As the new heads of the State Department and the CIA, they would direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world. The fraternal partnership gave the Dulles brothers a unique leverage over the incoming administration, and they were imbued with a deep sense of confidence that these were the roles they were destined to play. The 1952 presidential election represented the triumph of “the power elite,” in the phrase coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills, academia’s most
