Dulles Library of Diplomatic History

Dulles Library of Diplomatic History, a two-story hexagonal addition to the Firestone Library, was built at its southeast corner in 1962. It has a reading room on the ground floor and contains in stacks on the floor below, among other American historical manuscripts, the personal papers of John Foster Dulles '08 (1888-1959), United States secretary of state from 1953 to 1959.

The papers begin with the Hague Conference in 1907, which Dulles attended while an undergraduate, and extend over a period of more than fifty years, through the American Peace Commission after World War I, the founding of the United Nations after World War II, the Japanese Peace Treaty in 1951, and Dulles's years as President Eisenhower's secretary of state, to his death in 1959.

During his first term as secretary of state, Dulles was persuaded by President Dodds that Princeton would be the appropriate place for the preservation of his personal papers, and in 1958 he worked out an agreement to this end. A year later, when Dulles became critically ill, Clarence Dillon, then under-secretary of state, and other friends and associates of the Secretary initiated a plan to donate an addition to the library to house the Dulles papers and stand as a tribute to him. A single letter from the original sponsors brought additional contributions from three hundred other friends and admirers. ``This wonderful record of spontaneous and generous benefaction,'' President Goheen reported at the dedication of the Dulles Library in 1962, ``was paralleled by the speed and grace with which the hexagonal addition to the Firestone Library was developed by the architects [R. B. O'Connor & W. H. Kilham]. One week following our meeting with the original sponsors, floor plans and elevations were ready, so that immediately thereafter Mr. Dillon and his associates were able to show Mr. Dulles, days before his death, sketches of the building almost exactly as it stands today.''

When the plans were shown to Dulles, they were accompanied by a tribute which is recorded in one of the display cases of the Dulles Library:

``In a troubled time, your unfaltering leadership and indomitable courage have given strength to the free world and, in future, when men live in peace, with freedom and justice, you will be remembered as a leading architect of that world.''

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).