Of course, the Dulles brothers’ law firm was hardly alone in its eagerness to do business with the Nazis - many on Wall Street and numerous American corporations, including Standard Oil and General Electric, had “interests” in Berlin. Farben, the chemicals conglomerate that later manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of Jews. G., the arms manufacturer, and also worked for I. Sullivan & Cromwell floated bonds for Krupp A. Indeed, his friendship with Hjalmar Schacht, the Reichsbank president and Hitler’s minister of economics, was crucial to the rebuilding of the German economy. Kinzer highlights John Foster Dulles’s central role in channeling funds from the United States to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
In his detailed, well-constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for The Guardian, shows how the brothers drove America’s interventionist foreign policy.
But their influence was felt long before these official appointments. John Foster Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959 his brother ran the C.I.A. Both brothers were lawyers, partners in the immensely powerful firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose New York offices were for decades an important link between big business and American policy making. Their grandfather John Watson Foster served as secretary of state, as had their uncle Robert Lansing. John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, were scions of the American establishment. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world. Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book.
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