Early Life and Family
Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, and grew up in a family where public service was valued and world affairs were a common topic of discussion. Dulles was one of five children born to Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles and his wife Edith (Foster). He was five years younger than his brother John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of State and chairman and senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and two years older than his sister, diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His maternal grandfather was John W. Foster, who was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. His paternal grandfather, John Welch Dulles, had been a Presbyterian missionary in China. His uncle (by marriage), Robert Lansing, was also a U.S. Secretary of State. His nephew, Avery Dulles, was a Roman Catholic cardinal, Jesuit priest, and noted theologian who taught at Fordham University.
Dulles graduated from Princeton University, where he participated in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, and entered the diplomatic service in 1916. When Dulles was serving in Switzerland, he was responsible for reviewing and rejecting Vladimir Lenin's application for a visa to the United States. In 1920 he married Clover Todd, daughter of a Columbia University professor; their only son, Allen Macy Dulles Jr., was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War when a mortar fragment penetrated his brain. According to his sister, Eleanor, Dulles had "at least a hundred" extramarital affairs, including some during his tenure with the CIA.
In 1921 while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, Dulles exposed the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery, providing the story to The Times of London. The article was reprinted in The New York Times. In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's foundation in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944.
Read more about this topic: Allen Welsh Dulles
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won’t really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That’s the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)