In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Nick Bunker, author of An Empire on the Edge and Making Haste from Babylon - a dramatic, innovative account of a pivotal moment in the early Cold War.

In September 1949 Sir Winston Churchill called the United States "this gigantic capitalist organization, with its vast and superabundant productive power - millions of people animated by the profit motive." The dollar reigned supreme. From Washington the statesmen of America sought to guide the destiny of nations. Victorious in the elections of 1948, President Harry Truman and the leaders of the Democratic Party hoped to use the country's economic might to build on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. And then - during ten crowded months, between the fall of 1949 and the summer of 1950 - they were overtaken by the unforeseen.

In the Shadow of Fear describes the end of one era and the beginning of another. Joseph Stalin tested his first atomic bomb, Mao's army swept through China, and in America the age of FDR gave way to the beginnings of a new conservatism. An aggressive Republican Party, desperate to regain power, seized on rifts among its opponents, and Truman's program for universal health care and civil rights reform went down to defeat. The young Senator Joe McCarthy ambushed Truman and his party with a style of politics that aroused powerful emotions and deepened division. On the eve of the Korean War, a new mood of anger in the nation left many Americans calling in vain for a return to consensus.

This is a book about politics as it is and not as we might prefer it to be. Like Nick Bunker's previous book An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, it breaks down barriers between different kinds of history. Placing events in the United States in their global setting, from London and Paris to India, China, and Japan, Bunker shows us fallible human beings compelled to improvise as events spin out of their control.

A book whose themes still resonate in the divided America of the 2020s, In the Shadow of Fear gives us characters who personify its era. They include not only Truman, Stalin, J.F. Dulles, McCarthy, Dean Acheson, and the young Richard Nixon, but also half-forgotten actors on the stage of history: the labor leader John L. Lewis, "Mister Republican" Senator Bob Taft, McCarthy's foe Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and the scandal-ridden mayor of New York, William J. O'Dwyer.