“You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to
the last on is…that it will go over very quickly.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the strategic importance of Indochina, April 7, 1954.

John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower from 1953 until Dulles died in 1959.  During the Truman administration, Dulles had contended that the Truman policy of containment of communism should be replaced by a policy of attempted liberation of Communist-controlled countries.  Dulles believed in the domino theory described in Eisenhower’s statement, believing that if one nation in an area fell to communism, the rest, like a row of dominoes, would also fall to communism.  This doctrine played an important role in the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s.