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guy to soothe its pain. In the late '60s the Russian economy was in trouble,
their agricultural system was bogged down, and frustration was running
rampant. The best way for a leader to boost his popularity: mount a foreign
adventure...preferably against someone small and helpless. When the
Czechoslovakian uprising came in 1968, it was a godsend. Russian leaders
sent in the tanks. And the Soviet populace cheered wildly.49
More frequently, however, the victim is someone right at home. In the
early '50s, America suffered seriously from pecking order problems. We had
been humiliated in Europe, where the Soviets had grabbed eight countries50
and walled them off behind what Winston Churchill called an "Iron
Curtain."51 China, the keystone of our plan for Asian security, fell to a
Marxist revolution. We had lost nearly a quarter of the world's population to
our adversaries in only a few short years. Americans were desperate for
someone to blame. A slightly alcoholic senator from Wisconsin offered to
satisfy their hunger. There had been Communist infiltration of the
government, but by the time the pixilated legislator showed up President
Truman had eliminated it.52 Nonetheless, the senator cooked up fantasies of
a Communist plot within the American State Department. His claims were
so filled with fraud that nearly every major American newspaper revealed
their absurdity. But the public couldn't have cared less. They swept the
tipsy Senator up as a hero. And for nearly four years, Joseph McCarthy was
one of the strongest men in Washington, able to make or break careers with a
single word.53
Our problems, however, were not in Washington. They were overseas,
where Mao Zedong had ousted our allies in China, and Soviet-sponsored
Eastern European "leaders" had seized power in one state after another. A
few years earlier, when World War II had ended, we had disbanded most of
our military forces. The Soviets had kept theirs at full strength. In what
historian William Manchester calls a "near mutiny," servicemen had thrown
massive demonstrations demanding demobilization. And they'd gotten it.
The result: by 1950, the Russians had four times as many soldiers as we did,
and thirty tank divisions to our one.54 Confronting the Russians would have
The Soviet Union long indulged in the habit of beating up on the little
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