Born in Washington, D.C., on February 25, 1888, John Foster Dulles -- son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of a former secretary of state -- enjoyed a privileged youth. He was also extremely talented. He studied at Princeton, and before graduating in 1908 got his first taste of international politics when his grandfather brought him along to the Hague Peace Conference of 1907. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and George Washington University Law School. He passed the bar in New York and joined a law firm. During World War I Dulles worked at the War Industries Board and later served at the Versailles Peace Conference. Upon his return, he became a partner in his law firm, working primarily on international cases.

Dulles' work in foreign policy began with his association in 1937 with Thomas Dewey, the 1944 Republican candidate for president. In 1945, Dulles became a prominent Republican participant in bipartisan foreign policy endeavors, serving as senior U.S. adviser to the 1945 San Francisco conference of the United Nations. A great supporter of international cooperation, Dulles quickly became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after World War II when he experienced Soviet intransigence firsthand at various international meetings. In 1949, New York governor Dewey named Dulles to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the resignation of Robert Wagner. In a close election, he failed to win re-election the following year. The same year, President Truman charged Dulles with concluding a peace treaty with Japan. The treaty, along with a U.S.-Japan security pact, was signed on September 8, 1951.

After an election campaign in which Dulles sharply attacked the Democratic foreign policy record as ineffective and lacking in moral content, President-elect Dwight Eisenhower named Dulles as his secretary of state. Dulles and Eisenhower pursued a policy of strength toward the Soviet Union and communist China. However, the election promise of a "rollback" of communist power proved to be a hollow one. Neither in the case of East Germany (1953) nor in Hungary (1956) was there anything Dulles or Eisenhower believed the United States could do to support anti-communist uprisings in the Soviet bloc. The best one could do was hold the line. Eisenhower and Dulles redefined U.S. military options. Their "New Look" defense policy sought to combine fiscal solvency and a credible deterrent through heavy reliance on nuclear weapons. However, the Eisenhower administration also shepherded West Germany into the Western alliance. And it kept the United States out of major war. Recent archival findings suggest that Dulles was a good deal more sophisticated about the East-West conflict than his rhetoric at the time may have suggested. In 1958, Dulles was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 24, 1959, at age 71.