There was, Hughes noted, much talk about liberation of Europe, all of it curiously vague. “What are you proposing that we do?” Hughes kept asking Dulles. Hughes noted drily in his memoir that it was “extraordinarily difficult to persuade him to give clarity and substance to his critiques of ‘containment’ or to his exhortations on ‘liberation.’” The writer came away, as many had before him, with the belief that Dulles was both the most righteous and the most relentlessly devious man he had ever met in his life.
