Victoria Phillips

BAM 70100

Professor Jason Tougaw

10 September 2022

Footnote Assignment

I am working on two projects: a memoir (my thesis, I think) and a “traditional” diplomatic biography of Eleanor Lansing Dulles.

Memoir

The memoir uses disease as a metaphor for fifty years of life lived in New York City, 1962-2022: growing up in New York in an alcoholic household with emotionally dysfunctional adults; working as a dancer and waitress; transitioning to Wall Street; raising three children in an apartment purchased by a millionaire husband in the same building as my progressive school (nursery-high school) that went bankrupt and transitioned into condos; alcoholism, drug addiction, and cancer; restart as a professionalized writer who always wrote; COVID.

The footnote is the chapter (unwritten) about bringing up three girls in Manhattan, public, parochial schools and the mothers, and the elite private school scene, 1993-2006.

The text is something like:

If I had spent a few more days with him, someone would have gotten angry and left. I do not think that would necessarily have been me, but at that point I had a reputation for conducting relationships with men that led to my nickname, “Master of the six week relationship.” Decades after the divorce he said things like, “If I had known that, I never would have divorced you,” although I was the one who brought up the idea, although he followed through, and “I still love you,” all in front of either his girlfriend, my new husband, or our daughters. When I am with him and eat a meal, at family ceremonies like graduations or weddings or funerals, I find myself chewing my food consciously, teeth against teeth in the back, as though he has fed me glass and I am getting through the shreds. So, selfishly, I suppose, I did not walk away from him early on because I was pregnant after five weeks and I wanted that child. It was warmth inside me. At eight months, we touched hands through the tight pulled skin of my abdomen at night, palm to palm, and I wished my hands were tiny like hers so I could manage the fingertips, too. That was that child, and I wanted to have what turned out to be her more than anything else in the world. More than my million-dollar fantastic magical fuck-you career. More than my freedom. More than my developing sanity. Everything went on hold, particularly me. Because I wanted it that way just then. So, to be honest and non-martyr about him, I was not entirely innocent in the using game.[1]

[1] Emanuel Edward “Buzzy” Geduld can be googled.

Eleanor Lansing Dulles

The historiography of the Dulles family and its legacy in the United States is vast, and includes traditional cradle-to-grave biographies as well as analytical works on the Dulles influence in the making of political and religious institutions from the Civil War through the Cold War. As soldiers, missionaries, ambassadors, theologians, Secretary of Sates, bishops and cardinals, and people who engaged in cocktail diplomacy and espionage, the men have been well-studied through their vast public archives. Yet the women have been largely overlooked, despite their foundational roles as philanthropists, humanitarian activists, educators, translators, writers, and missionaries, as well as hostesses, despite public archival sources that chronicle their lives and hold their publications. Despite the dozens and dozens of biographies of her infamous brothers, John Foster, Secretary of State (1953-1959), and Allen, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1953-1961), not one biography exists of their sister, Eleanor, who worked for the United States government reshaping both domestic and foreign policy through the Depression and the Cold War (1936-1961, with consulting positions through the 1980s). Group biographies of the brothers or the family include Eleanor, but, like the women in the family in the literature of the field, she is either overlooked or becomes a feminized characterture, again despite extensive public archival sources that demonstrate otherwise. (1)

(1) See Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network(New York: Doubleday, 1978); Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, 2013); Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (University of California Press, 2013). Note that even the unabashedly anti-Washington podcast series, “Behind the Bastards in History,” in their three-part series on the Dulles family’s influence in US hard-empire building during the Cold War, mentions Eleanor in a quick aside as the sister who was “different” and a singularly good-Samaritan “humanitarian.” This is proclaimed despite evidence to the contrary regarding her motives and influence in rebuilding postwar Europe.

Part 1: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-how-the-dulles-brothers-created-the-cia-a;

Part 2: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-two-how-the-dulles-brothers-created-the-cia-a;

Part 3: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-three-how-the-dulles-brothers-created-the-cia?in_playlist=podcast (accessed 10 September 2022).