The year 1950 was perilous for what then, unabashedly, called itself the Free World. In January Britain’s Labour government extended diplomatic recognition to Mao Zedong’s Communist China. The same month a New York jury convicted State Department luminary Alger Hiss of perjury, the statute of limitations for espionage having expired. Days later Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy reaped headlines, the first of many, by alleging extensive infiltration of Hiss’s professional colleagues by agents loyal to Moscow. April brought the same department’s classified report NSC 68 establishing the parameters of Communist containment that would guide U.S. policymakers until the 1970s. It was quickly put to the test when, on June 25, Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel separating it from the democratic South; within days the South Korean capital of Seoul fell to the attackers.
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