Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-elitist, hyper-masculine raid on American liberties launched in 1950 in Wheeling, WV with his pronouncement that he possessed a list of 205 names of alleged communists in the State Department. His attacks over the next four years orchestrated under the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) took advantage of a period of national hysteria and demonstrated the particularly powerful vein of paranoia that runs through American politics. In the end, his efforts left Washington virtually void of intellectual and political expertise on China and the East, and at a disadvantage as China rose into the nationalist-communist vision of Chairman Mao, who refused to follow Khrushchev as he had Stalin.
Three years of fighting by United Nations forces on the Korean Peninsula produced little political or territorial gain or loss, and peace was made roughly where war had begun, though with 36,000 Americans killed. America’s involvement in Korea seemed to validate Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s concerns of a generation earlier regarding the League of Nations, and soon, United States' support of the French in Indochina led it into international entanglements that had it upholding empire in the name of self-determination. American policy soon became to globalize war—to demonstrate strength in every region, extending itself beyond Kennan’s core areas and more than once finding itself in support of a nefarious or corrupt or incompetent regime, preferable only because not a Marxist-Leninist led state.
In Guatemala, for instance, the United States was disturbed by attempts by the elected government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman to acquire some of the more than 40% of the country's land owned by the United Fruit Company—a monopoly linked closely with individuals in the Eisenhower government—and the CIA, fearful of connections between Guzman and the Kremlin, supported a coup that replaced self-determined leadership with a military dictatorship.
President Eisenhower noted in his 1953 "Chance for Peace" address that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed," and he pledged the United States ready "to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world." His fear of the domino effect of communism's encroachment on free societies ultimately triumphed, and his response to the warnings of NSC-68 was to prepare for war that would destroy the world—to create “a defense sufficient …[to] form the basis for an ultimatum to the Soviets that we will hold them responsible for, and subject to retaliation in case of additional aggression”—peace through mutually assured destruction (Engel 194).
In the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev’s aggressive leadership of the Soviet Union sought to account for perceived inequities and instability in the division of Germany under the Potsdam Agreement, which left West Berlin a secure pocket of democracy in the communist world. The Soviet Union's possession of nuclear technology and the surprise launch of Sputnik in 1957 suggested that Americans were falling behind in the race for international control.
By 1958, Khrushchev moved to force Washington’s hand through threats to deny supplies to West Berlin unless a treaty was signed closing the city to the East. His actions repeatedly escalated and released pressure leading up to the election of John F. Kennedy to the White House in 1960, an event which inaugurated the period of highest nuclear tension in the Cold War. Outgoing President Eisenhower was watching two developing situations in Laos and Congo, as these weakened governments might provide opportunities for Soviet intervention and influence.