that Rwanda has enjoyed in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes the leaders of Rwanda before the genocide such as Juvenal Habyarimana.
His 2013 biography The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War examines the Dulles brothers—Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively—and their prosecution of the Cold War, including US government-sanctioned murders of foreign officials. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/16/2014 .)
Book Reviews
Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. The Brothers is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of "inconvenient" regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world…In his detailed, well-constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer…shows how the brothers drove America's interventionist foreign policy.
Adam LeBor - New York Times Book Review
[A] fluently written, ingeniously researched, thrillerish work of popular history… Mr. Kinzer has brightened his dark tale with an abundance of racy stories. Gossip nips at the heels of history on nearly every page.
Wall Street Journal
[A] bracing, disturbing and serious study of the exercise of American global power… Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, displays a commanding grasp of the vast documentary record, taking the reader deep inside the first decades of the Cold War. He brings a veteran journalist’s sense of character, moment and detail. And he writes with a cool and frequently elegant style.
Washington Post
[A] fast-paced and often gripping dual biography.
Boston Globe
Born into Eastern establishment privilege, these two men strode into the uppermost strata of the U.S. government with a virulent anti-communist bent that infused US foreign policy during the Cold War. The siblings were temperamental opposites.... This approachable history is a candid appraisal of how the Dulles's grandiose geopolitical calculations set in motion events that continue to reverberate in American foreign policy today.
Publishers Weekly
Award-winning foreign correspondent Kinzer uses Wild West mythology—with the good guys gunning down the bad guys in a lawless town—to explain the policies of Cold War Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles.
Library Journal
An author tending toward criticism of American foreign affairs, Kinzer casts a jaundiced eye on siblings who conducted them in the 1950s. Framing his assessment as a dual biography of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles, Kinzer roots their anti-Communist policies in their belief in American exceptionalism.... A historical critique sure to spark debate. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist
[T]he dark side of Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration through the activities of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, the director of the CIA. The author reveals the pair's responsibility for the wave of assassinations, coups and irregular wars.... [T]he author clearly presents the Dulles family's contributions to the development of a legal and political structure for American corporations' international politics. A well-documented and shocking reappraisal of two of the shapers of the American century. (Best Nonfiction Book of 2013.)
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Brothers:
1. Start with the personalities of the two brothers: how do they differ from one another, and how they are similar? How did the family background shape the brothers' beliefs, attitudes, and actions as adults? Do you admire one brother more than the other?
2. Talk about the brothers' personal lives as adults: their relationship with one another, their spouses, and their children.
3. Kinzer examines the brothers' outsized influence in foreign policy as Secretary of State and Director of Central Intelligance. Is the author overly condemnatory...or are his criticisms on target? Critics say Kinzer does not take into account the tenor of the times: the fact that the Soviet threat was real and increasing and that China had come under Communist control, threatening to destablize the East. What are your views? Did the Dulles brothers overreach ... or were their policies and actions appropriate for the time?
4. To what degree does the United States have the right to interfer in other countries' governments? Do we have the right to overthrow foreign governments? Assist with or spur assassinations? What if our vital national interests are at stake? How do we determine what our national interests are? Have those "interests" changed over the past 50-60 years, since the time of the Dulles brothers? Or do our national interests remain the same—only the tacts change?
5. Talk about the Dulles family's financial support of preNazi and Nazi Germany. To what degree was the family complicit in the rise of Nazi power?
6. To what extent did the Dulles brothers operate foreign policy for the benefit of American corporations? Is that a fair, or unfair, assessment?
7. Talk about the CIA era under Allen Dulles. Lyndon B. Johnson once referred to it as "Murder Inc." Was he right?
8. Does this book alter or confirm your views of American foreign policy over the years? Were you suprised by what you read in The Brothers?
9. How would you describe the long-term influence of the Dulles brothers on US foreign policy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)