He was born in Watertown, New York, on the morning of April 7, 1893, with congenital talipes equinovarus, commonly called a clubfoot. The medical profession since Hippocrates had treated the condition with slow mechanical pressure to bend the foot back out. With the advent of anesthesia doctors began surgically repairing the damage by the late 1860s. The parents found a Philadelphia orthopedist who successfully performed the operation on the baby. Even so, the family treated Allen Welsh Dulles’s deformity at birth as a dark secret not to be revealed to outsiders.展开