Dulles

Dulles, name of 2 prominent U.S. lawyers and statesmen. John Foster Dulles (1888–1956) was U.S. secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–59), employing a strong foreign policy to block Communist cold war expansion. He was legal counsel at the World War I peace conference, worked on the UN charter during World War II, and negotiated the Japanese peace treaty (1951). His brother, Allen Welsh Dulles (1893–1969), an intelligence official, negotiated the Nazi surrender in Italy in World War II. He directed the Central Intelligence Agency 1953–61, considerably influencing foreign policy, as in the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.