John Foster Dulles; scholar, son of ex-secretary of state
WASHINGTON - John Foster Dulles, a noted Brazilian history scholar and the eldest son of the former secretary of state, died of kidney failure June 23 at North Central Baptist Hospital in San Antonio. He was 95.
Dulles, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin for 45 years and the author of books on Brazil and Mexico, was preparing for the fall semester until he became ill June 12. His wife of 68 years, Eleanor Ritter Dulles, died four days before her husband.
"He was a real character," said Tom Staley, director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. "We referred to him as 'Cactus Jack,' because he wrote these books about Brazil and Mexico. His students loved him."
John Watson Foster Dulles was born in Auburn, N.Y., and received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Princeton University in 1935. He received a master's degree in business administration from Harvard University in 1937 and then joined the
Banking was a bit tame for the young Mr. Dulles, so he went to work for a New York import-export business, C. Tennant Sons & Co. The company sent him to Nogales, Ariz., to work in a company mine.
He and his new wife, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia architect, liked frontier Arizona, far from their Northeastern establishment families.
In addition to his father, for whom Dulles International Airport is named, Mr. Dulles's great-grandfather and a great-uncle also were secretaries of state.
His uncle, Allen Dulles, would become head of the CIA, and his aunt, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, was a State Department official known as "the mother of Berlin" for her role in the city's recovery after World War II. His brother, Avery Robert Dulles, would become the first American priest to be elevated to cardinal without having been a bishop.
Mr. Dulles received another bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona's School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1943 and then took a position in Monterrey, Mexico, with Cia Metalurgica Penoles, a subsidiary of American Metal. He was in Mexico for 16 years, eventually becoming executive vice president of Penoles.
In 1959, Mr. Dulles moved to Rio de Janeiro to take a position with Hanna Mining Co. of Cleveland. The company owned a money-losing gold mine in Brazil, and Dulles was given the job of making it profitable.
The task proved impossible, given Brazil's political turbulence, and he left in 1962 to become a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Texas. For 25 years, he taught simultaneously at the University of Arizona.
His first book, "Yesterday in Mexico: A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919-1936" (1962), grew out of an impromptu conversation with President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines of Mexico about Mexican history.
He wrote 12 books and numerous articles on 20th-century Brazilian history, including "Resisting Brazil's Military Regime" (2007), the second of a two-volume work on Brazilian reformer Sobral Pinto.
