Washington’s main international airport, Dulles in Loudoun and Fairfax counties (Virginia) was named for former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, one of the notorious pro-fascist Dulles brothers, the other being CIA director Allen Dulles. Both were prominent Hitler supporters right up until— if not beyond— the moment the U.S. entered the war. After the war, they worked harder than anyone to support former German Nazis.
Many people who keep track of 20th century history are aware of the murderous roles the Dulles brothers played in shaping post World War II American foreign policy. In many ways, the U.S. is still reeling from the results of their horrifying activities in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo and Cuba. Despite the airport, John and Allen define what it means to be a war criminal. Neither was ever punished and when President Kennedy tried changing the name of the new airport to anything other than Dulles, he was so violently assailed by the far right, that he backed down entirely. Ironically, now it’s far right Republicans who want to change the name— but because they’ve come up with someone worse to name it for: The Señor Donald J. Trump Airport. I’ll come back to Señor T en un momento.
In his definitive book, The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer wrote, in way of introduction, that “This story is rich with lessons for the modern era. It is about exceptionalism, the view that the United States is inherently more moral and farther-seeing than other countries and therefor may behave in ways that others should not. It also addresses the belief that because of its immense power, the United States cannot only topple governments but guide the course of history. To these widely held convictions, the Dulles brothers added two others, both bred into them over the years. One was missionary Christianity, which tells believers that they understand eternal truths and have an obligation to convert the unenlightened. Alongside it was the presumption that protecting the right of large American corporations to operate freely in the world is good for everyone.”
Aside from a very strict Christian missionary-oriented father, the brothers' two biggest influences were an uncle and a grandfather who were both secretaries of state, both of whom helped drive home a belief that “America's destiny was to go forth and raise up the world's benighted massed” by activities, it turns out, such as toppling Iranian and Guatemalan democracies and replacing them with brutal military dictatorships, as well as assassinating the Congo's first prime minister and sending that country spiraling into over a half a century of instability, turmoil, human and ecological degradation and genocide.
Grandfather Foster was a typical self-righteous, conservative Republican asshole who served, briefly as Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State in 1892-3. He inculcated his two grandsons with the idea that America was “a nation blessed by Providence, powerful to the point of invincibility, whose people were destined to spread, civilize and command. From him they also learned how profitable it can be to ingratiate oneself with men of wealth and influence.” Gramps may well have been the nation's first corporate and international lobbyist. But he's better known for his singular accomplishment as Secretary of State. In 1893 he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and that country's annexation by the United States with the help of the U.S. military. He was the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrown of a foreign government. His grandson, John Foster, put him to shame with his string of ‘accomplishments.’”
The only good thing I can think of that John Foster Dulles ever did was, inadvertently, making Earl Warren chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Dulles brothers had just finished violently deposing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosadegh, and were getting ready to do the same to the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, when the 13th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Fred Vinson, had a heart attack and died. Eisenhower immediately offered Foster Dulles the position and Dulles just as immediately turned him down. He had monsters to slay all over the world and had no time for Justice, not even a chance to pervert it. Kinzer speculates that “Foster's decision to remain as secretary of state opened the way for the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. If he had decided otherwise and left the State Department, Allen would undoubtably have continued to press the anti-Arbenz project. Whether another secretary of state would have shared his passion for it is an intriguing question for which there can be no answer.” And that's true. But, had he been interested in domestic matters rather than international affairs, Kinzer could have taken the other fork for speculation, one for which there are plenty of answers: what if John Foster Dulles, a dull-minded bigot and fascist operative, had become the Chief Justice instead of Earl Warren? America would be a very different place today, a far worse one.
Warren, who had served 3 terms as the Republican governor of California (although he was also nominated by the Democrats for reelection), served as Chief Justice from 1953 until 1969. He was one of the three or four most impactful Chief Justices in American History and there isn't a single decision he is best known for— from Brown v Board of Education in 1954 to Miranda v Arizona in 1966— that Foster Dulles would have agreed with. Both men were Republicans and elitists but Dulles was the preeminent American reactionary of his time and Warren was a lifelong idealist and progressive.
In fact, Warren turned out to be so unabashedly progressive on the Court— and so persuasive in terms of forging a liberal activist majority on the Court— that Eisenhower came to rue the day he ever appointed him. Eisenhower is said to have remarked that appointing him was “the biggest fool mistake I ever made,” although this may be a right-wing myth.
Dulles would have never voted to desegregate American schools, the decision Warren is probably most well-known for. And Dulles, a dedicated anti-democracy fanatic certainly would never have championed the two big “one man, one vote” cases by which Warren ended the dominance of rural areas in state legislatures. Although conservatives in Congress frantically tried to pass a Constitutional Amendment to overrule Warren, they failed. “To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen,” explained Warren defiantly. “The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.” Had he been in a position to, John Foster Dulles would have ended universal suffrage entirely and gone back to a system in which only wealthy, white, male, property owners could vote.
So, you can imagine that the congressional Republicans would not agree if the Democrats suggested renaming Dulles Airport for Earl Warren. A delusional Pennsylvania reactionary, Guy Reschenthaler introduced the bill to name it for Trump. His backward, mostly rural district— all of Fayette, Greene and Washington counties plus most of Indiana, Westmoreland and Somerset counties— gave Trump a 31.5 point margin of victory of Biden… and also gave Neo-fascist lunatic Doug Mastriano an 11 point margin over Josh Shapiro. He had 6 far right co-sponsors, Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Troy Nehls (R-TX), Andy Ogles (R-TN), Barry Moore (R-AL) and Mike Waltz (R-FL). The airport is in Gerry Connolly’s district and he reacted appropriately:
