To understand his reluctance to tangle with McCarthy, consider that by the time Eisenhower came into office, anticommunism had flourished in America for over three decades. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the U.S. government had viewed communism as a sinister, secretive, revolutionary ideology hostile to freedom, to religion, and to private property—in short, entirely un-American. In the 1930s politicians hostile to the New Deal tried to stymie Roosevelt’s plans for social reform by invoking the specter of communism. Anxieties about subversive activities inside the country led to the
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