The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

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. Foster was a social misfit and one-woman man who memorized biblical passages, while his younger brother, Allen, was a libertine with a taste for servants and prone to fits of debauchery. But brotherly camaraderie is tangential here as Kinzer (Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future), an award-winning journalist, focuses squarely on how the men became architects of the emerging superpower. Restrained from their most ambitious foreign adventures under the Truman administration, their fortunes changed when the next president, Dwight Eisenhower, appointed Foster to lead the State Department and Allen the CIA. Consumed by their quest to avert Soviet domination across the globe, their fingerprints were all over some of the most sordid episodes of the Cold War: bringing down duly elected governments in Guatemala and Iran; sowing the seeds of the Vietnam War; assassinating Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; and attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro. 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. (Oct.)