John Foster Dulles vs William O. Douglas-- The Conservative Mind vs The Progressive Mind

Lately, I've been writing a bit about a book I'm reading, Prediposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford. As I mentioned the other day, one of the themes is that "liberals and conservatives report distinct personality and psychological tendencies and have different tastes in all sorts of things from art and sports to personality traits and vocational preferences… Conservatives' cognitive patterns reveal a comfort level with clarity and hard categorization while liberals are more likely to value complexity and multiple categories."

Another book I'm reading-- and loving the hell out of-- is The Brothers by Stepgen Kinzer, about two of the twentieth centuries most despicable American villains, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, two ruthless and venal imperialists who viewed the apparatus of power-- one ran the State Department and the other ran the CIA-- as vehicles for enriching themselves, their families and the circles. Early in Kinzer's brilliant narrative Foster had become the managing partner of the country's most powerful law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell and America's best paid lawyer. When he recruited his brother into the firm, Allen worried about "venturing into a moral and ethical twilight" and wrote "I want to keep as good a reputation as I can, notwithstanding the taint of my environment." Foster has chosen his brother when things went badly with one of his first prospective hires, William O. Douglas, one of the most brilliant legal minds of the century, a future chairman of the SEC and celebrated Supreme Court Justice. Foster told his friends that he had turned Douglas down because Douglas "didn't seem sharp enough." Douglas told the story a bit differently, and Kinzer's reflections on that illustrate the point in the work we're studying in Predisposed.

"I saw John Foster Dulles and decided against him because he was so pontifical," he wrote in a memoir. "He seemed to me like a high churchman out to exploit someone. In fact, I was so struck with Dulles' pomposity that when he helped me on with my coat as I was leaving the office, I turned and gave him a quarter tip."

Foster and Douglas were profoundly different kinds of Americans. Beneath their encounter lay opposing beliefs about how law should be practiced, how the United States should act in the world, and, in the end, how life should be lived. Foster was a tightlipped patrician who had become rich by serving America's powerful corporations and banking houses. Douglas was a passionate iconoclast who sympathized with underdogs and admired foreign cultures. One embraced religious and political certitudes, abhorred upheaval, and viewed the world from paneled suites in New York, Washington and European capitals. The other rejected dogma, learned about the world by taking rugged trips through remote lands, and believed the United States should approach other countries "with humility" and let them solve their problems "in their own way."

"I'm not sure I want to go to heaven," Douglas mused later in life. "I'm afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there."

Even if he has a rather important airport named after himself-- something JFK tried to prevent but was unable to achieve-- I tend to doubt that whichever saint is guarding the pearly gates, there would be any way for Foster to slip through. Dante's 8th Circle, in fact, seems to have been custom-designed for John Foster Dulles.

Douglas served longer on the Supreme Court, 36 years, from 1939, when FDR appointed him to replace another giant, Louis Brandeis, until 1975, longer than any other Justice in history. Upon his retirement, Time heralded him as "the Court's uncompromising Libertarian" though not a Ron or Rand Paul perversion of that word.

William O. Douglas was the court's most undeviating liberal voice right up to his sudden retirement last week. In his later years, some critics came to view Douglas as a dangerous radical. Yet Douglas did not see the court as a tool for radical social change, "but rather as a mechanism to keep open the democratic process," says Yale Law Professor Thomas I. Emerson. To this end his decisions supported free speech, the broadest possible interpretation of individual constitutional rights and, less often noted, far-reaching Government power to regulate the economy… He was "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court."

Right-wingers from the Dulles mold tried several times to impeach Douglas, and failed. He died in 1980 at the age of 81, outlasting the horrid and destructive Dulles, who died at age 71 in 1959.