Leave John Foster Dulles Alone

Efforts by a few GOP Members of Congress to rename Washington's Dulles International Airport (IAD) should be scuttled.

The mini-boomlet by a handful of GOP Members of Congress to rename Washington’s Dulles International Airport for President Donald Trump should not only be ignored but scuttled and mocked. It pretty much already has been, especially the mocked part.

One of Virginia’s most left-leaning Members of Congress, Gerry Connolly (D-VA), whose Fairfax County-based district includes part of the land on which the International Airport at Dulles, cleverly suggested that the GOP rename a federal prison for President Trump instead.

Foreign auto magnate and US Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) reminded reporters that during the Trump Administration’s ban of flyers from nations known for harboring, if not supporting, terrorism, “Muslims were detained” at IAD, Beyer extolled.

Of course, Beyer inaccurately demagogued Trump’s action as a “Muslim ban.” We won’t relitigate that today other than to suggest that Beyer’s response wasn’t very astute nor accurate, politically or otherwise. It suggests that Beyer was playing to his party’s growing anti-Semitic base on an issue no one cares about.

"They know Dulles will never be renamed after Trump. Again, that's not the point, the point is to suck up to their Dear Leader," Beyer said, not incorrectly. Beyer’s D+36 fever-swamped congressional district across the Potomac River from Washington, DC is home to the region’s other international airport.

There are two solid reasons to oppose the bill. First, the airport is already named after John Foster Dulles, who served most of the Dwight Eisenhower Administration as Secretary of State during the Cold War in the 1950s before his death from cancer in 1959. More about him later.

Second, this issue distracts and detracts from what voters care about, including their inability to afford groceries, gas, and housing and seeing many of their wages driven down and a surge of crime from an unfettered surge of illegal aliens, somewhere between 7-11 million and counting across our southern and, increasingly, northern borders.

President Reagan’s statue at the entrance of Washington DC’s other international airport. DCA was named after him in 1998.

Some may point to the 1998 legislation overwhelmingly approved by Congress to rename Washington’s International Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia, after President Ronald Reagan, then in the throes of Alzheimer’s Disease (he died in 2004). The bill, sponsored by the late US Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-GA) and cosponsored by 39 Senators, was approved on a 76-22 vote. All 22 no votes were Democrats, including Virginia’s junior Senator, Chuck Robb (D-VA). The GOP-controlled House followed suit, and President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law.

While there was ample bipartisan support for renaming DC’s airport for Reagan, there is no such support for renaming Dulles.

The difference is that Reagan’s political career was long over, and the airport wasn’t already named after someone. Previous iterations of predecessor airports, including one near where the Pentagon rests today, were named after former President Herbert Hoover. Trump, meanwhile, is the presumptive GOP nominee for President in 2024.

US Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), a chief deputy whip for the House GOP, is the bill's lead sponsor that will likely die in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Cosponsors include Reps. Michael Waltz (R-FL), Andy Ogles (R-TN), Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Troy Nehls (R-TX). I can’t see even Trump’s most ardent supporters caring much about this legislation. It is a waste of time.

But it’s a good opportunity to remind Americans about John Foster Dulles.

The highly skilled Dulles was the grandson of a former Secretary of State and nephew of another. A graduate of Princeton and George Washington University Law School, he served briefly as an appointed US Senator from New York in 1948 but did not win the Fall election. He helped draft the preamble for the creation of the United Nations. He served in the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the latter most famously as Secretary of State. He was the runner-up to Earl Warren as Eisenhower’s nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1953.

Dulles, a strong Christian, was fervently anti-communist and, along with Eisenhower, promoted a policy not of containment but isolation and for rolling back communism through peaceful means. He and Eisenhower were masters of brinkmanship to achieve their international objectives. Dulles was the first Secretary of State to conduct regular press conferences and was masterful at building international support and coalitions. “He was the champion of using security treaties — NATO, SEATO, the Baghdad Pact, and the Eisenhower Doctrine — to keep the Soviet Union in check,” writes the National Museum of American Diplomacy.

Dulles strongly supported the French in their war against communist insurgents in North Vietnam, but Ho Chi Minh’s communists won anyway in 1954. His detractors try to blame Dulles for America’s eventual involvement in Vietnam, but that’s unfair. He was focused on lasting peace on the Korean peninsula and wanted nothing to do with Ho Chi Minh and his government and compromise over the future of Vietnam. Dulles died long before Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s misadventures there.

President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1956 (photo from Wikipedia)

Acton Institute scholar and author Dr. John Wilsey reports this about Dulles:

When Foster died on May 24th, 1959, the whole world mourned him. His state funeral, as I said, was the largest state funeral in Washington's history since Franklin Roosevelt's in 1945, and surpassed only by Kennedy's a few years later. Dwight Eisenhower, his president, wrote that he was a, quote, "champion of freedom." He said he was a foe only to tyranny, and one of the truly great men of our time. "No one," said, said Eisenhower, "has the technical competence of Foster Dulles in the diplomatic field." Eisenhower said this about his secretary of state in 1956.

While I’m sure President Trump appreciates the effort to rename Dulles after him, he wisely hasn’t reacted thus far. He would be wise not to encourage his House minions further and instead promise to leave the name of Dulles International Airport alone. He could learn much from one of our most accomplished Secretaries of State.