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Stephen Kinzer does a great job of providing insight into the lives of the Dulles brothers and their impact on foreign policy. There's a lot to like about this book. The elite background of the Dulles brothers is crucial in understanding the trajectory their lives took, and Kinzer does a great job of walking us through that. In so many critical ways these two men directed the course of events for the United States in ways that are still felt today and Kinzer does a fantastic job of laying that out for the reader. Kinzer does a great job of presenting the facts. It's his conclusions that I found so distressing, and I think in the end they take a lot away from an otherwise fantastic book.
Kinzer again and again goes out of his way to make excuses for the inexcusable, undemocratic and criminal acts of the Dulles brothers. These men who grew up behind the curtain of power, spent their lives working for the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet, and spent much of their lives scaring their fellow citizens with the cold war narrative, Kinzer wants us to believe, were somehow just as fooled as the rest of us. I think it's safe to say that Kinzer makes a fatal error here. While it's clear that the documentary record left by the Dulles brothers is full of examples of them justifying just about everything they did on a Communist Conspiracy, is there any reason to think they themselves believed that? The short answer is no.
What's odd is that Kinzer documents the ties the Dulles Brothers had with corporations like United Fruit and their interests in Guatemala but rarely draws the conclusion that their obvious financial motivations might trump their supposed fear of the communist menace. And yet again and again, whether we're talking about the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala or the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran there were clear corporate interests at stake. But what's most distressing about this failure on Kinzer's part is that he goes out of his way to blame the rest of us for the crimes of the Dulles Brothers:
"Americans who seek to understand the roots of their country's trouble in the world should look not at Foster and Allen's portraits but in a mirror." Really? There's on obvious problem with this irrational conclusion by Stephen Kinzer: nearly everything the Dulles brothers actually did across the globe was completely unknown to the American people, kept secret and denied for decades. It wasn't a secret from the victims of these crimes. If these two terrorists--and that's what they were--were in such lock-step with the American people, why the need for such secrecy? Why the need for such duplicity? The American people loved Mossedegh; they loved Fidel Castro when he visited New York. They loved Lumumba. And again and again these victims of the Dulles Brothers crimes loved America. Ho Chi Minh modeled his declaration of independence on our own. Mossedegh begged Eisenhower for help even while Eisenhower was plotting with the British to overthrow him.
The problem here goes beyond the personal biases of Stephen Kinzer and point to a more systemic problem with what constitutes history in this country. The Dulles brothers, by all accounts, were secretive. They were raised in the art of state craft and well understood their class role in society. They were raised from an early age to be rulers, not ruled. And from the numerous examples cited in the book it's clear that they both understood the role of media and the art of "manufacturing consent" to borrow a phrase from their contemporary Walter Lipman. All that being said, where Kinzer draws his conclusions is from the written record by the Dulles brothers and their underlings. Would men of this calibre be so dumb as to commit their crimes to writing? Would they be so naive as to put the farce of their world wide communist conspiracy to writing? Of course not. But it's no surprise that those below them either believed it or were good at regurgitating its major talking points, and this is what passes for real history. Allen Dulles publicly and privately wrote about a communist conspiracy, his underlings reiterated these talking points, thus it must be true that he believed this.
Not surprisingly, Kinzer never quotes one of the Dulles brothers claiming that we need to go into Guatemala to protect our shares of United Fruit; nor do we find any quotes from the brothers aiming to protect western oil interests in Iran. I doubt any such quotes exist and yet it's quite clearly the real motivation behind much of what these men did with their lives. But there was an official narrative that could be used to hide what was actually happening and somehow that gets passed off by people like Kinzer as the real history. We were scared of the communist menace because of people like the Dulles brothers who fabricated the entire thing up and then were told that they believed it too!
The lengths to which Stephen Kinzer goes to absolve these two heinous men of their crimes disgusts me. That he pretends that the American people are somehow to blame for creating these two sociopaths is beyond the pale. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of very good information here and Kinzer is a good writer. But the assumptions he makes and the conclusions he draws just don't stand up to scrutiny. The Dulles Brothers should be reviled for the war criminals they were. The American people did not vote these men into office and we were rarely appraised of the massive crimes they were committing across the globe in our name. Their undermining of our democracy and that of many other countries should be a lesson to all of us.
Kinzer again and again goes out of his way to make excuses for the inexcusable, undemocratic and criminal acts of the Dulles brothers. These men who grew up behind the curtain of power, spent their lives working for the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet, and spent much of their lives scaring their fellow citizens with the cold war narrative, Kinzer wants us to believe, were somehow just as fooled as the rest of us. I think it's safe to say that Kinzer makes a fatal error here. While it's clear that the documentary record left by the Dulles brothers is full of examples of them justifying just about everything they did on a Communist Conspiracy, is there any reason to think they themselves believed that? The short answer is no.
What's odd is that Kinzer documents the ties the Dulles Brothers had with corporations like United Fruit and their interests in Guatemala but rarely draws the conclusion that their obvious financial motivations might trump their supposed fear of the communist menace. And yet again and again, whether we're talking about the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala or the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran there were clear corporate interests at stake. But what's most distressing about this failure on Kinzer's part is that he goes out of his way to blame the rest of us for the crimes of the Dulles Brothers:
"Americans who seek to understand the roots of their country's trouble in the world should look not at Foster and Allen's portraits but in a mirror." Really? There's on obvious problem with this irrational conclusion by Stephen Kinzer: nearly everything the Dulles brothers actually did across the globe was completely unknown to the American people, kept secret and denied for decades. It wasn't a secret from the victims of these crimes. If these two terrorists--and that's what they were--were in such lock-step with the American people, why the need for such secrecy? Why the need for such duplicity? The American people loved Mossedegh; they loved Fidel Castro when he visited New York. They loved Lumumba. And again and again these victims of the Dulles Brothers crimes loved America. Ho Chi Minh modeled his declaration of independence on our own. Mossedegh begged Eisenhower for help even while Eisenhower was plotting with the British to overthrow him.
The problem here goes beyond the personal biases of Stephen Kinzer and point to a more systemic problem with what constitutes history in this country. The Dulles brothers, by all accounts, were secretive. They were raised in the art of state craft and well understood their class role in society. They were raised from an early age to be rulers, not ruled. And from the numerous examples cited in the book it's clear that they both understood the role of media and the art of "manufacturing consent" to borrow a phrase from their contemporary Walter Lipman. All that being said, where Kinzer draws his conclusions is from the written record by the Dulles brothers and their underlings. Would men of this calibre be so dumb as to commit their crimes to writing? Would they be so naive as to put the farce of their world wide communist conspiracy to writing? Of course not. But it's no surprise that those below them either believed it or were good at regurgitating its major talking points, and this is what passes for real history. Allen Dulles publicly and privately wrote about a communist conspiracy, his underlings reiterated these talking points, thus it must be true that he believed this.
Not surprisingly, Kinzer never quotes one of the Dulles brothers claiming that we need to go into Guatemala to protect our shares of United Fruit; nor do we find any quotes from the brothers aiming to protect western oil interests in Iran. I doubt any such quotes exist and yet it's quite clearly the real motivation behind much of what these men did with their lives. But there was an official narrative that could be used to hide what was actually happening and somehow that gets passed off by people like Kinzer as the real history. We were scared of the communist menace because of people like the Dulles brothers who fabricated the entire thing up and then were told that they believed it too!
The lengths to which Stephen Kinzer goes to absolve these two heinous men of their crimes disgusts me. That he pretends that the American people are somehow to blame for creating these two sociopaths is beyond the pale. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of very good information here and Kinzer is a good writer. But the assumptions he makes and the conclusions he draws just don't stand up to scrutiny. The Dulles Brothers should be reviled for the war criminals they were. The American people did not vote these men into office and we were rarely appraised of the massive crimes they were committing across the globe in our name. Their undermining of our democracy and that of many other countries should be a lesson to all of us.