Unlike the affable and morally agile Allen, however, John Foster seemed to have inherited the severe, absolutist sensibility of their Presbyterian minister father. Ponderous in manner and given to self-satisfied pronouncements, both American and foreign officials tended to find a conversation with John Foster a tedious and one-sided exercise; as British statesman Harold Macmillan acidly quipped of him, “his speech was slow, but it easily kept pace with his thoughts.”
