This success in lowering the heat over Berlin was clouded by unsettling news. John Foster Dulles was dying. In February he had gone to Walter Reed for another operation on his cancerous intestines. Ann Whitman noted in her diary that the postoperation report was “not good”: “The doctors feel there is no use attempting another operation—they are going to give him radiation every other day.” The president, who, Whitman wrote, “did not dwell on death” and was rarely shaken by the loss of friends, was “hard hit.” He even mused about dying and seemed in a funk at the prospect of losing his closest
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