I detest the Dulles family. They were a damned historical nuisance, always stirring things up on behalf of corrupt dictators and oil and stuff, not to mention corruption in general.
Oh, let me count the coups. And the attempted coups.
And, oh my goodness, the steaming affairs! Of CIA Director Allen Dulles:
WALKING through the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., after handing in his resignation on Friday, David H. Petraeus passed a bas-relief sculpture of Allen Dulles, who led the agency in the 1950s and early ’60s. Below it is the motto, “His Monument Is Around Us.”
.... But private life for a C.I.A. director today is apparently quite different from what it was in the Dulles era. Mr. Petraeus resigned after admitting to a single affair; Allen Dulles had, as his sister, Eleanor, wrote later, “at least a hundred.”
Dulles ran the agency from 1953 to 1961, and he had a profound effect on America’s role in the cold war. Together with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he exercised enormous power and helped overthrow governments from Iran to Guatemala to Congo.
He was also a serial adulterer. Dulles was married in 1920, but he and his wife, Clover, had a difficult home life. She was sensitive and introverted, while he was handsome and charming — and a skilled seducer.
His affairs were legendary. The writer Rebecca West, asked once whether she had been one of his girlfriends, famously replied, “Alas, no, but I wish I had been.”
Ahem. Be warned, this is one my particular axes that I am always grinding.
Those damned hypocritical Presbyterians.
John Foster Dulles and Allen Welsh Dulles and Eleanor Lansing Dulles Blondheim (it appears that Eleanor may not have surrendered her maiden name of notoriety in this marriage) were the children of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster), paternal grandfather, John Welsh Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in India.
It is interesting to note that Henry Robinson Luce, founder of Time Magazine, he of the Credo which rose up in opposition to Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, was also the child of a Presby cleric, Henry Winters Luce, who was a Presbyterian missionary in China.
By Jove, those unholy Presbies were feverishly proselytizing all over the place in the Orient.
I mention Luce because it appears that Luce lacked a certain sexual energy and it is rumored that Allen Dulles and Henry Luce wifey Claire Booth Luce were intensely involved, adding a rather loose transduction of the name Luce (and I confess I am loosely stretching the definition of the word transduction).
So, it appears that while Allen Dulles was balling around he was also bolluxing the devil out of the internal affairs of nations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and, apparently, the Far East.
Um, how connected was Allen Dulles to the debacle in Vietnam?
Allen Dulles’s own role in the Vietnam project had to have been considerable; it was the most ambitious of all the CIA projects during his term as Director, far larger and far riskier than the much written about Bay of Pigs “fiasco.” It had greater longevity than kindred but smaller-scaled projects as in the Philippines, in Guatemala and in Iran. Vietnam was, I think, the only country in which other US agencies—State, Pentagon, AID, USIS, Commerce, Treasury—were subordinated to CIA direction and coordination. In spite of this, however, Dulles always managed to keep his name at a distance from the policy and its consequences. It is a major flaw of the Grose book that this fragment of his deviousness still reigns. Because of that flaw we still know far too little of the personalities, considerations and internal government debates which, in the key period from the Spring of 1954 to the Fall of 1955 “committed” the US to its worst Cold War defeat.
Since Allen Dulles was a bit of a slut ... would it be appropriate ....?