The Brothers Read online

  “The native inhabitants had proved themselves incapable of maintaining a respectable and responsible government,” Foster later wrote, “and lacked the energy or will to improve the advantages which Providence had given them.”

  This made John Watson Foster the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government. Others would follow—including, more than a half century later, his grandson.

  After leaving office, “Grandfather Foster” considered returning to his Indiana law practice, but after hearing another Indiana lawyer recount a long legal battle over a hog, he decided to stay in Washington. He set out not to become a lawyer like others, but to invent a new profession: broker for corporations seeking favors in Washington and chances to expand abroad. It was an idea that fit the era. American farmers and manufacturers had so effectively mastered the techniques of mass production that they were producing far more than the United States could consume. They needed foreign markets to fend off ruin. Many also coveted resources from overseas. This required a muscular, assertive foreign policy that would force weaker countries to trade with Americans on terms Americans considered fair. With a career of diplomatic service behind him, capped by a term as secretary of state, and with deep ties to the Republican Party, John Watson Foster was ideally placed to help these American businesses. Corporations hired him to promote their interests in Washington and in foreign capitals. He was counsel to several foreign legations. The White House sent him on diplomatic missions. He negotiated trade agreements with eight countries and brokered a treaty with Britain and Russia regulating fur seal hunting in the Bering Sea.

  This visionary protolobbyist thrived on his ability to shape American foreign policy to the benefit of well-paying clients. Both of his grandsons would do the same.

  In order to be near his daughter and her boys, “Grandfather Foster” bought a home at Henderson Harbor, near Watertown. Soon afterward, another eminent figure entered their remarkable family. Edith’s sister, Eleanor, married a dapper lawyer and diplomat named Robert Lansing, whose family had deep roots in Watertown. Lansing and “Grandfather Foster” had many interests in common, among them fishing, Washington intrigue, and global politics. The old man welcomed Lansing into the clan, and the boys came to adore their “Uncle Bert.” This was the foursome that set out onto the choppy waters of Lake Ontario every summer morning.

  “Grandfather Foster” was infatuated with the boys and decided that spending summers with them was not enough. He arranged to “borrow” them for the winter months at his red brick mansion near Dupont Circle in Washington. There they lived amid exotic art objects from China and other faraway lands, studied under private tutors, and were attended by liveried servants directed by a majordomo one member of the clan remembered as “Madison, the graying colored butler.” Best of all, they had the chance to sit through dinners with a dazzling parade of America’s political and business mandarins.

  Foster was first “borrowed” when he was just five years old, and soon after arriving made his first visit to the White House, as a guest at a birthday party for one of President Harrison’s grandchildren. Allie began his visits a few years later. During their childhood and early teens, both brothers came to feel at ease in the most rarefied circles. They dined with ambassadors, senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and other grand figures including William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Andrew Carnegie, and Woodrow Wilson. Although they were too young to join dinner-table discussions of world events, they paid close attention. From these long evenings they absorbed not only the precepts, ideas, and perceptions that shaped America’s ruling class, but also its style, vocabulary, and attitudes.

  “The women with their sequins and plumes and the men with their decorations and sashes were dashing and romantic,” their sister Eleanor later recalled. “Altogether, the teas and dinners had a dignity and graciousness that make modern cocktail parties seem chaotic by comparison.”

  Even at this early stage of life, Allie showed extraordinary curiosity about other people. In Watertown he had made a hobby of observing his father’s habits and making notes about them. He was only seven years old when his grandfather “borrowed” him for the first time, but he was fascinated by the lively debate that shaped dinner conversations. After the guests departed, the future spymaster would sit in his bedroom and write reports of what he had heard, summarizing the opinions of the statesmen whose company he had just left and seeking to analyze their characters.

  “I was an avid listener,” he later recalled.

  During that first winter in Washington, Allie developed a fascination with the Boer War, and he poured out his passion in a six-thousand-word essay asserting that “the Boers want peace but England has to have the gold and so she goes around fighting all the little countries.” His grandfather was so impressed that he paid to have the essay privately printed, complete with spelling errors, and Allie became a published author at the age of eight. His older brother was unimpressed, sniffing that Allie’s anticolonial ideas were “wrong-headed and infantile.”

  That view may have been correct, but in pronouncing it, Foster showed a judgmental harshness that never softened. From early childhood he was solemn, disciplined, and reserved, but also sharply self-righteous. He never lost his temper or complained, but disdained those who fell short of his standards. Memorizing long Bible passages—he could recite the book of John by heart—was one of his favorite pastimes.

  Already the two brothers were developing markedly different personalities. Foster was hardworking, narrowly focused, socially inept, and serious beyond his years. His sister Eleanor saw him “more like a second father than a brother.” Allie was outgoing and amiable, but prone to explosions of temper. “His intensity of rage, his emotion when he objected to something, was often overwhelming,” Eleanor wrote.

  The passage of time deepened these differences. Foster’s trademarks were a dark hat and umbrella, Allie’s a rakish mustache and pipe. Foster became rich and powerful, but remained nearly friendless and often seemed ill at ease. Allie developed into a witty raconteur whose genial manner could beguile almost anyone. He was, as one biographer put it, “the romantic and adventurous member of the family” but also “a much darker, more ruthless and unscrupulous man than his brother.”

  Two of the boys’ three sisters lived their lives away from the limelight—Margaret married a clergyman, Nataline became a nurse—but the third, Eleanor, was as formidable a character as they were. She was nearsighted almost to the point of blindness, but her upbringing made her a hardy swimmer and nearly as good a hunter and angler as either of her brothers. Though hardly a rebel, she was a free thinker who quietly rejected much of her family’s Christian piety, had lesbian encounters while an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, wore silk stockings, cut her hair short, smoked in public, and was even known to swear. Later she earned a doctorate from Harvard, traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, taught economics, helped run the Social Security system, attended the Bretton Woods conference that reorganized the world economy after World War II, held a variety of diplomatic posts, and wrote a dozen books with titles like The French Franc 1914–1928. Her intellect was comparable to that of either of her brothers. Had attitudes toward women been different during her lifetime, she might have risen to outshine them both.

  In the autumn of 1904, when Foster was sixteen, he entered the all-male environment of Princeton, his father’s alma mater, which had been founded by Presbyterians and was considered a kind of country-club seminary. He was uncomfortable at first, partly due to an outburst of self-hatred fueled by what the family biographer Leonard Mosley called “an emotion of a kind he had never experienced before.”

  He developed a schoolboy “crush,” for he was only sixteen, on one of his fellow students, a wild-eyed rebel two years older than himself. The feeling was more than returned. It was an exhilarating experience until the moment when he discovered from his adored older partner that male relationships can also have their physical side. To a young man who had, so far, only embarrassedly bussed a girl at a party, it was a devastating and shocking revelation of what he knew from his Bible to be a shame and a sin. He conveyed this sense of degradation with such effect that the fellow student walked out of his room and left the college.

  At the end of his junior year, Foster was given an opportunity few college students could imagine. The imperial government of China, which “Grandfather Foster” represented in Washington, hired the former secretary of state to advise its delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference in the Netherlands, and he took his grandson along as secretary. The conference was part of an ambitious effort, promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, to establish global rules that would reduce the danger of war. History assigns it only modest importance, but for nineteen-year-old John Foster Dulles it was a breathtaking introduction to the world of high-level diplomacy and international law. He was able to watch statesmen from dozens of countries ply their trade, with his grandfather at hand to interpret their aims, motives, and tactics.

  By the time he returned to Princeton, Foster had decided he would not become a preacher, as those closest to him had expected, but a “Christian lawyer.” This “nearly broke my mother’s heart,” he later confessed.

  Not every student at Princeton during those years dreamed of life in the political and economic elite. One young man who graduated in 1907, a year ahead of Foster, chose a radically different path. He was a Nebraskan named Howard Baskerville, like Foster the son and grandson of clergymen but moved by another sort of idealism. Neither Washington nor Wall Street appealed to him. Upon graduation he took a mission job as a schoolteacher in Iran. When he arriv
ed, he found the country in the throes of revolution. He passionately supported the embattled democratic movement and, when it seemed about to be crushed by foreign-backed royalists, recruited a band of young fighters to defend it. On April 20, 1909, he was killed in battle, becoming the first and only American martyr to the cause of Iranian democracy. The news shocked Princeton. There is no record of how Foster reacted—he had already graduated—but the two young men’s life choices reflected much about both of them. They also foreshadowed a fateful clash. Howard Baskerville died defending parliamentary democracy in Iran; forty-four years later, Foster and his brother would help crush it.

  Foster graduated second in the class of 1908 with a degree in philosophy. His thesis, entitled “The Theory of Judgment,” won him a year’s scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied under the philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson. Upon his return to the United States, he enrolled at George Washington University Law School, which he chose so he could live with “Grandfather Foster.” He finished the three-year course in two years. When not in class or studying, he worked as an assistant to his grandfather.

  During these years, Foster sharpened his ambition. He saw how effectively “Grandfather Foster” used an insider’s knowledge of politics and diplomacy to promote the interests of corporate clients with global ambitions. This, he decided, was the career he wanted.

  Allie arrived at Princeton two years after Foster graduated. Their dramatically different campus experiences reflected the psychic gap that separated them all their lives. Allie plunged into a sparkling world of clubs, parties, and girls. This drove his father to distraction and set off angry arguments whenever he returned home. Allie’s practice of last-minute cramming for exams always seemed to work, though, and like his brother he graduated with distinction. His thesis won him a cash prize of five hundred dollars, which he used to book passage to India, where through a Princeton connection he had found a job teaching English. It was his first step out from under his family’s long protective wing.

  Among the many girls Allie dated while at Princeton was a dainty, fragile one named Janet Avery, whose family lived in Auburn, New York, where Reverend Dulles had moved to teach at Auburn Theological Seminary. Allie found Janet staid and boring, and quickly moved on. Soon afterward, Janet became the object of his older brother’s affection. The traits that led Allie to drop her—steadiness, down-to-earth practicality, conventional attitudes, lack of frivolity—were just the ones Foster admired. With typical precision, he made a date to take her canoeing on the same day his bar exam was scheduled in Buffalo; if he felt confident he had passed, he would propose. The exam went well. A few hours later, while paddling, Foster asked Janet to marry him. She accepted immediately.

  As Foster had guessed, he passed the bar exam easily. At his grandfather’s suggestion he applied for a position at Sullivan & Cromwell, the country’s most eminent corporate law firm. His credentials were impressive: an outstanding academic record at Princeton, graduate study at the Sorbonne, a precocious understanding of international law, some command of French, German, and Spanish, and even a summer of behind-the-scenes work at a major diplomatic conference. The partners at Sullivan & Cromwell were unimpressed. They rarely hired anyone who had not graduated from an Ivy League law school.

  Foster, however, was better connected than most applicants rejected by Sullivan & Cromwell. He turned to his grandfather, who had known Algernon Sullivan, the firm’s late co-founder, and was willing to use that connection to appeal to the surviving co-founder, William Nelson Cromwell. “Isn’t the memory of an old association enough to give this young man a chance?” he asked Cromwell in a letter.

  Cromwell understood that when a former secretary of state recommends his grandson for a job, a law firm that relies on Washington connections should pay heed. He overruled his partners, and in the autumn of 1911 Foster joined Sullivan & Cromwell as a clerk. His starting salary was $12.50 per week, which his grandfather generously supplemented. From his new office at 48 Wall Street—the firm occupied the nineteenth and twentieth floors of the Bank of New York Building—he could see the portico of Federal Hall, where President George Washington was inaugurated in 1789.

  “Just you wait!” he wrote to Janet upon learning that he had been hired. “In a year or two, I’ll be hiring young men myself. I’ll be a partner, too.”

  The two were married in Auburn on June 26, 1912. Foster was twenty-four and Janet had just turned twenty-one. If she did not already realize that work would always be the center of his life, it became clear during their honeymoon in the Catskills. He had contracted a severe case of malaria while on a Sullivan & Cromwell mission to British Guiana—his assignment was to persuade its government to allow duty-free imports of American flour—and the combination of its effects and those of the quinine he took as treatment left him barely able to walk. A nurse accompanied them throughout their honeymoon. Nonetheless their marriage began splendidly, and they remained devoted to each other. Half a century later, after Foster’s death, she was told that a forthcoming book would portray him “warts and all.”

  “What warts?” she asked. “Foster was perfect.”

  By the time Foster joined Sullivan & Cromwell, it had already become a unique repository of power and influence. Enormous fortunes were accumulated in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many of the men who accumulated them used Sullivan & Cromwell as their link to Washington and the world.

  Algernon Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell founded their law firm in 1879 to pursue a new business art: bringing investors and enterprises together to create giant corporations. Sullivan & Cromwell played an important role in the development of modern capitalism by helping to organize what its official history calls “some of America’s greatest industrial, commercial, and financial enterprises.” In 1882 it created Edison General Electric Company. Seven years later, with the financier J. P. Morgan as its client, it wove twenty-one steelmakers into the National Tube Company and then, in 1891, merged National Tube with seven other companies to create U.S. Steel, capitalized at more than one billion dollars, an astounding sum at that time. The railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced as a “malefactor of great wealth” and “enemy of the Republic,” hired the firm to wage two of his legendary proxy wars, one to take over the Illinois Central Railroad and another to fend off angry shareholders at the Wells Fargo bank. It won the first with tactics that a New York newspaper called “one of those ruthless exercises of the power of sheer millions,” and the second with complex maneuvers that, according to a book about the firm, amounted to “deceit, bribery, and trickery [that] was all legal.”

  Soon afterward, working on behalf of French investors who were facing ruin after their effort to build a canal across Panama collapsed, Sullivan & Cromwell achieved a unique triumph in global politics. Through a masterful lobbying campaign, its endlessly resourceful managing partner, William Nelson Cromwell, persuaded the United States Congress to reverse its decision to build a canal across Nicaragua and to pay his French clients $40 million for their land in Panama instead. Then he helped engineer a revolution that pulled the province of Panama away from Colombia and established it as an independent country, led by a clique willing to show its gratitude by allowing construction of a canal on terms favorable to the United States. One newspaper called him “the man whose masterful mind, whetted on the grindstone of corporate cunning, conceived and carried out the rape of the Isthmus.”

  Clients favored Sullivan & Cromwell because its partners, as Cromwell later put it, had “come to know, and be in a position to influence, a considerable number of public men in political life, in financial circles, and on the press, and all these influences and relations were of great and sometimes decisive utility.” Sullivan & Cromwell thrived at the point where Washington politics intersected with global business. John Foster Dulles worked at this intersection for nearly forty years.

  His first clients were an early taste of the Sullivan & Cromwell mix: investors in Brazilian railroads, Peruvian mines, and Cuban banks. After war broke out in Europe, he traveled there to promote the interests of other clients, including Merck & Co., the American Cotton Oil Company, and the Holland America Line. All were pleased with the young man’s work.