After a time the reader realizes that some of the big-ticket shows of the decade are not there or have flashed past in a trice. īut the book works best as a glimpse into the world of the CIA director Dulles, not so much his elder brother the top diplomat. Kinzer has a good eye for color and captures the spirit of the two men well. The panorama of 1950s crises flies by-the Philippines, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Lebanon, Indonesia, the Congo, Cuba (the victory of M-26), and finally the Bay of Pigs-in a fast-paced and dramatic fashion. operatives and weaves a story of the times around them. Kinzer, many of whose major works concern events of the Eisenhower era, here takes the Dulles brothers as premier U.S. The Brothers is more than a joint biography of John and Allen Dulles. When Ike-he, too, had a nickname-summoned his own efficiency experts to check up on the agency, they warned him against the dangers of having two brothers in these high places and recommended he replace Allen Dulles at CIA. Allen had been by turns the Office of Strategic Services chief in Switzerland during World War II, an agitator for the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an efficiency expert enlisted by President Harry Truman to check up on CIA progress, and then the agency’s chief of operations-all before Dwight Eisenhower made him the top boss. Allen, a lawyer too-the brothers had both worked for the same Wall Street law firm-was more openly associated with diplomacy but more craftily connected with the secret world of spies. diplomatic job, one previously held both by his uncle and by his grandfather. A stalwart of the Republican Party, he latched early on to Eisenhower, advised him in the campaign of 1952, and emerged with the top U.S. “Foster,” as the president familiarly called him, was a Bible-toting lawyer, a fire-breathing Cold Warrior, and a major architect of the Japanese Peace Treaty of 1951.

In The Brothers Stephen Kinzer sets out to craft a joint biography of these two characters.Īnd characters they were. The two men, brothers in fact and in mission, were central to Cold War history for nearly a decade.

Eisenhower than John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state and Allen Welsh Dulles, his director of central intelligence. That was the day of the Eisenhower administration, and no figures were more important to President Dwight D. During the high Cold War no power was more central to global affairs than the United States.

The brothers stephen kinzer summary