I’m reading The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot’s 2015 page-turner about Alan Dulles and the CIA. Excerpts:
In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust….
[W]hen Allen Dulles served as the United States’ top spy in continental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders….
Allen Dulles outmaneuvered and outlived Franklin Roosevelt. He stunned Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, by turning the agency into a Cold War colossus far more powerful and lethal than anything Truman had imagined. Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office….
Dulles would serve John F. Kennedy for less than a year, but their briefly entwined stories would have monumental consequences. Clearly outmatched in the beginning by the savvy spymaster, who beguiled Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK proved a quick learner in the Washington power games. He became the first and only president who dared to strip Dulles of his formidable authority. But Dulles’s forced retirement did not last long after Kennedy jettisoned him from the CIA in November 1961. Instead of easing into his twilight years, Dulles continued to operate as if he were still America’s intelligence chief, targeting the president who had ended his illustrious career. The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy….
