When you hear the name "Dulles," your mind probably jumps to the massive airport in D.C. or the Cold War brinkmanship of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Most people assume the family was just a dynasty of stiff-collared diplomats and CIA directors. But honestly, the story of the eldest son, John W. F. Dulles, is way more interesting—and a lot more "down in the dirt" than you’d expect.
He didn't spend his life in mahogany-row offices.
Instead, Jack (as his friends called him) spent nearly two decades in the rugged mining camps of Mexico and Brazil. He wasn't just some executive observer; he was a metallurgical engineer who literally "mucked the roads" and worked the long end of a shovel. It’s a wild career arc. Imagine going from a Harvard MBA and a mining pit in Arizona to becoming the world's leading authority on Brazilian political history.
Why John W. F. Dulles wasn't your typical "Dulles"
He was born in 1913 in Auburn, New York. You’d think with his pedigree—grandson of one Secretary of State and son of another—he’d have walked straight into a cushy government role. He tried banking. He hated it. He felt like a "lonely clerk."
So, he did what any restless soul with a philosophy degree from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard would do: he moved to a mining camp in Patagonia, Arizona.
Jack wanted to build things. He wanted to see how the world actually worked. He earned a second bachelor’s degree, this time in metallurgical engineering, and headed south of the border. For seventeen years, he was a fixture in Monterrey, Mexico, working for Cia. Minera de Peñoles. He didn't just manage; he rode mules through the mountains to talk to miners.
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- 1935: Graduated Princeton (Philosophy).
- 1937: Finished Harvard Business School.
- 1943: Earned a Metallurgical Engineering degree from the University of Arizona.
- 1959: Moved to Brazil to save an unprofitable gold mine.
This "hands-on" life is exactly what shaped his later career as a historian. While he was in Mexico, he started talking to the old-timers—the guys who actually lived through the Mexican Revolution. He wasn't interested in just reading dusty archives. He wanted the stories. He met former presidents like Lázaro Cárdenas and Plutarco Elías Calles. He took notes on yellow legal pads. This eventually turned into his first massive book, Yesterday in Mexico.
The accidental professor at UT Austin
Basically, Jack Dulles became a historian by accident. He wrote Yesterday in Mexico while he was still an executive. When he moved to Brazil in 1959 to run a mining operation for Hanna Mining Co., he got caught up in the local politics. It was a messy time. People were literally yelling "Dulles go home!" in the streets because they associated him with his father's Cold War policies.
But he didn't go home. He got fascinated.
In 1962, the University of Texas at Austin snatched him up. They didn't care that he didn't have a PhD in history. He had something better: he had been there. He had the phone numbers of the people who ran South America. For the next 45 years, John W. F. Dulles was a staple of the UT faculty.
He was legendary on campus. Even in his 90s, he was still teaching. He’d zip around on a motorized scooter when his gout acted up, wearing seersucker blazers and tennis shoes (or slippers, if the gout was really bad).
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What made his history different?
Jack didn't care about "theories" or "interpretations." He called himself a chronicler.
He wanted to know exactly what happened and who said what. His methodology was simple but exhausting: he interviewed everyone. He tracked down the communists, the generals, the anarchists, and the presidents. He’d sit with them, smoke a pipe, and listen. Because he was a "Dulles," some people wouldn't talk to him at first. He once tried to interview the head of the Brazilian Communist Party, Luís Carlos Prestes, but got ghosted.
Still, he ended up writing 12 massive volumes on Brazilian history. He covered the suicide of Getúlio Vargas, the 1964 military coup, and the resistance movements. Some academics criticized him for being too "descriptive" and not "analytical" enough. They thought he was too cozy with the Brazilian military leaders like President Castello Branco.
Honestly? Jack didn't care. He felt that if you got the facts right and the story straight, the analysis would take care of itself.
A life of "fun and exciting" work
Until the very end, he refused to retire. When people asked why, he’d just ask what else he was supposed to do—watch TV? To him, digging through Brazilian political archives was "fun."
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He lived a life of strange contrasts. He was a deeply religious man who gave sermons in Monterrey. He was a fierce tennis player who stayed on the courts into his late 80s. He was a guy who knew the Austin skyline from his 27th-floor apartment office, which was always thick with pipe tobacco smoke (he moved his office off-campus because UT banned smoking).
He died in 2008 at the age of 95, just three days after his wife of 67 years, Eleanor, passed away. It was a quiet end to a life that spanned from the pits of Arizona mines to the highest levels of Latin American academia.
Actionable insights from the life of Jack Dulles
If you're a researcher, student, or just a history buff, there’s a lot to learn from how Jack Dulles operated. He proved that you don't need a traditional path to become an expert.
- Primary sources are everything. If you want to understand a movement, talk to the people who started it. Don't just rely on what someone else wrote about them.
- Cross-pollinate your skills. Dulles used his engineering precision and business background to organize massive amounts of historical data. Your "day job" skills are often your secret weapon in a different field.
- Persistence beats pedigree. He wasn't a trained historian, but he out-worked almost everyone in the field by showing up, taking notes, and refusing to stop learning.
If you really want to understand the modern political landscape of Brazil or Mexico, you sort of have to start with his books. They are the bedrock. Start with Vargas of Brazil or Yesterday in Mexico. They aren't light reads—they're thick, factual, and incredibly detailed—but they are the closest you'll get to being in the room when history was made.
Check your local university library or look for University of Texas Press reprints. His work remains the definitive account of a time when Latin America was being reshaped by revolution and reform.