John Foster Dulles: Radio and Television Address on Communism in Guatemala

John Foster Dulles was one of the first secretaries of state of the cold war era. Steadfast in his beliefs and an experienced orator, Dulles adeptly explained the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy decisions in public forums. Particularly when controversial matters needed to be addressed, Dulles, rather than Dwight Eisenhower, publicly spoke about them. In the conformist 1950s, when critiques of U.S. cold war policy were considered tantamount to embracing Communism, Dulles’s unflinching commitment to destroying the global Communist threat was widely embraced and almost never challenged. Dulles’s complete conviction of the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause as well as the significance of his role in the battle against Communism contributed to the strength of his public orations. He never faltered or reconsidered his position in interviews, and his responses, like his speeches, tended to have a proselytizing quality. Influenced by his experience as a clergyman, Dulles presented matters in terms of good and evil or black and white; based on his reasoning, gray areas did not exist.

His Radio and Television Address on Communism in Guatemala, exemplifies his unbending belief in the righteousness of his own actions and his ability to present his actions, as well as the policies of the Eisenhower administration, in an altruistic manner. In this address, Dulles claimed that Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the reformist president of Guatemala, was a stooge of international Communism and that, following the “domino theory,” his rule opened the door to Communist infiltration of the Western Hemisphere.